TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES AND THE PROVISION OF MORAL AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TRUTH AND DISTANCE

Abstract

This article is an ethnographic analysis of transnational family links between adult migrant children living in Australia and their kin in Italy, from the 1950s to the present. A key focus of the article is the persistence of bonds of emotion across distance. Drawing on Finch and Mason's research on caregiving relationships and Hochschild's work on emotional labour, it explores both the positive experiences as well as the tensions associated with the transnational exchange of moral and emotional support. The findings confirm the perseverance of bonds of emotion across distance and thus challenge arguments about the declining bonds within translocal families as a result of globalising processes. The role that new communication technologies play in sustaining these bonds is offered as a possible explanation to account for the apparent increase in the frequency of transnational emotional interaction over time. The article also calls for further work on the influence of physical co-presence or absence on emotional interaction over distance.

Key Words:

• transnational family
• transnational caregiving
• Italian Australian migration
• emotions and migration

“But why did you have to go to live on the other side of the world?” is a question many Italian migrants in Australia hear their parents sigh. Franca, ¹ who came to Perth in 1998 on a vacation, says she is now used to the comment and tries not to let it upset her. As is common with many recent migrants, Franca decided to settle in Australia after falling in love with and subsequently marrying an Australian. Franca's parents did not find her decision to migrate to Australia an easy one to accept. They felt that she had a good job in Italy and they were used to her living close by. They were also initially unsure about her chosen partner. The separation was made even more difficult because Franca and her mother enjoyed a very close relationship. They independently described each other to me as their “best friend.” Maintaining the level of emotional closeness they had grown accustomed to has been difficult across distance. Franca's departure left her mother very lonely, and she continues to suffer periods of depression as a result. At first Franca found it difficult to provide her mother the level of emotional support she craved across distance and, with the added strains of a young family, asked her mother to stop telling her the details of her despair as it was getting Franca down. Her mother explains:

But [our] relationship is still very close, even when something depressing happens to me. At the beginning, she used to ask me not to tell her about those things, but then I told her that I needed to tell her, that she is the only person who can … she gets rid of them for me. And I need that. I explained this to her a year ago, I told her that by saying that she didn't want to hear about my problems, she was hurting me, I felt like she didn't care anymore. And she understood, even though she felt terrible when she heard about my being depressed about something. And now our relationship is as it used to be.

Franca and her mother say that they “work hard” at “staying in touch.” After experimenting with different patterns and modes of communication, they have found that they are best able to maintain a close emotional bond by exchanging weekly phone calls on a specific day and time when both women are free and relatively relaxed. This allows them to talk without interruption for up to two hours. In addition, Franca carefully monitors exactly what she shares with her mother and tends “sometimes not to tell her everything.”

If I were to tell her all the little fights or all the problems that I have with [my husband] … then she'd just get crazy, ‘cause she loves me so much and she just wants me to be so happy. Of course, if it's a really, really big issue, sooner or later I will tell her; but … she already has a very stressed life and a lot of problems and I don't want to add to them.

Franca and her father do not speak very much on the phone, and they hear about each other through Franca's mother. According to the latter, at first he “put on a brave face” and tried not to let Franca know that he was really unhappy with her decision to live abroad. Fortunately, as is also a common experience, Franca's parents' concerns were significantly assuaged when they visited Franca and experienced something of her new life in Australia for themselves. Franca and her mother now try to visit each other at least once a year. Franca explains that it can take “a good week to ten days to get used to each other again and to reconnect.” The co-presence afforded by visiting provides an opportunity to share knowledge that is not based in verbal communication:

Yeah, visiting is a special time, you know why, because she can see my face, she can sense straight away, for example, if something is not right. Because we know each other so well that she just looks in my eyes and she knows how I'm feeling.

Migration and more generally mobility have become a feature of contemporary society and have resulted in a growing number of transnational families, like Franca's, which are separated by distance and national borders. Global circuits of power and capital, as well as political unrest, have increased the incidence of people on the move whether for career development and/or lifestyle change or sanctuary and economic security. These flows of people have resulted in transnational exchanges of support as homeland and migrant kin endeavour to care for each other across time and space. In addition, the greying of the Western world has increased the incidence of migrants needing to care for their ageing parents from a distance. Thus, transnational caregiving is a growing social phenomenon that is largely unacknowledged and under-researched.

The broad aim of this article is to address the link between emotions and globalisation, with a focus on transnationalism. Specifically, the article examines how families develop, maintain, and negotiate bonds of emotion across distance, since family members separated by distance are generally able to exchange all the types of care that proximate families do (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007). I am particularly interested in exploring the tensions associated with the exchange of emotional and moral support between parents and migrant children in transnational families. This type of support is the bedrock of family relations and is characterised by transnational family members' expressed commitment and endeavours to “stay in touch.” I argue that the notion of “staying in touch” is primarily a reference to the aspiration not only to maintain open channels of communication but some level of emotional connection.

Research for this article is drawn from a collaborative study that examines the dynamics of long-distance family relations and, in particular, the way migrants manage to care for (and about) their ageing parents from a distance, highlighting transnational caregiving as an important phenomenon of migration processes. ² Data collection comprised approximately 200 ethnographic interviews and participant observation with migrants and refugees settled in Perth, Western Australia, and their parents living abroad in Italy, ³ The Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Iran. Findings are also drawn from my previous and ongoing ethnographic research, including approximately 50 interviews with families in Italy and Australia (cf. Baldassar 2001; Baldassar and Pesman 2005).

