Lighting Up the Darkness: The Emergence of the “Family of Origin” Discourse in China

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-2010s, the concept “family of origin” has achieved surprising popularity in China. Different from family of origin’s academic meaning and neutral connotation in English, its Chinese translation, yuansheng jiating (原生家庭), explicitly draws attention to how parents and family can do harm to children. Adopting a phronetic iterative approach, I analyzed 48 family of origin narrative videos and their comments on one of China’s largest video-sharing sites, Bilibili.com, using the Darkness Model of Family Communication as a heuristic tool. Results revealed an interlocking system of individual, dyadic, familial, and social levels of family darkness, collaboratively articulated by online narrators and commenters. I argue that the Chinese discourse of family of origin opens up a dialogic space where communication about family problems and critiques of patriarchal family culture can take place in the time of neo-familism in China.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Elizabeth Suter and Sara Docan-Morgan for providing valuable feedback on an earlier draft of the paper. The author also acknowledges her gratitude to Ting Chen who provided research assistance and Kaixin Li who first directed the author’s attention to family of origin videos on Bilibili.com.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bullet comments or the bullet curtain (danmu弹幕) is a special feature of some online video platforms that allows users to make comments while watching a video. The comments are synchronized with the video, moving from right to left on the screen like flying bullets.

2. To avoid associating words like “dark” or “darkness” with specific individuals, I chose to use alternative phrasing, such as problematic or negative, when an individual is described. I retain the original name of the model and such phrases as family darkness to acknowledge the immerse value of the dark side family communication scholarship, which has corrected the positivity bias in family scholarship and the popular imagination of the family.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a research fellowship grant from the Center for Asian Business (CAB) at Loyola Marymount University.