How to grow up - the preface to "Pulling the Big Child"

【New Books in Academia】

Introduction to "The Pulling Of the Big Child: A Cultural Genealogy of Folk Parenting":

This book is a rural girl who has written a century-old educational genealogy of rural China through oral history and ethnography after becoming a mother, and conducts in-depth discussions on topics such as kinship co-parenting, endemic training, hardship ethics, adolescent throbbing, noble help, class ferrying, modern parenting anxiety, perfect motherhood, and symbolic patriarchy in family education. Here, we can see not only the complex experience of how five generations of a rural family have faced suffering, turmoil, and impermanence in the past hundred years, but also the multiple paths for "wild children" whose personal fate is closely related to the fate of the country.

Unlike the Rousseau school's utopian elite nostalgia for rural life and naturalistic education, and unlike the Bourdieu school's dichotomy of the pure and practical vision of elite education and popular education, the author unveils the many faces and deep structures of folk parenting that she has experienced: "the children of the poor are early home" - family labor education that combines education and livelihood; "forgiveness" and "roundness" - public leisure education constructed by games, secular conversation and social upheaval; "looking up three feet and having gods"—— Education on the sacredness of the "Heavenly Way" carried by words, reading, teachers, love, good karma, etc. In different historical periods, the practical vision of rural society based on livelihood considerations has always existed, but each generation has maintained a pure spirit and sense of merit of "learning for themselves" and "becoming a person", which is the key force to support the children of ordinary people to achieve class mobility and cultural transcendence. It can be said that folk parenting is both the pedagogy of suffering and the pedagogy of hope, and in the ultimate sense, it is the pedagogy of "late success".

I pulled you up with a handful of and a handful of urine, and I turned against you, and raised a white-eyed wolf! This sentence has always accompanied me in the process of growing up fighting wits with my mother since I was a child. Every time my mother angrily dropped this sentence, I could only stop the flag, although I was very unconvinced. At that time, I didn't understand the meaning of "pulling the child" at all, and I muttered silently in my heart, isn't it just washing diapers? Because my parents were very busy at work, my brother and I spent most of our childhood in the countryside with our grandparents and were not "close" to our mother.

After coming to the city for elementary school, I hated and loved my mother's discipline. I was used to being in the countryside, hating her for insisting that I cut my hair short like a tomboy, hating her for not wearing a beautiful dress for me, hating that she couldn't pay her tuition fees in time to make me humiliated by the teacher, hating her for not letting me read idle books, hating her for not letting me bring my good friends to play at home, hating her for always blaming me coldly... However, after understanding things, I also felt sorry for her. The mother is a thin southern woman, from childhood family conditions are superior, as a beloved little daughter, did not suffer much, after graduating from high school to work in the local public institutions, belongs to the "sitting office" people. In 1998, when the public institution was reformed, in order to earn more money to support a large family, my mother came out of the unit without pay and "went to the sea" to start a business. My father worked dozens of kilometers away, and my grandparents had a lot of land to plant but had a meager income, and they had to take care of their younger brother. The mother was solely responsible for the subsistence work of buying goods, setting up stalls, selling, collecting stalls, and settling accounts, the housework of laundry, cooking, and cleaning, as well as the family affairs of relatives moving around and interacting with people. In the busy interval, she can take care of me, and occasionally return to the countryside to visit the elderly and brother.

Every time after school, I would go to my mother's cramped and messy clothes stall, set up a small stool, and eat with my mother the meals I bought at the nearby food stalls. The mother always grabbed a few bites of rice quickly, or had to stop to deal with the comings and goings of customers after a few bites. My mother has a good eye and good eloquence, so the business is exceptionally good. The better the business, the less the mother could eat a few bites of hot rice, so she fell ill with a stomach problem. I wanted to help, and my mother waved her hand impatiently, rushed me to warm the book, write my homework, and said to me in a blunt tone: "Don't reach out and help, just do your own homework!" "I curled up in the corner of the stall and watched her deal with people of the three religions and nine streams. When the clothes are sold well or when the old patron is encountered, the mother's eyebrows are stretched a little; when the patron who is in trouble or looking for trouble, the mother needs to be careful to pay for it; when she encounters the evil spirit who comes to collect the protection fee, the mother has to bow down three times and four times, and endure the pain of cutting love. Sometimes, the mother's turnover is not good, the protection fee cannot be given in time, and the stall is smashed by the bad guys. I bumped into my mother silently holding up the crooked shelf several times, and she would occasionally sit in a chair and be silent or sigh for a long time, but she never shed a tear in front of me for these things.