The methodology for this study involved first identifying migrant children in Perth and through them contacting their parents in the homeland. This could explain why there is a predominance of families in the study who are actively engaged in transnational exchanges of support. There are undoubtedly cases of transnational families where support is not exchanged or where support is provided to certain family members and not others. But our methodology probably selected out families with communication failures. It is important to keep this sample bias in mind, particularly with regard to the discussion of findings below.

In this article I focus on the Italian families in the combined studies comprising migrants from three separate cohorts: 20 families from the immediate post-war period, 8 families from the 1970s–1980s, and 12 families from the last two decades. ⁴ The families in the first cohort arrived in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the massive blue-collar labour influx into the country. ⁵ During the first decade of this period, which represented the peak years, an average of 18,000 Italians arrived in Australia annually, with approximately 14 percent settling in Western Australia. These migrants tended to follow a pattern of occupational and residential segregation in the building, fishing, and food industries and form part of a now well-established ethnic enclave community. Since the 1960s, most Italians have lived in urban centres with 90 percent of Italians in Western Australia now living in Perth. Migrants from the second cohort arrived in the 1970s and 1980s as skilled and semi-skilled workers. While they do not form part of the village-out migration chains of the post-war group (and so do not tend to originate from the same towns in Italy), they are employed in service occupations within the community (e.g., language teachers and social workers). Reflecting the national pattern, the Italian-born population in Western Austalia peaked in the early 1970s (30,541 in 1971) and has since steadily declined. The vast majority (91 percent) of the 23,000 Italian-born people currently living in the State arrived before 1986, and they represent 10 percent of the total Italian-born population in Australia. ⁶ The most recent significantly smaller cohort includes people who migrated in the last two decades as professional or skilled migrants, who tend not to identify as members of the Italian ethnic community. These three waves of migrants reflect changing Australian immigration policies that initially favoured unskilled and family reunion categories but which currently prioritise professional and business migration. The recent drastic decline in Italian arrivals is also a result of the changing economic conditions in Italy that have seen the country transform from a place of emigration to one of significant immigration (King and Andall 1999; King and Rybaczuk 1993).

Transnational family caregiving relations

Our findings, some of which have been published elsewhere (Baldassar 2007; Baldock 1999, 2000; Baldassar, Wilding and Baldock 2007; Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007; Wilding 2006), unequivocally show that most transnational families exchange all the forms of care and support that Finch (1989), in her landmark study, identified as being exchanged in proximate families, including financial, practical, personal (hands-on), accommodation, and emotional or moral support (see also Finch and Mason 1993). Because of the distance that separates them, transnational family members are reliant on two types of technologies and two modes of communication to facilitate their transnational exchanges: communication technologies, which occur across distance and provide virtual contact through the use of phone, fax, e-mail, SMS texts, websites, videocam, postal and banking systems; and travel technologies, which allow people to visit each other (to be co-present) and have face-to-face contact. The exchange of financial, practical, and emotional support can occur through both (virtual and face-to-face) modes, but for obvious reasons, personal and accommodation support can only occur during visits.

Financial support has long been identified as a key source of support exchanged in families, and particularly in migrant families, where remittances are often the motivation for migration. The regular transfer of money from migrant to homeland kin was certainly a feature of the Italian post-war migrant's experience, primarily in the first decade following their migration. Most individuals in this cohort migrated with the intention of making enough money to enable a successful repatriation and about 40 percent of them returned to Italy (Thompson 1980). ⁷ The remitting of money largely ceased once migrants decided that they would not repatriate to Italy and concentrated on establishing themselves in Australia. This also coincided with improved economic conditions in Italy, particularly in the north of the country. While it was not uncommon for clothes, food, and other goods to be sent to migrants from their homeland kin, money rarely flowed in this direction. In stark contrast, among the sample of more recent migrants, financial support is most likely to flow from parent to child. These homeland families tend to be wealthier, and migration is not motivated by economic need but rather by career or lifestyle choices. Financial support is commonly provided to assist migrant children with purchasing a house and/or car and also to fund regular visits home. For example, Sara, who migrated in 1988, received money from her parents toward the purchase of a house: “Even though they were pretty much against [me settling in Australia], they weren't going to prevent it from happening by not helping.”

Practical support in proximate families commonly includes babysitting, gardening, helping with shopping, running errands, accompanying kin on medical visits, and so on. These are things that transnational family members also do for each other, but they can only occur during visits. In transnational family contexts, practical support largely involves the sharing of knowledge and expertise, which can happen across distance, and includes the exchange of advice and information on any number of topics including child rearing, real estate, loans, purchases, and recipes. Nico, who migrated to Perth in 2003, often calls his mother for cooking tips. These simple exchanges seem to render the distance that separates them irrelevant as his mother explains:

Sometimes Nico even calls me just for recipes and that makes me feel really good because … given the means that there are today … we can stay in touch today, like hearing from them every time that you want, basically.

Personal support involving the hands-on caring associated with childcare and nursing the sick or incapacitated can only be delivered face-to-face. This kind of caring occurs in transnational families during visits, and Italian migrants and their homeland kin from all three cohorts in the study dedicate extended visits to this purpose. Face-to-face support, and more generally co-presence, is especially prized during times of crisis. Parents, particularly grandmothers, commonly visit to offer support to newborn babies and their mothers. Migrants, especially women, often visit to provide personal care to a dying parent and, like Beatrice who migrated in 1976, to offer respite to siblings who usually perform this role:

I realised that my elder sister really needed support when my mother had to go to hospital and so I made the effort, found the money and time to make a long visit, and I'm glad that I did go back … . Every day I went to the hospital and I spent time with her and that certainly helped my sister a lot. Because, actually the last two years, she was a prisoner in her own home, she had to stay with my mother all the time. So she really needed a bit of a break.

