1 Site and Methdology

This chapter is based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in an agricultural village, which I call Jiatian village, located in northwest Henan province. About one mile outside of a busy township, the county surrounding Jiatian village has been the target of government poverty alleviation investment and an urbanization scheme since 2012, bringing in local employment, businesses, and improvements in the township infrastructure. I first visited Jiatian village in 2013 before I then returned for eleven months from 2014 to 2015 for my dissertation research. As a postdoctoral scholar in Shenzhen, I also returned to Jiatian in 2018–19 for two follow-up visits of 1–2 weeks. My research methodology utilized person-centered interviewing methods and focused on the narrative reflections of nine women between the ages of 40 and 75. In this chapter, I focus on the lower age limit of this cohort, those between 40 and 60 years old. I followed these key families throughout my four years of research, tracing their shifts in migration and changes care-taking, observing their family life, and recording their everyday struggles. I also conducted more traditional village-based ethnography, tracking the village demographic information and conducting a small-scale survey about family change.

2 Suffering and the Chinese Family

“See for yourself, are we or are we not facing hardship? (xinku bu xinku),” Aunt Xu poured steaming water into the large iron wok holding the dirty dishes from breakfast, pausing to wipe sweat from her brow that had formed despite the bitter cold in the room. “With three kids, how can life not be hard?”

“What can I do?” she continued. “If I don’t care for the kids, then how can their mother go to work? And if their mother doesn’t go to work, who will pay for the household expenses? The recent marriage of my grandson cost over 160,000 rmb—and this was only for the gift to our granddaughter-in-law. The wedding, the house, they all cost more.”

Aunt Xu, as in 40 percent of the households I met in Jiatian village, cared for her three grandchildren while her son and daughter-in-law were working some ten hours away. In the parents’ absence, the bulk of the household chores and the demanding childcare when the children were small all fell on Aunt Xu’s shoulders. Aunt Xu’s hardships were actually quite normal among the grandparents whom I met. Her everyday tasks included the daily laundry, sweeping the courtyard, feeding and clothing the children, and making three meals per day using the large stove that utilized agricultural refuse as fuel.

Aunt Xu justified the hard work of grandparents as part and parcel of the experience of having kin in contemporary rural China. Being a grandparent involves suffering, Aunt Xu seems to imply. This idea of a suffering grandparent was shared among many of my diverse rural informants; regardless of their actual care-taking burdens, almost all agreed that caring for the children in the absence of their parents and also caring for their aging parents and relatives were tiring and difficult jobs, but it was also normal, representing an inherent part of being a grandparent in the countryside. Likewise, it was universally agreed that suffering was part of the generational experience of those between ages 55 and 70 who had experienced the bitter years of collectivization and famine in the days before the reform and opening. In the words of one grandmother, “hardship is just part of our generation.”

Suffering, and complaints about suffering, which are constantly repeated by grandparents to describe their everyday experiences and contributions to the family, are subject to cultural and historical configurations of moral attitudes that shape the ways that people imagine and talk about hardships and dysphoric experiences (Wilce 2003). Suffering is a virtuous part of identity, especially for older people who imagine their contribution not only to the family but also to the nation in terms of their ability and experiential sacrifice of bodily comforts during the early years of the People’s Republic. Suffering becomes a meaningful cultural category which organizes the experience of being a grandparent and instills a sense of generational and collective identity in this rural community.

Suffering for the family, I argue, not only is a material condition or a description of poverty or bodily fatigue but it is also an affective state, a feeling of being ill at ease or facing hardships and troubles. Suffering is a kind of emotional posturing toward the family, which is expressed by my informants in the following Chinese terms, xinku (辛苦, to experience great hardships), ai (挨, to endure), and shou kunnan (受困难, to bear difficulties). Based on these linguistic terms, suffering is not simply passively experienced but rather it is borne and endured. Suffering can either enable family harmony or it can lead to isolation, depending on how the experience of suffering is (or is imagined to be) shared and distributed among the different generations of adults within the family. Thus suffering, and especially acts of shared suffering, can be one important way of instilling family harmony, unity, and a moral spirit of working together with a shared purpose.

In the face of the rapid social change, China has experienced a profoundly radical restructuring of the economic conditions that shape individual and family lives in a short amount of time (Yan 2010; Alpermann 2011; Chang 2010), leading to strong and divergent impacts of these conditions on the various age cohorts. The possibilities afforded by the employment, education, and labor markets all have resounding effects on the individuals’ understanding of their obligations to the family. The kind of contribution that each generation is able to offer to the family is configured not only by its individual experiences but also by larger economic forces, such as state retirement and benefit policies and the generational distribution of social resources. To understand how the contemporary intergenerational family operates as a unit of economic cooperation and a source of moral personhood, it is necessary to explore the history of the labor market in rural China.

