REVIEW ARTICLE
Deborah Davis-Friedmann. 1983. Long Lives: Chinese Elderly and The Communist Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. 140 pp., $20.00. Charlotte Ikels. 1983. Aging and Adaptation: Chinese in Hong Kong and the United States. Hamden, Conn., Archon Books. 262 pp., $27.50. Ada Elizabeth Sher. 1984. Aging in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Veneration. Boulder, Colo., Westview Press. 211 pp., S16.95. Numerous studies on the aging population of North America document a decline in the status of the elderly under conditions of rapid social change. They focus on the discontinuities which may exist in earning power, command of strategic information, centrality to the kinship unit, living arrangements, community structure, and, of course, health. Some of these discontinuities are linked with the individual life cycle, others with social class position, while still others flow from socioeconomic change. The three volumes under review here consider the extent of continuity and discontinuity in the lives of aging Chinese in the People's Republic of China 0aRC), Hong Kong, and in metropolitan Boston in the United States. They examine sources of variation in the living circumstances and social status of elderly Chinese, while at the same time offering us glimpses of their informants' feelings of well-being, their subjective quality of life. Taken together, the volumes provide an important addition to the emerging cross-cultural literature on aging. These volumes are timely since the proportion of elderly in the developing world is increasing, and by the year 2000 an estimated 60% of the world's elderly will live in the developing nations. Indeed, the elderly in the PRC will be so numerous that in 50 years they will constitute 1/16 of the world's total population! METHODS AND ORGANIZATION
OF THE VOLUMES
As non-Chinese conducting research in uncharted regions, the three writers must overcome linguistic and cultural barriers in gaining rapport. In addition Davis-Friedmann and Sher are confronted b y tight official restrictions on doing fieldwork in the PRC. While all three scholars utilize a qualitative fieldwork approach, buttressed by descriptive demographic data, their fieldwork methods differ considerably. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology I (1986) 103-108. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
104
REVIEW ARTICLE
Davis-Friedmann, one of the first sociologists to conduct fieldwork under the US-PRC 'exchange program' (of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC of the American National Academy of Sciences) is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. She combines analysis of the news media with data from two sets of informants, 88 retired urbanites in the PRC and 29 Hong Kong residents who matured in the PRC. She broadens her focus on life in the PRC by requesting the Hong Kong informants to discuss friends, kin, and neighbors they knew in the PRC. The strength of this two-pronged approach lies in its ability to overcome problems of reliability. By presenting the Hong Kong interviewees as informants about others, their supposed particular circumstances as 6migrgs can largely be overcome (Parish and Whyte 1978). These Hong Kong informants spoke at length (up to 5 hours) and relatively freely. In contrast, the PRC respondents provided valid data, but length of interview (30 minutes) and official presence limited depth of discussion. She also uses the 'park bench' method of finding PRC informants. Davis-Friedmann presents life history vignettes and analysis in the text and statistics in the notes. Analysis focuses on rural-urban differences in meeting problems associated with aging, attitudes toward the elderly, living arrangements, and relations with children and others. These variables guide us to her main thesis: intergenerational reciprocity is strong in the PRC but varies in rural and urban settings. The material is lively and vignettes believable; the results of 10 years of research are well organized and findings are solid. Sher, not fluent in Chinese, employs a more restricted method. In the PRC for a short several months' duration as a teacher, who becomes captivated by China, Sher focuses on respondents in various work sites, retirement homes and other units in the city of Shenyang, which has a surrounding rural sector. She presents her students' essays as well. The material is in the form of a working diary of notes and has an episodic quality. The presentation would benefit by a recombining of the cases under an explicit analytic framework. By presenting the cases in each unit she studied, supplemented by the policies on retirement in the units, Sher shows the variation in treatment of the elderly. The political importance of the elderly in each unit is alluded to ('the politics of veneration') but not closely analyzed. The study by Ikels, like Davis-Friedmann's the product of a decade of research, also uses two samples obtained independently of each other -- a Hong Kong and Boston sample -- but each is analyzed separately. Able to exploit conventional fieldwork methods in her chosen sites, Ikels draws a scientific sample. She is able to study the sample in its home environment and to contrast real actions with ideal patterns due to her freedom to move around and her facility with the Cantonese dialect. She collected life histories, has restudied many informants, and her data are consequently
REVIEW ARTICLE
105
rich and varied. Ikels divides the volume into analyses of Hong Kong and of Boston, covering systematically, but separately, data pertaining to the same topics. These topics, such as the family and community support systems, centered around the theme of the adaptability of the aged to social change, are later drawn together in a concluding chapter. This chapter addresses a paradigm on the status of the elderly by Rosow (1965). Ikels' portraits are sensitively drawn and nicely convey the personal views of her respondents' experiences of aging. Elderly Chinese express a concern for balance, harmony (do not overeat or drink too much), moderation (some physical exercise), herbal and other traditional medical treatments, and service to the family or community.