Like personal support, the provision of accommodation can only occur in loco, and family members in most cases stay with kin when visiting. Migrants invariably enjoy unlimited access to their parents' home. Accommodation, or more particularly, having access to a place to stay during visits, may become an issue for migrants if and when parents lose governance over their homes, through, for example, death, divorce, or a move to an alternative household or residential facility. The more recent migrants tend to have much younger and healthier parents who are not yet in need of personal care and who are also more financially able to purchase care supports. The limited use of institutional care in Italy and the tradition of caring for the elderly in the home is particularly strong in the post-war and 1970s–1980s cohorts where ageing parents tend to move in to live with a local child (Baldassar, Wilding and Baldock 2007). In recognition of the fact that their homeland siblings take on the lion's share of the personal caring required of parents as they age, there is some evidence among the post-war cohort that migrants relinquish their claims to inheritance, often with the proviso that there will always be accommodation made available for them when they visit. Berto, who arrived in Perth in 1956, is one such example:

I said they could have my share, especially my brother who looked after my parents for all those years. I couldn't help at that time, it was too expensive to visit, not like it is now, you know, I saw my mother three times in forty years … . But I know my brother, he will always make me welcome if I visit, you know, there is always a place for me there and that's all I want.

Emotional and moral support is the foundation of most family relations including transnational ones, partly because it is clear that the other types of support—financial, practical, personal and accommodation—also contribute to emotional and moral support. Indeed, none of these forms of support are mutually exclusive. It is also clear that emotional and moral support can be effectively exchanged well across distance, and the rest of the article is devoted to examining the complexities of this issue.

Emotional support across distance: “staying in touch”

As evidenced in the case study at the beginning of this article, a key finding to emerge from our research is the importance of “staying in touch,” including the need to “hear” and “see” each other, if not often, then at least regularly.

It's so important to stay in touch, just to remind them they still have a son, even if I'm so far away (Nico).

Once they came here and saw me, where I lived, how happy I was, they were much more at peace, there's something about being able to see with your own eyes (Nadia).

The practice of “staying in touch” can be compared with the typical pattern of reciprocal gift exchange, including generalised reciprocity (cf. Mauss 1969).

She is there for me and I am here for her (Franca).

I am happy to help out however I can. I would hope others would do the same for me if needed (Beatrice).

Putting time and effort into providing kin with moral and emotional support is a way of building a reliable relationship—it is an investment in future obligations, in the security of knowing that you can call on help if you need it and be certain to receive it. Here di Leonardo's (1987: 440) notion of kinwork, “the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties,” is helpful. Kinwork is largely conducted through efforts to “stay in touch,” including visiting, writing letters, making phone calls, organising reunions, celebrations and holidays, keeping family albums and sharing photos, and sending gifts and cards. What is often underestimated and unacknowledged about this kind of work is just how much skill and time is involved. To borrow Hochschild's (1983) term, it is a type of “emotional labour,” the fruits of which include the maintenance of mutually beneficial reciprocal exchange relations as well as a “sense of family” across distance (di Leonardo 1987: 443). In Finch and Mason's (1990) terms, “staying in touch” builds, and builds on, the history of negotiated commitments that make up family relationships as is evident in the following example.

When Nadia decided to marry an Australian man and migrate to Perth in 1982, her parents were very concerned about her; “they wanted me to be happy but they didn't know much about [my husband] and they had a negative idea about Australia.” Nadia relied on her sister, with whom she had always been very close, to help convince her parents that she was doing the right thing. Then, when Nadia's marriage broke down and she decided to remain in Australia, again her sister was an important source of support:

During the difficult time of the divorce, I had some long chats, but more with my sister than with my parents. It was more to reassure them that I was fine, that even if I wasn't feeling great, that you know, I was looking after myself, I was coping. So I think [the calls] increased at that stage and the letters decreased. My sister used to quite regularly—I think I've got about 12 tapes—used to record her voice on a tape recorder and, and talk to me, just like she would you know, talk to me as if I was in front of her, trying to just encourage me, to hang in there and, and everything would be fine, blah, blah, blah. So every month or so, I would get this tape!

As outlined at length elsewhere, Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding present an analytical framework to explore the practices of trans-national caregiving, arguing that the exchange of care is dependent on a dialectic of capacity (ability), obligation (cultural expectation), and negotiated commitments (family relationships and migration histories), which change over the family and individual life course. The particular combination of these factors can help to explain the specific experience of care for any individual. In Nadia's case, her sister has the time, money, and ability to provide her with emotional support. Equally importantly, their close relationship informs their sense of obligation to care for each other and has resulted in ongoing transnational exchanges of emotional support. Our research indicates that the particular combination of capacity, sense of obligation, and history of negotiated commitments that characterises family relationships at any given time can explain who provides support to whom, how much, when, and why. Negotiated commitments refer to the particular histories of family relationships as they are played out over migration histories. So, for example, whether migrants are given “license to leave” by their parents and kin may have a significant impact of the level and type of support they are provided (Baldassar 2007).