3 A Short History of the Laboring Rural Family

In prerevolutionary China, family divisions of labor were based on age and gender, with hierarchies linked to one’s age and status. The logic can be summarized by the saying nanzhuwai, nüzhunei, or “men manage the outside, while women manage the inside.” Outside tasks included culturally recognized forms of leadership, management, income-earning, and commercial activities, whereas women’s inside work included all domestic household tasks, such as sericulture, spinning, weaving, and sewing (Mann 2000). Although not necessarily recognized as major economic players, women’s inside work contributed significantly to the household economy and the women’s internal divisions of labor were quite important (Brown 2016). Older women were the recipients of the younger women’s labor as part of the filial code of honoring one’s parents. Thus younger women, namely the newly married daughters-in-law, shouldered the greatest burdens of the household labor and childcare (Wolf 1972).

During revolutionary China, age began to configure new ways of understanding worth within the family. In the rural context, for example, older women were awarded less work points than younger women (Li 2005). Along with the campaigns calling for an end to age-based patriarchy, the new economic policies, legal reforms, and the thriving youth culture began to shift the family system in favor of the younger members of the family (Blake 1979; Yan 1997; Davis and Harrell 1993). In my interviews with older women and men in Jiatian village, I discovered that during the collective era, even though elders were not remembered as important to the economic work-point system or the collective labor system, they were particularly vital to the family household labor, which were largely ignored by the revolutionary calls for gendered equality (Brownell and Wasserstrom 2002). For women with young children, having a mother-in-law became a potential source of labor cooperation which would ultimately enable the family to occupy a better economic position.

Because of the work-point system, all able-bodied men and women had to work. Many families could not sacrifice work-points for childcare or household work, such as weaving, sewing, or cooking. In particular, women with young children were left to make hodge-podge rearrangements for childcare. The strategies I recorded included tying infants to mattresses, bringing toddlers to the fields, and, importantly, engaging both the maternal and paternal grandparents to take care of the children. Poverty, hunger, and desperation meant reconsidering the previous practice of mother-led care and led my informants to comment, “whoever is able to care for the child should do so.” Under this ideology of pragmatism, and with the increasing importance of participation by younger women in wage and agricultural labor to national productivity, the ideal family structure slowly shifted along age-based lines. Divisions of inside and outside labor that previously were tied to gender increasingly came to be tied to age divisions (Lou 2011). This shift was further solidified by the tidal wave of rural-to-urban migration that began in the mid-1990s and continues to this day.

Following both market and political logic, many rural families divided their labor participation based on the pragmatism of the new migrant labor market in the urban areas. Low-skilled industries were largely based on labor capacity (or perceived labor capacity), such that gender and age determined individual access to secure, stable, and well-paid work. Older women ranked at the bottom of such evaluations, since they were assumed to lack the education, technical knowledge, or beauty of younger women or bodily strength of men in similar age-cohorts. Therefore, the migrant labor market tended to value younger more flexible workers and to undervalue older workers.

Accompanying this new economic dynamic, the household registration system (hukou) limited social welfare, health care, and school registration in urban communities so that children’s access to schooling and elder’s access to state-sponsored healthcare were linked to one’s place of origin (for a comprehensive review, see Young 2013). Low-skilled workers, who likely could not earn a merit-based residency transfer or could not have access to work-unit–sponsored schools or benefits, made economic and practical calculations, effectively dividing the family by age and ability to work. Elders and children thus remained in the countryside, maintaining the agricultural landholdings and preserving the access to rural benefits.

Jiatian village, like many other agricultural areas (C. C. Fan 2008), has been profoundly shaped by rural-urban migration, with more than 50 percent of all young adults relocating to city centers for work in factories, at construction sites, or in small businesses. In 2015, 23 percent of all children lived in split-generation households headed by the paternal grandparents, while their parents worked in the cities; 42 percent lived with their mothers and paternal grandparents; and another 11 percent lived in divorced-households without their mothers. In 2019 when I returned to the village, the number of children living without their parents had increased by 10 percent, in part because a large cohort of young children in the village had entered kindergarten, freeing up maternal time to migrate to the cities for paid employment.

The grandparents’ efforts to provide care are not always valued or recognized, even by the members of their own family. Most daughters-in-law with whom I spoke were dissatisfied with various aspects of the ways in which their mothers-in-law cared for their children and they complained about the grandparents’ lax discipline, lack of supervision over their child’s education, and their inability to control their child’s access to technology and their use of the Internet. In turn, grandparents complained that they were ill-prepared to supervise schooling, and they often made self-critical statements indicating that because of their own illiteracy, their grandchildren were falling behind in school. They did not understand how to use cell phones or the Internet and therefore, as reported, they had no idea how to limit usage.

Portraying grandparental care as lacking, inadequate, or incomplete was also echoed in the numerous campaigns that urged the migrant parents to return to the countryside. These well-intentioned attempts to reunite migrant parents and rural children portray the nuclear family as essential for psychological well-being. The unintended target of these campaigns was the care by the grandparents, which was deemed to be both overbearing and inadequate. School teachers in the township described children cared by their grandparents as “dirty,” “pitiful,” and “sad.” Scholarly reports based on numerous survey-based studies on left-behind children echo similar sentiments (see, for example, Fan et al. 2010; Ye and Murray 2010; Ye and Lu 2011).