THE FINDINGS Economics
These studies confirm Rosow's findings that the extent to which the elderly own or control property upon which the youth are dependent and the degree of economic productivity of the society are crucial determinants of their status. Davis--Friedmann focuses on intergenerational reciprocity and finds that while economic underdevelopment virtually requires mutual support for survival, the cycle of reciprocity differs distinctively in rural and urban areas of the PRC. Rural Chinese parents, lacking retirement benefits, raise their children as investments for the future. Parents must provide their sons with funds to marry, which in turn obligates the sons to support the elderly. Moreover, while the aged leave mainstream farming at an early age (during their 50s), they continue alternative subsistence activities for many years, thus reducing the period of their dependency. The elderly without children deliberately create ficfive kin ties for long term reciprocity. In contrast, urban elderly who have worked in state-run units (such as factories or schools) are blessed with sizable pensions, and their work unit apartments are not taken back upon their retirement. Their assets often exceed those of their adult offspring, who may depend on them. Further, limited geographical mobility and low rates of housing construction keep most urbanites in close proximity to kin. She notes a life without intergenerafional contact is unthinkable to the urbanites. Sher finds that many urban Shenyang work units continue to draw on the technical resources of their pensioned workers, giving these elderly a contributory role to play and a crucial community visibility which adds to their status. Ikels finds that in urban Hong Kong, lacking a universal pension system, with the state's role in supporting the aged minimal, adults support their elderly parents. The elderly poor without children must, as in the rural
106
REVIEW ARTICLE
PRC, turn to the informal economy to survive. They, too, forge reciprocal ties with others to supplement their meagre incomes. Those who remain in a stable environment can survive through such mutual exchanges, entering public hospitals at the last stage of illness. Old age homes are necessarily, if slowly, being constructed, as urban renewal projects steadily alter community environments which have supported the elderly. In the urban USA, immigrant Chinese will normally live with their children, who expect to see their parents through hard times. However, they can also survive independently on their social security, in old age homes, and through other numerous programs of assistance. Education and Culture
The three writers stress the unique generational context of the aged in Chinese society in the late 1970s. Since the adult offspring were educated to respect the elderly and to view themselves as links in a continuous family line, they are willing to incorporate their elders' wishes into their own life goals. Davis-Friedmann suggests that the downplaying of youthful sexuality in the PRC contributes to the continued respect for the aged. Further, the leadership reminds the youth that they are obliged to the elderly, who sacrificed to bring about the new regime. Similarly, Sher stresses the political role of the elderly. PRC leaders appeal to them as political supporters, to socialize the youth into frugal values. While the sociocultural and political environment in the PRC encourages acceptance and respect of the elderly, in Hong Kong and Boston it does not. Relegated to the economic margins and dying occupations in Hong Kong, where 'money talks', the elderly find no support for their status in the public culture. In North America, the school aged youth mix with non-Chinese who do not understand the Chinese respect for the aged. Thus in both settings respect for the aged is strongest among the middle-aged, schooled in a previous culture. The future for the aged in Hong Kong and the US holds out little promise of renewed respect. However, those immigrants who become citizens have, due to their numbers, some political impact in the US. The elderly in the PRC, Hong Kong and Boston are still a repository of valued folk culture, especially to their middle-aged offspring. True, the formal institutions in all the cases under study downplay, avoid, or even denigrate this culture, which includes age-old herbal remedies and folk religious observances. Nevertheless, many sons and daughters seek this knowledge from their elders. This folk culture is least valued in North America, and hence discontinuity in the cultural arena is greatest there. Nevertheless, Ikels finds considerable areas of cultural continuity between the older and the middle generations, thus illustrating the unique generational context of aging in this period.
