Chinese ‘Study Mothers’ in Living Apart Together (LAT) Relationships: Educational Migration,Family Practices,and Gender Roles

Introduction

Co-residence, geographical proximity, and spatial co-presence are characteristic features that were long considered key elements of a family in both Eastern and some Western societies. However, a growing body of literature has noted a rise in the West of couples in non-cohabiting intimate relationships over time, such as commuter marriages (Gersterl and Gross, 1984), weekend couples (Kim, 2001), long-distance relationships (Holmes, 2006), and – the term now gaining greater acceptance – living apart together (LAT) relationships (Carter et al., 2015; Duncan and Phillips, 2010). Under these circumstances, the societally accepted form of the family, which binds people to fixed social roles and contractual obligations, has been questioned. Some go further and argue that the traditional notion of family has disintegrated, leading to the de-traditionalisation of social life (Giddens, 1992).

In Asia, although some of the reasons for couples living separately are similar to those in Western contexts, such as job location, others are quite different. In China, such differences can be seen in the category of ‘study mothers’ (in Mandarin Chinese, peidu mama), which refers to women who physically accompany their children and take care of them so as to provide them with optimal living and study conditions. This can be achieved in multiple ways; for instance, sending children abroad to receive a Western education accompanied by parent(s), or internal migration to (low-cost but relatively high-quality) schools. Under such circumstances, the household is often split across a country or countries, as the husbands usually stay in the home country or travel to economically developed regions to provide financial support for their family. Such living arrangements, organised primarily around children’s education, are regarded as part of a wider strategy of capital accumulation for children (and the family) to achieve a better and higher social class status (Waters, 2005), especially for those coming from less wealthy areas (Fong, 2004). As such, Chinese children have to study very hard to gain a high score in entrance exams in order to get into the ‘best’ universities, which undoubtedly makes the competition fiercer than ever (Waters, 2005). This is manifested in the number of students taking the National College Entrance Examination (commonly known as ‘Gaokao’) across the years. In 1977, 5.7 million test-takers registered for the exam, the numbers reached a peak of 10.50 million in 2008, and have declined steadily since then. According to a recent report from the Ministry of Education, ¹ 9.75 million students sat the exam in 2018.

China has a long tradition of establishing extended households containing multiple generations as the ideal and dominant family arrangement (Zeng and Xie, 2014). However, people’s living arrangements and attitudes to intimate relationship have been undergoing dramatic changes since the late 1970s open-up policy, with greater tolerance of premarital sex and non-marital cohabitation. However, far too little attention has been paid to the complexities and diversity of family life regarding the way in which Chinese married couples live separately for their children’s education. This calls for closer attention to how women, who are often expected to accompany and take care of their child, even at the expense of their own career development, ‘do’ family and parenting in everyday life. Therefore, this research develops Morgan’s well-established concept of family practice by focusing particularly on Chinese study mothers, with the aim of adding new understandings of everyday family practices within an ever-shifting Chinese society. Taking a critical feminist approach, I explore how these study mothers negotiate gender roles and construct their identities, as well as the subjective meanings they attach to their experiences in contemporary Chinese society. Although it can be seen that moving away from a focus on the role of a wife can be somewhat liberating, I argue that, in being a LAT study mother, for the production of educational mobility, the traditional notion of ‘family’ is reproduced and practised in an old-fashioned way (e.g. providing children with emotional support and preparing their daily meals). In this way, social and cultural constructions of gender norms and the ideal of motherhood, as informed by traditional Confucian values, still play a key role in contemporary China.