Simultaneously, most of these rather young grandparents, in their early fifties or sixties, also bear traditional filial responsibilities toward their own aging parents and relatives. A report by the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates that 37 percent of Chinese adults between the ages of 20 and 70 are caught in “the sandwich generation,” meaning they have family care responsibilities spanning more than one generation: 83 percent of working-age adults in China support their parents financially; 45 percent of individuals dually caring for both older and younger family members report that they are “struggling to cope” with the financial and time commitments needed for them to care for both their children and their aging relatives. In rural China, the pressures may be even more keenly felt by not only the grandparents’ generation, whose perspective I describe in this chapter, but also by the middle generation of migrant parents who are providing financially for three different dependent generations—their children, their own parents, and their parent’s parents. In tangible terms, those between the ages of 40 and 65 bear the bulk of everyday caring tasks, such as cleaning, cooking, dressing, bathing, and managing medications and hospital visits. As I discuss below, these care-giving tasks may be felt differently depending on the perception of the moral obligations borne by each generation and the experience of unexpected or unanticipated difficulties along one’s life course. I propose that the key to understanding of their caring efforts is found in the concept of suffering, which allows grandparents to construct their experience as morally virtuous and socially productive.

In the cases I present below, I feature three grandparent-headed households in order to examine the ways in which the elder generation understands their affective and economic contributions to the multi-generational family. I show how their emotional contributions of suffering contribute to the undervalued care economy (Folbre 2006; England and Folbre 1999) in an increasingly trans-local China. Exploring both economic and emotional labor, I review how ideas of suffering are employed to reinforce family unity. My argument highlights the importance of emotional labor in intergenerational exchanges and illuminates the role of suffering in creating feelings of caretaking ambivalence.

Among all of these families, care responsibilities span four generations. The Jia family and Honglin’s family each care for a paternal matriarch, whereas Yuejie’s family bears responsibility for an elderly unmarried uncle. Their care situations are largely representative of many of the cases I encountered during my fieldwork. Even though each individual family has worked out its own care arrangements, their narratives reveal three major ways of dealing with the concept of suffering as a value that allows them to conceptualize and construct their experience within a moral and ethical framework.

4 “We Are United as a Family”

When I returned to Jiatian village in 2018 and 2019, I discovered that my neighbor’s two sons and daughters-in-law had migrated for work, leaving their three young children in the care of the elderly grandparents. The younger couples had returned during Spring Festival and when I saw them I was shocked because all four of the young people had become much thinner, losing close to 15 pounds each.² I immediately remarked how thin they were and how I barely recognized them. Aunt Lu agreed with me, “Working as migrants, they have suffered (xinkule). They work twelve hours per day and they don’t have time to eat.” She shook her head and amended her statement, “Actually, we all have suffered.”

Uncle Jia piped in, “Their thinness is good! (shou shi hao); in fact, before we were all too idle (lan). With nothing to do at home, everyone got fat. Now everyone is thin, but we are all productive and thin.”

In the three years during which I had known them, the family had improved their life circumstances considerably, building a stand-alone house for the elderly couple. The oldest grandchildren, now ages 4 and 6, had entered a private kindergarten and in the last year the family had been able to afford a costly medical expense—the removal of a uterine tumor. They also had been able to sign up for the government poverty benefit system and they receive a small monthly subsidy from the local government, easing the household budget and allowing the family to focus on saving for the children’s future education and marriage expenses. Additionally, the family was shouldering part of the burden of caring for the elderly matriarch, who at the time of this writing close to 95 years of age. She rotates between living with her three local sons for one month at a time (c.f. Jing 2004).

In the above discussion, a central organizing tension in the logic of care is the division between productivity and idleness. Productivity exists simultaneously with suffering and hardship. Idleness, on the other hand, consists of remaining in the countryside without access to productivity. Uncle Jia specifically links the development of labor-saving technology, such as mechanized harvesters and tractors, to the increase in leisure time, and thus idleness in the countryside. The untying of human labor from agriculture is what ultimately frees up the time of the grandparents to care for the children, which in turn enables the middle generation to engage in migrant labor. According to Uncle Jia’s thinking, this rearrangement of caregiving is a positive sign of progress mutually enabling the elder and parental generations to avoid the trap of idleness. Now, Uncle Jia states, they are thin, but being productive and thin is better, both morally and economically, than being idle and fat.

This is reminiscent of the traditional value in Chinese culture of industriousness, or what Stevan Harrell (1985) has called the “entrepreneurial effort.” The Chinese term for the concept is qinlao, a quality of laboring diligently. Harrell argues the family has long been a motivating factor for Chinese individuals since the kin group can determine one’s social and economic standing. During the revolutionary era, this value was channeled for the benefit of the national collective, yet it seems that the entrepreneurial ethos remained a central core in the way the family is joined together both ethically and morally.