There are many instances of parents who clearly felt an obligation to support their children even though they opposed (at least initially) their children's decision to migrate. For some, like Sara, this resulted in the provision of financial support (to help purchase a house) but limited emotional support and constant pressure to return to Italy, “You know, relatives saying, what the hell are you doing there?” For others like Nadia and Nico, their parents provided all kinds of support, including emotional and moral support, despite their opposition to the migration. Nico's mother explains:

I wish my son had not migrated … . But … at times there are phone calls where you say, “how are you, how is everything going?” And at times there is a need also to give help by hiding your feelings. You try to say … “You've made a choice, you have to be strong” … . While at the same time you feel bad because you feel that, perhaps from Mum, you should say, “Oh you poor thing.” But, no, at times I say, “No darling, you have to deal with everything, you made a choice, you knew that if there were problems you would find more of them … . You have to keep going.” But … these times weigh on you a bit.

The level of support migrants are prepared to provide to their parents can also be explained by the particular combination of capacity, cultural notions of obligation, and negotiated commitments of their families. For example, Bianca, who migrated in 2000, repatriated to Italy with her Australian husband for 15 months in 2004 to care for her mother, who had developed a serious illness and required personal care. Despite having two brothers who lived close to her mother, Bianca explained that:

As the daughter, I felt it was my duty to go. It was also something I needed to do for myself and something my brothers agreed was the best arrangement because I have always been my mother's favourite.

Stage in the life cycle is another consideration in negotiating family commitments as it can affect who takes on the primary role of caregiving responsibilities at any given moment. As a result, the obligation to care may shift more heavily to siblings who have fewer demands on their time. In this way, the stages in transnational family life cycles, mapped out through processes of migration across distance and borders, influence the type and pattern of transnational caregiving by informing the capacity, obligation, and negotiated commitments on which caregiving is based.

The broad pattern of transnational caregiving, and particularly the exchange of emotional and moral support and “staying in touch,” can be described as involving three principal types of care practice. Routine, day-to-day caring is characterised by the regular contact exemplified by Franca and her mother's weekly phone calls or Nico's calls to his mother for recipes. Ritual caring involves marking special events like birthdays and anniversaries and makes up much of what di Leonardo defines as kinwork. Crisis, key event caring, in contrast, generally involves unexpected or unanticipated events or times of increased need exemplified by the extra support provided by Nadia's sister during her divorce, by Beatrice during her mother's final years, and by Bianca during her mother's serious illness. Crisis care is commonly required during key stages (or crisis events) in the transnational family life cycle—the period immediately following migration, the time leading up to and after the birth of babies, and when parents lose their independence and become frail or ill (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007). Only the first stage is unique to transnational caregiving. These patterns of routine, ritual, and crisis caregiving have changed over time because of developments in communication and travel technologies. The following two extended case studies provide typical examples of some of these changes.

A lifetime of transnational exchange of emotional support (1970–2000): Nina's case

Nina migrated to Australia with her husband and small son in 1969. Unlike the post-war cohort, Nina and her husband had tertiary educations and came from relatively wealthy families. They did not migrate for economic reasons, and they were not connected to an enclave community by chain migration or kinship networks. They migrated on a government sponsorship scheme and were provided hostel accommodation and employment on arrival. It was Nina's husband who wanted to migrate because he was unhappy with the political unrest in Italy. He also had a rather strained relationship with his mother, which he hoped would be eased by distance. Nina, in contrast, had been happy in Italy, where she had her extended family to help with childcare and she was planning to return to a permanent teaching position. In Australia, Nina has studied and worked as a language teacher and interpreter. She explains that she had no active involvement in the decision to come to Australia, “I really didn't make the decision. It was really a surprise that my husband did. I said ‘Australia, why Australia?’” The couple's families were also surprised by their intention to move to Australia:

You know, they thought first that emigration was not in our family history, but more than anything they felt it was a bit strange because I had a job. Usually emigration is due to a lack of work, but I had a job and [my husband] also had a good job. We were both earning money, we were doing quite well, and we had help from our family. So, they really didn't understand the reason behind the fact that we were going away.

Although they felt it was economically unnecessary, Nina's family supported her migration because they believed a wife should follow her husband:

My mother first said, “Don't go.” Then she said, okay, we have to go because your husband wants to, because she's from the old school, and the wife follows her husband. So it wasn't discussed. However she said, “If things go badly, remember that you went there. Don't say I told you to, you went with your own legs.” So afterwards when things went badly, I couldn't even have the satisfaction of complaining to my mother, as she had warned me.

Nina had been very close to two aunts who had helped raise her during the war when her parents were often absent. These aunts wrote to Nina once a week from the day of her arrival and she replied with weekly letters. She also wrote regularly to her mother and still does. “I always stayed in close contact with my family, always, always, writing, writing, then, as soon as I could I went to Italy.” While she never received financial support from her family, despite sometimes needing it, they used to send her gifts:

For the children I have never had to spend a dollar because they would send me everything—clothes, from underwear, to socks, shoes … until the kids were about 15 years old and wanted to buy their own stuff. Packages arrived once a month. Toys and books at Christmas and Easter; gold jewelry, newspapers, clippings.

Her aunts were disappointed when Nina found she could purchase her favourite magazines in Perth and did not need them to be sent to her: “They liked to feel they could do something special for me.” Her aunts provided emotional support, particularly by encouraging her to be strong: “If ever I complained, they would say, but you have to be strong because you're walking alone, right. So I was, it's a support though because it would've been worse if they'd said, ‘Oh you poor thing’ for every little hardship.” Nina also recalled periods of time when she stopped writing, but described her failure to communicate as a sign that all was not well with her:

When I stopped writing every week, let's say to my aunts, it was I think, I wasn't very happy, I went through a period where I had some problems. And since I couldn't write any nice things then I didn't write anymore. I didn't feel like telling, of having to always to say, well everything's fine. I didn't feel like it. But they always wrote to me every week, they continued to write. I think they worked out something was wrong because I had always stayed in touch. That was a great support.