No matter what happened, my mother wouldn't let me squeak, just let me stay in the corner to do my homework, or let me walk away. Gradually, my mother saved money to rent a façade, and later bought a façade. The corners of my hiding were getting better and better, from the small stool next to the pile of clothes, to the cramped corner of a converted fitting room in a stairwell, to the under the cash register at the entrance to a bright and spacious façade. What has always remained unchanged is that the thin figure of my mother blocks everything, there is a quiet little corner in the bustling place of people, and I can't accompany my mother to taste the cold and warmth of the world when I see on the "island in the city". Later, I heard Teacher Xia Linqing talk about a father in a working family, he was driving for the leader, as a driver, he developed a kind of "presence and absence" ability, this kind of life experience in "self-exile", wandering in loneliness and imagination, I have a relationship.

My father worked far away, and the chances of our family reunion were always slim. Occasional reunions, parental communication also lacks warmth. Chai rice oil and salt, chicken and garlic skin are full of conversation and life. When I think about it, I have very little memory of my interactions with my father, but the house is littered with books that my father has read. When he was young, his father was tall and handsome, a man who loved to read and wrote very well. When the holidays were boring, the family was silent, and repeatedly flipping through my father's collection of books became my pastime, and even the boring and thick textbooks "Internal Medicine" and "Surgery" when my father studied in the medical university were all rolled up by me. I imitated the pen signature of his book countless times, of course, many times to sign on behalf of the parents. Gradually, my writing became more and more like the words he wrote, although he never taught me to write by hand. Occasionally, I would flip through old photographs from the family's collection, and my father was handsome in his white coat and stethoscope when he was young. Unfortunately, the father's temper is always very violent and impulsive, and he does not smile at the child and is not gentle and considerate enough to the mother. I admired my father's talent more through my father's objects and books, but in real life I often complained that he took too little care of his mother and us.

It wasn't until I gave birth to my own child, changed from a daughter to a mother, watched the child grow up, and struggled painfully in my studies and family, that I felt the pain of my mother saying that "there are old people on the top and small ones on the bottom" and "pulling on the big children". I tried to understand how parents grabbed any piece of driftwood in the tide of the times, and dragged a screaming toddler or a rebellious girl with angry eyebrows, to protect the children from freezing and starving every day. They've done their best, but this reflexive thinking doesn't dispel the resentment I've accumulated about them growing up. People often say that "things from near to far, close to estranged husband and wife", why is this not the case with parent-child relationships? My mother was close to me, but mentally far away from me; my father was far away from me, but mentally close to me. I hate and love them, and these two feelings are inconclusive.

This chinese complex parent-child relationship and parenting practice is the starting point for my doctoral dissertation writing. In the beginning, I wanted to write about "Pulling The Growing Child: Parenting Practices in the Age of Cultural Intermodality." My research was on three generations of childcare families like me. At this time, the object of my daily battle of wits and courage has been replaced by the mentor Professor Kang Yongyong. Teacher Kang scolded me mercilessly: "What about your research problem?" What about your theoretical opponents? I also unceremoniously rolled my eyes at him, and then I kept working hard to try to fight with him next time. During this period, I read a large number of books related to parenting, and the ones that inspired me the most were Alees's "Children's Century: Children and Family Life under the Old System", Laru's "Unequal Childhood: Class, Race and Family Life", Harris's "Myths of Parenting", Lin Yaohua's "Golden Wings: The History of a Chinese Family", Xu Xuguang's "Under the Ancestral Shadow: Relatives, Personality and Social Mobility in Rural China", Li Yinhe and Zheng Hongxia's "Grandson of a Grandfather", and Jing Jun's "". Feeding The Little Emperor of China: Food, Children and Social Change", Hayato Kawai's "Children and Evil", Saloway's "Born to Rebel". The book is read with relish, but it is still far from finding a clear theoretical opponent. At the beginning of the topic, I even quoted Teacher Kang's theory to prove the relationship between teacher and teacher! Not surprisingly, I was scolded by Teacher Kang again, "I blushed when I saw the students quoting my things", "Are you doing this", "The teacher's things are not used to quote, they are used to give you stepping stones", "To stand on the shoulders of giants".

I read a lot of books, but my paper has not progressed. My assistant tutor (the faculty implements a dual tutor system) and my feminist enlightenment teacher, Professor Zheng Xinrong, are anxious. She often worries about us female Doctors who can't graduate and carry oil bottles, hoping that we will not always "input", not always "consume", but more "produce". She wanted me to jump out of my acres and see more ordinary women and ordinary mothers. To this end, Teacher Zheng took us to read "Dou muen the Starry Sky: The Social Field of Home" together, which became the key to my shift from focusing on isolated individual families to focusing on families and history. For the first time, I saw "companions" who shared my painful experiences, but ended up with experiential retrospectives, narrative healing, structural reflections, and cultural transcendence. I began to feel less lonely, and I began to feel that my topic had a little commonality in the times when it came out of the limitations of an individual family. I tried to step outside the role of a daughter and look at myself as an intellectual woman. My thesis began as a self-study, but in the end it was not a self-study, or rather, true "self-research" was never confined to the self.

