Going Home for Chinese New Year: Are You Also a Guest Lodging in the Shadow of Your Past Self? | QDaily Research Lab

In their parents' eyes, kids never grow up — but why?

For most adults, going home for Chinese New Year is a trip through time.

Whether you're thirty-five and modestly successful, twenty-eight and still adrift, or a newly minted adult barely a semester into college, the moment you cross into your parents' territory you turn straight back into a thirteen-year-old.

You're a biological adult now, but your parents' picture of you never got the update. They hold onto certain fixed ideas for the long haul — that you're still too young to know what's best for you; that your favorite food is still the chive-and-egg dumplings you once wolfed down thirty of at a sitting when you were ten; that the moment you walk into the study it's "our son/daughter needs to study, keep it down so you don't disturb them." Before you're even through the door, they're announcing, excited: "I bought you a new pair of yellow bunny slippers, you'll love them."

In their eyes you're still a child. But you've started to feel like a guest in their house.

Look at how James Dobson — the psychologist who wrote Parenting Isn't for Cowards and has studied family relationships for more than forty years — describes his own experience: "My mother never quite noticed that I had become someone different. She needed to adapt to a whole new program for how we related to each other."

That is obviously hard to do, because your parents' impression of you was saved at the exact moment you left home for college or work. Every time you go back after that, they load that same save file, pull up their old experience of dealing with you, and use it to face someone who has been quietly grinding out levels on their own.

This cognitive gap makes a lot of things hard to talk about. QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey called "What Stereotypes Have You Caught Your Parents Having About You?" Based on 2,743 reader responses and related research reports, we found three basic misunderstandings that parents everywhere seem to share:

1. You live away from home, so making it back alive is an achievement

You've spent a year eating not-quite-clean junk food (takeout), and your heartbroken parents have been getting ready for months: ten links of cured sausage hung since Singles' Day, twenty-eight hairy crabs frozen since Mid-Autumn Festival, next year's dumplings already wrapped at Dragon Boat Festival — all of it waiting to hit the table the second you walk in. They watch you eat with doting eyes, while the standard patter plays on loop:

• Poor thing, this is the only decent meal you get all year — stop just grabbing the meat, eat more vegetables! Look at your hands, all those hangnails, and only two little half-moons on your nails!
• What's the story with these jeans and sweaters full of holes? Why spend money on defective goods?
• This pineapple stitch couldn't be easier — go dig out that big red sweater I knitted for you and put it on. Oh, and there are still those old long johns you left in the closet last year!
• Wash the dishes for us after dinner. Actually, never mind, don't go breaking them, they're brand new. You can't do a single chore — how have you not starved to death out there on your own?

2. Nobody's heard of your job, so it can't be stable

LinkedIn once surveyed 16,000 people worldwide and found that a third of them had parents who weren't quite clear on what their children did for a living. 74% of parents couldn't say what a UI designer does, 72% couldn't grasp what an actuary is, and 61% had no idea what a social media manager does. Asked what their kid does for work, some parents can only manage "something to do with money, maybe" or "some kind of computer repair, I think."

Even facing a line of work they know nothing about, some unflappable parents refuse to give up on applying their own life experience to your career, and offer advice like:

• "Why would you quit? Right now you can send one WeChat message and make over 10,000 yuan a month — where are you going to find a better job than that?"
• "Take the long view. Are you going to do games your whole life? It'll never be stable. Look at the Zhang kid next door — a civil servant, such an easy life."
• "You didn't get a raise this year — are things bad with your boss? Should you bring him back some local snacks?"

3. You've only just passed the age your mother was when she had you — what do you know about love?

When it comes to relationships, parents run a distinctive calculus, which mostly comes out as: "What is 'feeling'? Can feeling put food on the table?" "What is 'good-looking'? Can good looks put food on the table?" "What is 'love'? Can love put food on the table?"