Despite its hardships, Nina also described the distance that separated them as sometimes a useful dimension of providing emotional support to her family back home: “I think that since I was outside of things, when there's a big family there's always something going on and as I'm outside of it I don't know anything. I find the words to say, ‘well look it's not important, leave it alone.’ I can mediate.”

Like most of the people we interviewed, Nina says that she puts a lot of effort into “staying in touch” with her family. In the late 1990s, her son set up a computer with internet for her and since then Nina maintains regular email contact with those family members who have this facility. She phones and sends cards to close relatives on birthdays and religious feast days. Her mother does not have a computer, so they still exchange letters and little parcels and she phones her every Sunday: “With her old age, sometimes I think that she asks me to send things just to feel that I still think about her. Or to feel a bit fussed over, you know, by her daughter.” Toward the end of her mother's life, Nina felt she could not face visiting her given the heartache she felt her departure caused. In this case, the absence of her visit was a sign of great care and concern:

It weighs on me when I have to leave her because she cries; it weighs on me, I can't see her crying, and every time she sees me all happy, it seems to me like she comes back to life, she walks a lot. When there's noone there she's always sitting in her armchair. But the fact is that when I have to leave she gets very emotional and then it's also bad for her, she feels bad, and, for me it's a punishment, it's a terrible moment.

The transnational exchange of emotional support post 2000: Nico's case

Nico migrated in 2003 to marry an Australian he met and fell in love with in Italy. When I interviewed him he had been in Australia for just three months and was finding it difficult to get work of a similar kind and position to that which he had attained in Italy. The period immediately after migration is a particularly stressful time and one that requires increased moral and emotional support. Nico's wife described the psychological impact moving to a new country can have:

It's quite a draining period of transition … and the penny's dropping, it's going to take a long time to adapt and integrate I think. Just regarding that fact that he doesn't have the language skills to be independent by any means. Making a phone call, writing an address on a letter and being afraid of getting it wrong and I'll have to write it. And he's a gutsy, independent person, and he's very different here in that respect, very, very dependent on me.

The initial shock of migration is linked to a sense of losing control, as Nico comments:

In Italy I had control over almost everything, work, social life, politics, friends, I knew how to get around. Here I don't know anything, anything at all. I could get a job by word of mouth in Italy. Here, it can't happen, I don't know anybody.

Nico's limited English skills, his exhausting search for work, and living with his in-laws added to the stresses of settling into a new country. His struggle was further exacerbated by the fact that his family and friends thought his decision to move to Australia highly risky. His family had taken some time to accept his new wife, and although they eventually fully supported his decision to migrate, the difficulty experienced winning this support left the young couple feeling great pressure to succeed. Many times Nico wondered whether migrating had been the right decision: “This little doubt that stays inside you saying, but why did I leave? Why did I leave all those people that would do anything for me?”

As a way of coping with these stresses, Nico dedicates considerable time to keeping in touch with his family and close friends. He exchanges daily SMS messages with his mother, at least three phone calls a week with his parents, and weekly e-mails and SMS messages with his siblings and close friends. Despite all this contact, Nico explained that his father rarely speaks to him for long or about anything other than trivia, like soccer results or the weather. This silence on serious issues is not, he believes, an impediment to staying in close emotional contact:

I know my dad even if we're not speaking much, I know perfectly well what he's thinking. I know he doesn't say things to me in order to not make the situation any worse … . I don't have to tell him lies, he knows that I don't have a job, he knows that my problems with English are always there. So he doesn't even say, “You'll find work, you'll find work.” I feel that there is a bit of this displeasure, even if he supports me in every way imaginable.

A preoccupation expressed by both Nico and his mother concerned striking the right balance between being upbeat and easygoing in communication exchanges and being serious and expressing concern:

After eight or nine light-hearted phone calls, then I have to ask, “how are you going, really?” Most of the time it's just soccer results, I ask about anything new, about Italy, what's going on in the news. And then once in a while in a phone call it comes up, “Tell me about how things are going.” I always, always try to be careful not to emphasise the longing that I have for them, to not show all my worries but also to give support, to be a support.

Nico's careful consideration about what and how much to divulge about the difficulties of migration is partly a way of protecting his family from worrying about him. It is also a way of protecting himself from their negative judgement. The importance of making the migration a success was a common feature of Italian migrant experiences, particularly for those, like Nico, who did not migrate out of financial necessity and whose migration was viewed with suspicion. Whenever Nico considers returning to Italy, he thinks about what people will say:

If you return with good English skills you have added something to your life. If you return now, what have you done? You have lost half a year, they don't believe in you because for work that looks as though you ran away from Italy, that you were lazy. So you must swallow down a few bitter mouthfuls, so that you return with something more … . It's the same from a financial point of view. It's important to me to not go straight away and ask for money. I know that if tomorrow I ask, “Dad send me some money,” it would come to me the next day. However, I also know my Dad would say, “Hang on a minute, this kid goes away, and after two months he needs me.” It means that I really organised this without thinking it out. And so there is also the matter of not wanting to worry them too much, knowing perfectly well that if tomorrow I have a problem, they will help me in any way.

In Nico's case, concealing the truth about how well he is coping is to some extent a public secret (Taussig 1999):

I have always had a really open relationship with my parents. It's enough for them to hear my voice over the phone to understand, they know, even if I want to protect them a bit they know, they understand this and they reciprocate. They pretend that I am not worrying, however I know perfectly well how it is for them … . In the same way, I'm sure I would always know what their actual problems are. I would understand it from their voices. The first time I would say what's happened? “Nothing?” By the third time I would insist on knowing. After a week of phone calls every day, perhaps also getting angry, I would find out.