Family practices within scattered living arrangements

In the West, there is an increased diversity of both living and personal relationships, bringing about changes in understanding family life and a transformation in intimate relationships (Chambers, 2012; Jackson, 2015; Jamieson, 1999). David Morgan’s (2011) work opens up significant new possibilities for understanding contemporary family life. He departs from traditional definitions of ‘the family’ as family structures, and moves towards the idea of ‘family practices’, with a greater emphasis on fluidity, process and the everyday dimensions of ‘doing’ or ‘displaying’ family (Finch, 2007). In other words, family is considered to be a changing and culture-dependent social construction that is being done through a set of everyday practices: families are what families do (Smart and Neale, 1999). As such, family members are not only defined by marriage and kinship, as mothers and wives, for instance, but are also determined by routines and practices, such as ‘doing’ mothering. With a focus on active ‘doing’ through everyday activities, rather than the ‘being’ of family, this ‘practices’ approach, at least in some respects, enables us to explore how inequalities, power and divisions are practically constituted on a daily basis (Morgan, 2019).

Drawing on Morgan’s concept of ‘family practices’, Jamieson (2011) further develops the idea of ‘practices of intimacy’ as ‘practices which enable, generate and sustain a subjective sense of closeness and being attuned and special to each other’ (p. 1.2). In addition to mutual self-disclosure as a way of ‘doing’ intimacy (Giddens, 1992), the performing or receiving of practical care as a practice of intimacy is also essential within families and parent–child relationships. Practices of intimacy and family practices overlap in cultures that valorise families and intimacy and take it for granted that intimacy is an aspect of family life (Jamieson, 2011). Although Morgan’s influential work on the family practices approach has largely met a favourable reception, among the few negative comments, it has been criticised in part for ignoring the fact that family relationships are still seen as highly patterned and deeply embedded in wider structures (Widmer et al., 2008). Empirical research has repeatedly found continuity rather than ‘de-traditionalisation’ in the practices of ‘family’ over time, because people cannot easily perform a sense of family in a vacuum, but act according to the social and cultural norms within which they are embedded. In addition, the amount, character, and allocation of resources (such as emotional, financial and educational resources) are scarce and not even. Just as family practices might fit with and reproduce conventional scripts, so too might practices of intimacy. Notwithstanding critiques to Morgan’s (2011) work, this practices approach has significant implication for understanding ‘how family was implicated in a whole range of other social institutions and sets of practices’ (p. 2).

Previous research on the geographical splitting of families has predominantly focused on the central role of education in middle-class Asian families, and in framing transnational family strategies in relation to enhancing children’s various forms of capital as well as the status of the family (Chee, 2003; Waters, 2015). For example, in order to pass on their advantages and invest in their children’s future, Taiwanese parents had dropped their ‘parachute’ or ‘satellite’ children into the United States or Canada without the parents, who had returned to their country of origin to accumulate economic capital (Zhou, 1998). Waters (2005) focused on the importance of an overseas education as a strategy to both cultural capital and social reproduction in ‘astronaut’ families, where families immigrate to Canada and then the head of the household returns to Hong Kong to continue with his occupation. In South Korea, ‘kirogi families’ that divide themselves between two countries are practised mainly by middle-class families for the purpose of providing their children with Western credentials in response to external changes (Jeong et al., 2014). Due to children’s education, the practice of split households reveals gendered patterns: usually the mothers rather than the fathers uproot their lives to accommodate their child, although a few fathers also did so (Lee and Koo, 2006; Waters, 2010).

There is, however, very little literature focusing on the experiences of parent(s), in particular women, during the time when they accompany their children while leaving their partner behind. With the implementation of China’s one-child policy, which started in the late 1970s and ended in 2015, Chinese families became child-centred and that meant parents usually spare no efforts to devote themselves to their child’s development, though with different means (Fong, 2004; Shek, 2006). Through interviewing 20 middle-class Chinese ‘study mothers’ in Singapore, Huang and Yeoh (2005) indicated that the migration experiences of these women as transient migrants within the transnational households have significantly reinforced their identities as ‘mothers’, partly because the state policy has tightly restricted foreign mothers’ ability to work and, consequently, most of the women were confined to the home setting as full-time cleaners and food providers for their children. It could be argued that this transnational ‘education project’ ‘hinges crucially on the notion and realisation of the ‘sacrificial mother’ (Huang and Yeoh, 2005: 391). My findings support some of these arguments.

