Adrianna Tan
I’m very thankful that I like and adore my parents, because I know it is my ‘duty’ to return and provide elder care in a decade or so. There is just no other way around it.
At the same time, I also feel for my friends, who feel the similar call of ‘duty’, except far more heavily and unhappily, because their parents were awful to them.
Adrianna Tan
There’s an interesting model emerging in China where hetero single women, are opting out of marriage completely and settling down with each other in a platonic way. Divorced women are joining them too and co-parenting: https://youtu.be/7r-4OiXcLGY
It’s not that far-fetched. There have always been pockets of female community in Chinese history, like the Samsui women. It’s easy for try to read some repressed homoerotic subtext into it, but I think when times are tough, community is what gets us through it. No matter where you are.
Adrianna Tan
It’s hard to generalize of course, northwest and south asian cultures are very different. Even in talking to south asian friends, I think the idea of greater female independence in some East Asian cultures is fascinating. Unless you’re from a super trad family (and I would honestly be surprised to meet someone like this in Singapore / Taiwan / HK / China), I feel like gender in almost Chinese cultures is just ‘if you make your own money, go to town’. There’s still other shitty things, but less expectations around what you’re supposed to do as a woman. I think it’s different in Korea and Japan.
So I’ve personally always felt a sense of ‘I can do whatever I want as long as I’m financially independent’ but of course there’s still the other unwritten rules of ‘duty’. But it’s less gender-based, and more ‘just things you should do to exist in this community’. That said, I am very autistic, so if people are talking shit about me, I don’t know it.
Adrianna Tan
@onekind recently saw a story in Aussie news about a school to teach Aussie men how to cook because their wives died :/
Daniel Reeders
@skinnylatte I'm in the latter category. Morally I know I can't let my folks go through the wringer that is Australia's casualised for-profit aged care sector. But they were so totally disinterested in parenting children — Dad paid the child support bills and washed his hands of us — that it feels like salt in the wound having to parent them for 10-20 years. They've lived such atomistic social lives that there is no community for them to call on to support their independent living in older age. I really do think the Asian *ideal* (recognising the practice varies enormously) of ageing in place with family and community support is a preferable response.
Adrianna Tan
I think sometimes of how my mom’s side of the family probably lived in dwellings like these in Fujian, at least until they left for the ‘southern seas’. You were probably never lonely, but you were probably also overwhelmed sometimes. That feels like the push / pull of both models to me.
Adrianna Tan
@virbonus :/
Axel Gutmann
@skinnylatte I like and adore my parents too (always have b/c they are fine people) but *actually* fulfilling that duty (as my brother and I had to start in earnest last autumn) still isn't at all easy.
(Written in my parent's empty apartment near the nursing home, hoping this will be a night without a phone call).
Adrianna Tan
Also, I think that southern Chinese immigrants have had a long history of mutual aid. When I was growing up I thought it was just people wanting to stick to each other in a new place but after becoming an immigrant myself and learning shit the terrible odds of their lives in California and elsewhere, it seems like it made sense that they had to help each other. When railway workers were massacred, repeatedly, Chinese business people funded the legal responses. Of course they also benefited from importing this labor. But there seemed to be some sense of kinship in some way or more a sense of, ‘it doesn’t matter how rich I am, they’re coming for all of us anyway’.
And the way I see this manifested has been: I remember the first time I went to Phnom Penh alone as a a teenager, I was horribly lost. I found a shop, realized we spoke the same language, and they helped me get situated. Even where I live in SF, even though I don’t love hanging out with my elderly neighbors, I do generally feel like ‘if I need something..’ (more than salt, but less than a favor), they’ll definitely do it for me.
I guess I just don’t know how to not exist without this support, because I’ve never.. not had it.
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