GROWING OLD WITH DAUGHTERS: AGING, CARE, AND CHANGE IN

THE MATRILOCAL FAMILY SYSTEM IN RURAL TIBET

by

JING WANG

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Anthropology

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

August, 2018

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of Jing Wang

candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*.

Committee Chair Melvyn C. Goldstein

Committee Member Vanessa Hildebrand

Committee Member Lihong Shi

Committee Member Peter Yang

Date of Defense June 6th, 2018

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein.

To My Parents TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents ...... i List of Tables ...... ii Acknoledgements ...... iii List of Abbreviations ...... vi Abstract ...... vii Chapter One: Introduction ...... 1 Chapter Two: Field Site and Research Methods ...... 29 Chapter Three: Family, Marriage, and Household Economics ...... 63 Chapter Four: Living Arrangements, Filial Piety, and the Status of the Elderly ...... 121 Chapter Five: The Protective Mechanisms of the Matrilocal Family System for the Elderly Well-Being ...... 166 Chapter Six: Conclusion ...... 196 Bibliography ...... 204

i LIST OF TABLES

Table 2–1 Demographics and Landholding 2015 ...... 46 Table 3–1 Marital Status of Villagers Aged 30 and Above 2015 ...... 67 Table 3–2 Landholding Neolocal vs. Inherited Households 2015 ...... 75 Table 3–3 Marriage Types 2015 ...... 80 Table 3–4 Post-marital Residence 2015 ...... 88 Table 3–5 Post-marital Residence Across Age Group 2015 ...... 89 Table 3–6 Household Structure and Size 2015 ...... 93 Table 3–7 Mean and Median Income 2015 ...... 97 Table 3–8 Family Structure and Economic Stratification 2015 ...... 98 Table 3–9 “Going for Income” 2015 ...... 100 Table 3–10 Household Headship of Dekyi, 2015 ...... 112 Table 3–11 Adult Male Presence and Migration Status 2015 ...... 116 Table 4–1 Living Arrangements of the Elderly Parents in 2015 ...... 127 Table 4–2 Headship among Households with Elderly 2015 ...... 143 Table 4–3 Pension Management Arrangements in Dekyi in 2015 ...... 144

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of my dissertation committee members for their steadfast support through graduate school.

My advisor and gen-la, Melvyn C. Goldstein-la, has been especially encouraging and understanding at every stage of this work, for which I am deeply grateful. I am extremely fortunate to receive rigorous training and valuable guidance from him over the years. I thank Vanessa Hildebrand for her warm encouragement, passionate support, and insightful feedback. I always feel energized after our interactions. I have also benefited enormously from numerous conversations with Lihong Shi and I appreciate the rich and thoughtful comments she has given me. I thank Peter Yang for agreeing to be my committee member and for providing fresh and actionable feedback.

I am grateful to my Tibetan gen-la, Tsewang Namgyal Shelling-la.

Unwaveringly generous, compassionate, and patient, he taught me Tibetan language and helped me navigate the Tibetan culture.

I thank Cynthia M. Beall for always giving me the greatest advice and fresh insights. And I thank Katia Almeida for her enthusiastic support, advice, and encouragement.

iii I thank the Anthropology Department of Case Western Reserve

University (CWRU), the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Wadsworth

Dissertation Write-Up Fellowship, and Dissertation Seminar Fellowship, and the Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fellowship for providing funding to support my research.

I am grateful for the support and friendship provided by professors, colleagues and friends at CWRU have provided me through graduate school. Ariel Cascio was my "buddy" when I first came to the department and has become a wonderful friend ever since. I thank Ariel Cascio for her sense of humor, wisdom, and support. I am grateful to Jonathan Metcalfe for taking extreme trouble to help me and being unfailingly supportive. I thank Stephanie McClure, Laura Howard, and Smaranda Ene for good memories in Cleveland. Yunzhu Chen and I have become each other's dissertation buddy and I thank her for keeping me motivated.

I am also thankful to Chunden-la for feeding me delicious Tibetan food when I miss it and for her support throughout my years in Cleveland. I thank my friend, Janice Cogger, for her love, insights and passionate expressions of support. And I am grateful to Savery and Loius Rorimer for generously sharing their home with me and introducing me a new perspective on life in Cleveland.

iv My deepest gratitude goes to the many people in Tibet whom I am not able to name here—friends, mentors, and particularly the villagers who participated in my research—who went out of their way to help me and make this work possible. I am humbled by their compassion.

I thank Kate Mason for inspiring me to study anthropology in the first place and for being not only a superb friend, but an exceptional mentor with her thoughtful advice and enormous support and friendship. I am grateful to Denise Ho for her unceasing encouragement and guidance that were tremendously valuable in helping me navigate graduate school and beyond. I also thank Margaret for her friendship, warmth, enthusiasm, advice, and all the good recipes I have learned from her that keep me happy and content.

I thank Chen Wei for her delightful friendship since college and generous support during my fieldwork, assisting me financially, bringing me delicious snacks, and helping me throw a fantastic farewell party in the village I studied. I thank my gang in Lhasa—Mary, Kunsang, Lobsang, and

Xiaoqi—for their companion and friendship.

My biggest debt of gratitude goes to my family members whose love

I can never repay.

v LIST OF ABBRIVIATIONS

CCP Chinese Communist Party ch. in Chinese

FHH Female Head of Household

HH Household Head

PLA People's Liberation Army

PRC People's Republic of China

TAR Tibet Autonomous Region tib. in Tibetan

vi Growing Old with Daughters:

Aging, Care, and Change in the Matrilocal Family System in Rural

Tibet

Abstract

By

JING WANG

Based on 18 months of fieldwork conducted in Dekyi, a matrilocal village in Phenpo County in Tibet Autonomous Region, China, this dissertation ethnographically examines the aging experiences of the elderly in the matrilocal family system amidst rapid socioeconomic transformation.

This dissertation is one of the first few studies that present data on the matrilocal family system in Tibet.

Despite the socioeconomic changes that tended to erode the care the elderly in patrilocal areas receive, the elderly in Dekyi have been spared some of the negative impacts induced by such changes. Especially revealing was that while only half of the Dekyi elderly had control over economic

vii resources, all of the elderly were satisfied with the care they received from their co-residing children and children-in-law and were content with their situations.

Villagers claimed that their fortunate lots were precisely due to their matrilocal practice in which they kept their daughters at home instead of sons. As a result of the matrilocal practice, the elderly would receive care from their own daughters, who were considered to be more caring than sons and daughters-in-law. The data collected lent support to this claim, but also revealed a more complex picture. That is, daughters' desired care was made possible through the protective mechanisms of the matrilocal family system that tended to foster women-headed and conflicts-free households. On the one hand, as household heads, the daughters controlled household income, which gave them economic power to provide for their parents materially and financially. On the other hand, the matrilocal households tended to have fewer family conflicts than the patrilocal households did due to the less pronounced parent- and son-in-law conflicts.

As a result, the elderly in matrilocal households experienced harmony and security, which were essential to their psychological well-being. Moreover, friendly family relations enabled both daughters and sons-in-law to provide eldercare unaffected by negative emotions.

viii CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION:

RESEARCH QUESITON AND THEORETICAL DEBATES

As the global population ages rapidly, it becomes increasingly important to understand the diversity how people, communities, and nations respond to the tremendous demographic transition. One crucial area of inquiry is to understand how and why transforming forces induced by waves of globalism affect intergenerational relationships and the situation of the elderly in a variety of settings.

Anthropologists have been studying the social and economic aspects of aging in the non-western world seriously since the 1970’s when the “aging and modernization theory” first appeared (Cowgill and Holmes 1972;

Cowgill 1972, 1974, 1986). Those espousing this theoretical framework argue that the status and support of the elderly declines as societies modernize and extended families give way to nuclear families. Modernization and technological advances, therefore, weaken the traditional obligations of

1 filial piety, leaving the elderly with diminished status and material support.

Specifically, modernization is defined in the theory as:

The transformation of a total society from a relatively rural way of life based on animate power, limited technology, relatively undifferentiated institutions, parochial and traditional outlook and values, toward a predominately urban way of life based on inanimate sources of power, highly developed scientific technology, highly differentiated institutions matched by segmented individual roles, and a cosmopolitan outlook which emphasizes efficiency and progress (Cowgill 1974, 127).

Ikels (2004), in her influential book on filial piety, concisely summarizes the pathways to declining status postulated in the

“modernization” theory:

First, their land, the source of much of their influence over the young, is no longer the only means of gaining a livelihood. Young people may choose to migrate to work in factories in nearby towns or cities and live economically independent lives. Second, as literacy becomes widespread with the development of compulsory education, knowledge is no longer the special property of the age, and the rural experience of the older generation becomes less relevant for solving problems of urban life. Third, with urbanization young people are exposed to a broad range of ideas; they no longer have to accept uncritically the ideas and values of their parents, including ideas about the proper relationship between the old and the young. Fourth, physical separation of the home community and the workplace allows young people to escape the prying eyes of their neighbors and to evade gossip and other community-level sanctions should their behavior be found wanting. Fifth, the nuclear family comes to prevail over the extended family as young people become attached to the conjugal family of spouse and children at the expense of their relationship to their (distant) natal family of parents and siblings (Ikels 2004, 10).

2 Despite modernization theory’s “intrinsic popular appeal” (Ikels

2004, 11), it has been criticized on various grounds, and the evidence for the presumed decline of the status of the elderly is at best mixed.

First, historians expose the myth of a “golden past,” which uncritically propagates an idealized image of elderly in the past that enjoyed high status and were well protected and provided for in the extended families (Laslett 1976; Fischer 1977; Anderson 1977; Fennel,

Phillipson, and Evers 1988; Keith 1980; Quadagno 1982, 1999, Abel 1992). For example, Abel’s (1992) historical study of rural elderly living in the 1800s in the West finds out that extended family living did not guarantee high status of the elderly. Fischer (1977) points out that the status of the elderly was declining in the U.S. prior to extensive modernization and argues that the decline was spurred by the popularization of ideologies such as equality which dismisses the notion of age as a source of esteem. Ethnographic studies provide further refutations to such a myth. For example, some anthropologists report “death-hastening or other non-supportive (i.e., abandonment) practices towards the senile and infirm elderly in pre- modern societies (Hart 1970; Glascock and Feinman 1981; Counts and

Counts 1985; Glascock 1982, 2009).

3 Second, other scholars have argued that the status of the elderly did not decline with modernization in a number of modernizing countries including Samoa, Mexico, Thailand and Japan (Rhoads 1984a, 1984b;

Holmes and Rhoads 1983; Rhoads and Holmes 1995; Palmore 1975; Palmore and Maeda1985; Sokolovsky 1997, 2009b; Knodel et al. 2010). Based on her fieldwork in Samoa, for example, Rhoads (1984b) argues that the Samoan elderly maintain their high status despite the rapid development in Samoa mainly thanks to several cultural factors such as their kinship system and ideals about dependency and reciprocity. Moreover, Nolan (1979), Cherry and Magnuson-Martinson (1981) and Whyte (2004), in their studies of

Chinese modernization, have pointed out the importance of political factors in understanding social changes in China and its impact on the status of the elderly.

Whyte’s (2004) comparative study between Taiwan and China provides illuminating insight. In the mid-1990s, while urban Taiwan (data from 5 large cities including Taipei, Kaoshiung) is more developed than urban Baoding (a medium-sized city in Northeastern China), the pattern of the filial support system in urban Taiwan looks more traditional while

Baoding looks more modern. Specifically, for example, the urban Taiwanese elderly "are more likely to live in extended families with a married son" and

4 "less often have pensions or other sources of income, making them more dependent upon money provided by their children” (123). On the contrary, the elderly in Baoding are "more likely to live in nuclear families" and "to retain earnings of their own, with many depending upon pension."(123).

Whyte argues that Taiwan’s market-oriented path to modernization and

China’s socialist modernization contribute to the paradoxical findings.

In addition, Whyte concludes that there is no apparent erosion of filial piety in either society due to different combinations of factors. In

Taiwan, eldercare remains similar to the practices in traditional Chinese societies—the elderly live in extended families and are cared for by their sons and daughters-in-law. In urban Baoding, though extended families are breaking down, “a set of institutional practices fostered a high level of security for most elderly persons and a rich web of intergenerational exchanges that produced satisfaction for both parents and grown children”

(127). Whyte adds that this novel form of filial support system—living separately but having extensive intergenerational exchanges—“owed its vitality and shape to the socialist institutions and practices created in the

PRC in the 1950s” (127).

Third, scholars such as Goldstein and Beall (1982) observe that the concept of “status” itself is poorly defined in aging and modernization

5 theory: “the concept [status] has little utility for measuring the situation or condition of the elderly cross-culturally because it has not been clearly defined” (745, see also Goldstein and Beall 1981; Watson and Maxwell 1977;

Palmore and Manton 1974). They instead propose a 9-dimension definition of status:

To investigate the condition of the elderly cross-culturally, we have suggested disaggregating the status concept into nine dimensions including: (a) social status (prestige), (b) biological status (e.g., biological function, physical fitness), (c) health status (morbidity), (d) activity status (physical work undertaken), (e) authority status (power and authority exercised in the community and family), (f) economic status (control of resources and wealth), (g) household status (household composition), (h) psychological status (satisfaction with personal situation), (i) ritual status (role played in ritual life) (Goldstein and Beall 1982, 745).

“Status” thus can mean different things and have many levels. If status is taken to mean only prestige or economic power like most studies do, it refers to certain components of the total situation of the elderly. Goldstein and Beall (1982, 745) point to another dilemma that if “on the other hand, high status is taken ipso facto to imply health, wealth, and happiness, then the concept incorrectly lumps very different and independent factors.” Thus, without articulation and clarification of what status is, it is hard to tell what dimension of “status” a researcher refers to or make meaningful comparisons cross-culturally. For instance, the elderly may lose formal authority but

6 prosper economically under a given set of circumstances (i.e., urban Chinese factory workers as in Whyte 2004). In another case, Goldstein et al. (1982) observe a relatively high social status in the Tibetan (Sherpa) society in

Nepal, but this is not necessarily true for their psychological status.

Therefore, the multi-dimensional nature of “status” has to be taken into account in order for any research or cross-cultural comparisons to be meaningful.

Finally, aging and modernization theory is also criticized for its overgeneralization—failing to account for intra-societal differentiation, such as the well-off versus the poor, the healthy versus the infirm, urban versus rural, or men versus women (Ikels 2004). Studies have consistently shown that even within the same society the elderly’s aging experiences are not homogeneous. Fischer (1977), for example, notes that in the U.S., women, the poor, and minority groups generally were accorded low social profiles as they aged. Zhang (2009) points out the increasingly stratifying aging experiences, especially between the rural and urban dwellers in China. She argues that

“China’s current urban-centered development strategies have further disadvantaged rural families in general, and compromised the well-being of the rural elderly in particular” (Zhang 2009, 200). She elaborates:

7 China’s post-Mao development strategies heavily favor urban centers where entire new industries and service sectors have emerged and have triggered an ongoing massive rural-to-urban labor migration. More than 200 million able-bodied rural men and women have left their home villages for urban employment, leaving behind their young children and elderly parents to fend for themselves. …… It is under this new, unrelenting mix of market forces and urban- centered development strategies that the aging experience of rural elderly has taken a severe downward turn. Not only do aging parents have to provide their own eldercare in late life, but they are also burdened with the care of grandchildren, and some have to toil in the fields despite being very old. …… In contrast, their urban counterparts are in a better position to cope with China’s market reform and rapid socioeconomic changes. Owing to the legacy of socialist institutions, most urban retirees receive pensions, medical care and subsidized housing. Such state-instituted benefits enable urban elderly to maintain a certain level of economic security in their old age and become less dependent upon their adult children for financial support (200-201).

In the same vein, Goldstein and Beall (1986) specifically address this issue and caution us to pay attention to intra-society differences by showing how the modernization forces have differently impacted Hindu elderly of different castes. They discover that the economic changes have caused the breakdown of joint families in the high caste group in a Nepalese village, however it “had no negative effect on the lower caste elderly who traditionally earned their subsistence by individual labor for wages in kind or money” (314). They further conclude that “The impact of modernization on the family and the elderly was clearly dependent on the differing relationship

8 of high and low castes within this community to the economic resources. It was not change per se that negatively affected the elderly, but changing access to productive resources that did, and then only with respect to one social stratum, the high castes. In fact, for the low castes, there is evidence that these changes have actually improved their economic well-being” (314).

Moreover, other scholars question the simplistic, linear prediction of the status. Palmore and Manton (1974), for example, reported a curvilinear response to modernization, with the status of the elderly being lower during the early phases of modernization, but leveling off and even increasing later in the process of modernization. They attribute the rise of status to the pension system that is believed to mitigate the poverty associated with retirement in more developed countries. This echoes the findings in China that the urban elderly who tend to receive some sort of pensions have fared much better than their rural counterparts in the process of modernization (Jing 2004; Zhang 2009; Wu 2011).

Alternatively, a number of scholars have proposed what is sometimes called the “materialist constraints” theory to explain the changes we have seen in societies that are transitioning from agricultural societies to more industrialized and urbanized societies (Aboderin 2003, 2004; see also

Goldstein, Schuler, and Ross 1983; Treas and Logue 1986, De Lehr 1992; Fry

9 2009a; Kaufman et al. 2013). Among these scholars, Aboderin (2003, 2004), criticizes that the aging and modernization theory as too “idealist.” That is, it overemphasizes the ideological changes—such as the replacement of traditional values with "modern" values— in formulating the connections between social change and aging, and underemphasizes economic constraints on the elderly and their children. According to Aboderin (2003,

2004), it is the economic constraints—limited access to income and wealth—that have forced the adult children to choose between supporting their children and their parents.

Aboderin (2003), for instance, observes that worsening economic strain, such as un- and underemployment and the drastic rise of costs of living, exacerbated by increasing needs of the young, is the first and the most important factor underpinning the decline in familial support in

Ghana. The younger generation no longer has the resources or capacities to provide adequately for elderly parents.

Goldstein, Schuler and Ross (1983) reach a similar conclusion. They reported that among the households in which elders were living with married sons, as the cultural scripts prescribe, more than half of the elderly did not receive economic support from their sons. Without support from their children, these elderly essentially supported themselves. Co-residence

10 per se, therefore, does not automatically translate to good eldercare. Rather, the control of economic resources plays a more important role in obtaining good care. The story of an elderly woman living with her son is a case in point. In her tearful story, she said that “she made lamp wicks not just to pass the time but actually sold them so that she could have the equivalent of a few dollars a month to buy things (e.g., special foods she liked such as yoghurt). That she was unable to obtain this from her son and daughter-in- law and had to labor for wages was a humiliating public exhibition of rejection: the cultural ideal holds that one’s son should take good care of his parents in old age” (Goldstein, Schuler, and Ross 1983, 718). They sum up the reasons for the inadequate care as follows:

Unemployment, under-employment, and inflation are widespread in Nepal. It has become increasingly hard for sons to support even their own nuclear families. Because sons’ salaries are insufficient, they are forced to make difficult decisions regarding the costs of different uses of this income. Should the money be spent on one’s own children and/or style of life, or should it be used to provide one’s parents good food and expensive medical care? In this weighing of alternatives the Kathmandu elderly parents are the losers, and they understand this (721).

But Goldstein, Schuler and Ross (1983) further stress the importance of the elderly’s loss of control over their household’s income as a critical factor that has negatively affected the status and position of the elderly in their households. This reality is poignantly illustrated by the remark of a

11 79-year-old male who lived with one of his three sons: “old people must have their own money; otherwise they will not have a one rupee note even to purchase poison to kill oneself if it is needed” (718).

A third approach criticizes the epistemological limitations of both

"modernization and aging" and "material constraint" theories that are derived from their structural-functionalist assumptions and macro-level perspectives. As such, Aboderin (2003, 2004) argues these previous theories often do not account for social and cultural differentials, or the agency of the individuals. She thus advocates for a more sophisticated analysis of the complex socio-cultural dynamics underlying the changing intergenerational relations.

Fry (2005; 2009a, 2009b), among others, proposes the application of a globalization framework to examine the relationship between the socioeconomic and cultural changes and aging (Sokolovsky 2009a;

Bengtson et al. 2009). In its broadest sense, globalization is characterized by the intensified flow of goods, people, and ideas, compression of time and space, and high degree of interdependence and integration (Harvey 1990;

Beck 2000; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Scholte 2000). Although within anthropology, there is no one unified theory of globalization (e.g.,

Appadurai’s [1996] set of flows, and Ong and Collier’s [2006] global

12 assemblages), anthropological work on globalization nevertheless reflects the messy life realities in an increasingly globalizing world. It is well established that globalization has brought with it consequences both good and bad, which do not support the overly positive view towards development held by “modernization” theorists or the overly negative view of the material constraints approach (resembling the dependency/world system theories. See Frank 1966; Evans 1979; Wallerstein 1974). More importantly, globalization discourse in anthropology emphasizes global- local dynamics, culture, and agency (Lewellen 2002; Sholte 2000; Ong and

Collier 2006; Fry 2009a, 2009b).