With the convergence of new technologies that have transformed human labor in the countryside and with improved health and nutrition from education and healthcare campaigns, elders in rural areas are living longer and more comfortable lives. Yet psychologically and morally, some elders feel ungrounded without labor. In many families that I followed, men and women both worked in sideline industries, such as piecework beading and sewing or informal food carts, even though did not actually need the very low wages they earned from such endeavors. The common way to describe this sideline work was that there was “no money, but I have nothing else to do anyway.” In doing these small tasks, elders could stave off the boredom that comes from leisure as well as fight the trap of becoming useless, giving moral grounding to their everyday lives.

A second theme revealed from the above conversation is that the family is understood as a sort of bounded organism and it must solve its problems on its own. The key to this conception of the family is Uncle Jia’s framing of the ideal family as united (jiehe qilai) by an economic and practical dependency. Dependency, according to the logic presented here, strengthens the intergenerational family because the family has little choice but to work together. Uncle Jia even goes so far as to say that he would starve to death without the remittances from his adult children. In fact, this assertion is exaggerated because the elderly couple does receive a poverty-benefit ration and their yield from farming should enable hearty consumption of wheat and vegetables. But the other elders who live in the village without migrant remittances do face real economic hardships and they have no room in their budgets for any spending on consumption.

In a conversation several months earlier, Aunt Lu told me that if the young children were not in her care, then she would feel as if the house were empty. “They add excitement and liveliness (renao),” she asserted. While we spoke, the children were pushing small toy cars around the room and shouting gleefully. Aunt Lu and Uncle Jia both relished their care-taking responsibilities, often purchasing small treats for the children, teasing them, and doting upon them. Aunt Lu recounted with laughter that the youngest child loved to wash his feet before bed and the eldest child always chased the chickens. Despite Uncle Jia’s assertion of a simple financial exchange or an intergenerational division of labor, the daily acts of caregiving as part of grandparental care were much more emotional, involving a moral and ethical sense about what is right, good, and important in kinship relations. This is also clarified in Uncle Jia’s statement that their care is voluntary, motivated not by a sense of duty or financial desperation but because “we care about our own children.”

In Uncle Jia and Aunt Lu’s conversation, there is a real sense that if the family cannot pull itself together and collaborate economically, then the emotional ties that bind the family will be lost. Suffering, then, is a kind of affective tool that measures the family collaboration. In its ideal form, suffering is shared and distributed across the generations such that the entire family suffers together for the sake of economic progress. The Jia family narrative of suffering is a narrative of positive collaboration, in which the suffering is a visible sign of one’s hard work. Suffering, in this sense, is the way in which the traditional value of economic cooperation meets the more modern emotional sentiments that tie the family together in modern times.

Although some families might measure their unity based on happiness (see for example Yan 2003), the Jia family uses suffering as a key moral and ethical indicator. Suffering represents an important contribution by everyone to the family, but for Uncle Jia and Auntie Lu, in particular, suffering is an especially important contribution due to their lack of wage-remunerated labor. In this way, suffering becomes an affective contribution to the intergenerational family, binding together the family’s sentimental and economic standing and including both the sentiments and practical arrangements of everyday life.

5 “All These Troubles I Bear Myself”

At 9:00 am, when most of the neighbors had long since eaten breakfast, it seemed to Yujie that her family was the only one that was behind schedule. At 7:30 am the 7-year-old twin girls had knocked on the door of their older brother’s house. I was staying with the family during the Spring Festival and I answered the door. Guests had come, we needed to quickly dress and brush our teeth and head to the larger family home just 25 meters down the road. I dressed in a rush, throwing on a layer of long johns before climbing into the thick pair of cotton-padded pants that had been loaned to me for the week. My haste, however, was in vain as the 21-year-old sister-in-law, Meihua, remained in bed scrolling her phone while her 3-year-old daughter played at her feet. Despite the repeated insistence by the younger sister-in-law that she get up quickly, we waited for over an hour, playing with the 3-year-old, while Meihua continued to lay in bed, her eyes glued to her smart phone’s screen and oblivious to the growing anxiety of her younger sister-in-law and me. When we finally arrived at the family complex, Meihua immediately closed herself in the small bathroom since she had not spent anytime brushing her hair or washing her face when we were waiting for her. The young girls reported to Yujie, their mother, about how they had spent the last hour, how Meihua had spent the entire time looking at her phone and was still not ready to meet the family guests. Yujie was visibly upset, her eyes facing downward in a contemptuous grimace and her fingers drumming repeatedly against her legs to hide her anger. I quickly said hello to the visiting aunt and uncle who had traveled over 10 km in a small three-wheeled electric cart to make the visit before I retired to the kitchen to help prepare breakfast.

Yujie was still pacing, and I laughed saying that I had never seen anyone stay in bed so long. I was trying to bring some levity to the situation. Yujie spit back, “She is the laziest person I’ve ever met. Lazy, lazy, lazy!” Then, changing the subject, we began to prepare the dishes for the morning meal.