In order to gain a better understanding of how family practices are subject to cultural interpretations and social constrains, it is important to take account of the specific historical and cultural contexts in which people are embedded. Confucianism served as the dominant ideology in shaping traditional Chinese patriarchal family values (Stacey, 1983). In a collectivist society, like China, the well-being of the family is valued over that of the individual, and the subordination of women was of paramount importance in maintaining family harmony and social stability (Zang, 2011). As reflected in the three types of obedience (to their fathers when young, to their husbands when married, and to their sons when widowed), women were placed at the bottom under the familial patriarchal system. Although it has been universally acknowledged that women’s status has experienced changes over time and Chinese society has seen a rise of the notion of the individual since the late 1970s open-up policy (Yan, 2010). Still, the long-standing Confucian tradition remains deeply ingrained in today’s people’s everyday practices in relation to family life.

However, again, hardly any attention has been paid to how family headed by women is practised and maintained and how identity negotiations are formed and affected by certain cultural and social contexts. By applying Morgan’s ‘practices’ approach to the non-Western context, it contributes to existing knowledge by providing empirical evidence of the cultural specificity of family practices in the Chinese context. Drawing on interviews data with Chinese study mothers from varied socio-economic backgrounds, this study represents one of the first in-depth examinations of how family is culturally constructed and practised to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in contemporary China, despite undergoing profound social transformations over time. In the following section, I outline the methods employed to collect qualitative data from study mothers. Three empirical cases serve as examples to demonstrate both the multiple underlying reasons behind couples living apart and the coping strategies developed by different family members. This is then followed by examining, through the data, the rationale and negotiations that lie behind living apart from their partners as embarked upon by Chinese study mothers.

Research methodology

This research presents data on three study mothers as case study exemplars, which was derived from a larger study (of 35 women), that examines more broadly how Chinese women in LAT relationships construct ‘family’ and maintain a sense of ‘togetherness’. The extent to which the Western concept of intimacy is applicable to social contexts that are dramatically different from those of the West is also explored. My point of departure, more importantly, is to uncover how this group of people living outside the conventional family, makes sense of, negotiates, and reproduces family life and maintains intimacy across distance in the transforming Chinese society. In doing so, I have employed a feminist methodological stance to conduct an in-depth examination of women’s experiential and private accounts by allowing them to speak in their own words (Letherby, 2015).

My samples were limited to heterosexual women who live apart from their partners, for whatever reasons. In total, 35 women were recruited through different means. Ten of whom were mostly in their late 20s and recruited after I had advertised this research project on WeChat, the most popular social networking application in China. With the aim of uncovering as much diversity in the data as possible, the rest (25 people), whom I had never met before, were enrolled by asking intermediaries (such as my friends, older relatives, and colleagues) to introduce anyone they knew in couples living apart relationships. Though this meant that decisions about whom to include and exclude in the research were largely in the hands of intermediaries and snowballing had the potential to attract participants who share similar characteristics (Mason, 2002). Recruiting participants through personal networks is significantly beneficial with respect to building rapport and trust, considering my identity at the time of the interviews, as a young unmarried woman who had spent years in a Western country studying for a higher education degree. Consequently, my overall samples include people from all age groups (between 23 and 57 years) with varied social status and occupations (such as full-time housewives, teachers, study mothers, professionals, and retired people).