REVIEW ARTICLE
107
Kinship Chinese kinship ties have traditionally been focused on and structured around sons. In the PRC, rural residence patterns still emphasize patrilocal residence in which sons remain with their parents. City riving is more flexible, and living with daughters is feasible; but residence with a son remains the ideal. Davis-Friedmann finds that if the elderly and their married sons and daughters-in-law do not get along, complete rupture may occur in the rural setting, with the elderly parents living on their own. (Nevertheless, the recent population census of the PRC indicates that only a small fraction of individuals reside alone for any reason.) In the cities, in contrast, since urban housing is in short supply, parents rarely move out of their homes to live alone. The elderly can bargain, and rearrangements of traditional patterns of coresidence are possible. Ikels finds that kinship remains 'extremely important' in both Hong Kong and Greater Boston, but it is a kinship contracted to the stem family. In both of her sites, older populations are composed primarily of immigrants with broken kinship ties. Under contemporary industrializing circumstances, Ikels finds that immigrants continue to support their older parents, but collateral ties are weakened, both by geographical movement, and by the absence of economic motivation for cooperation. In Hong Kong, however, coresidence is not the critical measure of filial piety. While working-class elders may hold valued tenancy rights to public housing, which are of benefit to their children, some elders may live alone in apartments, rooms, or 'bedspaces' rented for them by children. In Boston redefinition of culturally defined roles frequently occurs, for example, daughters are no longer willing to be treated as peripheral members of the family. Disagreements over the older folk's childrearing techniques introduce a strain in three-generational families. Daughters-inlaw are often unwilling to continue helping mothers-in-law. These three studies focus on a historically unique population with roots in the 'traditional' order that valued the elderly and gave them continued activities through old age. Even under current conditions, kinship ties have not disappeared, and the elderly are virtually all enmeshed in real or fictive kin ties. However, the future is still uncharted, and many changes will occur in the relations between generations born in post WW II China, Hong Kong, and Boston. These are among the many findings on the situation of the Chinese elderly in these fascinating studies. Foi those interested in gaining a crosscultural overview of aging as an experience, Davis-Friedmann and Ikels, especially, will serve as crucial primary sources.
108
REVIEW ARTICLE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Parish, W. L. and M. K. Whyte 1978 Village and Family in Contemporary China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosow, I. 1965 And Then We Were Old. Transactions 2- 20--26.
Dept. of Sociology University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 Canada
J A N E T W. S A L A F F
Deborah Davis-Friedmann. 1983. Long Lives: Chinese Elderly and The Communist Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. 140 pp., $20.00. Charlotte Ikels. 1983. Aging and Adaptation: Chinese in Hong Kong and the United States. Hamden, Conn., Archon Books. 262 pp., $27.50. Ada Elizabeth Sher. 1984. Aging in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Veneration. Boulder, Colo., Westview Press. 211 pp., S16.95. Numerous studies on the aging population of North America document a decline in the status of the elderly under conditions of rapid social change. They focus on the discontinuities which may exist in earning power, command of strategic information, centrality to the kinship unit, living arrangements, community structure, and, of course, health. Some of these discontinuities are linked with the individual life cycle, others with social class position, while still others flow from socioeconomic change. The three volumes under review here consider the extent of continuity and discontinuity in the lives of aging Chinese in the People's Republic of China 0aRC), Hong Kong, and in metropolitan Boston in the United States. They examine sources of variation in the living circumstances and social status of elderly Chinese, while at the same time offering us glimpses of their informants' feelings of well-being, their subjective quality of life. Taken together, the volumes provide an important addition to the emerging cross-cultural literature on aging. These volumes are timely since the proportion of elderly in the developing world is increasing, and by the year 2000 an estimated 60% of the world's elderly will live in the developing nations. Indeed, the elderly in the PRC will be so numerous that in 50 years they will constitute 1/16 of the world's total population! METHODS AND ORGANIZATION
OF THE VOLUMES
As non-Chinese conducting research in uncharted regions, the three writers must overcome linguistic and cultural barriers in gaining rapport. In addition Davis-Friedmann and Sher are confronted b y tight official restrictions on doing fieldwork in the PRC. While all three scholars utilize a qualitative fieldwork approach, buttressed by descriptive demographic data, their fieldwork methods differ considerably. Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology I (1986) 103-108. © 1986 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
104
REVIEW ARTICLE