In the realm of aging, earlier attempts to associate globalization and aging tend to focus narrowly on the global demographic transition—all populations are aging, though at somewhat different rates, and its economic consequences (i.e., pension crisis) (World Bank 1994, Chawla et al. 2007; Lloyd-Sherlock 2010). The current utilization of globalization as a theory marks a paradigmatic shift towards a more qualitative approach, which also highlights the role of culture and individual agency. Aging in a global era is subject to a variety of potential influences, and also individuals, both elderly and the young, have the potential to impact their surroundings. A multi-level dialectic globalization framework leaves open

13 the possibility of understanding not only multiple influences on the elderly’s aging experiences, but also how the elderly, as a heterogeneous group, have adopted, and are adopting, differential strategies to adapt to the new realities.

As the link between globalization and aging has recently started to be explored, we are only beginning to understand how the consequences of globalization unfold in later life. And studies are increasingly showing that the elderly are not helpless victims in changing times depicted in the aging and modernization theory. Instead, they are shown to exercise their agency to secure a better old age for themselves. A case reported by Goldstein,

Schuler, and Ross (1983, 718) is a good example. Faced with declining support from his sons, an elderly Nepalese man cleverly made his sons and daughters-in-law to care for him by claiming he had a large locked box of gold and jewelry he had kept in a corner in his house.

In actuality, the growing literature on the effect of rapid change on the family, intergenerational relations and the well-being of the elderly, often use aspects of all three approaches. However, there is one glaring gap in this expanding literature, namely the dearth of data on the situation of the elderly living in societies that are matrilineal or that practice matrilocal residence at marriage where daughters' role in eldercare is emphasized.

14 This gap in the literature is especially significant because there is a growing body of literature in patrilineal and patrilocal societies that is newly suggesting the possible benefits of care provided by daughters for the well- being of the elderly (Childs, Goldstein and Wangdui 2011, 2012; Shi 2009;

Zhan and Montgomery 2003; Yan 1997, 2003; Miller 2004; Zhang 2007; Fong

2002, 2004).

However, there is virtually no data on how the same set of socioeconomic changes induced by globalization have impacted intergenerational relationships in matrilocal areas. Moreover, regardless of residence pattern, the elderly are not a homogeneous group and some of them exhibit great agency in securing better quality care for themselves

(Childs, Goldstein and Wangdui 2011, 2012; Zhang 2004, 2009; Ikels 2004;

Whyte 2003). Therefore, another important goal of the dissertation is to understand intra-societal variations: how and why elderly in matrilocal residence areas vary in their adaptation to the same set of developmental forces.

Rural Tibet (the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, or TAR) offered an unusual opportunity to examine this question because two types of family systems exist. Some counties use matrilocal residence at marriage

15 while others patrilocal residence. In patrilocal areas, the elderly live in their natal household with a son or sons and his/their wife who are responsible for their support. Daughters are sent out as brides, and are incorporated into their husbands’ families so are not expected to provide old age assistance to their parents. In the matrilocal areas, the opposite occurs. The elderly live with a daughter and her husband, and sons are sent out as grooms, and are incorporated into their wives’ households so are not expected to provide old-age assistance to their parents. These matrilocal and patrilocal counties largely share the same distinctive language, culture, religion, and economics and differ only in their marital residence preferences.

Consequently, by comparing the findings collected in the course of this fieldwork with data from studies conducted in patrilocal areas in

Tibetan and Han Chinese regions, this dissertation will examine the similarities and difference in the situation of the elderly living in the two systems. For example, whereas in the patrilocal literature a great deal of attention has been paid to the conflict between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law, what is the relationship between sons-in-law and parents- in-law in matrilocal families and how does that affect the care and well- being of the elderly. Is filial piety the same in both systems, and if not,

16 why? Since there is virtually no research that has been carried out in the matrilocal areas of Tibet, this dissertation will be the first study of the matrilocal variant of kinship in Tibet.

Gender, Filial Piety, and

Intergenerational Support in Tibet and China

Recent scholarship reveals that a key issue in intergenerational relations and eldercare lies in the gendered practice of filial piety and intergenerational support in different family systems. Specifically, this literature shows that support from sons versus daughters is becoming increasingly problematic in patrilocal communities in Tibet and the Han areas of China, because of declining adherence to filial piety by sons and daughters-in-law. This, in turn, is motivating some Tibetan and Han elderly in patrilocal parts to reassess the role of daughters in their old age care.

Filial piety, a core value regulating intergenerational relations in both Tibet and China, dictates not only support, but more importantly, respect and obedience from the young to their older generations.

17 In China, according to the Classic of Filial Piety, being filial means:

In serving his parents, a filial son reveres them in daily life; he makes them happy while he nourishes them; he takes anxious care of them in sickness; he shows great sorrow over their death; and he sacrifices to them with solemnity (Chai and Chai 1965, 331)

Confucius continues to clarify the most important aspect of filial piety:

Nowadays filial piety merely means being able to feed one’s parents. Even dogs and horses are being fed. Without reverence, how can you tell the difference?” (Confucius 1997, 53)

The Tibetan equivalent filial piety, though decidedly less elaborate and well known than the Confucian filial piety in East Asian societies, share many similarities with the practice of filial piety in China. As Goldstein and

Beall (1997) point out, Tibetan filial piety also emphasizes support, respect, and obedience:

Intergenerational relations between parents and children were defined by the Tibetan equivalent of “filial piety,” i.e., by a deeply felt moral/ethical value that held that children should respect, assist and obey their parents. Tibetans verbalized this as a reciprocal relationship – children owe gratitude to their parents for the hardship their parents underwent in raising them. (157)

In addition,

[f]ilial obedience in Tibet encompassed all aspects of life including ongoing day-to-day work tasks and major life cycle decisions such as marriage or entering the monastery. Tibetan elderly ideally could

18 expect to exercise tremendous authority over the lives of their children, and children reciprocally could expect to defer to the wishes of their parents – show filial piety – while their parents were alive. Even when elderly parents became frail and physically dependent on children for assistance in carrying out the tasks of daily living, their dependence was a “positive” dependence in the sense that it was more analogous to the dependence of a resource-owning lord on the work of subordinates more than the “subservient dependence” of a beggar on hand-outs (158).

From the Tibetan and Confucian accounts of filial piety, it is clear that material support alone is not filial piety. Respect and obedience feature prominently in the ideals of filial piety, which often manifests itself in the emotional support desired by the elderly and contributes to the

“psychological status” (Goldstein and Beall 1982) or psychological well- being of the elderly. It is, however, often these aspects—respect and obedience—of filial piety that are increasingly contested. Evidence from

China suggests that while children still accept the cultural obligation of supporting their parents materially and financially, some children are contending that providing material and financial support to their parents alone is sufficient for being filial (Yan 2003; Wu 2011). However, their parents believe almost the contrary. As one study by Wu (2011) points out,

“regarding how to be filial, most important is the feeling state. If one does not behave well, but expresses the proper feeling, it is sufficient to meet

19 one’s filial duty” (220) and “the children also must go beyond material assistance to provide emotional and moral care” (220-221).

The gap between the two generations’ understanding of what accounts for filial piety has some dire consequences for the elderly, as shown in Wu’s (2009, 2011) study of elderly suicide in China. In particular, he points out food preparation and serving is a venue saturated with meanings of respect and thus fraught with conflicts:

Food appears to be a trivial matter, but in fact it is symbolically loaded in the family’s core exchange relationships and can lead to tragedies. Jiaolan is not the only parent who has attempted or committed suicide on account of a conflict over food. An elderly man from Jianli hung himself because his son and daughter-in-law had hidden steamed bread and instead fed him rancid food. Another elderly man in Gouyi hung himself when he found there was no egg in his soup while everyone else at the table had one. Eryao, an old woman from Shuizhou, drank pesticide when she found her daughter-in-law had not cooked for her (Wu 2011, 223).

Wu concludes, “All these parents felt disrespected, ignored, or morally ‘put down’” (Wu 2011, 223). Admittedly, some elderly, faced with disrespectful, and thus unfilial behaviors of their children—mostly sons and daughters-in-law, sadly resorted to taking their lives as a form of protest.

There are, however, also increasingly reports that elderly are exercising their agency to counter this unfortunate reality and seek the care and support they desire (Yan 2003; Shi 2009; Childs, Goldstein and Wangdui

20 2011). That is, dissatisfied with the lack of respect from their sons and daughters-in-law, some elderly are turning to their daughters. In both

Tibetan and Chinese culture, daughters are considered to be more caring than sons and daughters-in-law but traditionally were neither expected nor in a position to provide primary care to their own parents due to a variety of reasons that will be discussed below.

The ideal of filial piety may have seemed to be gender-neutral, but in practice, it is often gendered. That is, there are higher expectations of filial piety on the part of sons, but women—as wives and daughters-in-law—are more involved in the bulk of daily elderly care. In China, the deep-rooted patrilineal tradition obliges sons to assume the primary responsibility to provide and care for their parents as well as to arrange funerals and carry out ancestor worship rituals after their parents’ death. The marginality of the daughters’ role in their natal family after marriage is pointedly encapsulated in a famous Chinese saying that compares “married daughter” to “spilled water.” When a daughter marries out and into her husband’s family/patriline, she is no longer considered a formal member of her natal household.

21 In Tibet, there are no patrilineal descent groups and kinship and marriage is bilateral, but household/family names are passed down primarily patrilineally and, as mentioned, post-marital residence in the overwhelming majority of areas is primarily patrilocal, which means that a

Tibetan elderly person is more likely to live with a son (or if polyandrous, sons) in her or his old age, and the son and his wife become the primary caregivers. Also in Tibet, as in the Han areas of China, when daughters marry out, they become members of their husband’s family, and their filial obligations are instead oriented towards their husband’s households. In fact, the Tibetans also has a proverb that epitomizes the "uselessness" of the daughters: "The Hen eats at home and lays its eggs outside" (Pemba 1996,

81).

The traditionally insignificant role of daughters in the practice of filial piety to their own parents, however, is changing. That is, daughters are becoming more involved in their own parents' eldercare. This is largely caused by the declining adherence to "traditional" filial practices on the part of sons and daughters-in-law. In particular, as I have mentioned earlier, the very concept of "filial piety" has become highly contested, especially in terms whether "respect" is an integrated part of filial support. Yan also argues that “unconditional filial piety which was based on the sacredness of

22 parenthood no longer exists.” And there emerges “a new logic of intergenerational exchange” in which “if the parents do not treat their children well or are otherwise not good parents, the children have reason to reduce the scope and amount of generosity to their parents” (Yan 2003, 177-

78, see also Yan 1997, 2016; Zhang 2005, 2009).

Against this backdrop, increasingly, studies reveal that the elderly in patrilocal communities are increasingly turning to their daughters for elderly support (Childs, Goldstein and Wangdui 2011, 2012; Shi 2009; Zhan and Montgomery 2003; Yan 1997, 2003; Miller 2004; Zhang 2007; Fong 2002,

2004). In particular, in his longitudinal study of in Xiajia village in

Northeastern China, Yan (2003) observes that in the 1990s:

Maintaining a good relationship with married daughters has become an increasingly important investment strategy for old age. Many parents began to allow young daughters to keep whatever income they earned from working outside the family in order to provide a bigger dowry when the daughters married or as a friendly gesture to the sons- in-law. As a result, married daughters visited their natal families much more often than they did earlier. These good relationships with their daughters were especially important to parents who did not get along well with their married sons and daughters-in-law (an almost universal circumstance at the end of the 1990s) (180, emphasis mine).

Yan (2003) further elaborates that while in cases of elderly abuse, the daughters are “the elderly parents’ last resort for help,” the more common pattern for daughters’ role in eldercare is:

23 …for daughters to visit their parents frequently, providing the care and emotional support that neither a married son nor a daughter-in-law can offer. During my 1999 visit several informants mentioned that when an elderly father had had a serious stroke his three daughters and their husbands took turns taking care of the old man, including feeding and bathing him daily, while his only son and his wife only occasionally paid him short visits (180).

In her aptly entitled article “Little Quilted Vests to Warm Parents’

Hearts”: Redefining the Gendered Practice Filial Piety in Rural North-eastern

China, Shi (2009) observes a similar trend in the daughters’ changing role in their own parents’ old age in a patrilocal village in Northeastern China where the majority of the elderly live with sons or live alone. From “spilled water,” daughters now become “little quilted vests to warm parents’ heart.”

Dissatisfied with the support—especially in the form of emotional support—and respect they have received from their sons and daughters-in- law, the rural elderly have been increasingly turning to their out-married daughters for the desired support and respect.

Shi shows that in the elderly parents’ opinion, the daughters are better than the sons and daughters-in-law in “expressing intimate care to parents” and “showing respect to parents.” She cites a 55-year-old woman’s story of the lack of concern from her son. The woman had some leg problem and all family members knew it, but she said, “My son shares a house with me. But he never asked about my leg after he came back from

24 work in the evening” (353). At the same time, Shi reports that many elderly parents feel their sons and daughters-in-law were disrespectful as a result of

“an increase in verbal abuse and physical violence from children, especially sons-and daughters-in-law” (354). Such disrespectful behaviors from sons and daughters-in-law are so prevalent that the elderly expressed that “they would consider their children filial if their sons and/or daughters-in-law did not physically or verbally abuse them” (354).

In Tibet, a similar, but a less severe trend is identified. A case in point is a recent study covering the years 2006-2011 in a patrilocal farming village. This study shows that while 97% of elderly lived in extended families with a son and a daughter-in-law, many elderly expressed displeasure and sadness over their treatment by their sons, and particularly by their daughters-in-law (Childs, Goldstein, and Wangdui 2011, 2012;

Goldstein et al. 2013). Goldstein et al. (2013), for example, reports an incident that an elderly woman felt hurt when “she asked her daughter-in- law for a special food,” but instead the daughter-in-law “gave her a lecture about how expensive everything was nowadays” (18).

As a result, many elderly indicated that were it not that their local norms did not permit it, they would have preferred to keep a daughter at home and bring in a groom for her so that they could live together with a

25 daughter in old age. This verbalized “daughter preference” was not just

“ideal culture” per se; a number of parents adopted a new strategy to help daughters establish economic independence through small businesses, education, and neolocal households. In this way, the daughters would be more available for providing assistance to their elderly parents unhampered by in-laws.

Specifically, the study reveals that the Tibetan parents in Norgyong took advantage of the economic opportunities in a nearby town (the county seat) to help their daughters to establish commercial enterprises like stores and to marry neolocally so as to “make an independent living. The fact that they are not beholden to in-laws in a marital household leaves them in a position to provide continuing assistance to their parents” (Childs,

Goldstein, and Wangdui 2011, 11). In a wealthier village, Betsag, the parents similarly invested in their daughters, but in this case they invested in the daughters' education in order to provide their daughters with the means of financial independence via government or urban jobs. As a result, Childs,

Goldstein, and Wangdui (2011) report that “a relatively high percentage of adult daughters now receive regular salaries through employment,” and

“many of these women are not constrained by the obligations of living in a husband’s natal household with elderly in-laws, and are thereby free to

26 assist their own aging parents” (11). Thus, the study of Childs, Goldstein, and Wangdui also demonstrates that these independent and “empowered” externally-resided daughters assist their parents with both emotional and instrumental support.

This body of literature, however, is based on research in patrilocal societies where externally-resident daughters only provide supplementary care (e.g., pocket money, intervention or emotional support at times of conflicts with co-residing sons and especially daughters-in-law). Therefore, we are still unclear about what it would be like if a co-residing daughter becomes the primary caregiver of the elderly. There are essentially three central questions that we need to answer to find out whether living with daughters is as beneficial as it seems at first glance. Do daughters have enough economic power to provide satisfying care to their own parents? Do sons-in-law willingly support their parents-in-law? Is there father- and son- in-law conflict equivalent to that between mother- and daughter-in-law?

Answers to these questions are especially crucial in rural communities where social security for the elderly is inadequate or nonexistent.

Therefore, in this dissertation, the point of departure is to examine the matrilocal residence family system in which eldercare is provided

27 primarily by daughters and to compare the family dynamics and eldercare between the matrilocal and the patrilocal family systems. In doing so, it is hoped that the complex social dynamics accompanying this process of change will be explained more thoroughly as well as why these changes impact some elderly and their intergenerational relationships with adult children, but not others.

Organization of the Dissertation

The dissertation includes six chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and theoretical framework of this research. Chapter 2 describes the field site and the research methods used. Chapter 3 discusses the family, marriage, inheritance as well as household economics. Chapter 4 analyzes the current status of old age care, intergenerational relations, and elderly well-being.

Chapter 5, compares the matrilocal family system with the patrilocal system and discusses the protective mechanisms of the matrilocal family system.

Finally, Chapter 6 provides a brief conclusion discussing the findings and their implications.

28 CHAPTER TWO

FIELD SITE AND RESEARCH METHODS

Chapter 2 will first provide a detailed account of the field site of this dissertation research, Dekyi1 village, and the larger region it belongs to, as well as a brief history of the major changes that the village and the region have seen. The second section of Chapter 2 discusses the research methodologies utilized during the research. These will set the stage for the analysis presented in the later chapters.

1 This is a pseudonym. In order to protect the participants of the study, all personal names are also altered in this dissertation.

29 Field Site

The 18-month fieldwork on which this dissertation is based was conducted in an agricultural village called Dekyi in Phenyül2 (tib. ’phan yul3), more colloquially known as Phenpo, of central Tibet, now located within the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in the People’s Republic of

China (PRC). I specifically selected the Phenpo region to study matrilocal family system and its impacts on intergenerational relations and eldercare.

This is because the whole Phenpo region, with an area of 4,512 km2, is known for its preference and practice of matrilocal, or magpa (tib. mag pa, literally, son-in-law) marriage, in which a daughter is kept home to inherit a household and her husband—the son-in-law—joins her household.

There is no official statistics on the rate of matrilocal residence at marriage in the region. My observation in Dekyi village and the larger

Phenpo region, however, confirms the prevalent cultural preference for matrilocal residence. In Dekyi, the survey data clearly show that matrilocal

2 Among Han Chinese, this region is known as Linzhou County (ch. linzhou xian), the name used in the Chinese Administration System after Tibet was incorporated into China in 1951. 3 The romanization of Tibetan letters follows the principles of the Wylie transliteration system. The romanization of Chinese characters follows the pinyin system.

30 marriage is the dominant form of marriage. After controlling for families having only daughters and families having only sons, the rate of matrilocal marriage was 49%, whereas the rate of patrilocal marriage was 8% in 2015.4

Thus, in Dekyi, at least, matrilocal marriage is not just a verbalized cultural preference, but also the preference in practice.

The name of Phenyül literally means the place of Phen, referring to a vast region of several valleys with the main one being the Phenpo River

Valley, directly north of Lhasa, the capital city of the TAR. Located at an average elevation of 4,200 m (13,779 ft), Phenpo is slightly higher than

Lhasa, but the weather is still considered to be mild compared to Tibet’s northern and western regions. The majority of the Phenpowas (the people of Phenpo) are Tibetan agriculturalists who grow grains, potatoes, and rape seeds mainly for self-consumption, while keeping a few cows for dairy products.5 But there are also nomads in the higher Reting Tsangpo River

4 The rest of the marriages are neolocal. The reason for why there is a large percentage of neolocal marriage will be addressed in full in Chapter 3. For now, suffice to say that the neolocal marriages are closely related to the matrilocal stem family system in which all siblings but one in each generation have to marry out and often times they establish neolocal residence. 5 There are also some Han Chinese living in Phenpo. All Han Chinese work as governmental staff and businessmen in the township centers (ch. xiang) and the county center (ch. xian cheng), so as some Tibetans.

31 Valley up north who raise animals such as yaks and sheep, rather than do farming.

Historical Changes: Phenpo in Traditional Society (before 1959)

Before the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959, the Phenpo region was under the jurisdiction of the Tibetan Government headed by the Dalai

Lama. It consisted of the six dzongs (tib. rdzong, a traditional Tibetan administrative unit) including Langtang, Khartse, Phonto, Lhündrup,

Zatam, and Taktse. Each district was jointly administered by two officials, one monk and one lay, appointed by the Tibetan Government. The district officials collected government taxes and arranged corvée human and animal services.6 Villages within these six dzongs were further organized into three main types of manorial estates—monastic, aristocratic, and governmental— attached with miser (tib. mi ser), or commoners working the land. The manorial estates in turn consisted of two distinctive sections: 1) a demesne section of fields whose yield belonged entirely to the lord; 2) a tenement section from which the miser derived their subsistence (Goldstein 1986).