35 qualitative semi-structured, in-depth interviews were carried out for understanding their experiences in LAT relationships from their own perspectives. The wide differences in participants’ social attributes made me aware, both during and after the interviews, that my positionality as a researcher was not fixed, but subject to constant negotiation between all parties. In comparison with the majority of participants who live apart from their partners owing to different educational and job locations, only six did so for their children’s education (and therefore were called study mothers). Demographically, they were in their mid-40s and none of them had experienced divorce. However, three of them were chosen purposely as the focus of this study, considering they not only vary in terms of educational level, family background, and occupation, but also in the ways they perform gender role-related activities to ‘do’ family: for Rosy, accompanying her son to study overseas played a role in fulfilling gendered expectations of a (qualified) mother and doing parent–child intimacy; Qingyan’s own biography history of not being supported by her own parents combined with the legacy of Confucian culture which emphases children’s interest were deeply rooted in her everyday family practices. As a result, she pinned her hope on her children; and in the third case, Minzhou’s image as a sacrificial mother was visible, in comparison with her husband, through a close examination of everyday food preparation. Although this is a fairly small sample, case studies were employed to exclusively interrogate contemporary real-life phenomena at the micro level within an individual setting and across settings so as to represent the subtleties and complexities of an individual’s unique experiences in their own right (Stake, 1995; Yin, 2014). More importantly, my intention is not to use these study mothers’ experiences to represent all Chinese women, as quantitative studies are most likely to do. The primary aim of this empirical research is to interpret the underlying meanings and enrich studies on gender and family practices, through the lens of Chinese study mothers.

All interviews were carried out in Mandarin Chinese, audio-recorded, and translated. Selected quotes were translated into English for the purpose of analysis. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted, guided by Braun and Clarke (2006), to code recurring topics in the transcripts. Three main themes were identified: gendered family practices; reciprocal family practices; and everyday family practices. Considering individuals give meaning to their lives and form their identities through narratives of experiences (Weeks et al., 2001). I employed narrative analysis to consider participants’ social context and how women make sense of the meanings attached to them during reading narrative contents. Since ‘neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society would be understood without understanding both’ (Mills, 1959: 3), I located study mothers’ accounts within a particular social and historical context, with the aim of understanding the meanings that living apart has on their practices of family and gender in local contexts (Finch, 2007).

Gendered family practices: ‘I’d like to more or less make it up to him’

Rosy, 46 years old, was the only study mother who had graduated with a university degree. For the past 2 years, she has been accompanying her now 16-year-old son while he is studying in the USA, and holds a Green Card (US permanent resident). Her husband has remained in Beijing to run a jewellery business to provide them with continuous financial support. Before becoming a study mother, Rosy worked in an insurance company with an annual salary of 600,000 yuan (about 68,155 in GBP) in Beijing, where she had been working for over 10 years.

Such split family living arrangements derive fundamentally from her son’s educational migration. Owing to China’s expansion of higher education during the late 1990s (Wan, 2006), being educated is no longer a taken-for-granted middle-class privilege (Waters, 2005) and the pressure on middle-class families to succeed in the local education system has gradually increased. It has been reported by media that the acceptance rate of the top 38 Chinese universities is only 2%, which means that only 188,000 out of 9.4 million test-takers in total made it in 2016. ² In addition, a recent report released by an education site ³ showed that, in Henan province where Rosy’s family resides, there is the largest number of Gaokao takers, with a total of 820,000 people having registered in 2016. Due to these circumstances, Rosy invested heavily by sending her son abroad in response to competition with his 820,000 local peers. Through this transnational educational migration, as a response to the working-class competition, Rosy has the privilege of passing on advantages to her son and withdrawing him from the local education system so as to access greater educational resources and, by implication, to success in a less stressful environment. With the full support of Rosy’s husband, it seems that sending their son abroad for education, in the company of Rosy as a full-time study mother, is an example not simply of an educational strategy pursued by middle-class parents (Gillies, 2005; Reay, 2000), but also of a classed strategy of ‘doing’ family: it seems that only upper-middle-class families can, in reality, ‘pull it off’.

Apart from external forces such as the Chinese educational system, Rosy’s decision to accompany her son to study overseas is also strongly related to her willingness to invest emotionally. It is important to note that at the very beginning Rosy and her husband were struggling to survive and had a difficult time balancing work and family life in Beijing. Under these circumstances, Rosy sent her son to a local boarding school from kindergarten onwards. After 9 years of boarding life (3 years of kindergarten and 6 years of primary school): ‘he did form some bad habits’, Rosy said, such as thumb-sucking, partly caused by a lack of companionship and a sense of insecurity in his childhood. After apparent deep self-introspection, Rosy claimed that

Throughout these years, I did feel a sense of guilt for sending him to the boarding school. I owed him [. . .] in my heart, I’d like to more or less make it up to him. I’m willing to fix it by accompanying him [during the course of studying abroad].