Later, when Yujie was no longer angered by the family drama, I asked what she thought about her daughter-in-law. When I had first met Yujie three years earlier, she had just arranged for her 18-year-old son to marry Meihua and, although overcome with anxiety about financing the wedding, Yujie was hopeful that the marriage would anchor her eldest son in the family, bringing a pause to his propensity to play and waste money. In the three years since, the young couple had given birth to a pretty daughter and had found work in a pork factory outside of Guangzhou. Meihua’s personality was continually jovial, she laughed heartily, teased her husband, and played with her daughter. But she seemed bent on asserting her power as a daughter-in-law, such as refusing to greet guests early in the morning. During the marriage negotiations, she had demanded bridewealth that matched that of her peers, an amount totaling almost 150,000 rmb. Yujie stated that in the past a daughter-in-law was expected to be docile and respectful, but in the current state of affairs she could do little to control, influence, or change her daughter-in-law’s behavior. Since her children spanned the ages of 22 and 7, she imagined herself in the position of being both an ideal mother-in-law and an ideal daughter-in-law at the same time.

“I like a peaceful family (heping jiating),” she insisted. “So even if there is trouble, I’m not going to say anything. In fact, I have so many difficulties—with earning money, with daily chores. All these troubles, I bear them all myself. I don’t share them with others. In that way, the others are happy. This year I couldn’t afford to buy the kids new clothes [for New Year’s]. I told them; we can eat bitterness ourselves (chiku). But I was afraid that she [her mother-in-law] would get angry. So, I spent 300 rmb —money I didn’t have— to buy her a new coat. I want others to be happy, then we can have harmony.”

This strategy of bearing trouble and avoiding confrontation actually seemed to work very well for the family. Yujie’s daughter-in-law regularly praised Yujie’s morality and personality, highlighting the ways in which she was tolerant and loving. Despite her reluctance to support Yujie in material and practical ways, she seemed to offer emotional support in the form of praise, affection, and general goodwill. Even though this offering of emotional affection seemed inadequate to Yujie, my discussions with other daughters-in-law of Meihua’s generation reveal that they calculate their duties toward their mothers-in-law quite differently. One recent bride summarized her attitude toward her in-laws as “If they won’t respect me, I won’t respect them.” This reciprocal calculation of emotional exchange means that during the first several years of marriage, daughters-in-law are basically testing out their relationships with their mothers-in-law in order to see how tolerant, loving, and mother-like the new family will be. The attitudes of the mothers-in-law form the basis for the later filial negotiations. This is the foundation for what Clara To calls “the gendered intergenerational contract” (To 2014), the role of each generation of women to contribute to the family caretaking responsibilities.

While Yujie and other mothers-in-law complain about the rising power of their daughters-in-law, they also seem reluctant to return to a more traditional mother and daughter-in-law relationship that largely characterized their experiences with their own mothers-in-law. For Yujie, this meant scraping together money for a gift to demonstrate her filiality and gratitude toward her mother-in-law. Yujie, on the other hand, did not expect or receive a gift from her own daughter-in-law.

In the family drama that unfolds above, Yujie’s thoughts on heping jiating point to the central value of suffering, or eating bitterness, in the sentiments that determine the family. Family, John Borneman writes, is not only a matrix of a relationship but also of sentiment (Borneman 2001). The moral ways of being in a family, and particularly a family that is united in peace, require particular kinds of affective, emotional, and material labor. Among the three generations of women, there is a significant difference in the ways that each woman contributes to family peace. The eldest family member, still able-bodied and in her late sixties, offers labor, cooking, and childcare, while Yujie and her husband work. Her practical labor expresses little in the way of emotional or sentimental platitudes and I never heard her praise or encourage her daughter-in-law. The youngest woman, Meihua, entering the family just three years earlier has the advantage of a long-term temporal plane in which to repay her mother-in-law for her current kindness and the large bridewealth she received at her wedding. She offers emotional support in the form of praise, but still seems unsure if and when she will offer more deferential or practical support, such as a ritualistic New Year’s gift. Yujie, however, is caught in between two kinds of demands—to be both a good daughter-in-law and a good mother-in-law requires no small amount of emotional and practical gymnastics.

Yujie’s statement—“All of these troubles, I bear them all myself”—demonstrates the ways in which she feels caught in between two kinds of obligations as well as the ways in which she imagines herself to be morally victorious despite being exasperated by the moral pivoting. Like many other women in their early forties in Jiatian village, Yujie had missed out on schooling and she could not read or write even her own name. Because of her illiteracy, she was limited to doing base-line factory, restaurant, or cleaning work, so her financial worries were already predetermined by her past. Her efforts therefore had to be directed morally, and her work involved bearing these troubles.

Yujie completes this emotional labor through emotional regulation—a silencing of perceived negative emotions in service to a moral attitude (Wikan 1990; Abstract 1989; Hochschild 2003). In effect, her attitude is very self-sacrificing. She understands her moral personhood to be stemming directly from this ability to create a peaceful and harmonious family. In her narrative, Yujie emerges as a moral victor in the family because she suffers not only to make others happy but also because the family enjoys peaceful harmony due to her suffering. In bearing the family’s troubles, she emerges as a moral victor.