6 For a discussion of corvée tax system, refer to Goldstein 1989.

32 Nominally, all land was the property of the ruler—the Dalai Lama, but it was distributed to three types of lords: the monastic lords, the aristocratic lords and the government itself. Generally speaking, although monastic lords and the aristocratic lords had full hereditary usufruct rights over their land, the government retained the ownership of the land. When circumstances warranted, the government indeed practiced their rights to take back the estates and redistribute them (Goldstein 1989; Kapstein

2006). Furthermore, the lords could not force the misers attached to their estates to leave as long as the latter fulfilled their obligations. On the other hand, the misers held land from one of the three major lords, or held no land, but nonetheless belonged to lords through the estate (Goldstein 1971a,

1971b, 1971c, Jiao 2001) and could not leave.7

Besides the 300 or so aristocratic lords (tib. ger ba), the lay population belonged to the miser stratum. Within this stratum, miser was further divided into two main categories: treba (tib. khral pa) and düjung (tib. dud

7 Kaptstein (2006, 178) argues that the economy in traditional Tibet was based on status, not money, with goods and services flowing generally from those of lower to those of higher rank. As a result, the lords/commoners stratification in Tibet can be viewed as primarily based on prestige, though the gap of wealth and power between the two is also striking.

33 chung) (Goldstein 1971a, 1971b, 1971c, Jiao 2001, Kapstein 2006).8 In general, membership in these strata was hereditary, and the linkage of miser to lord was transmitted through parallel descent: daughters were ascribed to the lord of their mother and sons to the lord of their father. The lord and the miser were linked through an estate. More specifically, the misers were linked to an estate rather than to the families that held it. For instance, if the estate changed ownership, the misers remained part of the estate and were linked to the new lords through it (Goldstein 1971a, 1971c).

Treba literally means “taxpayer.” Treba households were named corporate family units that collectively held sizable amounts of inheritable land from their lords, which in turn entailed burdensome tax obligations. A fundamental characteristic of treba families was the corporate nature, meaning land was held collectively, and obligations fell on the treba household collectively rather than on individuals (Goldstein 1971a, 1971b, Aziz

8 Though discussed much less in literatures, there was also a type of miser called nangma or nangsen who were house servants of the lord. They were often selected as a corvée tax from taxpayer or düjung families and became lifetime servants to their lord. They worked full-time for the lord and the latter provided them housing and food (Jiao 2001, 60, Kapstein 2006). However, despite the differences within düjung stratum and between düjung and nangsen, these types of miser were overall characterized by the lack of land, tax obligations and corporate household.

34 1978). The treba households had to pay various taxes in kind and money, as well as provide corvée services as specified in their land tenure documents.

They held written title to their land and could not be alienated from their land as long as they fulfilled their specified tax and corvée obligations.

Meanwhile, trebas could not unilaterally leave or abandon their land

(Goldstein 1971a, 1971c). Nor could they sell or buy land, for they only held usufruct rights to farming or grazing land (Kapstein 2006, 182).

Düjung, on the other hand, means “small household”, or more literally

“small smoke”. They had weak household identity and were characterized by the lack of corporate family. In general, they were mainly landless misers and subsisted by subleasing land or selling their labor. Even in cases when they received land from their lords, they held very small plots of land, and the land was not inheritable. In exchange for the small land they held, they were only required to provide insignificant corvée human labor to their lord (Goldstein

1971a, 1971b). Sometimes, this type of “bound” düjung were specifically created to help the treba households secure labor so as to fulfill their obligations, as in the case of Samada reported by Goldstein (Goldstein 1971b).

Another type was called “mibo” (tib. mi bogs, human lease) düjung. They gained their freedom of movement by paying an annual fee to their lord as

35 specified in their individual human lease. Thus they could work anywhere, and for whomever they wanted (Goldstein 1971a, 1971b, 1971c).

Early Socialist Era (1959-1980/1984)

Tibet officially became part of the People’s Republic of China in 1951 after signing the Seventeen-Point Agreement. For a while after 1951, Tibet’s political system could more or less function as usual, and the traditional way of life remained intact. However, following the Dalai Lama’s flight in 1959 after an abortive uprising, the Chinese government started socialist reforms

(i.e. land reforms) that ended the manorial estate system in Tibet. A few years later in 1966, the Cultural Revolution aiming at destroying “four olds” started, which further damaged the traditional way of life. For over a decade, communes (in the case of Phenpo, state farms which I will discuss the details shortly after the general introduction), rather than individual household, became the unit of production. Traditional social and religious life was also in shambles. Unfortunately, the limited research on Tibet of this period often focuses on political aspects and is politically driven. As a result, there is only a dearth of ethnographic data on the socio-cultural aspects available.

However, it is possible to make a general sketch of this period and how the political turmoil has impacted the Tibetans’ lives.

36 This period of socialist reform in Tibet’s history was characterized by redistribution of land, reversal of statuses, and the commune system’s replacing household production. Central to the socialist reform was the so- called democratic reform that aimed to end the feudal-like system in Tibet.

The Chinese state had two primary goals of the state’s democratic reform: 1) eliminating the so-called "feudal exploitive serfdom system" and emancipating the “serfs” and “slaves;”9 and 2) abolishing the "serf-owners’" landownership and redistributing the land to the "serfs" and "slaves" (Tibet

White Book 2009). Thus initially, land owned by the lords was redistributed among the peasants (DSCCPTAR 1991). And the poorest strata of Tibetan society, such as düjung and nangsen received land for the first time in their lives, got to a higher status, and benefited from the land reforms.

However, a few years after the official establishment of the TAR in

1965, a commune system was started, and the government began forcing

Tibetans into communes. According to Shakya (1999, citing Choedon 1978), communes were similar to state-operated farms, which had production quotas and other obligations. All land and animals were taken away from

9 Serfs and slaves are the terms used by the Chinese state to categorize the miser, or commoners in the Tibetan society. Serfs correspond to the treba and düjung, whereas slaves correspond to nangsen.

37 individual household and put under collective ownership. People were organized into production teams and earned work points for their living, with each task in the commune work cycle being awarded a set number of points (Jiao 2001, Goldstein et al. 2008).

For reasons unclear, the socialist reform in Phenpo was somewhat unique compared to other parts of Tibet. Instead of communes, the Phenpo region was made into two state farms—the Phenpo State Farm (ch. pengbo nongchang) and the Lhündrup State Farm (ch. linzhou nongchang). Villagers automatically became workers of the two state farms. In addition, the socialist reforms in Phenpo region started in 1959 when the state farms were established that year, whereas in most parts of Tibet were organized into communes at a later time. Information regarding the two farms remains murky because of the general lack of research on the socialist era in Tibet.

Unfortunately, there are even fewer studies specifically on the Phenpo state farms.10 Despite my best efforts, governmental records and documents are off limits due to the highly sensitive nature of research in Tibet. Nevertheless, it was possible to piece together a general picture of the operation of Phenpo

10 Yeh (2008, 2013) is arguably the most prolific researcher on state farms in Tibet, but her main focus is on the July First and August First Military Farms in Lhasa. She touches upon Phenpo State Farm in her writings, though.

38 State Farm and life on the farm through interviewing the Phenpo elderly who had first-hand experiences in the state farms and gleaning from Emily Yeh’s

(2008, 2013) work on state farms in Tibet. The Phenpo State Farm was the larger farm in the region, and it was also the one Dekyi villagers belonged to.

The Phenpo State Farm covered a vast area between the lower

Phenpo River Valley’s northern and southern ridges. It was established on

November 26, 1959, by the Agricultural and Animal Husbandry Division

(ch. nongmu chu) of Preparatory Committee of Tibet Autonomous Region

(PCTAR). In 1964, it was turned over to the Tibet Military District (ch. xizang junqu) whose Production Department (ch. shengchanbu) had already established and managed several state farms such as the well-known July

First and August First Farms. The names of July First and August First

Farms which respectively stand for the founding dates of Chinese

Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) betray their origins: farms established by the military. The military farms were mainly created to solve the food shortage problem faced by the PLA troops when they first arrived in Tibet in large quantities in the early 1950s.

Workers on the farm included both Chinese and Tibetans (many from

39 Kham area) hired from outside (Yeh 2008, 2013).11 The Phenpo State Farm operated somewhere in the middle between communes and military state farms such as the July First or August First Farms.

Like the communes, all land and animals were taken away from the villagers and became the property of the Phenpo State Farm. Villagers from the same village were made into a brigade and they were assigned work collectively. But unlike communes, the villagers—now workers of the farm—received a set salary, with slight differences between adult males and females. The scope and variety of their activities were arguably broader and more diverse. For example, they often traveled a greater distance from their home village to work, and if it was too far away from their home village, they camped on the site instead of returning home after a day’s work.

Moreover, they worked not only on agricultural jobs (i.e. plowing, sowing, harvesting), but also on construction projects such as roads, new fields, and reservoirs and irrigation channels.

11 Kham is in Eastern Tibet, one of the major sub-cultural areas in Tibet, now spanning the border regions of TAR, Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai, and Gansu. For a detailed discussion of Tibetan regions, especially with regards to the distinction between political and ethnographic/ethnic Tibet, see Bell (1992 [1928]), Richardson (1984), and Goldstein (1997). Phenpo is located in Central and Western Tibet (tib. dbus gtsang stod), roughly corresponds to TAR, political Tibet.

40 But unlike the July First and August First farms, the “workers” at the

Phenpo State Farm initially were mostly local villagers from Phenpo.12 As a result, there were no communal dining halls or dormitories because the farm workers already lived in the region. They usually returned home at the end of each day or camped on the work site. But perhaps the most significant difference from a state farm was that when the Phenpo State

Farm was disbanded in 1984, the farm workers—except the ones working in the Mechanization Team (ch. jidong dui) or the officials—became ordinary peasants again, without being entitled to a retirement pension as the workers on July First and August First Farms did.

The Phenpo State Farm eventually became not only the largest state farm of entire TAR, but also the most mechanized state farm in Tibet. At its peak, it had 110, 000 mu (18,121 acres), with 15,000 peasants working on the land (Yeh 2008, 59). Its high rate of mechanization had especially been hailed and modeled after by other farms in Tibet. According to Yeh (2008,

58), the Phenpo State Farm had become so exemplary that Hua Guofeng, then the secretary of the State Council and the designated successor of

12 There were also Han Chinese (cadres, technicians, as well as young idealistic Chinese who volunteered to help the “backward” Tibet to develop) and later Tibetan prisoners who were sent to the farm to be “reformed.”

41 Chairman Mao, visited the Phenpo State Farm during his official trip to

Tibet.13

Household Responsibility System and Decollectivization (After 1980/1984)

In 1979, China decided to end the commune system by launching a new economic policy. This new policy was called the “agricultural responsibility system” or the “household responsibility system.” It was first implemented in Chinese rural agricultural areas, and later in rural Tibet (Jiao

2001, Godstein et al. 2006). Under the new system, commune land was divided and contracted out to individual households on a long-term basis.

Everybody who was alive at the time of policy implementation received an equal share of the commune’s land (Jiao 2001, Goldstein et al. 2006). After paying taxes and quotas, the family could retain, consume the rest of the produce, or sell on the free market or to the government. This new system gave farmers control over the farming process as well as a great incentive to improve their living standard by working harder and more efficiently to produce more grain (Jiao 2001, 68).

13 Yeh (2008, 58) cited her interview with Loga [tib. blo dka', ch. Luoga], who had served as the leader of the Phenpo State Farm, to support her claim of Hua's visit.

42 While in other parts of Tibet, the Household Responsibility System was introduced around 1980, the collective way of life continued in Phenpo until 1984 when the Phenpo State Farm and the Lhündrup State Farm were disbanded.14 As I mentioned earlier, after the disbanding, the state farm workers became unsalaried farmers and land was redistributed to the villagers in the same year. For each village, land surrounding the village was measured and divided to each household based on the number of live members. Depending on the size of the land the village owned and the village population, the land divided to each villager varied from village to village, but usually, women and children received less land than men. This was the situation in Dekyi village, which I will discuss in the next section on the specifics of the village.

Though the economy in Tibet was making steady comeback after the decollectivization, it was not until the mid-1990s that economic development started to accelerate, especially after a major initiative, the “Develop the West

Campaign” was introduced (Goldstein et al. 2008). The “Develop the West

14 The Mechanization Team within the Farm was not disbanded and the workers in the team later became state employees and received a substantial pension when they were all forced to retire a couple of years ago. Two villagers in Dekyi worked for the Mechanization Team and now their handsome pension made them the envy of fellow villagers.

43 Campaign” aimed to stimulate economic growth in the western regions of

China, including the TAR, which had long lagged behind the economic boom experienced in the rest of China (Goodman 2004, Goldstein et al. 2008). This campaign included heavy investment in infrastructure, preferable tax rates, and so on. For instance, according to Goldstein et al. (2008, 515), China invested about 200 billion yuan ($24.3 billion) in large projects in the western regions in 2003 alone. Since then, more and more off-farm jobs, such as construction jobs, or skilled jobs were available throughout Tibet. Though there has been doubt concerning who benefited more from this "Develop the

West Campaign" (Fischer 2005), there was no doubt that the economy in

Tibet had expanded dramatically and Tibetans’ living standards had improved. Moreover, Goldstein et al. (2008) further argues that Tibetan farmers today can be said to be in the throes of shifting from a predominately subsistence agricultural economy with some supplementary non-farm income to a new mixed agriculture/non-farm income economy.

Dekyi Village

From the county seat of Phenpo, the way to Dekyi village follows a paved, pothole-dotted but scenic road westward for about 9 km (5.6 mi).

The road runs almost right in the middle of the vast barley fields with

44 rolling hills looming in the far ends of the valley’s both sides. After passing the crossroads to Nalanda monastery and then a few small village clusters, one reaches Dekyi village right by the road. It is hard to miss it because there is a school compound with a tall flagpole in it and several teashops that lend it an air of business untypical for a Tibetan village. Further up the road after about 1 km (0.6 mi) lies the Township (ch. xiang) seat where

Dekyi villagers go regularly to obtain services at various governmental bureaus, to see a doctor at the township medical clinic, or simply to hang out in the “fancier” teahouses that offer more contemporary food options.

There were a total of 65 households and 303 residents in the village, including 24 elderly (aged 60 and above).15 Most elderly lived with either a married daughter or a son (the few exceptions will be discussed in the following chapters, especially Chapter 4). Consistent with the local custom of matrilocal marriage, 75% of the elderly lived with their married or unmarried daughters. Table 2-1 provides a general picture of the demographics and landholdings in the village. More specific breakdown and analysis will be provided in the chapters when relevant topics are

15 I define elderly as aged 60 and above (but a more nuanced analysis will be given in Chapter 4), middle-aged as between 40 and 59, and the young adult as between 20 and 39.

45 discussed in detail.

Table 2–1 Demographics and Landholding 2015

# Mean # Mu per # Mu per Household Population Household Size Household Capita 65 303 4.7 21.0 4.5

All villagers are ethnic Tibetans and they are primarily agriculturalists. They grow barley, wheat, rapeseed, and potatoes. Their staple food is tsamba (tib. rtsam pa) made from roasted barley that is ground into parched flour. This can be eaten dry, but usually as a staple by moistening it with butter tea or simply water and kneading it into a ball

(called pag [tib. spags] in Tibetan). They also eat noodles and balek (tib. bag leb, flat bread) made from wheat flour. Rice and vegetables are also becoming popular which they buy from the market. Wheat flour and cooking oil are produced completely for their own consumption, while raw barley can be bartered for vegetables, wool, butter, or cooking utensils.

Potatoes are often planted in small plots of land in their fields, as well as in the courtyard attached to their houses. In addition, it is now becoming popular to build another garden for the purpose of growing

46 fodder for feeding the cows in the winter if one can find a small empty plot of land near one’s house and has the permission to build from the neighbors concerned. Families also keep some cattle, especially cows, for milk and meat. Milk then is made into butter and cheese for their own consumption, however, cheese is sometimes bartered for things from the traveling vendors who visit the village regularly. Except for a very few households with enough cows, butter needs to be bought from the market during the winter when milk production is low.

Besides their farm work, virtually all households nowadays have at least one family member, male or female, working for cash income, usually during the slack non-farming season. Their non-farm income seeking activities are facilitated by the village’s proximity to Lhasa. Most older villagers are illiterate and speak little or no Chinese, and therefore very few venture out of Tibet, unlike the better-educated Chinese migrant workers in

Chinese’s interior who often engage in inter-province migration to seek job opportunities. Rather, Dekyi villagers mostly work as laborers at various construction sites in Lhasa and its surrounding areas, or further away from the Lhasa valley where the jobs would take them. Due to the scarcity of industry in Tibet, virtually no villagers work in factories, but an increasing number of young men and women, equipped with better Chinese language

47 skills, land jobs in upscale tea houses, restaurants, hotels, discos, or night clubs as waiters, waitresses, or as security guards in Lhasa. The economic aspects of village life will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapters.

Historical Changes in Dekyi

The changes in Dekyi Village follows the regional trajectory I have just described. In the traditional Tibetan society before the Dalai Lama’s flight to India, Dekyi village was the manorial estate (tib. gzhis ka) of

Kundeling Labrang, an important reincarnation lineage in Lhasa, and the villagers were subjects (misers) of the estate. In Dekyi village, there were mainly two types of misers: the treba, or “taxpayer” households and the düchung, or “small smoke” households. The treba households held hereditary land from the Kundeling Labrang and, depending on the amount of the land they had, they were obligated to provide unpaid services (corvée labor), and various taxes in-kind to their estate owner. The majority of the villagers were düchung, holding no hereditary land and thus no tax obligations. They either made their living by working for the estate owner or the trebas, or by leasing a small plot of land to cultivate. This was essential for the functioning of the Pre-1959 Tibetan political and socio-

48 economic system that is often compared with the land tenure system in medieval Europe.16

In 1959, with the flight of the Dalai Lama to India and the establishment of Phenpo State Farm that was described in the section above, the Dekyi villagers’ life came to a dramatic change. Dekyi village became part of the Phenpo State Farm and the villagers automatically became workers of the farm. The whole village was organized into a brigade. And as a brigade, the villagers worked collectively on wherever and whatever the job assignments were. As such, households stopped being the unit of production and consumption. At the beginning stage of the state farm, work they did was mostly infrastructure construction such as building new roads, new fields, irrigation channels and reservoirs. After the completion of basic infrastructures, their work was channeled more towards agricultural activities such as planting, irrigation, harvesting, winnowing, and threshing. They traveled often, and when the work took them far away from their home village, they would set up tents to stay close to their work site during the night. The elderly and the fragile were usually assigned work closer to their home village.

16 See Goldstein (1971) for elaboration on the social stratification in traditional Tibetan society. Also see Aziz (1978).

49 The Phenpo State Farm was disbanded in 1984 and land was immediately distributed to the villagers. The state owns the land, while the villagers have usufruct rights for an unspecified period of time, but cannot sell their land. The general understanding is that the household could keep the land and pass it down to future generations infinitely. In Dekyi village, land was divided on a household basis according to the number, sex, and age of the living members of each household at the time of division. For adult males (aged 18 and above), each was entitled to 7 mu (1.15 acres) of the land, and for women and the children of both sexes (aged 17 and lower), each was given 4 mu (0.66 acres) of the land. On average, each household held 21.0 mu (3.53 acres) of land based on their landholding records. Any villager who were born after the time of the land division—when it was written on their household registration card (ch. hukou) —was not given any land. One village woman told me that her son was born a few months after the division and he was not entitled to any land.

This division is important because the amount of land an individual member of the household received has since become the main basis for land division during the time of household division. When family members marry out and establish their neolocal household in the same village, the couple’s entitled field is transferred to the newly established household. For

50 the ones who marry out of the village, if they live close enough, they often come back and cultivate the field themselves, whereas if they live far away, then the members of their natal home would cultivate the land for them and would give them tsamba, oil, and potatoes accordingly as a compensation for their not being able to take the land away with them to their new households.

Since 1984, the life standard of the villagers has improved dramatically. One thing the elderly villagers loved to tell me was that they now had so many different types of food to eat and had so many warm clothes to wear. In addition, all but four households have built two-storied houses with a courtyard. As for modern facilities, all households have TVs, and by the time I was to leave the field, flat TVs were making their way into some homes. About two thirds of the households had fridges. Electricity arrived at the village in 2010 and virtually all households had gas stoves for cooking. A running water system was built a few years earlier in 2007, but most of time it was unusable. It had broken soon after its completion due to the lack of adequate consideration of the cold weather. Temperature starts to drop below freezing point at night around October and when the water froze in the pipe, it broke the pipes. To make things worse, a cement-paved road was built inside the village in 2009, and it buried all the pipes under it,

51 making repair virtually impossible. As a result, during my 18-months of stay in the village between 2014 and 2016, the villagers had running water for less than 10 days. For most villagers, this caused some inconveniences but posed no big problems, since most families had a well in their courtyard and a manual water pump to pull the water up.