Rosy’s sense of guilt was experienced especially when she realised that she could have fulfilled her caring responsibility to her son, but did not do so due to lack of time or effort. As Bedford (2004) states, one’s guilty experiences are related to things that one does, rather than the way one is. In traditional Confucian culture, taking care of children has commonly been viewed as a woman’s responsibility, both practically and educationally. Although recent research has shown a slight transformation in practices of fathering to extend beyond the role of financial provider to a more involved mode of fathering (Choi and Peng, 2016; Wilding, 2018), it is clear that women are still very much expected to put family members’ well-being first, while at the same time, de-prioritising self-development and putting career development aside, as informed by a distinctively Chinese Confucian collectivism. Rosy, as a mother, bore the brunt of the blame for the harm caused by her limited emotional involvement with her son during his childhood when (particularly economic) capital accumulation was more highly prioritised. Consequently, in contrast to her previous parenting beliefs, Rosy positions herself as ‘being on duty’ to provide emotional support and help her son escape the fierce competition prevalent throughout the local educational system.

Although the decision of being a study mother came with a high price in terms of her established career development (and even marital life) and Rosy was subsequently faced with incomprehension, it enabled her to ultimately fulfil the gendered expectations of a responsible, caring, and emotionally engaged mother. As she illustrated,

Because people view things differently. I enjoyed each other’s company during his four years of high school in the USA more than stayed in Beijing making millions. If asking me to choose [between making money and accompanying children] again, I will still choose to be with my son.

From Rosy’s perspective, doing motherhood is characterised by child-centred, labour-intensive, and emotionally absorbing activities, and may lead to strengthen the practices of mother–child intimacy (Devasahayam and Yeoh, 2007; Hays, 1996). Rosy’s mothering practices entail more emotional engagement with ‘doing’ family life because experience, identity, and subjectivity are strongly informed by socially prescribed gender roles in the Chinese context. This further evokes the deep-rooted gendered division of emotional labour in families, making apparent the differential efforts of mothers and fathers. Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that gendered family practices, in this regard, are already partially shaped by traditional socially constructed gender norms, and this may, in turn, influence how families headed by women are practised and displayed as an outcome of separation.

Reciprocal family practices: ‘I hope my children can do things that I might not have the chance to do’

For my participant, working out how to construct a sense of family and maintain intimacy has become strongly intertwined with individuals’ own biographical experiences in the past. In sharp contrast to Rosy, who was able to mobilise resources to take her son to study abroad, Qingyan (47) was constrained from doing what she would wish to ‘do’, because of the scarcity of these social, economic, and educational resources. Growing up with her five siblings in a poor peasant family in Liaoning province, the north part of China, she could not go to college, even though she had received an offer. However, being a study mother has more to do with her willingness to ‘fix’ things and provide her children with opportunities to achieve in ways that she could not in her earlier lives. She explained,

I very much admire people who are excellent in studying. The reason that I could not go to a university is not because of my intelligence level, instead it’s family (financial) conditions [. . .] I hope my children can do things that I might not have the chance to do.