Similarly, Nico's mother described being able to glean the truth from the sound of his voice over the phone: “You know, even if he wants to hide something, you hear it from the tone of voice.” Nico and his mother also carefully choose particular modes of communication for particular purposes. If he is feeling particularly low, Nico will send a text message rather than phone. Similarly, Nico's mother resists the desire to write letters because in a letter she is less likely to be able to hide her feelings than on the phone:

Well let's say that, writing letters you put more feeling, you let go more. Rather with the phone you talk, you're more realistic, you talk about more mundane things, about what's happening, at least that's what happens with me. You see, I'm always trying to not make him suffer from my own heartache.

It is not surprising that the importance of regular visits is high on the list of priorities for Nico. The fact that his family has been to see where he lives was described as a breakthrough in their relationship with his wife and a change in their view of his migration:

It's something that's right. When you don't see people for too long, the joy that you feel when you see them is comparable to the pain that you feel when you leave them. So, once a year you suffer a bit, but not too much. If you don't see them for three, four years, when you see them, okay, you jump up and down, and when you go away what happens? That is why I want to avoid putting myself and them through so much pain when perhaps with a bit of attention to planning, attention to spending, I hope we can visit every year.

Visits were described by both Nico and his mother as being important for sharing the truth about health and well-being. When discussing her fear of causing her son pain by, for example, divulging some bad news about her own health, Nico's mother explained:

It's an issue of, of being afraid of causing them hurt, that is that they will worry. And so you try not to worry them, because you would really like to tell them certain things, you would also really like to tell him, but you try for a minute to be careful so that he doesn't have bad thoughts, so he doesn't worry. Because if they could perhaps be closer you could even say something. So, it's best to wait until we visit.

Emotional support: Modes of exchange

The history of “keeping in touch” and the exchange of emotional support for Nina and Nico reflect the changes in technology over time. The post-war and 1970s migrant cohorts initially stayed in touch via the virtual “voice” and “presence” of letters, postcards, and gifts, which were exchanged, at most weekly, but commonly monthly. Like Nina, they later began to use the telephone and more recently the computer and SMS texting. In contrast, e-mails and mobile phone messages characterise the exchanges of the more recent migrant cohort, like Nico, for whom routine caregiving occurs on a daily basis and often contains the details of everyday life. Members in these families are also more likely to engage in routine visits every year or so. Like Nina, transnational family members of all cohorts reserve letters for elderly kin as well as for special or delicate news. Cards continue to be ritually exchanged for anniversaries. Audiotapes have maintained their function over the years of sharing the messages of those too young, too old, or unable to write or phone. Crisis care scenarios trigger the increased use of all these modes of exchange, often in combination.

Our research shows that new technologies, such as e-mail, webcam, mobile phone text messages, videos, faxes, and websites are not simply replacing older, less useful forms of communication but are used to supplement existing modes of communication, such as letters, gifts, audiotapes, and photographs. New technologies are incorporated into long histories of families using all available means to keep in touch with their kin overseas (see also Benton 2003; Wilson and Peterson 2002; Dimaggio et al. 2001; Miller and Slater 2000). What has clearly changed, however, is the capacity for communication, from a situation when post-war family members relied on exchanging letters at long intervals, to a context in which most families today are able to exchange messages several times a day. This transition has generally been perceived as a “miracle” and as a very positive outcome of the “death of distance.”

It is of interest that, as Wilding (2006) makes clear, this very capacity for increased communication appears to have given rise to renewed expectations and obligations in transnational family relationships (see also Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007). Not only can transnational families keep in more regular contact, their members have begun to expect this. They also begin to expect the timely and accurate information about the health (including emotional) and well-being of family members. Once family members engage in more regular routine exchanges, like weekly phone calls, an expectation is built up that they will engage in ritual exchange; thus to miss a birthday becomes more significant. This kinwork in turn builds greater expectations and obligations for people to visit. Before considering the importance of co-presence in the practice of transnational caregiving, I will first summarise some of the issues associated with negotiating the exchange of information about emotional health and illness over distance.

Emotional well-being and the negotiation of truth and distance

As is evident in the above case examples, tensions associated with transnational caregiving, particularly the exchange of emotional support, appear to come to the fore when individuals are faced with the prospect of sharing bad news about their health and well-being with their transnational kin. Concern about how much information should be divulged, or is being divulged, is common as family members manage “truth and distance.” Some people, like Franca, feel that the best way to support distant kin is to protect them from bad news; others, like her mother, feel it is essential that they should be informed.

Bepe, who migrated to Perth in 1992, manages the sharing of information in a way that appears to be common among many transnational family members:

I promised myself that if there was some small problem that can be solved just within a matter of a month or two months I would never say anything to them—I don't want to upset them unnecessarily, because I understand what is the situation, what are the feelings when you are living so far away and you can't really go there, you can't do anything … . So, I believe that it is just pointless to upset them if you have a light in front of you and you know that you will solve the problem in a couple of months. But, if it is a very serious problem, yes, I would let them know.