Village Administration

Dekyi Village had an unusual arrangement in that the Village Head

(cunzhang in Chinese or grong dpon in Tibetan) shared more responsibility in everyday management of village affairs more than the Party Secretary

(ch. shuji). This was because the Party Secretary also served as the Vice

Township Head (ch. fu xiangzhang) and he worked at the Township center most of the time, leaving everyday village management to his counterpart, the Village Head. Were it not for that, the village head would be more like a figurehead or an assistant to the Party Secretary. The main work responsibilities of the village head included making announcements, distributing subsidies and other items, calculating electricity bills, collecting payments, and a myriad of village affairs that spontaneously sprang up.

52 The village head and the party secretary led a village committee that consisted of 3 people, including the two of them and a committee member who assisted them in village management. The village head and the assistant each received a meager salary when they served in the committee, with the former receiving RMB 14,000 (USD 2,153)17 and the latter receiving

RMB 5,000 (USD 769) for his yearly service. The party secretary received a much higher salary—RMB 7, 8000 or USD 12,000 annually—from his work as the vice township head, and thus did not receive any compensation for serving as a village committee member. In addition, the village head and the party secretary were selected every two years during the biennial village election. They were not considered as governmental workers and stopped receiving benefits once they were elected out of office.18 The one other committee member was appointed by the village heads and several villagers had served the role in the past, whereas the village head and the party secretary had been repeatedly elected and held their positions for over a decade.

17 The exchange rate used here is USD 1 to RMB 6.5. 18 But as I mentioned, the Party Secretary of the village was also the vice township head. This was not an elected position, rather, it was appointed from higher up.

53 The village’s households were organized into 8 teams that were supposed to help each other with farm work. The principle for this organization was based on vicinity, that is, neighboring households were grouped together. There was also a team leader for each team, whose main job was to make announcements and coordinate public work assignments among the team members. The team system worked exclusively at public level, however. For instance, every year during Chökor (tib. chos skor), a ritual held to solicit help from local deities to protect their crops, the teams took turns to be responsible for cooking, feeding, and entertaining the whole village during the two days of the ceremony.19 Other examples of team obligations included that being responsible for performing at some government-organized celebration. But privately, villagers preferred relying on relatives and close friends for help and they formed unofficial “help” groups, such as irrigation help (tib. chu rogs) group in which members helped each other to irrigate their fields, or pilgrimage help (tib. chos rogs) group whose members went on long-distance pilgrimages together.

19 Chökor was held around the fifth month of the Tibetan calendar to pray for protection of the crops from hail or flood in order to get good harvest. During the ritual, each household sent one member to participate in a parade circumambulating the village fields in their best clothes, while carrying religious items such as prayer books on their backs. After the parade, the villagers would celebrate the occasion for two days by communal eating, drinking, and dancing.

54 Since 2011, Dekyi Village saw the advent of the Zhucun Work Team, or the Village-Based Work Team of four members (including one driver) sent from a Lhasa-based work unit. The Zhucun Work Team system was not something new—it had its deep root in China’s early socialist years when cadres were regularly sent down to the village to dundian, or “squat on the spot,” mainly to carry out work of grass root mobilization or of improving village economy. But in the Tibetan context, weiwen, or

“maintaining stability” was of paramount importance in the aftermath of the 2008 turmoil in Tibet. Phenpo had perhaps the largest riot besides

Lhasa. In practice, the Zhuchun members in Dekyi village were unwilling

Lhasa salaried office workers who took turns to be stationed in their

“responsible” villages for a year.20 The acted more like an intermediary between the higher-up bureaucracy and the local village administration, helping the Chinese-illiterate village management to prepare reports in

Chinese. However, whatever they were supposed to do, they had not gotten the opportunity to prove their worth yet. Other than their frequent contact with the village management and the cook they hired from the village, they

20 Sometimes, they alternated in half-year cycles if the place they were sent to was deemed especially hostile, meaning higher elevation. Women were seldom sent to work in places other than Lhasa’s immediate environs.

55 had minimal contact with the villagers and led a boring and idle life that had earned them the apt nickname of “sleeping team” among the villagers.

Research Methods

Ethnographic dissertation research was conducted in Dekyi village for a total of 18 months between October 2014 and April 2016. Mixed research methods that included semi-structured, open-ended, and in-depth interviews, key informants, focus groups, and participant observation were employed. The interviews were conducted both formally and informally depending on the situation and the preference of the interviewees. In addition to these research strategies, a general village demographic and economic census was conducted twice: one at the beginning of my fieldwork; one towards the end of my fieldwork to clarify inconsistent information. Unfortunately, due to the sensitivity of conducting research in

Tibet, it was not possible to collect local and county government records, though some governmental officials were interviewed informally on issues such as pensions, governmental assistance, medical insurance and

56 reimbursement policies and examined some policy documents in their offices.

Households were utilized as the core study units. Among the 65 households and 303 villagers, there were 24 elderly (aged 60 and above) scattered in 20 households. Although the main research goal was to understand eldercare in this matrilocal setting, the research was not restricted to only the households with elderly, Instead, all households in the village were studied, with special attention being paid to households with elderly and extended families in order to study intergenerational dynamics.

At the beginning of the fieldwork, I conducted a household survey with all 65 households to gather basic economic and demographic information. A young village woman who could speak Chinese helped me carry out my survey by introducing me to the villagers and translating for me when I could not understand. Usually, unmarried village youth— especially the ones who could speak Chinese—were hardly home in the village, but at the time, she was staying with her parents helping with harvest, and decided to take a couple of weeks off before resuming her waitress job in Lhasa. She was of tremendous help showing me the ropes, like how to identify signs whether there was anyone at home and how to open the courtyard gate—extremely useful know-hows that made the

57 villagers’ homes accessible to me. Through the surveying process and bonding with my “assistant,” I identified potential key informants and gained overall impression of the economic status and demographic profiles of Dekyi village. Towards the end of my fieldwork, I carried out a follow-up survey by myself to clarify the information on the former surveys.

During the interviewing phase of the study, I interviewed each of the

65 households regarding their opinions, attitudes of, and/or experiences in matrilocal marriage, old age, care, and intergenerational relations. In addition, two in-depth interviews—one initial interview and one follow-up interview—were conducted with each of the 24 elderly, as well as one of their caregivers.21

The interviews were in-depth and open-ended. I had prepared slightly different sets of interview questions for different groups of people, such as the elderly, caregivers, middle-aged parents, and young villagers.

Questions were not asked in exact orders but the topics were all covered.

For instance, interviews with the elderly centered on their health, aging experience, the care they desired and received, relations with their children

21 An elderly woman, who is also the oldest in village, has dementia and my interview with her was not successful. Information about her was inferred from interviews with her daughter and son-in-law, as well as from her relatives and fellow villagers.

58 and children’s spouses, family decision-making process, choice of successor, the transition of power, and how they manage their pensions. The interviews were often conducted in private spaces where the interviewees were alone and could speak freely. Most often, these in-depth interviews were conducted in the homes of the interviewees or in my home (a house lent to me by a villager). And during the summer, they sometimes took place in the field, when the villagers were too busy to stay inside.

In addition, I was able to do focus group interviews with the elderly

(as well as few middle-aged women who were also present). As will be discussed in full details in the chapters to come, the elderly had a tradition of an intensive praying session that lasted about one month during the slow winter months. They gathered every day for a month chanting prayers together from 10 am to 5 pm. I participated in several of their prayer sessions and during the hour-long lunch breaks, took the opportunity to ask them about their opinions on the Buddhist and lay beliefs regarding old age, health, death, and care. I also utilized the opportunity to ask their opinions on current village affairs.

Besides surveys and formal interviews, informal interviews, chats, and participant observation played a significant role during my research.

Great insights were revealed during spontaneous conversations. On the one

59 hand, I followed the villagers around. I accompanied them to the field to do all kinds of farm work, like plowing, sowing, irrigating, harvesting, and winnowing. I also loved going to shopping trips with the young and middle- aged women, helping them select skin-care products, buying snacks, and gossiping over sweet tea, deep-fried, spicy potato chips, noodles, and sometimes beef momos (Tibetan-style dumplings). But my favorite activity with the villagers was to go on pilgrimage trips to the numerous monasteries and nunneries nearby during the pleasant summer days, which also doubled as picnic outings. Soon after my arrival at the village, I was slowly made into a regular cooking crew at the many mutual help construction events, after the villagers noticed that I was good at cooking spicy Sichuan food but incompetent at almost any other tasks assigned to me. By making myself ubiquitous, I built rapport with the villagers and gained their trust. The villagers slowly treated me as one of their own and opened up to me to share their lives with me. During the course of my fieldwork, I developed several insightful key informants and the villagers were willing to discuss even sensitive issues of their life experiences.

On the other hand, I had made my home a welcome space for the villagers to stop by and chat. When I initially arrived at the village, the village party secretary arranged for me to stay in one of the rooms in a

60 makeshift accommodation made for the Zhucun cadres. But the proximity to the “officials” was intimidating for the villagers to stop by freely. I moved to a spare house of a villager in about a month and this tremendously facilitated my research as villagers started to treat me as their “neighbor” and they would stop by in my house to chat, to borrow things, or to bring me food to eat. Village children especially loved to come to my courtyard to practice Chinese with me or simply run around during after school. The children’s presence also brought their parents or grandparents into my house when they came to call their children back to home for dinner. This sometimes brought the most unexpected and reticent villagers into conversations with me and from time to time, fresh insights were gained.

Finally, though I was not able to collect local governmental records and documents as it was deemed too sensitive, I was able to cultivate good relationships with the Zhuchun cadres, the local staff at various organs in the Xiang government and township clinic. We often discussed governmental policies regarding poverty alleviation, eldercare, and healthcare. These conversations were not only informative, but also enabled me to help the villagers to navigate the bureaucracies of healthcare and reimbursement. I also had informal discussions and formal interviews with a few Tibetan scholars, monks, and nuns on a range of issues ranging from

61 the matrilocal marriage custom to Buddhist ideologies regarding filial piety and aging.

Summary

I have thus briefly recounted the historical changes in the field site as well as the region where it is located. This chapter ends with the discussion of my research methods, the types and sources of my data, as well as how I established rapport with my participants. After setting the stage for my research, the details of my findings will be presented in the following chapters. In the next chapter (Chapter 3), a detailed description of the corporate family system, current marriage practices, as well as an in- depth analysis of household economy will be provided.

62 CHAPTER THREE

FAMILY, MARRIAGE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS

This chapter focuses on exploring the matrilocal family system in

Dekyi after the decollectivization in 1984. In particular, the first part of this chapter will examine the system of family and marriage in Dekyi, such as the corporate, stem family system, inheritance, and the matrilocal family systems. The second part of this chapters explores household economics and management in the context of a matrilocal stem family system and the broader economic environment in Tibet.

Corporate, Stem Family, Succession, and Inheritance

Except for the ten or so households that used to be named taxpayer families in traditional Tibetan society (before 1959), the rest of the Dekyi's

63 65 households traditionally had no household names.1 Unlike what Jiao

(2001) describes in his field site in the Tsang area of Tibet, the Dekyi villagers were not encouraged by the local administration to make up a new family or household name. For the few households that had household names, these were not used as family names in their household registration

(ch. hukou), but were regularly used in village interactions.

First of all, the households in Dekyi are corporate in nature—the household is the basic unit of production and consumption. But more importantly, this implies a cultural ideal that "the perpetuation of the corporate family was a prime concern to its members" (Goldstein 1971a, 70).

Like managing a corporation, the household heads manage the economic and human resources of the entire household, and make decisions about family affairs. In addition, all family members work towards the common goal of household welfare and the perpetuation of the corporate household.

The family system in Dekyi is also characterized by the ideal of a stem family. That is, only one successor in each generation is chosen to inherit the family; the siblings of the successor either leave their natal family or remain in their natal family as celibate members. As family

1 During household division, the household established by the member splitting from the main taxpayer household will not use that household’s name.

64 members from a young age have been socialized to put the family interest— the perpetuation of the corporate family—above their own interest, these non-inheriting siblings willingly leave their natal homes. In this way, the formation of a joint family, which is easy to fragment, is avoided.

In line with the matrilocal practices in Dekyi, one daughter in each generation is selected as the household successor. Her other siblings usually marry into other households as daughters-in-law or sons-in-law or establish neolocal families of their own. Once these siblings leave their natal families, they do not have responsibilities to contribute to their natal households, nor are they required to provide care and support to their parents. They usually only give some pocket money to their parents during the Tibetan

New Year, buy clothing or snacks for their parents, or help to foot their parents' medical bill if needed.

But there are also some non-successor siblings who remain unmarried. In these situations, they may join a monastery or a nunnery, live by themselves, and some choose to become the celibate member of their natal households. If a non-successor sibling forgoes his or her marriage and remains in the family, it does not mean they cannot have sexual relations with others. In Dekyi, for instance, a 37-year-old woman and her out-of-

65 wedlock 10-year-old son lived with her older sister, the chosen successor of the household. But she could not bring a groom into the household.

Table 3-1 below shows the statistics of the marital status of villagers aged 30 and above currently living in Dekyi.2 In 2015, there were 70 males and 80 females aged 30 and above. Among the 70 males, 64 (92%) of were married at the time of the survey, 3 (4%) were widowed, and 3 (4%) were never married. On the other hand, among the 80 females, 62 (78%) of them were currently married, 12 (15%) widowed, and 6 (7%) never married. Since detailed discussions of the marriage types and post-marital residence patterns will be provided later in this chapter, suffice it to say here that these marriages were predominantly monogamous. Thus, both the Dekyi men (96%) and women (93%) were likely to get married, with only a few remaining unmarried throughout their lives. And as will be demonstrate below, in line with the stem family principle, the few unmarried men and women were either absorbed by their natal families or moved out. In a few cases, the unmarried women inherited their natal households.

2 The age 30 was used as the cutoff age for the statistics on marital status in order to exclude the young, single villagers who are likely to get married in the future. In Dekyi, villagers usually get married before 30, and therefore someone who has not been married by then is not likely to get married later.

66 Table 3–1 Marital Status of Villagers Aged 30 and Above 2015

Male Females

Married 64 (92%) 62 (78%) Widowed 3 (4%) 11 (14%) Never Married 3 (4%) 7 (8%) Total 70 (100%) 80 (100%)

Of the three never married men, one was an elderly man who had separated from his natal family and taken his 7 mu of land with him. He lived with his adopted daughter (his niece), who was married with two children. One middle-aged man continued to live in his natal family that was inherited by his never-married older sister. But the older sister had an out-of-wedlock daughter who was in her 30s and was married with two children. The last never-married man in the village was the middle son of an elderly couple. He currently lived in a nearby monastery, but was not officially registered as a monk. Without official registration, he did not receive the subsidies monks and nuns were now entitled to. He expected to return to live with his inheriting brother when he was old.

Regarding the seven never married women, three of them were in their 60s. One woman used to be a nun in the traditional society, but returned to lay life during the Cultural Revolution. She lived with her

67 younger sister, who inherited their natal home and was married with a daughter. Another elderly woman had never married, but had an illegitimate son. She split from her brother’s (the inheritor of her natal family) household and established her own family with her son, taking away the 8 mu of land she and her son received and 3 mu of extra land her brother gave her. The last never-married elderly woman was the older sister of one never-married man I just mentioned. Besides this never-married brother, she had two more younger brothers but no sisters. One became a monk and one married into another Dekyi family as a son-in-law. She inherited her natal family. She also had an illegitimate child—a daughter now in her mid 30s.

The other three never-married women were middle-aged (40-59).

Two of them were sisters—one was deaf and dumb, and the other had bad hearing but could speak. They had three other siblings (two brothers and one sister) who had no disabilities: two married outside the village and one established his neolocal family in the village. The two sisters inherited the household and land from their parents and managed their household together. One sister had two illegitimate daughters and one had an illegitimate son.

68 The other middle-aged, never married woman was in her 50s. Her parents (both had passed away) initially chose her to inherit her natal family and intended to form a stem family with her. But her parents were not satisfied with her care and later moved in to live with her younger brother who had married neolocally in Dekyi, leaving her the old house and

7 mu of land, but giving their remaining fields to her brother’s family. She had no children of her own. Nowadays, she lived with one of her younger brothers who had married out into another village as a son-in-law, but had returned to his natal village to live with his sister after his wife died 10 years ago. Since all his children were grown up, he decided to come home to help his sister who was becoming old.

Finally, there was one woman in her late 30s had never been married, but she has an illegitimate son. She and her son stayed in her natal family with her older sister, the family successor, and the sister’s husband and three children. This never-married woman helped her sister with household chores and farming. She has not completely ruled out the possibility of getting married and establishing her own family one day.

What these statistics and analysis above reveal is that only one legitimate marriage is allowed per generation within the household. In this way, the family system in Dekyi also follows the “monomarital” principle

69 proposed by Melvyn Goldstein (1971a, 1978, 1987) to explain the marriage and family among the treba (taxpayer) strata in Tibet. Goldstein (1971a) states:

The monomarital principle recognizes that in each generation of a tre- ba family one and only one marriage can be contracted, the children of which are considered full members with full jural rights. The application of this norm was motivated by the strong desire to prevent partition of the corporate unit with its lands. Given the basic inheritance rule which held that all males in a family were coparceners with demand rights to a share of the family corporation’s land, Tibetans considered situations with two conjugal families in a given generation (i.e., joint families) unstable. Situations such as this produced serious conflicts of interest between the two conjugal families (and their two sets of heirs) and were thought likely to lead to partition between the two units (68).

Fraternal polyandry is the quintessential application of this rule— only one jurally recognized marriage is established between two or more brothers and a single bride; as a result, only one set of heir is produced in the next generation.

Additionally, Goldstein argues that the monomarital stem family is a

“functional isomorphism” of the classical stem family in that it “also perpetuates itself along one stem. However, it does so by retaining all the sons in the natal unit but linking them in marriage to a single bride. The set of male siblings acts as a single jural entity vis-à-vis the wife.” Thus the monomarital stem family “not only reduces the risk of the family estate

70 being divided, as does the classic stem family, but it also possesses one of the advantages of joint families, such as the concentration of male labor in the family unit” (Goldstein 1978, 327).

The current Dekyi’s family system demonstrates further ramifications of the classic stem family system. On the one hand, though the family “perpetuates itself along one stem,” the Dekyi case differs from the classical stem family in its inheritance since modern Chinese law gives all who were alive at the time of decollectivization rights to land. In Dekyi, all children—both sons and daughters—in a family are coparceners with rights to demand his or her share of the family corporation’s land (how the share is calculated and how inheritance is carried out will be discussed shortly). On the other hand, the Dekyi stem family system differs from the polyandrous family system in that frequent household divisions take place in order to maintain only one marriage per generation in the corporate family, rather than keeping male siblings together in one marriage as in fraternal polyandry. The Dekyi practice, however, unequivocally exhibits the foremost value of the monomarital principle—the “prevention of the establishment of a joint extended family” (Goldstein 1971a, 69).

The current practices of the Dekyi stem families are related to the inheritance rules that have been developed since the decollectivization in

71 1984. Therefore, it is important to discuss the inheritance rules and their applications.

Inheritance and Household Division

Due to the lack of data on Dekyi before 1959 and the virtual cessation of inheritance practices during the collective era, the inheritance practices after the “Household Responsibility System” was introduced and the collectively-held land was redistributed among Dekyi villagers will be focused on.

The basic inheritance rule will be briefly recounted here. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the 4 or 7 mu of land that each live family member was given in 1984 has become the single most important basis for inheritance. In general, when a family member is to be married out of the household, he or she is entitled to claim his or her share of land. But in practice, this person can inherit his or her share of land only if one’s new family is within the same village or in an adjacent village (usually within the distance of 10 minutes motorbike ride). When a family member marries somewhere farther away, his or her share of land would remain with his or her natal family. As compensation, they would receive roasted barley flour,

72 cooking oil, wheat flour, and potatoes, which, however, does not correspond strictly to the out-marrying person’s exact share.

Despite this basic rule, household heads can also use their discretion to give more or less land than the corresponding share of an out-marrying family member. More often than not, family members receive more land than their documented share, especially for the ones whose incoming husbands or wives either do not have land in Dekyi or cannot bring their households’ land to Dekyi. The aforementioned elderly woman received 3 extra mu of land when she split from her natal home as a single mother.

Equally important, if not more, in carrying out inheritance, is the quality of the land. Household heads also have the authority to decide what type of land to give to a leaving family member, and generally it’s a mix of both good- and poor- quality land. Decisions are also made on case-by-case basis. One village man, who was married into Dekyi initially as a son-in-law from a nearby village, told me that they received very good-quality land when his marriage to his wife was changed from matrilocal to neolocal. He viewed it as a gesture of compensation: he and his wife had contributed a lot to the common household before they were asked to leave and establish their neolocal family. In another case, when a woman married neolocally in

Deckyi, her inheriting brother gave her 7 mu of good quality land, despite

73 the fact that her listed share was only 4 mu. This was based on the fact that the woman's in-marrying husband was from a faraway village and could not bring land to Dekyi.