In particular, how study mothers arrange family life and make sense of their practices is profoundly shaped by the social prescriptions, economic constraints and cultural values in which they are embedded. With the idea of preventing her children from missing the opportunity of gaining a beneficial education, Qingyan decided to go to Beijing alone as a private tutor in 2006 when her son was 7 years and her daughter was 5 years, in the hope of earning money. Despite her husband’s opposition, Qingyan’s agency in relation to resource accumulation was clearly manifested and even increased, as expressed by a ‘flexible’ family practice in the sense that she has taken a primary role as financial contributor in her family (Morgan, 2011). Nevertheless, she returned to her hometown 6 years later because her children were about to reach the key stage of their education. In this sense, working practices can also be understood as engaging in family practices; that is, family members reflexively negotiate their gender roles and reproduce relationships through working away (to financially support their children’s studies) and coming back (to provide their children with daily care). The rationale behind this appears to relate not only to Qingyan’s cultural positioning as a mother and principal caregiver, but also to her biographical experiences of not being supported by her own parents – the agency to ‘do’ family and mothering in different ways. This implies that people’s parenting ideologies and family practices are not always set in stone but are flexible and intimately reproduced by the changing economy and particular societal context in which people are situated.

Compared to elite and middle-class parents, some working-class, under-educated parents have only limited resources to mobilise and therefore cannot transmit any ‘privileges’ to their children. However, they firmly believe that pursuing a degree is the ‘only’ effective path for people without a ‘strong’ family background and financial base to promote upward mobility and live a ‘different’ life. To verify the authenticity of this view, people often recounted their own (unsuccessful) life experiences as an example. Qingyan, for instance, used her so-called ‘frustrating life’ as a source of enlightenment, to instruct her children:

If you study well, you will have a bright future, and your life will not be like mine, running around [. . .] I just felt that education, for me like having no (mighty) family background, is a way forward [. . .] I just want to raise and nurture my children. If they are useless and not promising, life is not worth living for our grown-ups.

Clearly, Qingyan’s narrative placed high value on children’s education and tied her own life and even the well-being of the family closely to her children’s future in the long run, even if self-sacrifice was needed in the short term. Family practices are culturally specific and contextually dependent, where the way of doing family is subject to social and cultural constructions of gender around the roles of mothers and fathers. In Confucian culture, individuals are expected to fulfil their duties as parents or children and, for instance, women were considered to be responsible for children’s educational attainment and future development (Inoguchi and Shin, 2009; Lim and Skinner, 2012). Accordingly, as a child, being filial to his or her parents is perceived as the basic familial obligation to fulfil, and particularly in the Chinese context, studying hard has been considered as one of the most important way of ‘repaying’ parents’ sacrifices. Nevertheless, to some degree, parents’ practices of intimacy is a way of devoting themselves to advancing their children’s education and have been heightened by conscious calculations concerning how to ensure they are well educated and have a bright future. As Jamieson (2011) argues, ‘practices of intimacy are implicated in seeking its success’ (p. 5.3). In this regard, Chinese study mothers’ practices of ‘doing’ family are partly grounded in traditional views on familial obligation and therefore, show an association with Confucian ideology of childrearing for parents’ old-age security.

Everyday family practices: ‘His three meals a day had me trapped’

During the interviews, when I asked: ‘why is it the mothers, not the fathers who often accompany their children to study?’ the answers that were frequently given were about the ‘only child’ and ‘food’. This was especially true for those who had failed to get credentials themselves and who were barely able to provide their children with the necessary academic support. The sentiment was certainly echoed by Minzhou (38), who grew up in a working-class family in a small town in north China and left school without qualifications. At the time of the interview, she was living with her only son (16 years old), while her husband had been working far away in Guangzhou, south China, for several months:

We only have this one child. [If I wasn’t accompanying him] I would be worried that he might not be able to eat well, and I’d be worried whether he was getting bad and going to the internet café [. . .] at least [by accompanying him] I can cook for him here and guarantee the quality of his food. He won’t learn bad things and will come back home on time.

