“A New Job after Retirement”: Negotiating Grandparenting and Intergenerational Relationships in Urban China

ABSTRACT: Based on interviews with 120 adult only children and their parents in urban Tianjin, this article shows how grandparenting becomes a crucial site for the intergenerational negotiation around childcare, family obligations, and the unfulfilled aspirations for individualisation. While only child couples rely heavily on their parents for childcare, a lot of tensions are involved in this process. Although grandparents do not always willingly embrace the heavy burden of intergenerational childcare, their concern about elderly care sometimes compels them to nevertheless take up the work. Through providing a nuanced picture of grandparenting in urban China, this article seeks to reveal the changing ideas of family obligation and responsibility, as well as the social transformation in China that underpins such change. It argues that the individualisation process is far from finished, as reality is pulling people back to solve problems within the family. KEYWORDS: grandparenting, only child couples, generation, individualisation, social change.

Bordering Work and Personal Life: Using "the Multiplication of Labour" to Understand Ethnic Performers' Work in Southwest China

ABSTRACT: This article explores how “the multiplication of labour” can be used as a theoretical lens to make sense of the blurred boundaries between work and non-work spheres. It does so by drawing on the experiences of ethnic performers in Southwest China. Ethnic performance becomes a site of border struggles, as performers struggle with their desirable performance and undesirable presence, as well as work’s colonising effect over their personal lives. “The multiplication of labour” points to work’s diversification, meaning that performers are expected to do multiple aspects of labour at the same time, many of which are unrecognised and unremunerated. It also captures work’s intensification, which is shown not only through the prolonged working hours but also in how work intrudes into the most intimate areas of performers’ personal lives. In resistance, ethnic performers engage in a more playful and reflexive self-making, which is nevertheless constrained by ethnicity and gender.

KEYWORDS: The multiplication of labour, ethnic performance, work-life intersection, bordering, intimacy, rural-urban migration, agency.