The issue of inheritance is trickier for those who were not born at the time of land division and thus do not hold any land under their name.

Since the group of youth born after the land division in 1984 are only beginning to get married and establish their own households, how inheritance will play out in this generation is just beginning to unfold and it is still uncertain the trajectory it will take. During the fieldwork, there were three marriages that involved children who were not entitled to any of their natal family’s land,

One young man who was married matrilocally into his bride’s household in 2015 was not entitled to any family land—his mom, my neighbor Tsomo, was pregnant with him at the time of the land division.

His bride’s household had plenty of land and therefore did not need his contribution. In another case, the young woman who had no land in her name was the chosen successor of her natal household and was set to inherit the household property that included both her parents’ share and any other land that her siblings could not take away. Thus her matrilocal marriage at the time did not involve any tricky issue of land division. The

74 last case involved a young woman, Choedron, who also did not have any land entitlement. She was married patrilocally into her husband’s household in a nearby village. However, her husband was set to inherit a large amount of land because none of his siblings—all governmental workers in the city or on the way to becoming one—wanted or could take any land. There was, thus, also no real need for her parents to give her land to live on.

Given that many villagers had married or moved out of the village and thus could not take their land with them, it was not surprising to see that the land tended to stay concentrated in the households that were inherited from an earlier generation. The following table (Table 3-2) shows that the neolocal households that were established after the land division in

1984 held on average less than one third of the land held by the main natal households.

Table 3–2 Landholding Neolocal vs. Inherited Households 2015

Neolocal Households Inherited Households # of Households 25 40 # of People 100 203 # of Mu 217 1147 Mu Per Households 8.68 28.68 Mu Per Capita 2.17 5.65

75 Choosing a Successor

As regards to choosing a child to inherit the household, usually a daughter is selected in accordance with the matrilocal marital norms.

However, a son can also be chosen to inherit if the household has no daughters. Sometimes, in a household with both daughters and sons, a son might be chosen as a successor instead of a daughter as their parents see fit.

There are no fixed rules mandating how to choose a successor and this is up to the heads of the household. For example, birth order was not an important factor, but it could be a factor to consider if there was a big age gap between the eldest and second oldest daughters. In such a case, it would better to keep the eldest daughter as the inheritor, so she could get married and bring a male labor into the household. In some other instances, demographic situations leave the parents with no one but the youngest daughter to inherit, because by the time they are choosing an inheritor, the other daughters have already been married out.

Nevertheless, when parents have choices, one strategy is to choose the child who has the best relations with the parents or the one who is the most obedient. For instance, my neighbor Tsomo who has three sons but no daughters, told me that she had already made the decision to keep her middle son,

76 I have the best relationship with my middle son. While my older son is out working at construction sites to get money, my middle son is always home helping me with housework and farm work. We thus have developed good cooperation when working together. He treats me very well and always asks me to rest and let him do this or that.

Such strategies have been well documented by scholars studying the selection strategies in fraternal polyandry (Goldstein 1971, 1978, 1987). In other words, although Dekyi and the fraternal polyandrous areas differ fundamentally in preferring matrilocal and patrilocal residents respectfully, at the same time they share the same family ideals and only one set of heir per generation, and pursue a flexible strategy for deciding how to achieve that outcome.

Marriage Types, Residential Patterns, and Household Structure

In traditional Tibet, marriage was often arranged. In patrilocal marriages, a go-between representing the groom’s household was sent to bride’s family to request the hand of the potential bride to marry into the groom’s family, or as the Tibetans call it, nama longwa (tib. mna’ ma slong ba). And if permission was granted by the bride’s family, further negotiations would be underway to make arrangement for the marriage.

77 There usually was an engagement ceremony, during which the groom’s family presented a khata (tib. kha btags, ceremonial scarf3), chang (tib. chang, wine made from barley), orin (tib. o rin, money to repay the bride’s mothers’ milk), as well as other gifts to bride’s family. Usually a wedding ceremony (tib. gnyen sgrig rten ’brel) was held, but it could also be skipped if the household was too poor to hold it. After marriage (tib. chang sa rgyag pa), the bride moved into the groom’s household and the young couple had their own children and thus a new cycle would start. Such was the experience of the Dekyi elderly, though according to the matrilocal tradition of Dekyi, it was usually the bride’s household who proposed to the groom’s.

After the dramatic changes following the Dalai Lama’s self-exile and the subsequent turbulent collectivization years, the practice of arranged marriage and its associated rites and ceremonies in effect came to a halt.

The middle-aged men and women above the age of 50 told me that they usually married through khatupa (tib. kha thug pa), literally meaning

“meeting the mouth.” Jiao (2014: 118) describes it as “close to what in the

West is called ‘living together,’ and generally did not involve a wedding rite

3 Usually it is white, but it can also be yellow when offering to high lamas or other people held high positions.

78 in traditional society. The woman simply moved in with the man.” It is different from the arranged marriage, or longwa (tib. slong ba). Middle-aged villagers told me that during the collective years, as they all worked alongside people from other villages, it was easy to meet someone. And because of the scarcity of resources, ceremonies were rarely held.

Nowadays in Dekyi, the marriage practices have changed again.

Continuing the pattern from the years of the collective, men and women usually meet their future wives and husbands during their migrant work, but the discussion of their marriage usually starts after the young couple has their first baby. Only then would the parents of the young couple consider their relationship serious and stable. After that, the parents would discuss whether the marriage would be matrilocal, patrilocal, or neolocal, whether there would be a wedding, and when the transfer of bride or the groom to the other household would be. Unless the young couple work together outside of the village, they live separately until the agreement of their marriage is reached. Like the poorer families who seldom had weddings in the old days, in contemporary Dekyi, a wedding ceremony is also not always held, especially among the poor families or in situations where couples are establishing a neolocal household outside of the village.

79 Marriage Types

In Dekyi, 98% of the marriages were monogamous (Table 3-3). There were, however, a few polygamous marriages: a mother-daughter polygynous marriage that happened long time ago (thus was not recorded in the marriage type statistics in 2015, but the case will be discussed later), and there were two current fraternal polyandrous marriages, neither of which originated as such. The rarity of polygamous marriage forms in Dekyi contrasts strikingly with other Tibetan communities in the past and at present. It is why Dekyi is seen emically by Tibetans are part of a distinctive minority kinship area where matrilocality is the culturally preferred custom.

Table 3–3 Marriage Types 2015

Monogamy Fraternal Polygyny Total Polyandry Age Group # and % # and % # and % Marriages 20-39 35 (100%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 35

40-59 42 (95%) 2 (5%) 0 (0%) 44

60 and 16 (100%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 16 above Total 93 (98%) 2 (2%) 0 (0%) 95

80 After China’s incorporation of Tibet in 1951, polygamous marriages were banned in the Chinese constitution, but there were no discussions, let alone plans, to end polygamy in Tibet and other minority nationality areas.

However, during the Collective Era in the 1960s and 1970s, this regulation was carried out strictly with respect to new marriages (Jiao 2001). When the communes came to an end and the Household Responsibility System was implemented in the early 1980s, marriage regulations in minority areas were loosened and the economic situation in Tibet has changed tremendously.

New economic policies that aimed to develop Tibet created conditions that favored the practice of fraternal polyandry by creating a situation similar to that found on manorial estates for the taxpayer population in traditional

Tibet. Thus, there was a revival of fraternal polyandry in Tibet (Jiao 2001).

However, this did not occur in Dekyi which as mentioned, traditionally was a matrilocal preference area.

According to my elderly informants who had greater knowledge about the traditional society, matrilocality was the overwhelmingly preferred marriage type and polygamy was rare in the old days. The only case I was told about was the aforementioned woman who had been in a bi- generational polygynous relati0nship with her mother after her father died young. She and her step-father/husband later moved out to establish their

81 neolocal family when her younger sister was old enough to marry and could take care of her mother. As regards to fraternal polyandry, no elderly knew of any polyandrous union in their parents’ generation or in their own generation. The lack of fraternal polyandry in the traditional society in

Dekyi is surprising given that for the taxpayer households it was considered highly advantageous for several brothers to marry polyandrously in order for them to fulfill their tax obligations and have labor available to engage in non-farming activities to generate income (Goldstein 1971, 1976, 1977, 1978;

Aziz 1978; Jiao 2014).

Since the farmers in Dekyi were taxpayers on a monastic manorial estate traditionally, the same forces were presumed to have been in play then. Unfortunately, my informants could not provide much information about this as all of the elder were teenagers in the traditional society and thus had no good understanding of the working of the traditional society.

But since this area was well known to have been a special matrilocal area despite the same manorial estate system being in place, consequently, I have to assume that this was simply an area with a different and distinctive marriage customs, the origins of which are unknown.

Nevertheless, in 2015, there were two fraternal polyandrous marriages. However, both cases started out as a monogamous marriage, but

82 became a polyandrous one later for reasons other than economic considerations, which used to and continue to be the main reasons for polyandrous practices in other areas. Instead, one polyandrous marriage in

Dekyi involved “love,” and the other one was the result of a series of unfortunate events.

The “love” polyandrous marriage was contracted among a middle- aged village doctor called Tsering, his youngest brother, and their shared wife, a woman who married into Dekyi from a nearby village. The village doctor first met the wife when he was practicing medicine in her village.

They fell in love and then got married about 20 years ago and established a neolocal residence in Dekyi. However, the youngest brother had an affair with his sister-in-law, and moved in to join his older brother’s family against the will of his parents but certainly with the permission of his older brother. The younger husband was not considered to be a bright person in village opinion and he was often the butt of jokes because of his polyandrous marriage. For instance, villagers often joked that if he did not behave well, he would be kicked out by his wife. And indeed, during the

83 second Tibetan New Year I spent in the village, his parents told me that he was thrown out by his wife, adding that “we had told him so!”4

The other fraternal polyandrous union actually was my landlord’s family. The two brothers both came to Dekyi after marriage with two Dekyi women from two different families. The older brother, Dawa, and his wife,

Lhagpa, had a neolocal residence, whereas the younger brother Nyima had married into his wife’s household as a son-in-law, co-residing with his wife’s widowed mother. But a series of unfortunately events began to unfold about

5 years ago. First Nyima’s wife died during childbirth (the baby girl survived and was given to her paternal aunt to raise in another village). Then a year after his wife’s death, their older son, a boy about 10 years old at the time, drowned in the reservoir near the village. Nyima was left alone with his mother-in-law who now blamed him for her daughter’s death. The relationship between the in-laws deteriorated so much that they split in less than a year.

4 I was told he was kicked out by his wife and returned to his parents’ family to live from time to time. So nobody took it seriously when he was kicked out again during the 2016 Tibetan New Year. When I inquired about his situation in his parents’ house, his other older brothers and brother-in-law who were home celebrating the new year laughed so hard that they couldn’t stop.

84 Nyima was grief-stricken and became alcoholic. For about a year, he went to Tibetan dance halls to get drunk almost every night and wasted away any money he made. Dawa became concerned and decided to intervene. He talked to his wife about having his brother join them and form a polyandrous marriage, and his wife agreed. After having a “home” again, Nyima slowly stopped drinking, and he started to contribute his income to his new home.

Both these examples and the bi0generational polygyny I mentioned earlier reveal that polygamy is culturally acceptable in Dekyi. No one in these polygamous unions was stigmatized. In addition, the “enriching” effect of polyandrous marriages was also visible in the two polyandrous unions. In the polyandrous marriage involving the village doctor, despite the doctor husband receiving a regular monthly salary of about RMB 1,300, their family was still one of the poorest in the village. They were one of the only four families in Dekyi that still lived in a one-story house and theirs did not even have an enclosed latrine. This was partly because both husbands loved playing mahjong (gambling), and their shared hobby was costly. The wife thus told me “it is good to have two husbands because I receive two incomes.” With the income from both husbands, they managed to send their oldest daughter to attend university outside of Tibet in

85 Shaanxi province. In my landlord’s case, the joining of the younger brother and his economic contribution lifted the household above the poverty line and they were able to decorate the interior of their house and buy electronic appliances.

While all villagers seemed to understand the economic advantages of fraternal polyandry, few villagers voiced that they want polyandrous marriage for themselves. Even the six members currently in polyandrous unions said polyandrous marriage was not their first choice, but they could see the benefits.

Patterns of Post-Marital Residence

The marriage system in Dekyi is unique in its cultural preference for and the actual high prevalence of matrilocal residence after marriage, in which a daughter is kept at her natal home and her husband—the son-in- law—moves in to live with her family after marriage. While matrilocal residence is regularly practiced all over Tibet, it is usually contracted out of contingency—such as by families having no sons—and it is certainly a relatively rare form of marriage. But in Dekyi, nearly half of the marriages were matrilocal. Such a high prevalence could not be explained sufficiently by demographic factors alone.

86 Even a cursory look at the statistics of the marital patterns (Table 3-

4) reveals that the pattern of residence after marriage in Dekyi is predominantly matrilocal, which accounted for 47% of all recorded marriages. Out of the 95 marriages, there were 45 matrilocal marriages. And among these, only 5 marriages, or 11%, were contracted because a family had only daughters. On the other hand, there were 16 patrilocal marriages

(17%), 9 of which occurred in families having only sons. Thus, if we control for the demographic factors of having only sons or only daughters (14 cases in total), we are left with 81 total marriages, of which 40 were matrilocal

(49%) and 7 were patrilocal (8%). This, thus, shows us an even more pronounced picture of the prevalence of matrilocal marriages.

The remaining 34 marriages (including families with only daughters and sons), or 35%, were neolocal, meaning a couple established a household separate from either set of parents after their marriage. And the relatively large percentage of the neolocal marriage reflects the consequence of the monomarital stem family system in which only one daughter is selected to inherit and all her other siblings have to marry out into their spouses' households or establish their own neolocal residence. A further analysis of the 34 neolocal marriages shows that all of them were contracted because

87 parties of these marriages were not the selected inheritors in their natal households and therefore they established their neolocal residence.

Table 3–4 Post-marital Residence 2015

Having only Having Having both sons daughters only sons and daughters Total Matrilocal # (%) 5 0 40 (49%) 45 (47%)

Patrilocal # (%) 0 9 7 (8%) 16 (17%)

Neolocal # (%) 0 0 34 (43%) 34 (35%) Total 81 (100%) 95 (100%)

In addition, if we compare the marital practices across generations

(not controlled for demographic factors), matrilocal marriage remained the most popular form of marriage among the young (20-39), middle (40-59), and old (60 and above) generations (See Table 3-5). These statistics demonstrate that matrilocal marriage is not just the preferred marriage in theory, but in practice, too.

88 Table 3–5 Post-marital Residence Across Age Group 2015

Matrilocal Neolocal Patrilocal Total Age Group # (%) # (%) # (%) Marriages 20-39 18 (51%) 10 (29%) 7 (20%) 35

40-59 18 (41%) 19 (43%) 7 (16%) 44

60 + 9 (56%) 5 (31%) 2 (13%) 16 Total 45 (47%) 34 (36%) 16 (17%) 95

Among the 7 patrilocal marriages in which the households had both sons and daughters, two cases involved families that were initially living with their daughters, but later changed to keeping their sons due to circumstances. The remaining 5 patrilocal marriages were arranged in families that also had daughters. In these cases, males were selected instead of their sisters by their parents because either they had the closest/best personal relationship with their parents vis-à-vis their other siblings, or they were considered to be very good at work by their parents. The only living parent who intentionally kept their son instead of a daughter told me,

“it was the same to keep a daughter or a son.” It was, however, also clear that the mother in that case had a close relationship with her son. And this may have played a role in keeping her son rather than her daughter at

89 home. There was no evidence showing that choosing sons to be inheritors was correlated to economic considerations.

As matrilocal marriage is widely practiced in the whole Phenpo area, there has been no difficulty for families to acquire sons-in-law. Inter-village marriages within the Phenpo region were commonplace. The majority of the sons-in-law or daughters-in-law who married into Dekyi were from different villages in Phenpo region; there were only a few inter-region marriages in the village. For example, a man and two women, both from

Tölung, married into three different households respectfully as a son-in-law and daughters-in-law. A woman from Shigatse married into Dekyi and established neolocal residence, and another woman who was also from

Shigatse married into Dekyi as a daughter-in-law.

Thus, even though the young generation of the villagers usually met their future spouses while they migrated to work, with only these few exceptions, the majority of the villagers managed to find someone who was from Phenpo. This was facilitated by the common job-seeking practice in which the villagers got their job through a "head recruiter," usually a fellow

Phenpowa who had connections to construction sites and hired villagers from the same region. Therefore, the chance of meeting someone from

Phenpo was high.

90 However, the negotiation of marriage could also be difficult, if both parties involved in the marriage were the only child or the selected inheritor of their respective household. The aforementioned marriage of

Choedron presented such a case. Choedron was initially the selected inheritor of her household. She had only a younger brother, who was a taxi driver in Lhasa and was not interested in living a village life. However, her husband was the only feasible inheritor of his household as virtually all his other siblings held governmental jobs. Since neither family was willing to release their "only" inheritor to the other household, they engaged in a 10- year negotiation to figure out who should marry into whose household.

While Choedron and her husband had two children already, including one who was 10 years old (both children lived with their mother), they kept living separately but visiting each other frequently while their parents negotiated. Eventually, Choedron's younger brother agreed to return home to inherit, and Choedron's parents thus agreed to marry her out. As Choedron's case demonstrated, marriage negotiations were still determined by parents and could be contentious. And it also demonstrated both generations understood well the importance of the perpetuation of the corporate, stem household.

91 Household Structure and Size

As I mentioned earlier, the stem family ideal prevents the formation of large joint households (as in the traditional Chinese family system).

Similarly, the predominance of monogamy and matrilocal residence curtails the formation of large household through combining several brothers in each generation in one marriage to a single bride. Consequently, the Dekyi households were overwhelmingly monogamous, nuclear, with an average size of 4.7 people per household. The households with elderly aged 60 and above or with middle-aged parents in their late 50s tended to live in extended stem families.

As shown in Table 3-6 below, in 2015, among the 65 households in the village, 43 of them, accounting for 66% were nuclear. The rest 22 (34%) of the households were extended stem families. But while there were more nuclear households than stem families, this reflected the household developmental cycle in which families constantly change from nuclear to stem and stem to nuclear as family members marry, new members are born, and older members die. In addition, the breakdown of the family types in different age groups shows that nuclear families were the most common among the young to middle age groups, whereas for the elderly, the most

92 common family type was stem family—almost 80%. The few exceptions of

nuclear families in the old age group will be explained in Chapter 4.

Table 3–6 Household Structure and Size 2015

Nuclear Household Stem Household Total Age # (%) of Average # (%) of Average # of Average Group Household Size Household Size Household Size 20-39 7 (100) 4.1 0 (0) 0 7 4.1 40-59 32 (84)* 4.2 6 (16) 6.7 38 4.7 60 and 4 (20) 1.8 16 (80) 5.7 20 4.8 above Total 43 (66) 4.0 22 (34) 6.0 65 4.7

* This number includes two polyandrous nuclear families that I have discussed earlier.

Generally speaking, a nuclear household consists of a married

couple—either young or middle-aged—and their unmarried children,

whereas a stem household contains either an elderly or middle-aged couple

(or widows, widowers), their married children, and their grandchildren. The

implication of the family structure in Dekyi is that in most households,

there tends to be only one married, adult male in each generation, unlike in

fraternal polyandrous families in which there are usually more than one

93 married, adult male in each generation. This unusual family feature in turn has significant implications for household economics and management.

Household Economics and Management

At the center of corporate family is its economic life and how it is managed. In rural Tibet, economic activities exhibit the features of mixed economy of subsistence agricultural and cash/market economy (Goldstein et al. 2008). While subsistence farming remains the basis of rural life in

Tibet, non-farm cash income has come to play a dominant role. As I have described in Chapter 2, villagers engage in agricultural activities mainly for self-consumption and agricultural products cannot generate any cash due to the low prices for barley and wheat, the main crops they grow. Instead, villagers participate in a host of off-farm job in order to generate cash income to cover an increasing list of expenses.