To be sure, the implementation of China’s one-child policy has strengthened parents’ resolve regarding giving all their attention to the precious ‘only child in the family’. During the course of accompanying their children to study, study mothers, basically, have been performing the caregiving role in a way that organises their daily lives around their children’s needs as well as frees them from additional family obligations. In doing so, their daily lives are fundamentally confined to the home setting to provide three homemade meals a day. Minzhou recounted her daily routine:

I prepared breakfast for my son and woke him up at 6.30 in the morning. He went to school at 7 o’clock. Then I cleaned the house before strolling down the streets. At 11 a.m. I got ready to cook his lunch before he came back around 12 noon. He then returned to school at 1 p.m. I would have a nap after he left; otherwise, I went out for groceries. You see, his three meals a day had me trapped (laughter). Time passed so fast; I had to prepare his dinner at 4 p.m. before he was back at 5 p.m. After he left, I sometimes went to the park for a walk till 7 o’clock and then went back home, watched TV or played with my phone. That’s it. He’d be back at 9.20 p.m. from school, when I had already prepared him some fruit. He went to sleep around 11 p.m., and so did I.

In Minzhou’s narratives, her regular activities seem unremarkable and hardly worth talking about. But, in fact, it reflects some degree of collaboration in order to accommodate other people’s timetables (Morgan, 2019). De Vault (1991), in her study Feeding the Family, illustrates that cooking as a way of showing care operates as a form of doing gender in which ‘a woman conducts herself as recognizably womanly’ (p. 118). Based on the provision of nutritious sustenance and day-to-day accompaniment, this feminine ideal of care constructs an identity for Minzhou. In this sense, moving away from a focus on the role of a wife can be somewhat liberating, as living apart can free women from ‘doing her partner’s laundry’ and ‘making his food’. On the other hand, the role of mothering was still expected to continue, if not increase, their daily domestic workload. Although there has been a rise in men’s participation in housework across the globe to different extents (Altintas and Sullivan, 2016), we can certainly observe the continuing dominant gendered discourses which still influence how these domestic practices are understood. As women are still ‘strongly tied to the traditional connection between food, care, and femininity, including a relationship of obligation and responsibility around food’ (Aarseth and Olsen, 2008: 282; see also Parish and Farrer, 2000; Shu et al., 2012).

Through looking at women’s everyday routinised practicalities in LAT relationships, it can be seen that the identity of Chinese study mothers is largely in accordance with the image of ‘sacrificial mothers’ described by Huang and Yeoh (2005). As their focus on motherhood, rather than wifehood, is practised by prioritising the well-being of their children ahead of their own personal fulfilment or their spouse, it can in some ways be overwhelming. This sacrifice is also fully manifested with respect to food preparation and distribution (Attree, 2005) because they would prepare food in the light of their children’s preference and eat less (quality) food than they provide for them. Ironically, the gendered sacrifice was almost taken for granted, not only by the fathers but also by the study mothers themselves. This is well exemplified in Minzhou’s account:

Life is forcing us to do so [couples living separately], there’s no way to change. I can’t ask my husband not to work away from home, [in that case], how could we survive and sustain our life? Likewise, I can’t leave my children alone and live with my husband, as I would regret it for the rest of my life if he [her son] became bad during these three years [of high school].

Similar ideas are shared by Rosy, who recounted: ‘my husband could not give up his business, and my son could not stay alone in a foreign country either [without my accompanying him]. So, I choose to go with my son in such a specific and no-way-to-choose situation’. During this process, the involvement of Rosy’s husband with his business comes out as a ‘non-negotiable fact’ to which she has had to adjust her promising career plan and their personal lives. In this sense, the fathers, unlike the study mothers, basically play a dramatically different role in supporting their family members and thus doing family. One possible implication is that family practices are often intimately bound up with gender practices in which men, as the sole and primary contributors, are responsible for providing continuous financial support by finding jobs that are well paid, while being absent from their wife and children’s daily lives. These diametrically opposing parenting roles that men and women have played and continue to play in Chinese society, in turn, have reinforced the traditional deep-rooted gendered practices in the allocation of domestic work, whereby men play a key role in the wider society, and women are confined and bounded more tightly to the family chores, and therefore to subordinate status. This finding reaffirms the instrumental role of the husband and father in this family living arrangement.

