From Disappointment to Resilience: Reunification Between Chinese Transnational Mother and Her Returned Child

From Disappointment to Resilience:

Reunification between Chinese Transnational Mother and her Returned Child

 

Background and Purpose: In New York, the practice of transnational mothering among Chinese immigrant mothers became more pervasive in the last two decades. An estimate of 20,000 “yang-liu-shou” (overseas-born stay-in-hometown) children were in Fuzhou-Fujian region of China in 2012. When immediate relatives took care of their babies, immigrant mothers continued working in the US and sent money home to support their children. These yang-liu-shou children often were returned to their biological parents when they approached school age.

Social service professionals in the community primarily perceive that mother-child reunification is a difficult process in adjustment and redefining kinship ties. However, there are very few studies examine the impact of separation on attachment between Chinese immigrant mothers and their returned children. This study attempts to explore this phenomenon to learn about experiences of both Chinese transnational mothers and their American-born babies raised by caregivers in China.

Methods: This phenomenological qualitative study was conducted in New York. Sixteen Chinese immigrant mothers aged 18 to 45, who sent at least one American born child to China for childcare and the child returned to New York in the last six years, participated in an in-depth and semi-structured interviews. Eight respondents sent one child and seven sent two children to China. One respondent sent all her three children to China. The sample was non-probability purposive and participants were recruited using snowball sampling method. The interview covered participant’s background, experiences of early motherhood, decision-making process, separation, mother’s perceptions of the child’s life in China, experiences of reunifications.

The interview was conducted in Mandarin, the dialect both respondents and interviewer spoke. Interviews were translated and transcribed into English for analysis. The phenomenological analysis of the interview data was based on Giorgi’s framework of explicitation.

Findings: When Chinese immigrant mother imagined how happy they would be for the homecoming of their child, the returnees responded to their arrival differently. Returning to their birthplace, but a strange land, implied that they left the ‘home’ where they grew up. They separated from their caregivers and attachment figures that raised them in early years.

A few mothers had very traumatic experiences upon their children’s return, but most mothers had re-established relationships with their children within few weeks or months after the children’s return. All returned children gradually forgot their “China-mama” and their early lives in their perceived homeland. Immigrant mothers believed that birthmother-child connection was a natural human instinct.

Conclusions and Implications:

Narratives of Chinese transnational mothers revealed that reunification was not a state in temporal and geographical contexts, but a dynamic process from disappointment to resilience. Findings of this study help develop strategies to prepare children for their return to the US.; ameliorate their adjustment, address reunification conflicts with parents; and limit psychological damage. I recommend further research to explore the risk and protective factors occurred in the process of reunification and resilience in addition to studies from the perspective of the children.