As much as Yujie’s discussion of bearing trouble is a lament or a complaint, it is also a cultural and local assertion of her own moral personhood. Unlike Kleinman (1988b; 1988a), who argues that suffering is an expression of disorder, the suffering expressed by Yujie and other grandmothers are statements of order—they are proof that they are conforming to the correct sets of ethical and cultural demands of a moral personhood. In a different context, Jason Throop (2008) examines the role of suffering in the South Pacific community of Yap. Drawing from Lévinas (1998) and Scarry’s (1985) reflections on pain, Throop argues that narratives help shape pain from a meaningless experience into a virtuous moral engagement. Throop (2008:176) outlines the many ways that Yapese culture constructs enduring pain as a positive moral attitude, including laboring without food, enduring medical treatment, and surviving war injuries, and he points out that suffering has value within the Yapese community through the connection to others. This positive valence of “suffering-for” allows individuals experiencing pain to transform an otherwise useless and meaningless tragedy into a purposeful event. Likewise, in Yujie’s narrative, bearing trouble becomes a moral gloss to enable the happiness of the family. Even if the suffering is solitary, it is transformed into a collective act of suffering on behalf of the family.

6 “That’s The Difficulty For Us Women in Our Forties”

From her friend and neighbor, I had heard that Honglin’s situation had worsened. Honglin had always worked long hours, and when I had first met her, she was spending most of her days mixing cement at a local construction site. She was saving money to pay for her second son’s new house, she told me, since the one that they had previously constructed was rejected by his future bride. Now, three years later, Honglin was no longer working in construction but instead she had become a full-time caretaker for her 2-year-old grandson. However, instead of enjoying her new role, she found herself even more anxious because a series of unfortunate events had led to a huge financial and care-taking burden.

Her eldest son, who had been happily married and living in a different city, had returned home, despondent and heartbroken when his marriage had ended in divorce. Honglin immediately began planning to arrange a second marriage to a local girl, trying to mend his broken heart. She soon discovered that since he was divorced, not only would the matchmaker demand more than twice the normal fee, she could expect that the new daughter-in-law would demand an extra-large bride price. In the meantime, there were other financial obligations, hospital bills from her husband’s recent car accident, a fine for her grandson who had not filed on time for his household residence permit, and the everyday cost of living.

Her sons and husband worked, but she complained that her second son did not, in fact, provide sufficient financial support. “My second son doesn’t buy [us] anything. … He pays for the formula, and that’s pretty much it. Every two months, he gives us about 500 rmb, but everything else, we must take care of it by ourselves. Nevertheless, whether or not he gives us any money, I still have to care for his son.” She continued to describe her financial situation in terms of a competition between care and finances, “I cannot earn any money because I also have to look after my mother-in-law. In Zhengzhou, my husband is only paid once a year; the rest of the year we live on loans.”

Her daughter-in-law was neither helpful or supportive; “For a whole year she [the daughter-in-law] did nothing. I mean not a single thing. She didn’t get out of bed, she didn’t cook food, she didn’t even wash a dish. She just would leave the bowl by her pillow. So incredibly lazy. In fact, all young people of her generation are like that. Doesn’t get out of bed, demands good food, and after she has eaten she just leaves. If you behaved like this in the past, you could not have survived; you would enrage the elder generation. Even my own mother-in-law, if I don’t give her good things, if I don’t care for her well, she will be very angry. If there is anything that I don’t do well, she will give me an unhappy look (gei lianse kan). That’s the difficulty for us women in our forties. When I got married and left home, my brothers didn’t care one bit. But my daughter-in-law will dare to demand things for herself.”

Honglin, just like Yujie and Aunt Lu, can be classified as what is known in the United States as a member of the “sandwich generation” (Roots 2014; Zal 2001). Faced with the triple burden of caring for her adult children, grandchildren, and elderly parents-in-law, Honglin not only faces extreme financial burdens to support her eldest son’s remarriage but also the emotional and practical troubles of dramatically different expectations about roles and attitudes within the family. These radically different generational expectations contribute to her daily financial struggles, since her son fails to remit adequate funds for the young child and for her practical daily life. And now she has now added one additional member to the family [her daughter-in-law] who also requires care instead of contributing to the household labor.

Complaints about daughters-in-law, as noted in the latter two cases, are incredibly common. While a good number of mothers and daughters-in-law cooperate well and divide household responsibilities fairly, common disagreements between the two generations of women often stem from different expectations about their chores. Even when the younger woman moves to a separate residence, it is common for the older generation to continue to provide a large portion of the cooking and cleaning tasks. Given these complaints about the general character of daughters in law, many mothers-in-law with whom I spoke were happy when their daughters-in-law migrated for work, even if it meant that they were left with a larger child care-taking burden. Mothers-in-law actively encouraged their daughters-in-law to find wage labor, complaining that at home the daughters-in-law were too prone to laziness and if they were to earn an income, they could at least contribute to the family economy.