Because individuals, like Bepe, regularly use distance to “hide the truth,” transnational family members are well aware of this particular limitation of transnationalism; thus, much effort is invested in “reading between the lines” of letters, “listening to the sound of the voice” at the other end of the phone and even, like Nina's aunts, interpreting silences. Other strategies used include asking other locally-based contacts to “play detective” and check up on their distant kin, “in the flesh,” and report back their firsthand accounts of how things are, as Bepe explains (see also Baldock 2000):

I don't always know exactly what's going on with all of them. No; because the distance is a real impediment and if the information is transmitted via either a phone call or a letter, it's still limited … I could see they did their best … I rely on more people, on more sources. They rely only on me and [my spouse], so I think it's probably been more vague for them than it is for me.

The hiding of the truth associated with health concerns may be linked to a common practice in Italy, particularly among older generations, of not informing people about their fatal illnesses. Nadia explains that this practice has largely been rejected by younger people:

My dad was telling me that his cousin has cancer but he doesn't know … . They wouldn't tell somebody who's sick, you know, that they are sick. So, everybody knows except the person. Because they have to face death and they might get frightened, terrified. It's a horrible experience and so you spare pain and worry because it may not happen and if it has to happen, it happens anyway. So, for their sake, it's better not to tell them. But I think the split came in 1968 when all this sort of thinking got rejected totally.

The question of how to best handle news about serious illness sometimes creates tensions between the generations, as in the case of Nadia's family, who decided to tell their father about his cancer, when it was clear he would have preferred not to know. In certain cases, hiding the truth can be akin to a public secret as the family members involved are usually aware of the pretense. Franco, who migrated in 1950, for example, agreed with his siblings not to tell their mother about her fatal illness. When asked whether he thought that his mother was aware of the gravity of her situation, Berto replied, “I couldn't be sure from the phone calls… But when I saw her, I could tell from the look in her eyes.” Berto's mother never said anything to contradict the optimistic comments of other family members. They all acted the drama, without ever openly admitting the truth of how serious her sickness was. In adhering to her particular role in the script, by accepting at face value the family's optimistic view of things, Berto's mother was also carrying her responsibility to avoid unnecessary distress for her family.

In other cases, attempts to conceal the truth are actively resisted. Teresa, who migrated in 1980, was not told of a close aunt's death until she visited (two months later). Teresa was extremely upset by this withholding of information, and she berated her parents at length, insisting that in future she should be told all bad news as soon as possible and that she should be informed of all illnesses, whatever their degree of seriousness. In their defence, her parents reasoned that, “there was nothing you could do anyway living so far away.” They thought it was better to share this news face-to-face and waited for her visit. It appears that visits are particularly important in helping to resolve some of the tensions associated with truth and distance.

Seeing is believing

As noted, people were concerned about carefully managing the information they shared with loved ones to ensure they did not worry them unnecessarily. Many consciously hid, or attempted to hide, the full truth about their emotional state of being. All, in turn, expressed concern about their ability to know exactly how their loved ones were faring. Given these limitations imposed by distance, it appears that people put great stock in co-presence as a way of validating the status of the visited; to check if they are “really okay,” as well as to avail themselves of what they feel is an appropriate time to share the extent of their true feelings, when they are in each other's presence.

People regularly spoke of the need to “see” their loved ones, “with my own eyes,” to confirm their health and well-being “for themselves.” This is not to say that individuals might not try to hide the truth about their emotional well-being while on a visit. But in general, it was felt this would be harder to achieve. Parents, like Nadia's and Nico's mothers, talked about the relief they felt when they could finally “see” that their children seemed truly happily settled in Australia. Older migrants, like Nina, Beatrice, Berto, and Franco, who were not able to visit very often, spoke of the tremendous shock they received when they saw how frail and old their parents had grown since their last visit. The ageing process had been largely hidden from them in the regular letters and phone calls they had exchanged.

The need to undertake a visit in order “to see,” to check the well-being of distant kin, is most strongly expressed by parents of recent migrants soon after their child's migration. This is perhaps because most parents have little, if any, access to information from other people about their migrant children. The parents of post-war migrants rarely visited at all, and if they did, it was likely to be several years after the initial migration. My previous research (Baldassar 1997, 2001) charts the dramatic increase in visits by post-war migrants to their hometowns in Italy from approximately one a decade in the 1950s and 1960s to, for a lucky few, one every two years in the 1990s.

Other visits that feature the motivation “to check up on,” over and above the usual desire (that characterises all visits) “to see” loved ones, are visits by grandparents to “see” grandchildren, particularly new babies, and by migrants to “see” ailing parents, particularly if disability (dementia, deafness, paralysis) makes it impossible for them to communicate by phone or letter. Importantly, a significant outcome of “seeing” children, grandchildren and parents, is that visitors feel more reassured and more accepting of the migrant's decision to settle abroad. A visit appears to be the best way of resolving tensions associated with a lack of “license to leave,” as was the case with Franca, Nico, and Nadia; the latter explains:

They found it really hard to accept. It took them a long time so they obviously didn't want me to go because I would have been so far away from them … . For the first year … my mum would cry every time someone mentioned my name! … Just the feeling emotional, “Oh … that daughter … I wonder what she's doing now. I don't know, I can't see her.” It's not being able to see, not being able to verify with her eyes… . When they came over, they saw how my life was and they could verify things … it reassured them … . It made a huge difference.

“Seeing” each other also reassures people that their kin “haven't changed a bit,” that they remain “just the same,” that despite the distance, they still have a son or daughter, mother or father. In this way, attachments with significant kin are revived, and in the case of grandchildren, formed and developed. These attachments ensure people feel they are maintaining a sense of “closeness” with significant kin, feeling that they still “know” each other. People also spoke about “getting to know” kin and developing relationships that carry obligations for a continued set of interactions. Visits often inspire an increase in transnational communication both before and immediately following, and visits also often increase and broaden the transnational network of kin and friends. The maintenance of these consociate attachments is often underpinned by a sense of moral obligation toward family, evident in duty and ritual visits, through attendance at funerals, baptisms, weddings, significant anniversaries, Christmas, class reunions, times of crisis (migration, birth, illness, death), and the sense of duty of seeing family regularly (Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding 2007).

