Innocence and Investments in Intimate Economies: Fantasy-Building of Overseas Filipino Workers and Children in a Japanese Village

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

Abstract

Lisa Malkki and Emily Martin (2003) note that many parents subscribe to an idyllic vision of childhood where children live in a protected world of play and innocence that separates them from the harsh realities of the adult world. In the Philippines, this vision may enable parents to willingly leave their children behind with other caretakers in order to work abroad as Overseas Filipino Workers. Through fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in San Pablo City, Philippines, this paper investigates the children of the Japanese Village, their caretakers, and their parents who, as descendants of Japanese ancestors, have recently discovered their rights as Japanese citizens and have started to migrate to Japan for work. As they fill their natal homes with gifts of anime toys, geisha figurines, and other aesthetic artifacts to symbolize their intimate, transnational connection, this paper considers Annette Weiner’s concept of “keeping-while-giving” (1992), alongside Georges Bataille’s notions of excess and luxury (1989), to explore the limitations of migrant parents’ gift-giving practices, caretakers’ affective labor, and children’s understanding of the investments involved in restructuring transnational migrant families through intimate economies. As various caregivers transcend gendered reproductive and productive roles to provide children with gifts of love and care, the paper argues that caregivers and children engage in what Melanie Klein (1975) refers to as “phantasy-building,” the instinctual ability to imagine and actualize selfhoods and childhoods that, in this case, repairs what was seemingly lacking in households bereft of one, sometimes two parents.

Author

• Cheryll Alipio, The University of Queensland