Growing up in a Periodic Fatherhood Household: Children of Taiwanese Business Entrepreneurs

• In Event: On the Move for Money, Left Behind for Love: Negotiating Work and Family in Cross-Border Migration

Abstract

This paper explores the experiences of staying-behind children of Taiwanese business people in China. The number of couples and families living apart while together transnationally has risen rapidly in Taiwan since the late 1980s due to the large movement of Taiwanese business people to China. To take advantage of China’s cheap labor and huge domestic market since the country opened its doors to global capital in 1978, thousands of Taiwanese business owners and managers—mainly married men—have worked and lived in China for extended periods, ranging from several years to more than two decades. They usually make a week-long conjugal visit every three months. Their children in Taiwan are characterized to be growing up in a periodic fatherhood household. This paper shows how periodic fatherhood has shaped those children’s intimate experiences with their parents and their ideas and practices of their own intimate lives. It finds that there are gendered differences in those children’s relationships with their fathers and mothers over time and how growing up in a transnational family makes these children develop a gendered sense of and even some sort of resistance to transnationalism. The data for this paper comes from more than a decade of research on Taiwanese business people in various Chinese cities and more recently, from four years of interviews with children and spouses of Taiwanese businessmen in Taiwan.

Author

• Hsiu-hua Shen, National Tsing Hua University