The need to “see” each other and to be “co-present,” expressed by informants as a key feature of visits, supports Urry's (2003) claims that such “physical, corporeal” travel forms the basis of contemporary transnational social life:

This mutual presencing enables each to read what the other is really thinking, to observe their body language, to hear “first hand” what they have to say, to sense directly their overall response, to undertake at least some emotional work … Such “co-present interaction” is fundamental to social life (Urry 2003: 163).

The relationship between emotions and physicality (the influence of bodily co-presence or absence on emotional interaction) is a largely under-examined area (but see, for example, Lyon 1995, Lyon and Barbalet 1994 and Lock 1993). Elsewhere, I have discussed the way some Italian elderly people's experience of health and well-being is directly related to how close they feel they are to their children and to how regularly they see (and are co-present with) them (Baldassar and Pesman 2005: 143). What is clear from this research is that emotions, particularly feelings of guilt and nostalgia, are key motivating agents in the practice and performance of visits.

The limits of transnationalism

Somewhat surprisingly di Leonardo (1987: 452) argued that the investment of kinwork “was in most cases tragically doomed” because of the ongoing decline of intergenerational obligations. In stark contrast, the research by Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding (2007) provides clear evidence that kinwork continues to occur and that it continues to be important in demonstrating as well as establishing future expectations of care and support. Moreover, this is despite large-scale migration processes dispersing families across national borders. Di Leonardo's (1987) kinwork research was conducted among (translocal) Italian families living in the United States (see also di Leonardo 1984). Arguably, “staying in touch” is more important in transnational contexts than in proximate ones where distance needs to be worked at to be overcome. Urry's (2003) argument that we need moments of co-presence to sustain relationships would appear to be confirmed by our study.

One reason for the apparently stark differences in our findings of continued efforts to stay in touch and di Leonardo's assessment that intergenerational contacts were declining might well be explained by the bias of our sample in favour of successful bonds and positive experiences of transnational support (as explained above). Another important explanation relates to the changes in technologies that have come about in the twenty years that separate our studies. This raises the question whether advancements in our ability to stay in touch has increased our sense of obligation to remain connected (cf. Wilding 2006). Technological transformations have changed the tools that people use to stay in touch as well as the ways in which people stay in touch by increasing the levels of obligations that are attached to long-distance relationships of care. Thus, the need for co-presence is increased simply because the means to visit have increased. This would explain why the post-war and 1970s migrants like Berto, Nina, and Franco managed to maintain close emotional relationships with their transnational kin despite not being able to phone or visit very often. The limited capacity for transnational communication in the decades following the war meant that people were not able to, nor obliged to, maintain the level of contact that characterises transnational family relations today.

At the beginning of this article I argued that the notion of “staying in touch” is primarily a reference to the aspiration not only to maintain open channels of communication but some level of emotional connection. The exchange of emotional and moral support is clearly influenced by long distance, but it is not necessarily inhibited by it. It appears that as long as family members work hard at “staying in touch” by making use of all the technologies available to them, they can maintain mutually supportive relationships across time and space.

I thank Maruška Svašek, Zlatko Skrbiš, Thomas Wilson, Jonathan Hill, Linda Smith, and, in particular, Identities' anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms have been used in this article.

2. This project, “Transnational care-giving: cross-cultural aged-care practices between Australian immigrants and their parents living abroad,” was conducted with Cora Baldock and Raelene Wilding from 2000 to 2005 and was funded by the Australia Research Council Large Grant A00000731.

3. Stephen Bennetts, PhD candidate in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at UWA, conduced five of the Italy sample interviews on my behalf.

4. For further discussion on these three cohorts, see Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding (2007) and Baldassar (2007).

5. The numbers of Italian migrants in Western Australia reflect the figures for the country as a whole. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were approximately 8,000 Italians in Australia, most of whom lived in rural districts. Between 1922 and 1930, some 25,000 people left Italy for Australia. The Italy-born population of Australia rose from 33,632 in 1947 to 120,000 in 1954 and expanded to 228,000 by 1961, reaching a peak of 289,476 in 1971. By the census of 1996, the figure had declined to 238,263 and in 2001 it had fallen to 218,718 (1.2 percent of the total Australian population) due to a combination of deaths occurring in the ageing population, repatriations and limited migration from Italy to Australia. In 1996, the second generation (at least one parent born in Italy) numbered 334,036, almost 100,000 more than the first generation. In 2001, the figure had risen to 355,200, representing 44.4 percent of the total Italian-Australian population and over 136,000 more than the first generation, which comprised 30.9 percent. An estimated 197,600 Australian-born of Australian-born parents claimed Italian ancestry (ABS 2003). The total Italian-Australian population in 2001 was 800,256 representing 4.6 percent of the population (ABS 2001). For further information about Italian migration to Australia, see DIMIA (2003), Castles et al. (1992), and Rosoli (1978).

6. According to the 2001 census, Western Australia is home to about 23,062 Italy-born persons (1.3 percent of the total WA population), 68,000 people whose parent or parents were born in Italy and around 100,000 people who claim Italian ancestry.

7. The high rates of repatriation inspired a government inquiry; see Martin (1978: 31), Price (1971: A9–A10), and IACCSP (1973).