In general, villagers agreed that a family needs to have an annual cash income of around RMB 10,000 to get by, covering five basic categories of expenses: food, clothing, transportation, utilities, and new year

94 celebration.5 But if villagers want to improve their living standard and do such things as buying new electronic appliances, furniture, or motorbikes, then more money is needed. In addition, in recent years, college education has become a major expense for some families. In Tibet, while pre-college education costs almost nothing, college education can be expensive.6 The tuition for college ranges from little—if one goes to a teacher’s college or enrolls in a program of teacher training in a regular college—to RMB 10,000

(the private colleges).7 In addition to tuition, food and accommodation amounts to another RMB 10,000 for a school year. Thus, a family with a college student needs to spend additional RMB 10,000 to 20,000 a year. In

5 For instance, with regards to food, during the winter (about five months) when milk production is low, butter needs to be bought. And as Tibetans drink butter tea throughout the day, they usually consume 10-15 jin (a little over a pound) butter per month, and butter costs RMB 30 / jin. As for utility bills, most villagers now use gas stove and gas costs about RMB 400 - 1,500 per year. Cell phone fees are also climbing. With the exception of the elderly, virtually all adult members of the family have a cell phone and data usage is becoming common place. Using data on cell phone is expensive due to the surcharges for exceeding the data limit, a common occurrence because of the villagers' inexperience in monitoring data use. Finally, new year celebration is the biggest expense of the year when the Dekyi villagers stock on food, drinks, and snacks, buying new clothes, and giving pocket money to family members. Even the poorest household said they spend RMB 2,000 to 3,000 on that. 6 In Tibet, special educational policies such as Three Provisions, or sanbao in Chinese are enacted to relieve rural families of school costs. It provides rural school children with free food, school uniforms, accommodations. See Postiglione, Jiao, and Gyatso (2005). 7 Private colleges in China are often of lower quality.

95 2015, 18 households (28%) had one or more children in college and another

9 (14%) households had at least one child in high school. Therefore families usually needed cash income over and above what their fields produced for their own food and basic needs.

Not surprisingly, except for some unusual circumstances, every household had at least one member working for non-farm income in 2015.8

Usually, villagers migrated out of the farm for months on end during the slack farming season to work for cash. Unmarried men and women were equally likely to migrate to work, however, once women married and had children, they stopped going to work for non-farm cash income. Instead, married women remained at home tending family farm, animals, childrearing, eldercare, and other daily household management affairs.

Married men tended to stop migrant work after at least one of their children started to work and bring cash income home.

As show in Table 3-7, the average annual household income was

RMB 21,638. However, the median income was RMB 15,115, which was lower

8 In 2015, only one family had an adult male who did not engage in cash-seeking activities. This family consisted of a young couple and their toddler son. The husband got into a motorcycle accident and broke his leg. As a result, he was not able to work for cash. They had to borrow money for the husband's treatment. The Zhuchun cadres and Dekyi villagers all donated money to help the family to pay for their medical bill.

96 than the average household income and indicated that over half of the

Dekyi households made less than the village-wide average income annually.

In other words, although all households started basically equal in 1984 at the time of decollectivization, significant economic stratification had developed.

Table 3–7 Mean and Median Income 2015

Total Mean Household Median Household Households Income Income 65 RMB 21,638 RMB 15,115

Table 3-8 further illustrates the relationship between family structure and economic stratification. Based on the village consensus on what being poor, average, and rich means, a poor family was defined as one earning less than RMB 10,000, and an average family was one earning between RMB 10,001 and 30,000. A rich family was one earning over RMB

30,000. From Table 3-8, it was clear that whereas 32% of the nuclear households were poor, only 5% of the stem households were poor.

Similarly, only 12% of the nuclear households were rich, while 28% of the stem families were rich. The findings in Dekyi thus conform to the general

97 pattern that in both rural TAR (i.e. Jiao 2001, Goldstein et al. 2008) and

China (Yan 2003), extended families enjoy a higher economic level than

nuclear families after the decollectivization. Nevertheless, despite the

economic disadvantage of nuclear families, they were the predominate form

of family in Dekyi, due to the family developmental cycle.

Table 3–8 Family Structure and Economic Stratification 2015

# (%) Poor # (%) Average # (%) Rich Total (RMB 0-10,000) (RMB 10,001-30,000) (RMB 30,000) Nuclear Households 14 (32%) 25 (56%) 5 (12%) 44 (100%) Stem Households 1 (5%) 14 (67%) 6 (28%) 21 (100%)

Types of Migrant Work

“Going for Income”

The Dekyi villagers engage in migrant work that resembles what

Goldstein et al. (2008, 520) call “going for income.” It refers to “non-farm

income that includes both income earned in one’s own village and income

earned by going to work outside the village.” And it consists of three broad

types of work: unskilled manual labor jobs (e.g. construction laborers),

98 skilled jobs (e.g. masons, carpenters), and entrepreneurial activities (e.g. trucking, contractors for construction projects).

In 2015, 68 villagers engaged in these three types of migrant work. 38 of them worked as unskilled laborers at construction sites, carrying loads, laying bricks, mixing cements. For unskilled laborer job, a man usually earned RMB 130-150 per day, but a woman earned RMB 130 per day. 4 villagers were skilled laborers such as masons, carpenters, cement floor experts. Skilled workers’ wages were higher, about RMB 150-180 per day; they were always men. In addition, 26 villagers engaged in various entrepreneurial activities, such as contracting construction projects, providing trucking services, opening teashops or stores, driving bicycle rickshaws, shuttle vans, taxies or tourist jeeps, or being contract furniture painters. The Table 3-9 below gives a general idea of the earning power of the three types of “going for income.”

99 Table 3–9 “Going for Income” 2015

Type of Work People Involved Average Annual # (%) Income (RMB)* Unskilled Laborer 38 (56%) 7,928

Skilled Laborer 4 (6%) 12,025**

Entrepreneurs 26 (38%) 12,876 Total 68 (100%) 10,061

* Average Annual Income here refers to the net income that was turned in to the household head after the workers expenses were paid. ** The average income for the skilled laborers was much higher than that for unskilled laborers in part because it was easier for them to find jobs and thus they spent more time working and less time searching for jobs.

The most popular forms of entrepreneurial activities villagers engaged in were construction-related subcontracting work—such as working directly as contractors of construction projects or providing trucking or excavating services through their self-owned machinery—and the opening teashops/general stores. For instance, four related families formed a construction business, two families owned trucks and one family owned an excavator and they made money by hiring out to work. There were also 4 teashops (all doubled as a general store) and one vegetable vendor. The popularity of opening teashops as a viable entrepreneurial

100 activity was largely due to the presence of the Township Primary School at the edge of the village, since it provided these teashops with a steady body of patrons—students, school teachers, and parents/grandparents who came to drop and pick up their kids. These teashops served sweet tea, simple noodle dishes, and beer, as well as provided a place for the village males to play mahjong and Tibetan dice games (usually involving gambling).

There were also some other types of entrepreneurial activities. For instance, in the past, it had been popular to establish young men as shuttle van drivers (between the county seat and Lhasa) or as taxi drivers in Lhasa, but in 2015, this fad had already started to fade out because fierce competition had made these businesses much less profitable. In 2015, there was only one village man—a son-in-law newly married into Dekyi—who was being supported by his father-in-law to start a shuttle business between

Lhündrup county and Lhasa. Before his business endeavor started, he worked a contract driver for township officials, making about RMB 1,400 per month (RMB 16,800 annually). His new business did not last long. In early 2016, after the Tibetan New Year, they sold the van and he went back to his old job as a contract driver, earning a monthly salary. His father-in- law told me that there was so much competition that they not only did not make any money, but lost money on this business venture.

101 Another strategy in the village was to train young adult males to be furniture painters. After finishing the training process, they usually started out as subcontractors, getting jobs from the more established furniture painters and receiving pay based on how many cupboards or tables they painted. Some were content with this arrangement, but others wanted to eventually become the boss—landing bulk businesses of furniture painting and then subcontracting to other. During my fieldwork, one young man finished his training with his maternal aunt’s husband and started to subcontract work from this uncle. There were a few more young men who were going through the training at the time. This strategy was usually used by families who had relatives or friends who were furniture painters.

But besides these “going for income” activities that have also been documented in other parts of Tibet, two other income-seeking categories were becoming increasingly popular. One is what I call “city jobs;” the other is formal governmental jobs.

“City Jobs”

“City jobs” refer to a range of unskilled jobs in the service sector such as waiters, waitresses, shopkeepers, security guards, and hotel

102 receptionists that mostly attract young villagers who can speak Chinese.

The reason I call these types of work “city jobs” is because of the completely different lifestyle these jobs entail than the manual laborers jobs I have just mentioned. The city job holders tend to be more established in the city and have a cosmopolitan lifestyle that involves frequenting teashops, restaurants, and dancing halls, dressing fashionably, and hanging out with friends. No doubt most Dekyi youths prefer living such a life, but their parents are less happy because they tend to bring little or no money home, even though they tend to work all year round. Maintaining a city lifestyle requires paying for an apartment, dining out, and entertainment. leaving them little or no income to bring home.

In stark contrast, the manual laborers stay at free housing provided by the contractor. Food is either provided for or the villagers cook for themselves with the tsampa, butter, wheat flour, cooking oil, potato they take from home, so only vegetables need to be bought. They seldom bring meat with them from their homes because of the lack of refrigerating facilities. And due to considerations of cost, they do not buy meat or eat meat dishes often. They spend little by going to relatively inexpensive teashops to have some sweet tea or Tibetan style noodles, and otherwise

103 only have to pay for cell phone costs and transportation so their expenses are low.

A vivid example from my fieldwork sharply contrasts the two lifestyles. In 2015, 3 villagers (two married men, and a young unmarried woman who was related to one of the men and was brought along to cook while simultaneously working as a laborer) worked for a house remodeling project in the Barkhor, the circumambulation (also doubles as a market) path around the Jokhang—the holiest temple in all Tibet—right in the heart of Lhasa. A small, bare room with a broken sofa next to the construction site was provided as their free accommodation, where they also cooked breakfast and dinner (lunch was provided by their employer).

Despite the centrality of their location in Lhasa, they told me they seldom left that part of the Barkhor where they stayed, when I asked them whether they took the opportunity to enjoy the convenient and exciting life in

Lhasa. Only one of the men, who used to be a monk, told me that he was happy that he could circumambulate the Jokhang every day before and after work.

One day I was in Lhasa running some errands, and I decided to pay them a visit. After being shown their bleak “home” that looked even worse than I had imagined, and knowing that they would not have any meat

104 dishes until their next home visit, I insisted on inviting them to a nearby

Amdo restaurant (famous for its fatty beef momo, or dumplings) to feed them with some meaty food. However, no matter how hard I tried, none of them would order the beef dumplings—claiming it was too expensive (it cost about RMB 10, about 5 times the cost of the noodle they usually took), and instead each ordered a bowl of noodles that only had dots of low- quality beef in it. Their attitude was strikingly different from the young villagers who worked “city jobs” in Lhasa. They were much more at ease eating at restaurants and cared less about the price. They readily went to restaurant, teashops, coffee shops, or dancing halls and felt at home in those places.

In 2015, there were 10 young villagers worked different types of “city jobs.” The majority of them were working as waiters, waitresses, shopkeepers and they spent most of their time in the city and only returned to Dekyi during harvesting and during Tibetan New Year. But as was mentioned earlier, despite the fact that they worked for a longer period during the year, they usually brought much less income home than the ones working as laborers. On average, the 10 individuals contributed RMB 3,140 per household, and 4 of them did not bring any money home at all.

105 State Jobs

Another emerging trend of income seeking behavior is the emphasis placed on getting formal state jobs, including formal employment in governmental agencies, public schools, hospitals, or state-owned enterprises. Formal employees of these state agencies differ from contract employees in the same agencies in that their job is more secure and paid higher than the contract employees, and they are entitled to state- sponsored substantive pensions, whereas the contract employees are not.

The following analysis reveals the wide gap in benefits between the formal and contract state employees.

Altogether, 5 villagers were formal state employees. Two of them were still working (one was the village party secretary/vice township head and the other was a teacher at the township primary school) and three of them retired (two retired from the Mechanization Team and one retired from the township primary school). The retirees received a pension that was equal or even slightly more than the salary they received at the time of their retirement.9 Therefore I grouped them together in the same category.

9 Favorable retirement plans for formal state employees have been implemented intermittently in Tibet. Most recently, they were implemented in Tibet in 2016 and as a result, a formal state employee who was qualified for regular or early retirement and chose to retire that year would receive a pension exceeding his

106 The five of them had an average annual income of RMB 71,520. Meanwhile, there were 4 contract state workers: two village doctors, one village head, and one village committee member. In stark contrast, these four contract workers received an average income of RMB 13,150 annually, more than 5 times lower than their formal counterparts.

This discrepancy was especially bitterly felt by the two village doctors who worked at the township clinic. Both of them were middle-aged and were trained in special secondary medical schools (ch. zhongzhuan), which was considered to be less prestigious than the college medical schools. And without a formal 4-year college medical education, they were hired as contract doctors at the township clinic. They had the same responsibilities as the “formal” doctors, and they often worked more because they were more sought after by the villagers for their experience. In contrast, the formal doctors were mostly young graduates who were sent to work in the township hospital. These two more experienced village doctors, however, received 1/4 or 1/5 the formally employed young doctors.

or her salary at the time of retirement. This led many state employees to choose an early retirement for themselves fearing such a policy would be revoked with the change of leadership of the TAR.

107 The pay discrepancy during work, expands even more after retirement. Because contract state workers are not permanently affiliated with the state agencies, they are not entitled to the generous pension scheme enjoyed by formal government employees. For instance, these two village doctors have rural household registration, so would receive a pension for rural elderly when they turn 60. However, this pension is low.

Rural villages aged 60 and above have recently started to receive a modest pension through a newly-implemented Rural Pension Scheme. In 2015, each elderly received a pension of RMB 1,440 (around USD 222) per year. Unless the rural pension is significantly increased, which is unlikely, the two village doctors would receive an annual pension a little more than RMB 1,440, almost 10 times less than what they received before retirement. But this decrease is more striking if we compare it with the pensions received by the three formal state retirees in the village. Their pensions ranged from RMB

60,000 (USD 11,630) to 84,000 (USD 12,923), or 50 times more than what an average rural pensioner in Tibet would receive.

Thus, the 5 families that were fortunate enough to have a member working as formal state employees, all belonged to wealthiest strata in the village. And It is hardly surprising to see a unique income-seeking pattern of placing unprecedented importance on obtaining state jobs emerged in

108 Dekyi village, or in the TAR in general. This also reflects the fact that such opportunities to obtain state jobs are becoming more attainable to rural

Tibetans, which in turn has created unprecedented passion for education in recent years.

To sum up, while “going for income” (Goldstein et al. 2008) remains the dominant type of income-seeking behaviors, two other types of income seeking are also emerging. Though “city jobs” and formal state jobs involve only a small number of villagers, they have vastly different impacts on household income. While getting “city jobs” are not very useful in increasing family economic position, securing formal state employment is the best way to get rich.

Household Headship and Decision-Making

So far, the family system, marriage practices, household structures, and the income-seeking patterns in Dekyi have been examined. These factors produced another distinct feature of the Dekyi family system— women are predominantly the household heads. Household heads (HH) are called kimdag (tib. khyim bdag) throughout Tibet.10 Jiao (2001), in his study

10 However, there are two “types” of kimdag in Dekyi: one on paper; one in effect. In the household registration card (ch. hukou ben), usually a senior male

109 of a Tsang village, describes kimdag as dealing with “affairs outside of the domestic routine”, such as “the management of farming, animal herding, trading and sideline work” (95). In addition, the kimdag “represents the family and participates in community social and political affairs,” and “[h]is authority is not only respected by family members, but also by members of the community” (95). He further elaborates on the ways the household head’s authority manifests in daily life:

He sits in the priority seat in the house and is always the first to be served food. In community gatherings, he and other household heads are treated importantly in terms of the serving of barley beer and the seating arrangement (Jiao 2001, 95).

He argues that this is perhaps because “Tibetan kinship is bilateral,

[so] there is a strong patrilineal bias in terms of inheritance and succession to authority. Consequently, the household head in Dechen is almost always male, although if a household has no adult males, a widow or unmarried mother can serve as the household head. Similarly, the headship is usually passed from father to older son” (Jiao 2001, 96).

member of the family is registered as the household head (ch. huzhu), reflecting a patriarchal tendency in both the Chinese and Tibetan family system. In daily family affairs, however, the actual kimdag of a household is considered the one who controls the household income by the local villagers.

110 Jiao (2014) also mentioned another type of headship—nangma (tib. nang ma), mother of the house. In other words, nangma is the female head of household (FHH) (See also Goldstein et al. 2013). According to Jiao (2014) a FHH has:

broad authority over the household’s internal operation. Her main responsibilities involve preparing daily food for the family (or if it is a large family, overseeing this work, looking after young children, milking cows once a day, processing milk into butter, overseeing the kitchen and clean up tasks, and so on. She also supervises and assigns tasks that are related women’s work and house chores, keeps the keys to the storeroom, and is responsible for both keeping track of food on hand and husbanding foodstuffs so the resources are used evenly and family does not run out of food. This control of the storeroom keys is symbolic of her domination of domestic life, and her prestige is well illustrated by the Dechen wedding ceremony (102).

Dekyi household headship differs from what have been described in these patrilocal areas in four key aspects. First, instead of men, women tend to be household heads in Dekyi. Based on the household survey, 50 (77%) had female household heads. By comparison, only 9 households (14%) were headed by a male member, and 6 households (9%) had joint household heads—usually a middle-aged couple who co-managed the family budget and household affairs (See Table 3-10).

111 Table 3–10 Household Headship of Dekyi, 2015

Male Female Joint Total # households headed 9 48 6 63 by married # households headed 0 2 o 2 by unmarried % 14 77 9 100

Second, household headship in Dekyi entails different meaning from that in the patrilocal areas. In Dekyi, the kimdag, refers to the one who has control over the purse strings of the household income and manages the daily affairs such as buying grocery, arranging the tasks of the day, or deciding on what gifts to present to a household having a celebration.

When members of the households need to buy things, they have to ask the kimdag for money. But there is no division between a kyimdag and nangma. When I asked the villagers if there is nangma, they mistook it for the Tibetan dance halls that are also called nangma, but here refers to a homonym that is a Tibetan song style. After I described to them that it had to do with the management of food, etc, they told me that they did not have such a term, but married women in households had a similar role managing food, caring for children, milking cows, or washing clothing. In Dekyi, there

112 were no locked storerooms of food items that only the nangma had the key to, although household income was safely hidden in a place (not always locked) that the kimdag knew.

Thus, the definition household headship in Dekyi does not have a strict domestic and outside division—such as the distinctive sphere and responsibilities of HH and FHH—as in patrilocal areas. Admittedly, in male-headed households in Dekyi, the male-female distinction is similar to that in patrilocal areas. But even in such situations, women’s symbolic domination of the domestic sphere through the control of keys is absent.

Third, the defining characteristic of headship in Dekyi is the control of the household budget, and the headship is devoid of the formal authority that accompanies headship found in patrilocal areas. These female household heads also represent their respective households in social and community events, but they do not enjoy the type of formal authority as described in Jiao (2001, 2014). In families, only the elderly—both male and female—would occupy the best seats and beds of the household and would be served food first. In social occasions, usually men—regardless their age or their headship—are treated importantly. For instance, during mutual help events, when meals were served, male members were seated on

Tibetan-style sofas (also functioned as beds at night) inside the main room

113 of the house on the second floor and were served with one or two extra dishes. On the contrary, all women sat on the floor in the courtyard having their meals, without the one or more extra dishes the males were served.

Finally, while it is clear that household heads are responsible for daily financial and domestic management and that, important decisions such as buying a tractor, getting into a business, or buying animals are usually reached by discussing this with all adult members, the authority of making the final decision usually remains with the kimdag and her or his spouse.

The reasons villagers gave to explain their unusually high percentage of women-headed households were two-fold. One the one hand, they said it was because the men often migrated to work and their absence made it a convenient, or even necessary practice to have women as household heads.

On the other hand, village men and women often commented that it was better to have women as household heads, because women were less wasteful than men. It was widely believed that men—especially young sons and sons-in-law—were wasteful. They were said to have many expensive habits, smoking cigarette, drinking beer, frequenting teashops, and worst of all, gambling. Village women also smoked and drank, but they usually smoked home-made snuff (tib. sna ta), and drank home-made barley beer,

114 and thus the cost was much less than buying the commercial goods. They only went to teashops occasionally, and virtually no women gambled.11 Such a perception about men was best summed up by a village man, when he told me how fortunate he was because he had only daughters. He said,

“Sons and sons-in-law smoke, drink, go to the teahouses, go to the dance halls, and they play mahjong. They squander all their money, and in the end, they come home and beg their parents for money. Sons [and sons-in- law] are useless.”

Both claims sound plausible. Though it would be difficult to trace every expenditure in the household to prove that men are indeed more wasteful than women, it is possible to examine the claim that there are “no men” at home to be household heads by analyzing the number of adult men in a household and their migrant work status. The following table compares the male presence at home among female-headed, male-headed, and jointly-headed households.

11 One eccentric elderly widow was a conspicuous exception. She spent most her time drinking beer, smoking cigarette, and gambling. She was fortunate to have a son who was a high official (thus rich) in Nagchu area of Tibet and this son footed her bills, even though she was living with her other son and daughter-in- law.

