Gender and Linked Lives in Chinese Beliefs About Adulthood

ABSTRACT

Understanding how youth conceptualize adulthood can give insight into how they make major life decisions that aggregate into larger trends. Yet research on beliefs about adulthood is underdeveloped with respect to gender, non-Western experience, and parental influence. Based on interviews with 71 young men and women in southwestern China, I demonstrate that neither of the prevailing paradigms for understanding the transition to adulthood fully accounts for how interviewees conceive of this stage of the life course. Instead, the Linked Lives principle, which emphasizes the interdependence of lives, better addresses interviewees’ prioritizing support of parents in defining adulthood as well as the significance they attach to the traditional markers. Finally, gender intersects with the Linked Lives principle such that women are less likely than men to view themselves as adults. This paper demonstrates how looking at gender and Linked Lives together can give more insight into the transition to adulthood, especially outside the West.

KEYWORDS:

• Asia and Asian America
• aging and the life course
• sex and gender
• family

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. That financial independence was a top criterion of adulthood by interviewees is consistent with studies of Chinese college students (Nelson et al. 2012; Nelson, Badger, and Wu 2004; Sarah, Nelson, and Barry 2006). Unlike college students, however, interviewees were of an age when earning a living was an immediate reality. Some work has found that young adults may discard markers of adulthood that feel unattainable, replacing them with new ones of their own (Silva 2013). Since unemployment was very low in this sample, financial independence may have felt more within reach for this sample than it did for the working-class American sample Silva (2013) studied.

2. For context, in this study, 71% (49 of 69) of interviewees defined themselves as adults. Unfortunately, two women were not asked this question. Efforts to keep the interview conversational in tone (rather than, say, reading the interview guide aloud) typically produces better data by creating a more natural, relaxed atmosphere, but it can mean that occasionally a question will be skipped. The rate of defining oneself as an adult in this study is higher than the 59% found by Badger and colleagues (Sarah, Nelson, and Barry 2006) for college students and higher still than the 22% found by Nelson and colleagues (Nelson et al. 2012), also for college students; it is also higher than the 44% found for female migrant workers in China (Zhong and Arnett 2014).

3. This finding stands in contrast with work for the US that found that youth defined adulthood partly in terms of taking responsibility for oneself rather than for parents (Dalessandro 2019); indeed, it is more typical in the literature on the United States for young adults to view intergenerational responsibility as flowing downward from parents to themselves (Napolitano 2015; Waters et al. 2011). However, a strand of work that investigates the transition to adulthood of immigrant and second-generation American youth, as well as working-class and poor youth has identified some commonalities with the Chinese case. For instance, Filipino and Latin American youth retained a stronger sense of obligation to family than did those from European backgrounds and were more likely to provide financial support to their families (Fuligni 2007); this sense of financial obligation also emerges in comments made by Hmong youth as well as some working-class white youth in Waters’s et al.’s (2011) work. Therefore, although the high education level of interviewees would place most of them in the middle class, their views on adulthood are less consistent with those of the white middle-class than they are with other groups of Americans.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline.

Notes on contributors

Danielle Kane

Danielle Kane is assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University. Her current research focuses on gender and the transition to adulthood in China, and her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Sociological Forum, and the Journal of Family Studies.