Davis-Friedmann, one of the first sociologists to conduct fieldwork under the US-PRC 'exchange program' (of the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC of the American National Academy of Sciences) is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. She combines analysis of the news media with data from two sets of informants, 88 retired urbanites in the PRC and 29 Hong Kong residents who matured in the PRC. She broadens her focus on life in the PRC by requesting the Hong Kong informants to discuss friends, kin, and neighbors they knew in the PRC. The strength of this two-pronged approach lies in its ability to overcome problems of reliability. By presenting the Hong Kong interviewees as informants about others, their supposed particular circumstances as 6migrgs can largely be overcome (Parish and Whyte 1978). These Hong Kong informants spoke at length (up to 5 hours) and relatively freely. In contrast, the PRC respondents provided valid data, but length of interview (30 minutes) and official presence limited depth of discussion. She also uses the 'park bench' method of finding PRC informants. Davis-Friedmann presents life history vignettes and analysis in the text and statistics in the notes. Analysis focuses on rural-urban differences in meeting problems associated with aging, attitudes toward the elderly, living arrangements, and relations with children and others. These variables guide us to her main thesis: intergenerational reciprocity is strong in the PRC but varies in rural and urban settings. The material is lively and vignettes believable; the results of 10 years of research are well organized and findings are solid. Sher, not fluent in Chinese, employs a more restricted method. In the PRC for a short several months' duration as a teacher, who becomes captivated by China, Sher focuses on respondents in various work sites, retirement homes and other units in the city of Shenyang, which has a surrounding rural sector. She presents her students' essays as well. The material is in the form of a working diary of notes and has an episodic quality. The presentation would benefit by a recombining of the cases under an explicit analytic framework. By presenting the cases in each unit she studied, supplemented by the policies on retirement in the units, Sher shows the variation in treatment of the elderly. The political importance of the elderly in each unit is alluded to ('the politics of veneration') but not closely analyzed. The study by Ikels, like Davis-Friedmann's the product of a decade of research, also uses two samples obtained independently of each other -- a Hong Kong and Boston sample -- but each is analyzed separately. Able to exploit conventional fieldwork methods in her chosen sites, Ikels draws a scientific sample. She is able to study the sample in its home environment and to contrast real actions with ideal patterns due to her freedom to move around and her facility with the Cantonese dialect. She collected life histories, has restudied many informants, and her data are consequently
REVIEW ARTICLE
105
rich and varied. Ikels divides the volume into analyses of Hong Kong and of Boston, covering systematically, but separately, data pertaining to the same topics. These topics, such as the family and community support systems, centered around the theme of the adaptability of the aged to social change, are later drawn together in a concluding chapter. This chapter addresses a paradigm on the status of the elderly by Rosow (1965). Ikels' portraits are sensitively drawn and nicely convey the personal views of her respondents' experiences of aging. Elderly Chinese express a concern for balance, harmony (do not overeat or drink too much), moderation (some physical exercise), herbal and other traditional medical treatments, and service to the family or community.
THE FINDINGS Economics
These studies confirm Rosow's findings that the extent to which the elderly own or control property upon which the youth are dependent and the degree of economic productivity of the society are crucial determinants of their status. Davis--Friedmann focuses on intergenerational reciprocity and finds that while economic underdevelopment virtually requires mutual support for survival, the cycle of reciprocity differs distinctively in rural and urban areas of the PRC. Rural Chinese parents, lacking retirement benefits, raise their children as investments for the future. Parents must provide their sons with funds to marry, which in turn obligates the sons to support the elderly. Moreover, while the aged leave mainstream farming at an early age (during their 50s), they continue alternative subsistence activities for many years, thus reducing the period of their dependency. The elderly without children deliberately create ficfive kin ties for long term reciprocity. In contrast, urban elderly who have worked in state-run units (such as factories or schools) are blessed with sizable pensions, and their work unit apartments are not taken back upon their retirement. Their assets often exceed those of their adult offspring, who may depend on them. Further, limited geographical mobility and low rates of housing construction keep most urbanites in close proximity to kin. She notes a life without intergenerafional contact is unthinkable to the urbanites. Sher finds that many urban Shenyang work units continue to draw on the technical resources of their pensioned workers, giving these elderly a contributory role to play and a crucial community visibility which adds to their status. Ikels finds that in urban Hong Kong, lacking a universal pension system, with the state's role in supporting the aged minimal, adults support their elderly parents. The elderly poor without children must, as in the rural
106
REVIEW ARTICLE