Broadly, all this warm, breezy life advice is there to remind you that dating has very little to do with "feelings," "looks," or "love," and a great deal to do with "food." And since you've never once managed to look after your own stomach properly, they have every reason to believe you have no idea how to handle your own love life either. Which brings on another round of warm, breezy life advice:

• "You're already living together, so what is this, just messing around and never getting married? (Devastated.)"
• "If getting married or not makes no difference to you, then why on earth haven't you done it?! (Devastated x2.)"
• "This not-marrying, no-kids thing — it's fine to joke about, your parents won't take it seriously. Once you meet the right person, it'll all fall into place." (Said with total confidence.)
• "Career matters, of course, but family comes first in the end. Your children are the ones who'll look after you when you're old."
• "Mom isn't trying to rush you into having a baby, but 25 is the golden age for fertility, and I just want to remind you that after the new year you'll be twenty-eight in Chinese reckoning — if you try hard you can still catch the tail end of it."

The roots of this kind of bias may well be structural. According to the 2017 Report on China's Floating Population Development, released late last year by China's National Health and Family Planning Commission, there were 245 million migrants within China in 2016, 64.7% of them born in the 1980s and 1990s. Roughly speaking, one in every ten people in China today is a young person working away from their parents.

Add up the time you've spent with your parents since you started college, and across a decade it might not come to six months. That brief, thin new experience of being together stands little chance of dislodging the impression you left when you lived under the same roof day in and day out. While you're working somewhere else, your contact with them is a few simple exchanges over the phone or a video call — and the family communication style we're all used to happens to be "share the good news, keep the bad to yourself."

A raise, a new friend, a better rental — those you're happy to tell your parents, so you can be glad together. But how do you even start on the real troubles: "I've accomplished nothing at work, I'm not growing, and I don't know how to fix it," "I never leave the house, so I have no chance of meeting anyone," "they knocked down my partition wall without any notice"? "They wouldn't understand anyway" — and the less you say, the less they understand.

You can't help complaining, protesting, or gently teasing your parents about how they misread you. But the ways they have of getting to know you again are, realistically, just as limited.

One reader in the QDaily Research Lab survey put it this way: in a generational relationship of long separations and poor communication, sticking labels on the younger generation is really parents' way of closing the psychological distance. Labels save on cognitive effort, but they're imprecise, they lag behind reality, and they flatten everything into one crude picture.

Another reader pointed out: my dad probably doesn't even have a "stereotype of me" — what he has is a simple reflection of the generic "child" image already circulating in society. We think that reader may have caught something true about generations in general.

The labels parents love to pin on their kids are mostly variations on the same few themes. We've collected 13 of them below — you'll know every one:

A credit to the family: Out in the world you're a haggard programmer pulling all-nighters to ship features, your waistband loosening and your hairline receding by the day. Back home, you're suddenly the golden child — "first in the class since forever, graduated from a top school, works at BAT, we don't know what they do, but they're some kind of boss!"

Sensible: "You've always been the thoughtful one, the one who listens to reason — so on this too, you need to listen to us. While our legs still work, hurry up and have a baby, or who's going to help you raise the kid later? Think it over — doesn't that make sense?"

Honest to a fault: "I'm not telling you to cheat anyone, just — never wish harm on others, but never drop your guard against it. Being too honest means you're careless, means you're a fool. Don't get fleeced and then thank them for it," your worried mother reminds you for the thousand-and-first time.

Stubbornly principled: You don't cozy up to your boss, you don't sweet-talk women, you don't push when the feeling isn't there, you don't fight or grab for anything. You see yourself as an enlightened monk; your parents see a hopeless case — "All you do over Chinese New Year is bury your face in your phone grabbing red envelopes. Can't you send your bosses a New Year's greeting? Can't manage a few auspicious words? Fine, at least forward that one your aunt posted in the group chat, the dog face made out of punctuation marks."

Restless: "That railway job your second aunt lined up was a good one, so close to home — if you'd just come back right after graduation, you'd have a stable job by now, a big place of your own, and you wouldn't be fretting over a residence permit."

Stubborn: Back at your dear old mother's side, a good life laid out right in front of you — so why grit it out in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou instead of coming home and living properly? "You'll probably say your mom's wrong again for saying this, but I think you won't shed a tear until you see the coffin."

Mischievous: Just a bit rowdy, talks too much, loves an audience, gets hyper around people — "full of tricks, but no real malice."