Conclusion

This article has paid special attention to the reasons for and family experiences of Chinese study mothers during the period of accompanying their children to study within the Chinese context. The trend of couples living apart driven by educational mobility has to be understood as not only a way of maximising their children’s opportunity to accumulate cultural, social, and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1986), but also as part of wider family practices in a gendered and rational way. My research, therefore, takes a family practices approach and applies it to a non-Western context, given that it provides a more comprehensive understanding by embracing ‘both individual and relational behaviour, and habituated routines that may reproduce and sustain pre-existing ways of being together’ (Gabb and Fink, 2015: 9).

Although the ‘traditional’ gendered division of labour has been shaken due to women’s increased education and participation in the labour market since the economic reform, gendered expectations, and the traditional normalised family pattern of women being the caregivers remain powerful in contemporary Chinese society. In my narrative analysis of study mothers’ everyday experiences, the role of ‘sacrificial mothers’ has always been recognised compared with the fathers, based on their day-to-day activities and the efforts they make in relation to their children’s well-being in the process of capital accumulation. This kind of taken-for-granted gendered family practice has merged with gender practices whereby women are expected to fulfil their feminine roles as mothers through undertaking caring work and providing emotional support. However, my research stands in sharp contrast to research on LAT relationships in the Western context, which show that couples living apart could be seen as radical pioneers moving beyond traditional forms of ‘the family’ and provide a way for women to ‘undo’ gender and subvert the traditional patriarchal power base at the site of domesticity (Roseneil, 2006; Upton-Davis, 2015). This is in part a recognition that in Chinese families, and even in most Asian families, the ethics of care for children is paramount for mothers, and accordingly, women regard their caregiving role as integral to their identity as mothers. ‘Doing’ gender in a way that is congruent with cultural and social expectations of gender roles may directly or indirectly contribute to how family is constructed and practised. As Gross (2005) argues, family practices are embedded in both culture and history, in ways that mean the personal and social are inextricably linked (Smart, 2007). Therefore, this article suggests that Chinese study mothers’ everyday family practices have to be understood alongside their individual biographical histories and wider cultural and social contexts.

However, doing family in the form of accompanying their children in order to provide emotional support and homemade meals every day, not only serves a pragmatic purpose, but also ‘performs a symbolic function, with mothers literally constructing a sense of family through their everyday family role’ (Gabb, 2008: 91). This set of routine practices has great implications for reinforcing a dominant ideal of motherhood, and the stereotypical feminine model of caring, ‘of serving others’. In other words, the traditional forms of family are framed and routinely practised as they fulfil their gender role expectations as mothers. Therefore, this article suggests that family practices play a role in the construction of subjective identities and are inextricably linked to mothering practices; in particular, practices of ‘intensive parenting’ (Hays, 1996). The underlying ideology, as informed by Confucian values, is to put children’s well-being in first place and to prioritise the role of parent compared with any other roles in the family (Choi, 2006). However, this could further result in the reproduction of new inequalities at the heart of family practices, in seeing childcare as something that is better performed by ‘mothers’, and as something that also reinstates care as a feminine activity, as well as reinforcing gender roles and hierarchies. Although justifications are often given for parents’ devotion, some women, for example, are still uprooting themselves at any cost in order to accompany their children and, by implication, to both ensure a better future for their children and protect their own old-age security.

Nevertheless, this finding may not be universally applicable to all Chinese women, owing to the small sample size. In fact, the results should be taken with caution because they should be understood alongside women’s personal biographies and the wider social contexts within which they are embedded. In addition, the current study has only concentrated on women’s experiences. Unfortunately, the viewpoints of children while their parents were living separately were not included because they were under 18 and remained at school studying. Far too little research has been done on the role of children in split family living arrangements in the sociology of family and the migration literature. Similarly, men’s voices are also missing due to the scope of this study. As people ‘do’ family in different ways in tackling social, spatial, economic, and cultural framework conditions, more future studies with a greater focus on children’s and husbands’ opinions about family life at a distance are therefore suggested.