Long Ties, Filial Tension and Temporality in Transnational Chinese-German Families
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.7112Keywords:
sandaitongtang, jinxiaodao, tianlunzhile, filial morality, emotional constraintsAbstract
This study examines how Chinese migrant mothers married to German husbands sustain and reinterpret filial piety (尽孝道) within transnational Chinese-German families. Although these households resemble “modern” nuclear families in Germany, the mothers remain morally oriented toward the Confucian ideal of the three-generation family (三代同堂). The aspiration for intergenerational co-presence shapes their emotional labour and obligations to parents in China, generating ambivalent feelings of love, guilt, and responsibility. Rather than weakening kin ties, migration reconfigures filial practice into a transnational project enacted through affective communication, extended visits, and symbolic efforts to reproduce three-generation relatedness across distance. Using a collaborative ethnographic approach (Lassiter, 2005; Rappaport, 2008), grounded in a friendship network of Chinese migrant mothers, the study draws on conversational exchanges, emotion notes, and WeChat messages to trace moments when filial morality is activated. The findings demonstrate how these women sustain and re-embed filial ethics in migration, challenging assumptions about the disappearance of filial morality during migration.
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