Getting too big for their britches: Long past puberty, but the rebellion hasn't faded a bit. "So what if you can earn your own money now? Ignore your elders and you'll come home crying sooner or later."

Ungrateful: "I fed you, clothed you, gave you everything, and now look — you don't call home once a week. Bring up finding a partner and you blow up; you wouldn't even go meet the Li family's son like I told you. That young man's family has three houses and two cars, and he's raised a Series B for his own startup. Even if you don't want to date him, can't you at least be friends?"

Lazybones: Is there a single slump-on-the-sofa slacker who hasn't earned their parents' high praise — "never stands if they can sit, never sits if they can lie down"?

Picky eater: Ever since you were little you've picked at your food, taken the meat and left the vegetables, and couldn't stand a single Sichuan peppercorn on your plate — your favorite was always the homemade chili oil. In college you had your parents mail you a jar because you couldn't get used to the cafeteria food. This year they made a whole table of your favorite dishes again, and now you say you only eat salad and boiled chicken breast? A signature dish rehearsed all year long, and the exam came back off-syllabus.

All thumbs: You can't sweep a floor clean, you waste water washing dishes, you announced you'd show off in the kitchen and nearly wrecked a pot, and you can't even hold a bowl of rice without your elbow sticking out. Becoming a competent adult may take you another hundred years.

Oblivious: "Guests arrive and you don't know to greet them? Everyone's rushed off their feet and you don't lend a hand? A bottle of oil tips over and you don't even set it upright? How did someone as quick and deft as me end up with a kid this lazy and clumsy?"

Most of these labels point to the same figure: a typical teenager who can't look after themselves, is lazy, and won't take advice.

People often say "in your parents' eyes you'll never grow up," and all of it supposedly comes from love. But here's the interesting part: search "in their parents' eyes, kids never grow up" and you get two opposite kinds of results — on one side, children complaining about why their parents can't stop telling them what to do; on the other, parents making tearful declarations like "Don't be afraid, kid, your parents will always have your back."

Focus on the Family, the parent-child NGO founded by the psychologist James Dobson mentioned above, once ran a survey asking people what their biggest problem was in dealing with their parents. The number one answer: "My parents still can't accept that I'm an adult now." Respondents in their 30s, 40s and even 50s all said they were troubled by parents who kept criticizing them, correcting them, and pressing their own wishes on them.

Taking "in your parents' eyes you'll never grow up" as a given may in fact create three sizable problems.

For one, parents underestimate their children — they don't believe their child, as an independent person, can improve their own circumstances. That can lead them to try to control and step into every choice their child makes, large or small.

The usual form is doubt: "You're going out dressed like that?" "What were you thinking when you bought that?" "Why would you do something like that?" — the unspoken line being "are you stupid?" Or hints: "You won't like this," "You don't really like them that much," "Do you know what you're doing?" — all signaling that they, not you, know what's best for you.

At the same time, parents over-romanticize their children, treating everything you do as adorable, the way it was in childhood, and raising an overgrown baby. Causing trouble for other people is waved off as "being naughty" — and though "you're clumsy, you can't do anything," there's no pressure to change, because that is exactly what lets you see how thoroughly you get looked after at your mother's side.

Beyond that, this pattern of parent-child interaction can easily become part of your own belief system, so that without noticing it, you pass the same sarcasm and the same strong urge to control on to the next generation.

Changing it takes effort from both sides: your parents have to accept that you're an adult who can take responsibility for your own decisions, and you have to learn to act like an adult at home.

We often joke that the first three days back home are when you and your parents get along best, and that past a week it always ends in mutual irritation and a blowup. Sue Kolod of the American Psychoanalytic Association says this happens because, under stress, people trigger a psychological defense called regression: they drop the more mature coping skills they've learned and fall back on a way of behaving from an earlier stage of life, meeting the present situation with primitive, childish responses. That might mean going straight into combat mode the moment you feel slighted, rejecting everything your parents say without hearing it, or simply avoiding the conversation.

So it isn't only your parents' image of you that's stuck in your teenage years. The way you answer them hasn't grown up much either.

Illustrations: Lin Xiaoyao