Student Research Partnership in Anthropology – Sacrifice & Separation: Left-Behind Families and Alternative Legacies of Chinese Migration

23 September 2024
By Sunny Shiqi Sun '26

This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to work with Professor Cheryl Yin and dive into an anthropological project focusing on the lives of left-behind wives in Southern China during the twentieth century.

The topic of migration has always fascinated me, particularly its impacts on family separation. In Southern China during the 20th century, many men migrated abroad for work, leaving their wives to manage households and communities on their own. This project allowed me to explore how these women navigated the challenges and adapted to their changing social roles.

Over the summer, we explored this topic through reading literature and focusing on a case study Xing Ye Qing, a woman from Wenchang, Hainan, whose husband migrated to Cambodia in the 1920s. To ground the case study in its historical context and put it in a comparative context with her contemporaries from different parts of China, we read through a variety of literature sources, including ethnography, historical studies, archival research and novels. The ethnography and novels touched me a lot by revealing the texture of lives of left-behind wives through packed details and personal stories.

The most challenging part of this project was to put together pieces of information from different fields and perspectives in order to tell a coherent story about left-behind wives. Literature from migration studies, political history and gender studies are not in conversation with each other, and most of the time women’s perspectives are lacking in historical narratives. Nevertheless, it was also during the process of synthesizing information from different academic disciplines and balancing the diverse perspectives that I have achieved the most personal growth.

One of the key learnings from this project is how left-behind wives served as intermediaries between overseas relatives and modernizing China. The transnational bond maintained by remittance networks enabled them to have horizons that exceed the scopes of spatial constraints and to connect with overseas realities, though mixed with imagination and idealization. They actively embody their husbands’ values and cope with difficulties in changing  times through resilience and innovation. 

I hope to continue the project of recovering female voices in migration history in the future. Understanding the roles these women played provides a more nuanced view of how migration reshapes social structures. Moving forward, I aim to continue exploring the intersections of migration, gender, and community resilience, and probably go to Hainan in person for more in-depth fieldwork and archival research.