China’s Migrant Mothers

Migrant workers in China, who often work hundreds of miles from their families and home, wait at a long-distance bus station in Shenzhen to return home during the annual Chinese New Year. (Photo courtesy of Meng Li)

One autumn morning in 2000, Ma left her husband’s village in Sichuan province for a factory job in Shenzhen, a three-day bus ride. Her departure meant her daughters, ages 5 and 2, would be raised by their irascible father (who was prone to angry outbursts after a luckless night’s gambling) with occasional input from her grandparents, Ma’s in-laws (who had little affection for the girls).

When Ma first arrived in Shenzhen, she wept almost every day. Her eyes welled up at the sight of other people’s children. “There was a radio in our factory that played the song, ‘Only Mother Is the Best in the World.’ I could not control my tears,” Ma told Meng Li, professor of communication studies in the LMU College of Communication and Fine Arts. The song became the title of Li’s journal article on the subject.

Two of the most poignant lines are:

A child with her mother is as precious as a gem … 
A child without her mother is as lonely as a blade of grass.

In 2023, there were nearly 300 million Chinese rural-urban migrant workers. More than 37% of them were women, many the mothers of so-called “left-behind children.” Early research exaggerated the differences between these kids and other children, drawing attention to primarily their negative attributes — weaker academic performance and more mental and behavioral problems. Chinese media have highlighted these disparities, effectively stigmatizing left-behind children and impugning their absent mothers.

By the time Ma met Li, she’d lived apart from her family for nearly 20 years. Her daughters were grown women. Too old to work on the assembly line, Ma hand-stuffed cotton into plush animals at home for local factories. She occasionally participated in events organized by a grassroots NGO serving migrant women in Shenzhen. Li spent the spring of 2019 volunteering there. An ethnographer who collects narratives, she had come on a pre-tenure sabbatical hoping to establish relationships with migrants.

Ma was easy to approach, lively and chatty. But waves of maternal guilt could still sweep over her at the thought of her daughters. When recollecting a shopping trip with her daughters the first time she returned home after migrating, Ma confessed to Li: “The younger daughter could not remember me, but she followed her sister’s lead and called me Mom. I was so touched. How could I have been so heartless to have left them?”

It was the first of many light-bulb moments for Li.

“I heard so many stories about guilt,” she says, recalling those early conversations with migrant mothers. “And every time, there were strong non-verbal reactions. Some women would stop talking. Some suddenly burst into tears.”

Li would go on to conduct scores of in-depth interviews in Shenzhen and Beijing. She meticulously coded 24 of these testimonials, creating a rich dataset to probe the little-understood phenomenon of Chinese migrant maternal guilt.

In several published articles, Li paints a gut-wrenching tableau of emotional suffering. She learned that it used to take Ma days to get through her husband’s letters from home. Tears would cloud her vision as she read about her daughters’ everyday lives, and she’d have to put the letter down.

Perhaps the saddest story Li heard is Cao’s.

A migrant from Gansu province, she’d spent 11 years as a maid in Beijing, sending her earnings home to her family. Cao described the pain of having her embrace rejected by her young son when they were briefly reunited over the Chinese New Year. “He wiped away my kiss using his hand,” Cao told Li. Comparing herself to a dog, she had sadly reproached her child: “Your mother is not even as loved as your dog. You hold him up and kiss him.”

Having identified migrant maternal guilt as her research area, Li delved into the scholarly literature. She found many studies on white, middle-class women in the West feeling guilt for prioritizing career over motherhood. But nothing on poor Chinese migrants.

While much has been written about China’s left-behind children, the emotional toll on their parents is largely ignored in public and academic discourse. Chinese research into maternal emotions focuses mostly on anxiety: middle-class urban moms worried that they hadn’t signed up their child for enough “talent classes,” hadn’t hired the right tutors, hadn’t sufficiently exposed their child to foreign travel.

“But when I talked to migrant mothers, who oftentimes come from low-income, rural backgrounds, I did not hear anxiety,” Li says. “I heard guilt. They see their children’s problems — or whatever they identify as problems — as their own fault.”

Adding to this guilt is the “pathologization” of left-behind children, which assigns blame for any negative outcomes on the absent mother. Migrant mothers, Li says, even blame themselves for imagined failures.

A woman named Xu had “sobbed uncontrollably” when talking about her son’s fractured arm, believing the accident could have been averted or the damage less severe if only she’d been present.

Another woman named Dong had defied the odds: Her son was an outstanding student. Yet she burst into tears when she heard about his special recognition in the school’s program for left-behind children. In her eyes, it was a stain she’d cast on his future.

As Li pursued this line of research, she experienced some guilt of her own — in reflecting on her privilege as a member of the urban middle class. She’d grown up in Zhengzhou, a city in Henan Province. Her mother was a radiologist; her father, a documentary maker. Li spent four years at the Communication University of China in Beijing and had never even noticed the “urban villages” teeming with migrants near her campus.

“It was an invisible group,” she says. “No one mentioned their existence. And I majored in journalism. I still find that ironic,” she says.

The guilt shouldered by migrant women, she notes, is unfounded, given that their plight is firmly rooted in larger Chinese societal and structural pressures, such as rapid urbanization, insufficient public services and antiquated hukou (housing registration) policies.

Traditional Chinese gender norms and expectations exacerbate the social stigma attached to migrant motherhood and deepen these women’s guilt. The Confucian model of the family, Li says, is best captured in the proverb: “Men manage the outside, and women manage the inside.”

Li published her findings in the Journal of Family Communication, and the paper was named outstanding article of the year. A related study, “Guilt and Compensation,” appeared in the journal Family Relations.

Intent on reaching a broader audience, she repurposed her scholarship for the popular press. In an op-ed that appeared in The Paper, a major Chinese news platform, Li pushed for a deeper understanding of migrant families and advocated for policy changes and interventions to support them.

She was contemplating a book-length project on the subject when the pandemic abruptly ended her ability to do field work in China.

“I left Shenzhen three days before the Wuhan lockdown, and I wasn’t able to return for three years,” Li says.

But she has kept in close contact with her migrant women research subjects. She recently learned that Dong’s academically gifted son had been admitted to a top university in his province.

The names of the migrant mothers found in this story have been changed in order to protect their privacy.—The Editor 

Diane Krieger is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in publications at Tufts University, Johns Hopkins University, Caltech and The Idaho Statesman, where she was the resident philharmonic and theater critic. She also was on the staff of USC Trojan Family Magazine and USC Chronicle for many years. Krieger covered the 2023 Hollywood strike for LMU Magazine.