Listening to Fathers

Abstract

This chapter is a report on a study of the father’s role in rural Chinese society and how it is interpreted in the home, articulating of the joys and sorrows of fatherhood in its positive and varied forms. On the one hand, the study attempts to examine the fathers’ different understandings of their role at home and the diversified ways of interpreting that role. On the other hand, the study seeks order in the fathers’ different understandings of their role and their interpretations of that role. The end product of this search for change in order and order in change reflects the pains, conflicts, helplessness, initiative, and creativity of the fathers. This study suggests that conventional concept of the father’s role as the economic provider of the family is changing in the conventional rural Chinese families. The data tell of the flexibility, changeability, and plurality of the father’s role. In the rural Chinese families, fathers are relentlessly endeavouring to debate the definition of their role with society. Some fathers have even broken through the constraints of society’s definition of their role at home and tried to give play to their creativity and interpret their role in new ways (such as detachment, manipulation, and transformation), based on their own interpretation of the role and their own preferences. What’s more, the changing process is a kind of struggles in between oneself, the family members, and others’ views. More interestingly, the way that father presents today may lead to a very complicated family roles system, and changing father roles may bring an important movement in future China.