115 Table 3–11 Adult Male Presence and Migration Status 2015

Female-Headed Male-Headed Joint-Headed Households # Households # Households # (%) (%) (%) Having no adult working 4 (8%)* 0 1 (17%)** males

Having only one adult male 29 (58%) 2 (22%) 0 who migrates to work

Having only one adult male 11 (22%) 0 2 (33%) who stays at home

Having two adult males: one 6 (12%) 7 (78%) 3 (50%) stays at home, one migrates to work Total 50 (100%) 9 (100%) 6 (100%)

* They were all widows. ** This was the household with two unmarried sisters who co-managed the households.

Table 3-11 shows that in the female-headed households, 58% of the households had only one adult male who migrated to work during the slack season, but came home to help with farm work when needed.

Contrastingly, in the male-headed households, 78% of them had two adult males, and the male household heads remained at home while their sons or sons-in-law did migrant work to bring cash home. Additionally, 50% of the joint-headed households also had two adult males, one migrated to work and one stayed. These statistics, thus, directly and indirectly lent support to

116 the villagers’ explanation that the male’s “absence” or “presence” at home was associated with their decision of headship.

This explanation, however, provides only part of the story. The statistics also beg the question why, the 17 households that had males who did not migrate to work, chose to have female household heads, or among the 9 male-headed households, why the women were not household heads.

There were, unfortunately, no short answers to these questions. As regards to the first question, when I asked the household members why men were not selected as household heads when they were available to serve as such, I was often reminded by my interlocutors that men were wasteful, so it was better to have women as household heads. But the answer to the second question may suggest some other explanations. Out of the 9 households having male heads, six of them were considered to be out of necessity. For instance, in five households, it was because the wives of these males considered themselves incapable of managing finances—two of these women claimed that they could not even tell the differences between different bank notes. In other words, the male household heads were not

117 the first choice: their wives were, but the headship passed to them because the wives could not serve as such. 12

In contrast, only 3 represented the genuine situation in which the males were the first choice to be household heads. One case involved a middle-aged man Lobsang and his family. He was now in his 40s and married into Dekyi first as a magpa into his wife’s family. He was very capable and strong-minded and therefore had clashed with his father-in- law, also capable and strong-headed. They eventually split and Lobsang and his wife established their neolocal household. Perhaps because of his strong personality, he became the household head. This rather peculiar case aside, the other two cases were more illuminating because of a pattern they revealed. Both households involved here used to be large taxpayer households in the traditional society and both men inherited household headship from their respective fathers. Additionally, both of their marriages were patrilocal. The last two cases suggested the role of post-marital

12 The last case of male headship out of necessity involved a tricycle rickshaw driver and his family. The rickshaw driver was the household head because of an unusual situation. He spent most of his time in Lhasa working and taking care of their two sons, both in high school. His wife stayed behind in the village working the farm, but visited her husband and sons from time to time. Thus, in a sense, their “home” had at least temporarily shifted to Lhasa and it made more sense for the husband to be the household head.

118 residence might have played in the phenomenon of female household headship in Dekyi.

In other words, matrilocality could potentially explain that men are seemingly only the second choice to be household heads. Specifically, in the matrilocal family system, land was usually inherited through women, which certainly had some effect in elevating women’s standing vis-à-vis their incoming husbands. Besides the inherited land, women also made significant contribution to household economy and the proper functioning of the households. First, when their husbands left the village to seek temporary work, women were the ones who did all the farm work as well as raised cattle during their husbands’ absence. It was often said that the only farm work a Dekyi woman could not do yet was driving a tractor. And farm work aside, women also shouldered virtually all household chores, childrearing, and eldercare.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, before marriage, women were as likely as men to seek non-farm income. Though women largely stopped migrant work after marriage, there were also increasing opportunities for women to work for cash income while remaining in the village. In 2015 and

2016, for example, there were several construction projects in the township and one right in Dekyi. As a result, many married women worked these

119 manual labor jobs for cash income when they could make time for that.

Echoing Yan’s (2003) analysis how women in rural China became decision- makers of the household through their contributions to household economics and functioning, I also argue that the Dekyi women’s contribution to the households in the post-reform era makes it possible for them to have the final say in the households.

120 CHAPTER FOUR

LIVING ARRANGEMENTS,

FILIAL PIETY, AND THE STATUS OF THE ELDERLY

Soon after I entered my field site in Dekyi village, I saw an elderly woman loitering around “my home” a lot.1 It did not take long for the pattern of her daily routine became clear to me: she would usually stop by my place around noon and/or in the late afternoon, spinning a prayer wheel in one hand and counting her rosary in the other, while quietly chanting prayers. If the door of the room next to mine was open—when it was, a TV was almost always on—she would linger for a longer time, leaning on the door and intently watching whatever was showing on TV. All of the time the busy praying activities of her hands and mouth continued.

I managed to talk to her and learned that her name was Lhamo. She said that she was in fact my “neighbor” and her home was right next to

1 That was during the first month after my entering the field. At the time, I was staying in the temporary housing for the Zhucun cadres.

121 mine. She circumambulated the village doing prayers three times each day, morning, noon, and afternoon and my home was on the last leg of her route. She loved to stop by to rest, chat, and watch TV before going home.

Lhamo seemed to be happy and healthy, but when I told other villagers about my encounter with her, I found myself inevitably being asked a seemingly rhetorical question: “Do you know where she lives?”

It turned out that what I took for her home was in fact her son’s house. They shared the courtyard and the gate to it, but her home was a one-story, one-room, mud house located inside an animal pen that was littered with fodder and animal excrement. It stood beside her son’s two- story house. She did not have electricity in her mud house until two years ago when her son finally connected electricity from his house over to hers.

She had no TV set. That was the reason for her daily TV watching ritual at my “home,” an activity she obviously enjoyed.

She had split with her son’s family because of her bad relationship with her daughter-in-law and had moved out of the two-story house she used to share with her son into the shabby room he built for her. Lhamo was 63 years old, never married, and had only one child—a son—from an affair with a married man. Among the 24 elderly living in the village, she was the only elderly person who lived by herself, cooked for herself, and

122 cared for herself. She was the closest case in Dekyi to elder abuse, and a daily reminder to all villagers of how true their fear of a nama, or daughter- in-law, was.

It was often said that Lhamo’s misfortune was the result of having no daughters. Middle-aged village women often joked with me that they were afraid of daughters-in-law, because “when daughters-in-law arrive, parents’ faces become ugly.” This, echoes what Milarepa, a beloved 11-12th century

Buddhist yogi in Tibet, famously sang,

He brings home the daughter of some strange man And turns outside his kindly father and mother. (Clarke 1958: 31)

The Dekyi villagers claimed it is precisely because of their fear of daughters-in-law, that they and their fellow Phenpowa, practice matrilocal marriage. By keeping their daughters at home, they solve two dreaded problems. First, they conveniently eliminate the difficult mother- and daughter-in-law relations and thus build a generally champo (tib. ’cham po, generally translated as harmonious or friendly, see Goldstein 1994, 412) family. Second, for most parents, living with daughters means better old age care because it is culturally believed that daughters will give more loving care than sons or daughters-in-law. This chapter examines such issues and

123 is organized around three important aspects of eldercare: 1) living arrangements; 2) filial piety; 3) the current status of the elderly.

Living Arrangements

In societies lacking adequate social security systems, living arrangements of the elderly—whether they live with a child or live alone— is a critical factor determining the type and amount of old age support an elderly obtains. The latest CLAS (China Longitudinal Aging Survey) carried out nationwide in China in 2014 reports that the 88.1% of the elderly now receive some sort of pension, but the rural-urban divide is substantial.

While urban retirees from state-owned enterprises or governmental organizations received a median pension of around RMB 2,500 (USD 384) monthly, elderly urban residents (with urban household registration but who did not hold state jobs in the past) received a median monthly pension of RMB 900 (USD 138). In stark contrast, the rural residents (with rural household registration) received a median monthly pension of only RMB 60

(USD 9), constituting less than ¼ of the estimated average monthly expenses. Consequently, while pensions amount to 82.1% of the urban

124 elderly’s source of old age support, for a rural elderly, it accounts for only

14.6%. Consequently, support from children is still the most important source of support for the rural elderly (39.4%) (NSRCRUC 2014), even though the elderly now receive some forms of pension.

In Dekyi village, thanks to the introduction of the New Rural

Pension Scheme (often referred to in Chinese in its shortened form: xin nong bao), Dekyi elderly started to receive a small pension since 2010. In

2015, each villager aged 60 and above received a monthly pension of RMB

120 (USD 18). Pensions will be further discussed later in this chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that this was not enough for the elderly to be self- sufficient, and thus living with an adult child remained a crucial factor for an elderly to obtain old age support and care.

The 24 villagers (16 females and 8 males) aged 60 and above in 2015 lived in 20 households. For convenience, I follow the WHO convention to define elderly as being aged 60 or above.2 But such a divide is artificial. In

Dekyi, there are two main indicators when a woman or a man is considered to be “old,” gengo [tib. rgan gog] in Tibetan. First, a woman or a man becomes old when she or he stops doing the hard field work. An elderly

2 WHO Fact Sheets: Aging and Health. http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/ageing-and-health, accessed April 24, 2018)

125 person may continue to help with some insubstantial farm work if her or his help is needed, but she or he is not expected to engage in hard work such as irrigating the land or harvesting the crops. Instead, the proper work for an elderly to do is, for example, to help with cooking or other errands during the busy harvest season. Another indicator is when the villagers start to call this person momo (tib. rmo mo), grandma, or popo (tib. po po) grandpa.

However, that is not always the case, for example, there is one elderly man named Tashi who just turned 60 in 2015 and was still active in farm work, but villagers were starting to call him popo.

Among the 24 elderly, 3 elderly women and 1 elderly man were never married, 11 elderly were either a widow or a widower, and 9 elderly still had a spouse.3 As Table 4-1 below shows, 88% of the elderly were living with a son or daughter and virtually all of the children these elderly lived with were married.

3 The odd number is due to the fact that three elderly had spouses who are younger than 60 years old, and therefore are not considered as elderly.

126

Table 4–1 Living Arrangements of the Elderly Parents in 2015

# of Elderly Men of Elderly Living Arrangements Aged 60 & Above Aged 60 & above Living with a married daughter 16 67% Living with an unmarried daughter 1 4% Living with a married son 4 17% Living with an unmarried son 0 0% living with spouse only 1 4% Living alone 1 4% Living in an elderly home 1 4% Total 24 100%

In addition, as Table 4-1 reveals, the data is consistent with the local

custom of matrilocal marriage in that 17 elderly, accounting for 71% of all

elderly, lived with a daughter, compared to only 4 elderly (17%) who lived

with a son. But as was also seen in Table 4-1, some elderly did not live with a

child, either a son or daughter.

127 Living Alone, Living in an Elderly Home and Living with a Spouse Only

Regarding the three atypical cases shown in Table 4-1, in which an elderly person was not living with a child, one was the elderly woman

Lhamo who was described at the beginning of this chapter. After splitting with her son and daughter-in-law due to mother- and daughter-in-law conflicts about 12 years ago, Lhamo gave up her share of land to her son.

But as compensation, she received tsampa, wheat flour, cooking oil, and potatoes from her son’s family and a little bit of meat and butter annually.

She also had an elderly pension (RMB 1,440 for 2015), as well as a reward for having given birth to only one child4 (RMB 960 for 2015). These were her only sources of income and she said it was enough, but she led a very frugal life. In addition, she had to collect fuel, carry water, cook for herself, and wash her own clothing. Her situation was pitied by all villagers. Lhamo's story will be dealt more in the next chapter.

Another was a widowed elderly woman named Chokyi who lived in the Elderly Home in the County Seat. She was the mother-in-law of Nyima, whose misfortune and the resultant polyandrous marriage was detailed in

Chapter 3. We already know that after her daughter and later, her grandson,

4 In China, as part of One Child Policy, women having only one child are given a small financial reward called "Single Child Benefit" (ch. dusheng zinü fei).

128 died, she and Nyima split, after which, Nyima joined his brother’s family as the co-husband, and Chokyi ended up in the elderly home. But her journey to the Elderly Home was not immediate, and was illustrative of one way that such cases were dealt with.

Chokyi first moved in and lived with her eldest son who had a separate household in Dekyi. This move, however, was difficult from the start. Her son had a stroke about 8 years earlier and had been wheelchair bound ever since, whereas Chokyi had cataracts in both her eyes and was almost blind at the time (she had since had a free operation on one eye arranged by the Elderly Home). Chokyi and her son, therefore, were both reliant on the nama, Mimar, who had no helpers at all. She had three sons, one of which, the youngest, was in college. The eldest son was a tourist jeep driver in Lhasa and had established his own household in the city. Her middle son was the selected inheritor and he was not yet married and worked as a contract driver for the township officials so he did not live in the village. Thus, none of Mimar’s children was available to help with the overwhelming caregiving task. Nor did they bring in a wife for the son who could help.

After about a year, Chokyi’s co-living with her son’s family proved to be too big a burden for Mimar. They had quarrels and neither was happy.

129 Recognizing such a living arrangement with her son would not work out in the long term, she decided to leave. She was one of the most outgoing and talkative elderly in the village, which was viewed negatively by her fellow villagers as being overly gossipy and aggressive. This personality certainly earned her some bad reputation, but helped her to be outspoken about her needs and she pressed the village officials to find a solution to her situation.

They first arranged her to stay in the Village Committee conference room and eat with the Zhucun cadres for about a year, and then they managed to arrange for her to live in the state-run Elderly Home in the County Seat.

Only elderly without children are eligible to be admitted to state-run, free

Elderly Home, so since Chokyi still had living children, the village leaders had to make special arrangements for her with upper-level government agencies, but they were successful.

Chokyi had lived in the Elderly Home for about a year. There she was provided free food, accommodations, and basic care. In addition, she could keep her pension, which she used to buy special treats like momo and clothing, or to fund her pilgrimage trips. She also saved part of her pension and gave it to her daughter-in-law as assistance. She only visited Dekyi during the Tibetan New Year, or sometimes during special occasions (like her youngest grandson’s college admission party). But her relatives,

130 including her daughter-in-law, visited her regularly and brought her snacks and fresh farm produce such as potatoes. She was so well adapted to life in the elderly home that one of the most beloved rumors in the village was that she had even got a boyfriend in the elderly home. Chokyi told me that she was happy and grateful. Her only problem was, as she tearfully told me,

“I miss my son.”

The third case of “living alone” was Tashi who I mentioned earlier.

He was living with his middle-aged wife, Budri. Like Chokyi, those two ending up living alone because of misfortune. The elderly couple had only two sons and had planned to keep their younger son in the household and have him take a bride and inherit it. This son, however, died 7 years ago in a motorbike accident, leaving his parents and his “girlfriend” and infant daughter (who was born four days before her father’s death) behind. The mother of his daughter was from another family in the village and there had been talk of marriage after the childbirth (as was mentioned earlier, it is now customary to have a child before marriage negotiations commence).

But the young man’s untimely death changed the trajectory of both families involved. The marriage certainly vanished, and the new mother was kept at home, instead of the initial plan of sending her as a nama and keeping her older sister at the natal home. For Tashi and Budri, their hope of

131 establishing an extended stem family with her younger son was crushed.

The choice of their younger son as the successor was not random. It was in fact a carefully thought out choice because the wife of their older son was notoriously difficult.

Their older son was already married neolocally in the village. He and his wife had one daughter in middle school and one in primary school. He mostly lived in Lhasa, driving a tourist jeep, whereas his wife—Pemo—lived in Dekyi, operating a teashop. Despite being a teashop hostess, she was well-known for her rudeness. She never had really good relation with her parents-in-law, but the situation never got too bad because they lived separately. After the tragedy, the elderly couple, especially Budri, hoped they could form one extended stem family, so they could have someone to care for them in their later years when they got weak.

Although it didn’t work out, Tashi and Budri had managed well so far, partly because of Tashi’s substantial income. He was one of two retirees from the Mechanization Team (ch. jidong dui) of the Phenpo State Farm and as such he was entitled to a monthly salary of ￥ 7,000. In addition,

Tashi just turned 60 and was in good health and his wife is younger, although she had a knee problem. Also, his wife had many siblings in the village, so they could still get by with the help from her relatives. The fear of

132 later years, however, was always on Budri’s mind. And this was motivating her to make all kinds of efforts to gain the favor of her daughter-in-law, but she had not yet succeeded. Tashi, however, was less concerned, perhaps emboldened by his economic power and his relative “youth” and health. He was less tolerant towards his daughter-in-law’s disrespectful behaviors towards them, and thus he had a more strained relation with his daughter- in-law.

Co-residence of Elderly and their Children

As was indicated above, virtually all the elderly in Dekyi lived with a child. Regarding the 4 elderly living with married sons and daughters-in- law, only one of the elderly woman had no daughters to choose, while of the other three elderly, one elderly couple and an elderly man lived with a married son despite having daughters.

As was briefly mentioned in the previous chapters, the elderly couple initially arranged a matrilocal marriage for their only daughter and lived with their daughter and son-in-law. Both father-in-law, Gyaltsen, and son- in-law, Lobsang, were capable and strong-headed. And they had clashes and they finally split after an incident involving a yak about 7 years ago. For reasons that I could not fully figure out, one day Gyaltsen went to the

133 People’s Court in Lhündrup County (presumably as one party of a case) and returned home with a yak as compensation instead of cash. Lobsang was not happy about it and had quarrel with his father-in-law, Gyaltsen. Later,

Gyaltsen accused Lobsang of not caring for the yak and in the end asked his daughter and son-in-law to move out. Meanwhile, Gyaltsen’s youngest son—who married to his wife’s household as a magpa—returned to Dekyi with his wife and children, citing he had health issues. They stayed in a rented spare house of a fellow villager. Gyaltsen then asked his son to move into his house and made the son the heir. Though neither Gyaltsen nor his son said this was planned, others, including Lobsang, the son-in-law, felt it was intentional.

Lobsang told me that he was very bitter about it at the time of the split, because he felt he was kicked out of a house to which he and his wife had contributed a lot. But he also said that as compensation, he received good quality land and his father-in-law also paid for them to build a one- story house and helped them buy furniture. Lobsang’s wife was very sad about the split but said she had no choice but to follow her husband for the sake of their two children. The ill feelings between Gyaltsen and Lobsang took some years to dissipate. But nowadays, they were on good terms and helped with each other with work as relatives did.

134 The other case was the family of an elderly man of 78 years old of age and his much younger wife who was in her late 50s. Although, they had a daughter, they chose to live with their youngest son, because the daughter had long married out and the mother and son had good relationship.

Thus in Dekyi village, with only these few exceptions, all other elderly lived in extended stem families with a child, and what is significant is that the overwhelming majority of these lived with a married daughter in a matrilocal marriage. This is the culturally ideal living situation for the elderly, since living in an extended household in old age provides the elderly with the support they need—food, clothes, shelter, and service—at a time when they are becoming physically weak and cannot do productive work anymore. With respect to residence patterns, therefore, the elderly in

Dekyi are still residing in the traditionally appropriate situation. These findings parallel findings in other Tibetan regions where elderly co- residence with a child occurred in also over 90% of the cases (Childs,

Goldstein, and Wangdui 2011).

135 The Cultural Ideal of Old Age Care: Tibetan Filial Piety

The keystone of old age support and care in Tibet is that children must repay the kindness of their parents, “pha ma’i bka’ drin gsabs dgos red,” or “pha ma’i drin lan ‘jal dgos red” (Sung 2001, 2007; Lo 2004; Goldstein and

Beall 1997; Tsomo 1988). These sayings resonate with a Buddhist “filial piety” ideology that culminates in the “Sutra about the Deep Kindness of

Parents and the Difficulty of Repaying It,” or more aptly called “the Sutra of

Filial Piety.”5 The Sutra expounds the difficulties of raising children, extols the boundless kindness of parents, especially the mother, and emphasizes adult children’s obligations to repay their parents’ kindness. This is a paramount task that is almost impossible, as explains the Sutra “If a person were to circumambulate Mount Sumeru6 for a hundred thousand cycles, that person would still not have repaid the kindness of his parents”

(Nicholson 2000).

Nevertheless, Buddhist filial piety, represented by the Sutra, is highly influenced by the famed Confucian filial piety. In fact, the Sutra itself is said

5 It’s called ma yi drin lan gzo ba’i mdo in Tibetan. 6 Also known as Mount Meru. It is a sacred mountain with five peaks in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology and is considered to be the center of all the physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes.

136 to be of apocryphal nature and was created by the early Chinese Buddhists in their efforts to reconcile and assimilate the fundamentally different

Buddhist ideology, which is essentially family-renouncing, with Confucian filial culture, which cultivates a cult of family and ancestors (Arai 2010; Sung

2007; Ch’en 1973). Buddhist filial piety even outdoes the Confucian: it prescribes more severe and grave consequences of unfilial behaviors by couching it “in terms of hell wherein unfilial children would face torture, sufferings and the eventual karma in which they would be transformed to beasts” (Sung 2007: 200).

