Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
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Crossroads
by Han Zhu
I stand on a crossroads between two cultures and two generations. I am too young to be a true first-generation Chinese immigrant because I was only five when I came to America, yet too old to be a second generation immigrant because I was not actually born here. My parents are not young, and yet they are not old enough to be considered “elderly.” My identity gives me a unique vantage point from which I can observe the intergenerational relationships across cultures. From here, I can see the intricacies of these relationships in China and in America, all the subtleties and differences in the ways we interact with the aging generation. The effect of these cross-cultural and intergenerational dynamics is an important issue to examine as life expectancies continue to increase and cultures like Chinese and American mix. From where I stand, I have noticed that there are many differences in the way we view and interact with the elderly, governed by mechanisms that work in both obvious and subtle ways.
When I was little I once heard a story that went something like this: There was woodcutter who loved his mother dearly and was very devoted to her. One year there was a famine, and the woodcutter’s family ran out of food to eat. The woodcutter’s elderly mother, in particular, was suffering from health problems and could not tolerate the hunger. To appease his mother, the woodcutter cut off a piece of his own flesh, cooked it in soy sauce, and gave it to her, telling her it was a wild chicken he had found in the woods. Do you find this story strange? It is actually a celebrated Chinese story from the famous historical novel, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” by Guanzhong Luo that has been read to children in China for hundreds of generations. It represents a staple class of Chinese children’s stories that teach cultural values about devotion to one’s parents. Another such story, the Legend of the White Snake, tells the tale of a man who kneels for three whole days in front of a tower in which his elderly mother has been locked away to “move the heavens” into freeing her. There are countless other stories like these two examples that are focused on a grown child (usually a male, interestingly) committing extreme acts of devotion for his parents. Ingrained in these stories, and in the culture itself, are the underlying expectations of a type of parent-child bond that may be different from what many Americans are used to.
Before going into detail about the exact nature of these Chinese intergenerational relationships, let’s first compare the above stories to some Western children’s stories. Take the folktale “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for example. After being kicked out of the house by his mother for disobeying her, Jack climbs up the beanstalk to meet the giant and have his own adventures. In Disney’s movie The Little Mermaid II, despite loving her mother dearly, Ariel’s daughter rebels against her mother and runs away from home in order to find her own path. In many other stories, the focus is on the child leaving home and going on a journey to search for his or her own identity. If family or parents are mentioned, it’s usually in the context of how they have shaped the child’s experience. That is not to say that family in itself is not equally important in the Western values as it is in the Chinese culture. The Bible, for example, tells of a man who welcomes home with open arms a son who had years earlier demanded his inheritance and left home. With this example, we can see that there is no de-emphasis of parental love in Western culture. However, the expectation of sacrifice and unconditional love is on the parent, and not so much on the child, whereas the Chinese folktales bring into the center of focus the child’s role of duty and sacrifice to his or her parents. The stories from each culture shade differently the subtle balance in parent-child relationships. What, exactly, are the underlying cultural beliefs that account for these differences, and how do they affect the way the younger generation interacts with the older generation in the two cultures?
The Chinese have a concept known as filial piety, a deep love and respect for one’s parents and ancestors. The children have a responsibility not to be rebellious, to show love, respect and support, to take care of their parents, to display courtesy, to wisely advise their parents, to conceal their parents’ mistakes, and to display sorrow for their parents’ sickness and death. The traditional value of filial piety, built up over thousands of years from Confucian values, runs deep at the very foundation of Chinese culture. The Chinese word for filial piety, “xiao”, is the one of the first words every child learns, because it is considered the primary and most important virtue you can have. Your ancestors are sacred, and one of the worst ways to get insulted is to have your ancestors snubbed. For example, the coined insult “Screw 18 generations of your ancestors!” is reserved for one’s greatest enemies. Needless to say, the responsibility to take care of your nearest ancestors, the people who birthed and raised you, is enormous. In my father’s words, one’s debts to one’s parents will take a lifetime to repay.
How does this dynamic compare to that of Western culture? Filial piety may not be as explicitly recognized or practiced in America as it is in China. However, is there still some sort of mechanism that allows children to pay back their debt to their parents? In an “Introduction to Psychology” lecture at MIT last year, Professor Jeremy Wolfe once said, “Sometimes you may wonder how you can pay your parents back for all they’ve done for you. Your parents may tell you this: ‘You can never pay us back, but one day you will have children of your own, and you can do for them what we did for you. That’s how you can pay us back.” What Professor Wolfe says suggests a cyclic, intergenerational relationship of parental-child love, spiraling into each new generation. Your parents take care of you and raise you, and you in turn take care of your children, and they will take care of their children in turn. In establishing this, however, one might acknowledge that Western parent-child relationships are inherently unequal, but that this is justified by the fact that the children do pay their parents back, so to speak, by ensuring the prosperity and survival of the next generation.
The differences in assumptions in the parent-child relationships in each culture lead to some important practical implications, the most distinct of which is that a sizable percentage of Chinese adults take their elderly parents into their homes to care for them. In contrast, senior housing and nursing homes are widely used in the United States. Even among the Chinese parents and children who do not co-reside, there is frequent interaction. Not visiting your parents almost every day, especially if you live within a reasonable distance, is considered a violation of the principles of filial piety. The popular song sung at Chinese New Year’s says it all—“Come Home to Visit More Often” is a message that rings true in every Chinese person’s heart. Comparatively, in the United States, the children are less likely to live near their parents, so the opportunity for daily visits may occur less often.
