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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the transnational family life of Chinese educational migrants in Germany. It explores how care is practiced and expressed across borders, and how filial piety, affection concerns, and material interests intertwine to influence care exchanges and families’ understanding of return.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, more young Chinese pursued overseas education with the financial support from their families. The parents viewed higher education overseas as an investment that can enhance the family’s capacity to withstand potential risks. Thus, studying abroad is not merely a pathway of individual mobility, but a family project embedded with investments and returns, expectations and obligations. This paper focuses on young Chinese who pursue higher education in Germany and subsequently remain there for work, examining the care exchanges between them and their parents, specifically, how they recognized and practice care.

By multi-sited ethnography in Germany and China, this paper demonstrates the non-simultaneous and asymmetrical care exchanges among family members. Care is transmitted through emotional concerns, practical actions, and economic assistance. Ideally, parents care for their children, and when they grow old children reciprocate by caring for them. However, family members experience and perceive care differently, which in turn shapes their expression of care. The findings show that filial obligation, emotional concerns, and material interests intertwine and influence young transmigrants’ understandings of return. These understandings do not always fully align with parental expectations and therefore require ongoing negotiation. Conflicts arising from mismatched expectations of return should not be understood as failures of care exchange. Rather, they reflect processes of mediation and negotiation, through which families continuously redefine care, love, and filial obligation. Therefore, the returns of migration and education cannot be reduced to income or permanent residency alone but be understood as part of broader moral and emotional economies.