At this time, I happened to be at the "Commen" reading Bourdieu's "Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgment" and Zelize's "Pricing Priceless Children: The Social Value of Children in Change". Originally, I was introduced as a "fan sister" of Bourdieu and Zelize, with the admiration of fans who worship the great god. The intimidating teacher Kang could not help it, he believed that Bourdieu did not break through the structural determinism in the end, and Zelize finally failed to get out of the economic value determinism of children. The crowd quickly split into two factions, and in the end neither of them could convince anyone. But the key thing is that Mr. Kang broke my "filter" of Bourdieu and Zelizer, urged me to complete the rethinking of Bourdieu theory, and finally I began to criticize the "Bourdieu God" in the article "Cultural Separation" and the Stigma of Low-level Education" and also found a key theoretical opponent.

Silent and sensitive, I was born to sprinkle joy and roll in the social field, and as a mother, I had a little more subtle ability, and listening to stories and telling stories has become the ability to "grow" on me, but it has not yet been internalized into a mission. At that time, the family's grandfather was still alive, close to the age of 100. I stroked his dry hand, listened to his vague words, looked at the tears coming out of the corners of his eyes, and unconsciously moved and moved. Grandpa said, "Lingzhi (my nickname), when I die you will burn it for me." "He wanted to say, I can't wait for you to graduate, and if one day, you write a book, burn it on the grave and burn it to me." Later, when I graduated, my grandfather had passed away, and I never saw his story written. Life and time, neither of which are equal.

In the process of talking with the older generation, the flow of cultural life made me sigh, strangle, intoxicated, admired, and fascinated. Every time I coax my child to sleep, I get up and put on a cloak, my son's sleep sniffles on the side, and when I sort out the recording on the computer, it is like a night spirit possessed. Yes, I fell in love with this, I fell in love with me like this. Soon, my field data was more than 400,000 words. Spanning a hundred years of history, dozens of untold stories of life, how do I present them? How can I fulfill their trust and trust in me? The love of words is one thing, the rationality of words is another.

I had to temporarily withdraw from these stories and loves and "self-exile" again. If you study alone and have no friends, you will be lonely and unheard. For the next whole year, I went to the classrooms of Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Beijing Normal University, listening to Qu Jingdong's intensive reading class on "On the Spirit of the Law", Teacher Li Kang's History of Western Sociology, and Teacher Chen Jianxiang's family education class, and participating in the reading clubs of Kang Yongyong, Chen Xiangming, and Zheng Xinrong. It wasn't easy at all, and all sorts of ideas were fighting in my head. Especially in the key concepts of "technology", "nature", "capital", "market", "labor" and "anxiety", Teacher Kang is a narcissistic optimist, Teacher Zheng is a bitter and vengeful school, Teacher Chen Jianxiang is a natural Buddhist school, and Teacher Chen Xiangming is a moderate action school. They are also "quarreling" every day, gentlemen do not move their hands, and the natural duty of intellectuals is to quarrel every day. These teachers have different concepts and positions, and I am mentally tormented and often doubt my life. But in essence, it is my own concept that has not grown out at all, so I can only be the "wall grass" of the theory, and feel that everyone who says it makes sense.

Where is the breakthrough? At that time, I suddenly realized that the legendary deep Cave of Plato, close to the mouth of the cave, must be full of forks in the road. Choosing any theoretical path that the teacher has taken, or pointed out to me, may lead to the exit. However, I wanted to make a way out myself. The reason is that my path to reading has become too much dependent on the master, and I need a complete spiritual separation to complete a work of art that is completely independently made by me, even if it is clumsy to carve only an "ugly little bench", even this time! I'm going to complete a long-lost spiritual coming-of-age ceremony. However, although the "nagging" of teachers is blocked, this breakthrough is still achieved on the shoulders of predecessors. Teacher Kang led us to read "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Other Side of Good and Evil", and Teacher Xiang Ming led us to read "The Beautiful Risks of Education", at this time, my academic career has just come to an end. These three books appeared just in time to help me complete a set of summative thinking about the bottom society's bottom line upbringing and moral reverence based on "scarcity". At the same time, I have also seen the pure gaze of generations of rural readers in the struggle for "not to eat in the field", in the anxious society called "inner volume" by countless elites, based on the love of nature, based on the entrustment of the heart, and based on the practice of human nature in the sense of Arendt. This time, the mother's, the father's... Many people's hunched bodies and high heads have finally merged with my writing in the vague history. Those who have worked with me to complete these words, those who are still alive or have passed away, their faces are also clear at this time. Of course, there are still many regrets about the thinking and writing of folk parenting, and those that have not been completed, dear readers, will continue to be completed in your understanding.

An Chao (Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University, Lecturer, Beijing Normal University)

In December 2020, he was in Mingzhai, Tsinghua University

Source: China Youth Daily client