A series of demographic studies record the rise of grandparenting in both urban and rural China (Cong and Silverstein 2008; Silverstein and Cong 2013; Xu, Silverstein, and Chi 2014; Ko and Hank 2013; Nyland et al. 2009; Zeng and Xie 2014). For example Chen, Liu, and Mair (2011) note that beyond the first year of life, paternal grandmothers spend as much time with the children as the mothers do. This is true in both urban and rural China, despite the differential access to quality daycare. Feinian Chen (2014) analyzes data from a large-scale social survey and finds that the daughter-in-law’s professional standing is often determined by the availability of the mother-in-law’s labor. In this volume, Qi explores the phenomenon of “floating grandparents” who accompany their extended family in urban centers and Huang’s chapter highlights the role of urban grandparents. All of these data point to the idea that grandparenting has become an enduring family strategy to deal with the challenges of contemporary economics and the demands for dual-wage families.

In European and East Asian contexts, researchers have pointed out the connection between the paucity of state welfare systems and the increase in grandparental involvement (Bordone, Arpino, and Aassve 2017; Arber et al. 2012; Glaser et al. 2013). Coupled with a demographic transition and increasing numbers of younger women in formal or migrant employment, grandparents fill the practical gaps in childcare (Emick and Hayslip 1996; Shore and Hayslip 1994; Chen, Liu, and Mair 2011). The conversations with Honglin and Yujie also point out that custodial grandparenting and migration may be a strategy to ease relations among the generations. Most families I met agreed that while the mother was the best person to care for their own children, grandmothers enabled mothers to work outside the home allowing for extra income as well as clear expectations for each family members. With more firm divisions of household roles, intergenerational relationships may be smoothed avoiding the daily conflict and negotiations of chores and responsibilities.

Still, many grandparents have a profound ambivalence toward their care-taking responsibilities, describing the obligation as a moral and ethical task to be undertaken regardless of the amount of remittances provided by their adult children. Ambivalences in intergenerational relationships exist because of structural and ideological contradictions (Luescher and Pillemer 1998). On the one hand, grandparenting is fraught with exhausting and tiresome routines of caretaking, while on the other hand, grandparents can derive satisfaction from an active role in the intergenerational family (Backhouse and Graham 2012; Doley et al. 2015; Hoang, Haslam, and Sanders n.d.; Park 2018)

Honglin’s ambivalence about her care-taking responsibilities is most keenly felt in the conflict between her responsibility toward her eldest son and her commitment to her grandchild. She wants to work to earn income, but her time is taken up with caring for her grandson. She cannot earn the cost of a new bridewealth for her heartbroken son and spend her days chasing a toddler at the same time. Traditionally, Chinese kinship studies describe the horizontal conjugal and vertical intergenerational relationships as being in direct conflict with each other (Fei 1992). Rubie Watson (1985) famously analyzed relationships among brothers as a source of tensions in the distribution of kinship resources. Honglin’s situation brings a new twist to these traditional conflicts, adding not only competition among brothers but also competition among brothers and the brothers’ children. Honglin’s situation reveals a new kind of intergenerationality, one that cannot be explored simply by comprehending the vertical and horizontal relational pulls; those that are directed diagonally both upwards and downwards at the same time must also be examined. As the family becomes increasingly expanded, so too are commitments increasingly in conflict. Honglin finds herself unable to meet all of these obligations.

Honglin’s complaints express a desire for recognition for her unfair burdens. Meeting kinship duties through suffering is not always a sign of moral fortitude or virtuosity. Rather, Honglin’s complaints highlight a profound disconnect between family expectations and contemporary ideals of the rights and responsibilities of family membership. While the grandparents with whom I spoke never anticipated the state to care for them in their old age (in contrast, see the chapter by Huang in this volume), they certainly did not expect there to be such radical shifts in terms of their positionality. “The difficulty for women in their forties,” Honglin reminds us, is that not only have social changes radically restructured their economic value but also they themselves have suffered as daughters-in-law in service to the patriarchal family, and then are only to be disappointed by the partial dismantling of the family structure. They find themselves once again at the bottom of the family hierarchy with no hope of climbing to the top.

Honglin’s story does have some unique points—she has an unusually large number of sons, for instance, and her son’s remarriage makes her family’s economic situation especially precarious. However, she shares in common with the grandparents I feature above the struggle to manage the new expectations for intergenerational cooperation and the divisions of labor. She, like many grandparents, is worried about the financial contributions of her adult children but she seems embarrassed to directly ask for more.

Discussions about suffering and hardship are a vehicle to draw attention to the mismatch between one’s expectations and reality. Grandparents all utilize narratives about suffering to draw attention to this uncomfortable fit between the ideal and the reality. In some cases, these realities are shared across an entire generation, requiring a shift not only in how one thinks about one’s individual life but also about how one engages with society.

