Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility, Filial Piety and Care

Abstract

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.

Keywords:

• Transnational Migration
• Gender
• Youth
• Care
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

This article benefited from feedback by colleagues at the 2016 Association of Southeast Asian Studies UK Conference, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, University of London, where an earlier version of this article was presented.

ORCID

Carol Chan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9879-5144

Notes

[1] These names are pseudonyms in accordance with academic ethical convention.

[2] The degree to which migrants actively participate in the process of data falsification varies widely, with some migrants aware from the beginning of the application process, and others only prior to departure at the airport.

[3] I came to these three sites by serendipity. One was the home village of a labour activist I met in Yogyakarta in 2012. I was invited to stay in the second site through a former migrant who worked in Singapore (where we met previously). My entry to the third site was facilitated by a researcher who had been working closely with residents on migration-related issues for years. As an ethnic-Chinese Singaporean who speaks fluent Indonesian, I negotiated being misrecognised as a (potential) recruitment agent, employer and NGO worker. However, as an obvious ‘outsider’, many residents enthusiastically shared their experiences, questions and views about migration.

[4] For example, nearly all migrants embark on temporary contracts to work in other countries in Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Middle East.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Pittsburgh (USA), the Institute of Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at the University of California Irvine (USA) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant: ‘Southeast Asian Women, Family and Migration in the Global Era’).