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Contribution short abstract

This study examines how elderly villagers in a post-industrial Yangtze Delta community normalize non-stop laboring bodies while denying fatigue. The ethnography explores how the exclamation "Sǐrén hún!" reveals everyday care ethics and how shared vulnerability can foster relational care practices.

Contribution long abstract

Rapid urbanization and marketization left villages behind in China, while villages are living in their temporal rhythms under uneven development. Even after reaching retirement age, elderly villagers kept taking on different kinds of work, stopping only when their bodies began to hurt, or when illness finally forced them to. Labor and rest, health and illness, vitality and fatigue, these tension-filled moments often coexist in the same field scene, in the same non-stop laboring body, and even at the same moment. Beyond polarization, the paper asks why fatigue is not legitimized as something one could openly claim, entangled with labor history and care ethics, in a post-industrial community in the Yangtze River Delta with agriculture activities still existing. Based on participant observation and interviews with elderly villagers and some women caregivers, a recurring refrain is “Why do that? Sǐrén hún!” (What the hell are you doing that for? Just stop working.), a local fixed expression combining a literal “death” expletive with a half-teasing and half-sympathetic admonition, manifesting everyday relational care in rural China. Drawing on feminist and post-humanist care theories, the paper shows how elderly villagers, who have experienced the rural collectivization period, shape ethics by neglecting or even denying fatigue during everyday labor work and care practices. What’s more, this research also reveals how fatigue sometimes operates as a possible turning point, where sisterhood and the whole community are interconnected through shared vulnerability, mundane relational support, and a contested future imagination.