PRC, turn to the informal economy to survive. They, too, forge reciprocal ties with others to supplement their meagre incomes. Those who remain in a stable environment can survive through such mutual exchanges, entering public hospitals at the last stage of illness. Old age homes are necessarily, if slowly, being constructed, as urban renewal projects steadily alter community environments which have supported the elderly. In the urban USA, immigrant Chinese will normally live with their children, who expect to see their parents through hard times. However, they can also survive independently on their social security, in old age homes, and through other numerous programs of assistance. Education and Culture
The three writers stress the unique generational context of the aged in Chinese society in the late 1970s. Since the adult offspring were educated to respect the elderly and to view themselves as links in a continuous family line, they are willing to incorporate their elders' wishes into their own life goals. Davis-Friedmann suggests that the downplaying of youthful sexuality in the PRC contributes to the continued respect for the aged. Further, the leadership reminds the youth that they are obliged to the elderly, who sacrificed to bring about the new regime. Similarly, Sher stresses the political role of the elderly. PRC leaders appeal to them as political supporters, to socialize the youth into frugal values. While the sociocultural and political environment in the PRC encourages acceptance and respect of the elderly, in Hong Kong and Boston it does not. Relegated to the economic margins and dying occupations in Hong Kong, where 'money talks', the elderly find no support for their status in the public culture. In North America, the school aged youth mix with non-Chinese who do not understand the Chinese respect for the aged. Thus in both settings respect for the aged is strongest among the middle-aged, schooled in a previous culture. The future for the aged in Hong Kong and the US holds out little promise of renewed respect. However, those immigrants who become citizens have, due to their numbers, some political impact in the US. The elderly in the PRC, Hong Kong and Boston are still a repository of valued folk culture, especially to their middle-aged offspring. True, the formal institutions in all the cases under study downplay, avoid, or even denigrate this culture, which includes age-old herbal remedies and folk religious observances. Nevertheless, many sons and daughters seek this knowledge from their elders. This folk culture is least valued in North America, and hence discontinuity in the cultural arena is greatest there. Nevertheless, Ikels finds considerable areas of cultural continuity between the older and the middle generations, thus illustrating the unique generational context of aging in this period.
REVIEW ARTICLE
107
Kinship Chinese kinship ties have traditionally been focused on and structured around sons. In the PRC, rural residence patterns still emphasize patrilocal residence in which sons remain with their parents. City riving is more flexible, and living with daughters is feasible; but residence with a son remains the ideal. Davis-Friedmann finds that if the elderly and their married sons and daughters-in-law do not get along, complete rupture may occur in the rural setting, with the elderly parents living on their own. (Nevertheless, the recent population census of the PRC indicates that only a small fraction of individuals reside alone for any reason.) In the cities, in contrast, since urban housing is in short supply, parents rarely move out of their homes to live alone. The elderly can bargain, and rearrangements of traditional patterns of coresidence are possible. Ikels finds that kinship remains 'extremely important' in both Hong Kong and Greater Boston, but it is a kinship contracted to the stem family. In both of her sites, older populations are composed primarily of immigrants with broken kinship ties. Under contemporary industrializing circumstances, Ikels finds that immigrants continue to support their older parents, but collateral ties are weakened, both by geographical movement, and by the absence of economic motivation for cooperation. In Hong Kong, however, coresidence is not the critical measure of filial piety. While working-class elders may hold valued tenancy rights to public housing, which are of benefit to their children, some elders may live alone in apartments, rooms, or 'bedspaces' rented for them by children. In Boston redefinition of culturally defined roles frequently occurs, for example, daughters are no longer willing to be treated as peripheral members of the family. Disagreements over the older folk's childrearing techniques introduce a strain in three-generational families. Daughters-inlaw are often unwilling to continue helping mothers-in-law. These three studies focus on a historically unique population with roots in the 'traditional' order that valued the elderly and gave them continued activities through old age. Even under current conditions, kinship ties have not disappeared, and the elderly are virtually all enmeshed in real or fictive kin ties. However, the future is still uncharted, and many changes will occur in the relations between generations born in post WW II China, Hong Kong, and Boston. These are among the many findings on the situation of the Chinese elderly in these fascinating studies. Foi those interested in gaining a crosscultural overview of aging as an experience, Davis-Friedmann and Ikels, especially, will serve as crucial primary sources.
108
REVIEW ARTICLE BIBLIOGRAPHY
Parish, W. L. and M. K. Whyte 1978 Village and Family in Contemporary China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosow, I. 1965 And Then We Were Old. Transactions 2- 20--26.
Dept. of Sociology University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1 Canada
J A N E T W. S A L A F F
