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

Abstract

Chinese people have a long history of giving great weight to education. Under the one-child policy, Chinese parents usually spare no efforts to devote themselves to their child’s development. This study examines how the gendered experiences of Chinese ‘study mothers’ ( peidu mama) who accompany their children to study while living apart from their partner, has impacted upon their everyday practices of ‘doing’ family in the Chinese social, historical, and cultural contexts. Drawing on data from qualitative interviews, this article examines how family is culturally constructed and practised in order to reclaim conventional forms of family and gender norms in China. For a woman, being a full-time study mother, even when it is at the cost of living separately from her partner and established career development, has been considered as a way to privilege ‘motherhood’ over ‘wifehood’. The dramatically opposite parenting roles reinforce and entrench the existing traditional gendered division of labour and gender hierarchy in contemporary Chinese society, which has a long tradition of patriarchal families within Confucian culture. This research suggests that family practices in the multi-local household setting are often closely implicated with practices of gender, class, mothering, and social norms. By focusing on these often-neglected groups, this study opens a new avenue to examining the diverse strategies employed by people in varied living arrangements, to negotiate gender roles and everyday family practices.