Co-residence and visiting aside, even general financial assistance for elderly is a big issue in both cultures. Although in China the government encourages work units, neighborhood committees, and other organizations to provide assistance to the elderly, most elderly still receive the majority of their financial support from their children. In the West, you might see the balance reversed and the parents financially helping grown children more than they receive assistance. Not to say that there also isn’t a certain amount of co-helping when it comes to finances in America, but how do the elderly survive economically if most of the help does not come from their children? In America, Social Security is still there as a national system to aid the elderly, in addition to private charities. Social Security, being a unified national system, puts the burden of aiding the elderly on the whole society instead of the individual family unit, which the Chinese system relies on.
On the other hand, each of the two support systems has its own share of problems. For example, China’s system of relying on families to provide financial assistance fails when elderly individuals do not have children to take care of them. In rural areas, where sons are still given the role of taking care of his family while the daughters are married outside the family, not having sons around is equal to being condemned to have no one around to take care of you in old age. This explains the strong bias (particularly in rural areas) for sons and the discriminatory treatment of daughters, who are sometimes abandoned or killed at birth. Although many of China’s companies also provide support systems for some elderly individuals, this does not help if the elderly individual never worked for such companies to begin with. We can also point out that in the American system, Social Security provides the bare minimum for survival. In addition, Social Security as we know it may change drastically in the next few years, which does not guarantee much aid for elderly generations to come. As such, perhaps a certain amount of conversation between the two systems could lead to a net positive effect for both sides.
Up until now, I have only touched on the characteristics and implications of intergenerational relationships in China and in the United States. However, what happens when you mix the two cultures, as in my family’s case? The Chinese-American case is indeed a unique one. My parents and their peers brought with them all the old values from China, ingraining the concept of filial piety in me and others of my generation. At the same time, we (the younger generation) have also been at least partially assimilated into the American culture, along with the economic and social lifestyle. Will our parents demand we take them into our homes and support them indefinitely? Will we still have enough of the Chinese filial piety values in us to do so, despite the pressures of our careers and hectic lifestyles? It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how things play out between these two generations, but perhaps it is still too early to gather enough data on the subject, since our generation has yet to grow independent of our parents, and our parents can hardly be called old. However, perhaps we can view the effects of assimilation much sooner than we’d expect—by studying the interaction between my parents their parents.
Despite the fact that my own grandparents have never considered permanent immigration to the United States, I have talked to many friends whose grandparents have permanently followed their children out of the homeland to take up residence in America. Immigrating when you are young is one thing, but I can hardly imagine the hardships aging people face as they learn to live in a foreign country. Many of these elderly Chinese become isolated not only because of their age but also because of the language barrier, and become recluses in their children’s homes. Ultimately, they become moody and depressed, with nothing to preoccupy them during the days save the silence of their working children’s homes and, if they’re lucky, small grandchildren who are too young to go to school. In this arrangement, as far as I can see, nobody is happy.
This is where elderly Chinese communities, having flourished in various senior housing establishments across America, come into play. I myself was very surprised to find out about them. I had initially believed that if someone of my parents’ generation here in America actually lacked enough filial piety to put their parents into a nursing home, it would create a scandal. These things do happen, after all. My parents have given me various examples of “ungrateful” children who put their parents into nursing homes and “neglect” them, probably in the hope that I will not turn out to be that “heartless.” But there is the flip side of the coin. Large communities of Chinese elderly, all of whom immigrated here after retirement to be close to their children, have found company in large numbers in some of America’s senior homes. These communities defy the image of a lonely Chinese individual withering away to nothingness in a foreign wasteland; they provide more emotional and economic support than families alone can offer. For instance, many Chinese elderly opt for senior housing simply to get health care benefits, since applying to Medicare and Medicaid is a long and difficult process. Emotionally, they receive the support of a large number of Chinese-American elderly peers whom they are able to socialize with. Best of all, their children are nearby, which makes frequent visits convenient.
As a Chinese-American from my generation, where does all this put me? Should I follow the paths of my ancestors and unconditionally take my parents into my home when they become old? Or should I take some advice from my adopted culture and put my parents in a Chinese senior citizen’s home? I think there is one side of this whole issue that I have yet to comment on, and that is what would my parents want? In the end, it really depends on how traditional or liberal my parents are at that point in time. Perhaps they would be horrified at the prospect of spending their remaining years in a nursing home, and curse themselves for having raised such a disloyal child. Or perhaps they would take on the attitudes of many others and seek the company of other elderly Chinese-Americans in senior citizen’s homes. Perhaps they might even go back to China. The possibilities are endless. I don’t know what will happen 10 or 20 years from now, but I do know one thing—when the time comes, we will all sit down together and discuss it, and I will honor my parent’s wishes because the filial-pietist in me will always be alive and kicking. Ultimately, family is family, no matter what culture you are in. Family members help each other if other family members are in need. Everything else can be worked out along the way.
© 2007 MIT E-merging Journal
