Your parents or mine?
Print Edition
Every year young couples must decide which set of in-laws to visit on Chinese New Year. Tradition dictates they visit the husband’s family, but many women say that’s unfair. Yao Minji talks to couples who are torn.
For three years, Zhang Lianhui and her husband Lei Yu had been on the go during Spring Festival, the one time in the year that nobody wants to be on the road with millions of others heading for family reunions.
The young couple needed to visit both of their parents. Every year, they spent Lunar New Year’s Eve and the first day with Lei’s parents and grandparents in a small town near Yangzhou in Jiangsu Province.
They also visited all his relatives and friends in the town, and then headed to Zhang’s home in Yiyang city in Hunan Province for the rest of the seven-day holiday.
For the older generation, it was easy — in most cases, the wife always followed the husband to his hometown, while her parents are visited by sons and daughters-in-laws.
Today many more young people are working away from home, and they are often the single child, which means their parents expect them to visit on the biggest and most important festival of the year, regardless of their gender. Zhang, 29, a department manager at a foreign firm, and Lei, 32, a private investor, are both only children.
Whose home to visit becomes the simplest and yet most complex problem for young couples, who are not big followers of traditional patriarchal ideas. Many young people, especially women, don’t believe they must visit their in-laws first instead of their own parents for the Chinese New Year celebration.
“It was very, very tiring,” Zhang tells Shanghai Daily. “Going to one place in the seven-day Spring Festival break is already quite a hassle, not to mention going to two places, taking different transport and then visiting dozens of relatives and friends in each.”
After seven exhausting days last Chinese New Year, they agreed this year they would only visit Zhang’s family, and Lei’s family in 2015. But Lei backed out at the last minute, when they were about to buy plane tickets online.
Growing up in a patriarchal family, he found it too difficult to explain to his parents they were visiting his wife’s family rather than his on the big day.
“It’s not just my parents, but also my grandparents, who are in their 80s, and all the other relatives,” says Lei. “They’ll think my parents nurtured a son who couldn’t even fulfill basic filial piety, simply visiting them on Chinese New Year.”
And the argument began.
“I couldn’t believe he chickened out,” says Zhang. “We agreed last year! Now he accuses me of not understanding his filial piety. Well, how about my duty then? I did not perform my own filial duty when I gave in and spent New Year’s Eve with his parents for three whole years. We only visited my parents afterward, and I never challenged that decision.”
They quarreled fiercely and finally decided to go back to their separate hometown during this upcoming Spring Festival.
“These kinds of disagreements are on the rise,” says 49-year-year-old Wang Aifang, who works at Tianlin residential community office in Xuhui District. “Part of my duty is to solve family quarrels, and many fights originate in the New Year schedule.
“It’s not only the non-Shanghai natives who quarrel over which city to visit, but also the Shanghainese fight over which dinner to attend on the eve,” Wang tells Shanghai Daily. “For us, following the husband was taken for granted, but not for these young kids. The husbands may still hold the traditional idea, but the wives want to be equal in every respect, from dividing housework to taking turns to visit parents.”
Wang says that there is no ideal solution to fit every family, but understanding each other’s perspective often helps a lot, especially for the men and their parents.
“Of course I want to see my son and his wife during Chinese New Year, but I can also understand how the in-laws wish to see their daughter as much as we do,” says Zhao Liang, a 62-year-old retired professor in Shaoxing city of Zhejiang Province.
His son and daughter-in-law have always split up to visit their own parents during Spring Festival. “They’ve spent all year with each other, so it doesn’t hurt to be away for just a few days,” Zhao adds.
Steven Cao, a 33-year-old bank operations manager, has invited his parents from Sichuan Province to travel with them to Hong Kong during the Chinese New Year. Neither set of in-laws lives there.
After five years of marriage, he hopes to make a Hong Kong trip a regular event in the future, hoping to satisfy everyone.
“My wife is from Shanghai, but we always went back to my hometown for Spring Festival,” he says. “But it was tiring, especially after we had a child, now three and half years old. Taking a toddler on a long trip during Chinese New Year is just crazy.”
Cao tries to find a balance between fulfilling his duty to spend time with his parents in Sichuan and making it easy for his own family. And his parents have shown a lot of understanding.
“What they want most is to spend time with their grandchild,” Cao says. “With advanced technology and all these portable devices and video conference apps, that isn’t too difficult even though they live so far away. I spent a bit of time teaching my parents how to use the apps, and they are pretty good with that.”
It also works better for his parents to visit Shanghai, since they have retired and can visit much earlier without having to squeeze into packed trains with millions of other travelers at this time of year.
Ma Dan, an evening newspaper reporter from Jiangsu Province, is also atypical — she and her husband take turns and visit one family each year. The 31-year-old reporter and her husband also try to visit each other’s family in a different time of the year to make up for not visiting during Spring Festival.
“Our parents are very understanding of our decisions, because they were from different cities and have been through the whole process as well,” Ma says.
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