5 - Red envelopes and the cycle of yang

Summary

The school textbooks read by children in Angang outline certain features of Chinese kinship, including the notion of a reciprocal tie between mother and child. Such representations might or might not find reflections in the community. (But where is the boundary between a story and the child who reads it?) Textbooks draw attention to certain parent–child scenarios, creating possibilities: the recognition of, or enactment of, similar scenarios in non-school life. In the texts, the obligation between mother and child is composed around a series of transactions. In particular, economic interdependence is highlighted (a mother washes clothes to send her son to school, while the son saves money to reduce her hardship). And a form of ‘physical’ interdependence is also implied. (A son fails to protect his health, and his mother subjects him to corporal punishment. Later, made anxious by his illness, she uses her tongue on his diseased eye.)

Here, descriptions will be given of the community-based version of parent–child reciprocity, in particular its evocation through transfers of food and money. Looking at these phenomena, three things become apparent. First, some of the transfers seem obviously symbolic or ritualised (the giving of ‘red envelopes’ at the lunar new year), whilst others seem more substantive (the provision of financial support). But here it is difficult, and also perhaps misleading, to draw a firm contrast between the substantive and the symbolic. Second, these transfers, which might be said to underline certain relationships and thus to influence identification, could equally be said to produce the relationships in the first place.