7 Conclusion

I began this chapter with Auntie Tang’s poem “Everything changes” to point out the ways in which a radically shifting social structure has reorganized the family as a basic unit of moral personhood and as a unit of economic survival, necessitating even more intensive intergenerational cooperation. Many authors researching intergenerational families highlight the ways in which reciprocity (Cong and Silverstein 2008; Zhang, Gu, and Luo 2014; To 2014; Coall et al. 2018) and emotional ambivalence (Hoang, Haslam, and Sanders n.d.; May, Mason, and Clarke 2012; Sadruddin et al. 2019) shape grandparenting obligations. My discussion explores suffering as a key concept in both of these theoretical frames. The struggles of three different grandparent-headed households demonstrate that suffering can be included as collaborative emotional work in reciprocal intergenerational exchanges. At the same time, suffering can lead to emotional ambivalences and complicated attitudes that characterize intensive caretaking responsibilities.

Suffering has become a key way that older people understand their labor in the intergenerational family. Without access to high-wage income, suffering becomes one benchmark affective contributions. Given that household care and labor are often invisible and devalued, the grandparents must find ways to measure their investments of time, effort, and energy. Discussions about suffering and hardship thus become a central way to frame their daily lives in an ethical and moral framework that historically has been valued as a central part of Chinese citizenship.

In referencing suffering, the above grandparents are drawing from a cultural imaginary propagated in part by the Chinese party-state. During the collective era, to suffer for the revolution was considered the highest ethical good. Attitudes of altruism, endurance, and selfless acts of nationalism were honored and encouraged by the party. A typical example of encouragement of these attributes is found in the memorializing of Lei Feng, a young martyr in the People’s Liberation Army. His diary was published in 1963 and became the basis for a number of propaganda campaigns that encouraged individuals to sacrifice their lives and physical comfort for the sake of national progress (Farquhar 2002).

Vera Schwarcz argues that personal suffering is also utilized by the Chinese government to “enforce amnesia about unspeakable portions of one’s own history” (1997:126). In ritualized “speak bitterness” sessions, older members of the community tell tales of woe and sorrow to indirectly praise the contemporary situation. By drawing attention to the bitterness of the past, the community frames their current sufferings in a meta-narrative of progress, which ultimately places responsibility for the progress on the actions of the party-state. In her analysis, Schwarcz (1997:121) notes the make-up of the Chinese word “ku.” Alternately bitterness or sadness, ku 苦 is made of the radical grass (艹) and the radical ancient (古), and it conveys a “notion of an old hurt grown terribly sour over time … this appreciation for bitterness at the heart of suffering is key to all Chinese expressions of grief.” In the contemporary context, suffering is found in both past and present and a progressive narrative is not always easily found in the vicissitudes of state policies.

These bitterness campaigns served to solidify class formation and unite over the hatred of the old society. A similar function can be seen when grandparents share complaints about novel kinship expectations. It is important to note that ku also has a healthy, positive valence as well, even without the coopting of suffering for political means. For example, eating bitter melon is thought to be beneficial to health, hence children and the elderly are often required to eat bitter melon to nourish the body. Additionally, neng chi ku (the ability to eat bitterness and endure suffering) is a quality that is highly regarded by my neighbors and interlocutors. While suffering has been utilized by the Chinese Communist Party to support a grand narrative of progress, suffering is a central part of the local moral code in the village. The ability to endure suffering, to work hard, and to perform heavy labor are all important ways in which villagers understand themselves and their community. In contrast to urbanites, intellectuals, and individuals who do not contribute to the family economy, rural grandparents feel that their ability to withstand hardships and to work is an important marker of identity. Suffering centers prominently in such narratives not only because everyone truly did suffer or is suffering but also because suffering is a quality that is socially desirable. Suffering is politically beneficial to the national narrative, but it is locally beneficial as well.

In effect, the values instilled by revolutionary China—a fear of idleness, a compulsion to work hard, and the nationalistic desire to contribute to a progressive narrative—have all been reinvigorated by the economic changes that have brought the family together. The dismantling of the collective system and the establishment of a totally new kind of migrant labor market effectively disenfranchised the rural elders. Simultaneously, the national household registration system radically limited the movement of children who were tied to their places of origin because of restrictive access to education. Thus two distinct generations are thrown together and are dependent upon the wage labor of the middle generation. This dependency creates new opportunities for both intimacy and conflict.

Yet suffering can only create family unity when it is shared among all parties. Whereas Uncle Jia’s family demonstrates the profound emotional and practical productivity of suffering together, this kind of harmony is not shared among all the families in my study. When one party does not suffer, or seem to suffer, this places greater demands for sacrifice on one or more of the other family members. Yujie’s and Honglin’s cases are both effectively illustrative as they both struggle with the unequal contributions of their daughters-in-law to the household economy and labor.

A discussion about suffering, however, does not always contain a moral meaning, and the sufferer does not always end up as the moral victor. Rather, sufferers may point to suffering because of a lack of control. In other words, suffering is sometimes meaningless, random, and without a cure. The suffering of grandparents caught in changing kinship expectations is not easily alleviated. The struggle of those who suffer at the random hand of generational fate is to bear, to endure, and to find an ethically meaningful life.