Buddhist filial piety has spread all over Asian through the Sutra and is especially influential in East Asian countries where Confucian ideologies have a strong hold. Perhaps due to the lack of such a Confucian culture, In

Tibet, Buddhist filial piety is relatively subdued. No one—not even the monks or scholars I have interviewed—knows about this sutra personally.

In addition, monks and villagers were unfamiliar with the fantastic filial stories in another scripture called “Sutra on the Skillful Means for Repaying

Kindness.”7 One learned Tibetan monk I first met at a wedding (he was a guest as a relative) and then befriended, was at a loss when I asked him

7 In Chinese: da fangbian fo bao’en jing, and in Tibetan: thabs mkhas pa len po sang rgyas drin lan bsab pa’i mdo, or ’phags pa drin lan bsab pa’i mdo.

137 what Buddha taught about treating elderly parents. After some time, he told me that children are deeply indebted to their parents, “pha ma’i bka’ drin che shos red.” As a result, children should treat their parents well.

Otherwise, as the Tibetan monk told me, there would be “las rgyu 'bras,” or karma and retribution. But he added, sometimes, it is possible that parents are not well treated by their children because of their own bad karma.

Nevertheless, Dekyi villagers are less concerned with the scriptures.

They simply say that “pha ma la gus zhabs zhu dgos red, zhabs phyi zhu dgos red,” meaning that one should respect and serve one's parents (Goldstein and Beall 1997.) Thus, not unlike the famous Confucian filial piety, but certainly not as articulated, the Tibetan equivalent of filial piety also requires that “children should respect, assist and obey their parents”

(Goldstein 1997: 157; also see Childs, Goldstein, and Wangdui 2011).

Status of the Elderly

The data show that at least for the current generation of elderly parents and their young to middle-aged children, the obligations of filial piety and the logic of intergenerational exchanges remained intact. In

138 practice, the elderly were generally well provided for and respected. This can be illustrated by examining the different dimensions of the elderly status. As I have cited in Chapter 1, Goldstein and Beall (1981, 1982) propose that the elderly status be disaggregated to nine different aspects. Again, these are:

(a) social status (prestige), (b) biological status (e.g., biological function, physical fitness), (c) health status (morbidity), (d) activity status (physical work undertaken), (e) authority status (power and authority exercised in the community and family), (f) economic status (control of resources and wealth), (g) household status (household composition), (h) psychological status (satisfaction with personal situation), (i) ritual status (role played in ritual life) (Goldstein and Beall 1982, 745).

This framework will be utilized to evaluate the different aspects of the elderly status, but based on the situation in Dekyi, slight adjustments have been made. Since I did not have the tools to measure the biological fitness, this aspect of elderly status is not evaluated. In addition, due to the close association between activity status and physical health among the

Dekyi elderly, the two categories were combined into physical health status.

Finally, religious status was also adjusted in order to reflect the circumstances in Dekyi. Thus, this study examined 7 dimensions of the elderly status in Dekyi: 1) social status, 2) authority status, 3) economic

139 status, 4) household status, 5) physical health status, 6) psychological health status, and 7) religious status.

First, the Dekyi elderly enjoyed high social status, which was evaluated mainly by the degree of respects accorded to the elderly in social interactions. All elderly claimed they were well respected at home and in social interactions. My observation also showed that the elderly were generally treated well and shown respect both at home and public spaces.

At home, the elderly were usually served first at meals, and in general, the elderly’s beds were the ones that received the most sunshine for warmth.

During colder days, when the indoor stove was set up for cooking and heating, the elderly usually occupied the warmest spots near the stove. For the elderly over 70 years old or those who are weaker, beds were also made for them. At public spaces such as in teashops where the elderly men sometimes went for some entertainment or while waiting to pick up their grandchildren, elderly were often treated with free sweet tea, and sometimes even noodles, by the younger patrons. While Dekyi villagers did not use the Lhasa honorific system of speaking, the gestures they made toward them indicated respectfulness.

Second, the Dekyi elderly’s high social status, however, did not extend to their authority status. Goldstein and Beall (1981, 1982) defined the

140 authority status as the elderly’s power and authority in their community and family. With respect to this same criterion, it was found that the elderly did not automatically hold high authority in either the community or families based merely on their seniority. Rather, power and authority were based on capability and usually reserved to the males who were considered to be capable and knowledgeable such as the elected village heads and were still actively engaged in village affairs. For instance, one elderly man was widely considered to be very capable during his younger years and might have enjoyed high authority during those years. But now he was just respected as any other elderly but did not have any concrete power or authority over village affairs.

The situation was similar at home. While the elderly enjoyed power and authority when they were household heads in the past, their authority over family affairs passed down to their children after the headship transfer.

But as was analyzed in Chapter 3, the Dekyi household headship was mainly concerned with managing the household income, and family decisions over important issues were communally made rather being solely made by the household heads. Thus, even after the elderly had passed the headship to their children, they were consulted on family affairs, but their opinions did not carry any special weight. The story of a family’s decision to invest in an

141 expensive excavator was a case in point. An elderly woman told me that her daughter (household head) and son-in-law asked her opinion about the investment and she told them that it was a bad idea because it was too risky. Despite her concern, her daughter and son-in-law made their own evaluations and went ahead with the plan.

In general, 12 elderly (50%) who were either the HH or the spouse of the HH said that they had authority over family affairs, and the rest 12 elderly (50%) who had passed down their headship said that they were still consulted from time to time, but their words were not always followed.

Third, with regards to their economic status—control of resources and wealth, the picture is also murky. In the stem family system, the household head is the one who controls family land and the family wealth.

As shown in Table 4-2, 12 elderly (including the ones living alone) were either the HH or the spouse of HH, and thus they had control over their household or personal income. The other 12 elderly already passed their household headship to their daughters, sons, and daughters-in-law and had no control over family income.

142 Table 4–2 Headship among Households with Elderly 2015

Elderly Living with Adult Children Elderly Living Total Alone # (%) # (%) # (%) # (%) # (%) # (%) Households Elderly Household Elderly Households Elderly s Headed by Elderly 7 (35%)* 9 (38%) 3 (15%)** 3 (12%) 10 (50%) 12 (50%) Woman

Headed by 8 (40%) 10 (42%) 0 0 8 (40%) 10 (42%) Daughter

Headed by 2 (10%) 2 (8%) 0 0 2 (10%) 2 (8%) Son-in-law

* A middle-aged woman who was married to an elderly man was calculated in this category. ** This also included a middle-aged woman, Budri, the wife of the elderly man Tashi.

As I mentioned earlier, the elderly in Dekyi also had been receiving a pension since 2010. This pension, however, was considered to be household, not personal income, and was controlled by the household heads. Table 4-3 demonstrates that, with only a few exceptions, this was generally the case.

143 Table 4–3 Pension Management Arrangements in Dekyi in 2015

Pension Management Elderly Living Elderly Living Elderly Living Elderly Living in Arrangements with Daughters with Sons Alone Elderly Home Controlled by 16 3 1 0 Household Controlled by 1 1 1 1 Oneself Total 17 4 2 1

Among the 17 elderly living with daughters, only 1 elderly controlled

their own pensions. In this only exception, the elderly woman considered

her daughter (the HH) wasteful and she negotiated to control her own

pension so she could use the money more wisely, such as buying more

durable things. She also emphasized to me that she was not using her

pension for herself, rather, she used the money to buy things for her

granddaughters and for household expenses. Among the 4 elderly living

with sons, only the idiosyncratic elderly woman who loved drinking and

smoking kept the pension for her self-use. With regards to the 3 elderly

lived by themselves or with a spouse, it was natural for them to control

their own pension.

144 To sum up, the economic status of the elderly was complicated. Half of the elderly had control over resources and wealth as household heads or spouse of household heads, and the other half did not. The potential negative impacts of the lack of control over financial resources for half of the elderly is, however, mitigated, by their household status, which will be discussed next.

Fourth, household status refers to the family structure and living arrangements of the elderly. As was analyzed at the beginning of this chapter, with only a few exceptions, the elderly lived in extended stem families and the majority of them lived in the ideal situation with married daughters in a matrilocal stem family. As a result, the elderly enjoyed high household status and they were well provided for and taken care of by their children, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law.

The story of Sangmo and her mother, Drolkar, was a case in point.

Drolkar was the oldest person in the village who also had dementia. She and her daughter had a poor relationship in the past. According to villagers and her daughter, Drolkar was a very strong-minded woman and also a bit eccentric, a quality that may run in her family.8 She considered that her

8 She is the half sister of the eccentric elderly who loves drinking beer and gambling.

145 daughter Sangmo and her son-in-law (the village head, Gyalo) were incompetent and decided to live alone. After this, she helped other villagers with work instead of her own daughter, at a time when Sangmo had three young kids and needed her mother’s childcare help the most.

This caused Sangmo and her husband some difficulties having no one to help caring for their children, as well as embarrassment as if they were mistreating their mother. They finally reconciled when Drolkar started to get weak. She moved back in with Sangmo 15 years ago at the persuasion of other villagers.

Sangmo was now one of the exemplary filial daughters. Despite the need to get as much sunshine as possible due to Tibet’s cold weather conditions, she covered the bottom half of all of the windows of her house because Drolkar was confused by her reflection in the glass and was sometimes scared. She learned to cook Chinese-style porridge with chicken—most Tibetans seldom handle or eat chicken due to religious considerations—because her mother had lost all of her teeth and also because she heard from her youngest daughter who worked at a Chinese restaurant, that chicken stews were very nutritious. She seldom took pilgrimage trips like other women of her age, because she did not want to leave her mother alone at home. She asked me, “Were it not for love, would

146 I care for my mom like what I do now considering how she treated me in the past?”

Another very memorable case was the care received by a widowed elderly man called Buchung. Twice during the 2015 Tibetan New Year at two different weddings—he was the most honored guest because one was his own granddaughter’s wedding, and the other was his older sister’s (who already passed away) granddaughter’s—I saw he was served something special during the parties after the wedding ceremony. It was not the common fare of noodle soup with radish slices that was the most typical peasant dinner served at social events.

It turned out that his son-in-law, took advantage of the ample supply of fresh yak meat at the wedding to prepare Buchung's favorite dish: sha rjen, ground raw beef mixed with chili paste, a Tibetan delicacy. The preparation generally required fresh, good quality beef (preferably yak meat) and a lot of chopping. Buchung’s family could not afford to eat sha rjen much at home because they were raising two school children, including one in a pricy private vocational school. This had made their household into one of the middle-to-poor families in the village and they did not eat beef or yak meat often. So at the weddings, his son-in-law chopped the fresh yak meat and served it to Buchung. He ate contently and slowly with pag, the

147 moistened roast barley flour and homemade barley beer. No one else was offered the special meat dish; and we quietly ate our simple noodle soup with bits of meat and lots of radish, and which required no fresh beef.

Fifth, the physical health status was measured based on the elderly’s activity level, presence or absence of morbidity, and mortality. With only one exception (Tashi), no elderly in Dekyi still did heavy labor. They mainly helped with household chores and childrearing responsibilities. When the elderly had time, they participated in religious activities, ranging from praying at home (which always involved chanting, spinning prayer wheels and counting the beads on their rosaries at the same time) to going on pilgrimage trips to monasteries and nunneries. Their ability to undertake these activities largely depended on their physical health (and their free time).

In Dekyi, no elderly had serious disabilities that prevented them from performing daily functions such as eating, dressing, and toileting by themselves. The closest case was the oldest elderly, the woman in her mid

80s. She had dementia and needed constant monitoring and some special care (i.e. bathing), but otherwise she was in good physical health and could eat, go to the toilet, dress by herself. However, 10 elderly had chronic health

148 issues9 (i.e. high/low blood pressure, chronic stomach illness, and bad legs) that were serious enough prevent them from fully helping with family chores, childrearing, or participating in religious activities. Finally, in 2015, 3 elderly got severely ill, were hospitalized, and eventually 2 of them passed away. These three episodes of severe illness and health-seeking behaviors are especially illuminating in understanding the rural health care system and the health risk factors for the elderly.

All villagers have rural collective health insurance (ch. hezuo yiliao) for a small fee (RMB 30 per person per year). Each household receives a

“medical card” (called sman deb by the villagers, literally medical book), to which money will be loaded at the beginning of each year. In 2015, the amount was RMB 123 per person. For example, if a household have four members officially registered with their households, then RMB 492 would be loaded to their medical card. Villagers could use the medical card to pay for outpatient services at the governmental township clinic and at the

Lhündrup county hospital up to the amount preloaded to their card. The medical card was used collectively by all family members, therefore the

9 Chronic health issues were defined as having an illness for over 2 years. In this category, the elderly usually talked about the illness they had suffered for a long time and had to take medication on a regular basis.

149 healthy members were subsidizing the unhealthy members for the latter’s medicines and hospital visits. When the amount was used up, villagers needed to pay out of pocket for outpatient treatments and medicines.

When it came to hospitalization, the villagers had to go through a referral system. They first needed to visit the township clinic, which also had a small capacity of two hospital beds. Doctors at the township clinic could also take patients for in-hospital treatment, and the treatment fees would be deducted from the patients’ household medical cards. Or they could refer the patients first to the county hospital, and from the county hospital, patients could be further referred to governmental hospitals in

Lhasa if the doctors feel they could not treat the disease. Treatment at the county and Lhasa hospital had to be paid in advance through paying a deposit. It was customary to ask a patient to make a deposit of RMB 1,000 or more at the beginning of hospitalization, and after a couple days, the patient would be told that the deposit had been used up and would be asked to make another deposit. The final bill would be calculated when the patient was released from the hospital. If the amount was greater than the deposits, the patient had to pay the difference before he or she could be released from the hospital. If the amount was less than the deposit, the remaining amount would be returned to the patient.

150 The patient then submitted the receipts to the township healthcare official for reimbursement. Reimbursement depended on proper referral process and taking good care of all receipts. For hospitalization in the county hospital, villagers could be reimbursed 80% of the medical costs, whereas for hospitalization in Lhasa hospitals, they were reimbursed 70% of the medical cost. However, not all of the medical costs are reimbursable. A detailed discussion of what were reimbursable and what were not was out of the scope of this dissertation, but suffice to say, in general, common, generic drugs and examinations were reimbursable, whereas special drugs

(imported drugs and special nutrition supplements) were not.

Despite the relatively generous health insurance policies, the poor- quality rural care, the villagers' unfamiliarity with modern medical system, and their delay in health seeking behaviors out of fear of high medical cost presented high risk factors for the elderly, especially when they suddenly got sick and need hospitalization.

Drolma was one of the elderly who passed away after getting sick in

2015. She was a 78-year-old widow living with her daughter and son-in-law.

Drolma was healthy before suddenly getting illness shortly after the Tibetan

New Year celebration in March 2015. When I first saw her in the fall of 2014, she was hurling small stones to guide her cows. She looked so agile and

151 energetic that I took her for a teenage girl when I saw her from afar. She regularly attended religious activities in the village and went to pilgrimage trips. Since she did not have any young grandchildren that she needed to babysit, she sometimes would do village circumambulations with Lhamo.

Money was tight in Drolma's household because her daughter and son-in- law had three school children including one in high school to support.

After she got ill, her daughter took her to the township clinic and was treated as having cold (tib. cham pa)—a common diagnosis for uncertain diseases. Despite the treatment and shabten (tib. zhabs brtan) rituals that aimed to facilitate her healing, Drolma got worse and she quickly stopped going outside and spent most of her time in bed. However, she was only taken to the county hospital for treatment in late May when she became very swollen.

She remained in hospital for two weeks, being treated with more antibiotics and the expensive nutrition supplements. No one in her family understood what was wrong, though when I went to visit her, I saw that a card attached to her hospital bed displayed her diagnosis in Chinese— pneumonia. Her swollenness did not go away. Nor did she feel better.

Considering the cost of staying in the hospital, they all decided it would be better to just go home. She received more IV treatment at home

152 administered to her by the village doctors and she died in a week. Her whole hospital bill added up to a little over RMB 10,000 and they got reimbursed for only RMB 6,600. Some of the expensive nutrition supplements were not considered regular medicine and were thus not reimbursable.

During Drolma's hospital's stay, her daughter and the niece of her son-in-law were in the hospital taking turns providing nursing care and cooking day and night. Drolma's son-in-law did not migrate to work after

Tibetan New Year that year because of Drolma's illness. He was needed at home to help with farm work and household chores while his wife cared for

Drolma. He told me that it was the first year he did not migrate to work in his adult life, adding, “I am very hardworking. For a few years, every time that I returned home, I did not even unroll my beddings.”

Chime, an elderly person who just turned 61, died in a similar pattern. He lived with his daughter and son-in-law in an average-income household. His grandchildren were both in primary school, therefore their education had not incurred high cost yet. He suddenly got sick in early

May, feeling pain all over his body and could not function. He was soon taken to township clinic for treatment with no avail. Soon several religious rituals were held to facilitate his recovery, and they did not work, either. He

153 was finally taken to the county hospital and then the hospital in Lhasa in late May. His family members did not understand what went wrong during his hospital stay. He spent one week in the hospital, but returned home from hospital in early June seeing no improvement to his symptoms. He died next day. He accumulated a hospital bill of around RMB 8,000, and got

RMB 5,000 back. His son-in-law told me that the rituals cost another RMB

2,000.

What was common in these two cases was that the initial treatment from the township clinic was timely. This was largely because villagers perceived treatment there as free because they could pay by using their medical card. But when it came to seeking hospitalized care, they hesitated even when they knew they could get reimbursed later. As the village elderly told me, they usually dugru gya (tib. sdug rus rgyag)10, meaning to endure, tolerate, bear hardship, until they could not. In other words, in order not to burden their children with high medical expenses, they endured and delayed their hospital until it was inevitable. In addition, their unfamiliarity with the Chinese medical terms might have also contributed to their reluctance in going to hospitals.

10 Translation see Goldstein 1994, 624.

154 Their cases contrasted starkly with the story of the third elderly who also got sick that year but survived. Norkyi was in her mid 60s and was recently widowed. She lived with her daughter and son-in-law, both farmers. She had another daughter married neolocally in the village to a teacher who was formally employed in the Township Primary School. Her family was wealthy because her husband, before his death (right before I started my fieldwork), was a formally employed doctor at the county hospital and therefore had received a high salary. Besides wealth, perhaps equally importantly, her deceased husband’s job as a doctor, provided the family members with the knowledge of the medical system that few of their fellow Dekyi villagers had. After Norkyi had a stroke, her son-in-law who was a teacher at the township primary school and had a minivan, drove her to the Mentsikhang (the Tibetan Medicine Hospital) in Lhasa on the same day.

This was unthinkable for most other villagers, because in order for reimbursement, they had to go through the referral process from the township to county and finally to Lhasa. Without the referral letter, the villager ran the risk of losing reimbursement. This old lady, instead, was sent to the Lhasa hospital first, and her children obtained the referral letters later. Because of the promptness of her treatment, she recovered and

155 returned to the village in about a month. Her both daughters took turns to care for her in the hospital. The total hospital bill cost around RMB 20,000, and they were reimbursed RMB 12,000. Norkyi's survival provided several lessons. First of all, their family wealth made it possible for them to seek medical help immediately without worrying about how it might burden the household. Second, their knowledge in modern medical system also facilitated their seeking help in the early stage of the illness.

In short, though all elderly were able to perform the activities of daily living without assistance, about half of the elderly complained they had chronic health issues that have restrained their activities. In addition, when they suddenly fell ill, their delay in seeking hospital care had significant negative consequences and in the case of Drolma and Chime, they died.

Six, while the physical health status among the Dekyi elderly was mixed as shown above, their psychological health status, measured by the satisfaction with their personal situations, was in general excellent. For the

21 elderly (87.5%) living with sons or daughters in extended stem families, all of them were satisfied with their situation, saying that they were well provided for in their daily lives, respected by all children, and cared for when they got ill. For the elderly in their 70s, their daughters and

156 daughters-in-law also helped them make their beds. The psychological status of the three elderly (12%) living alone or in an elderly home was less ideal. The embarrassment of not being able to live in the ideal stem family aside, the three elderly living by themselves were worried about their future when they could not perform daily functions any more. Despite their worries, they seldom complained, but tried to the make the best out of their situations by devoting to religious activities.

Seven, religious status is measured here by the elderly’s satisfaction level of their religious participation. The deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs holds that as one ages, one should devote more energy and time to religious practices in order to get ready for their rebirth, preferably a better one.

Therefore, one important dimension of elderly life is to engage in religious activities as much as possible to accumulate merits through such things as chanting prayers, spinning prayer wheels, as well as visiting monasteries, all of which are considered to be meritorious activities that can help eradicate their demerits and in turn help them to gain a more favorable rebirth in their next life. The Dekyi elderly also told me the reasons for their devotion to praying were “shi dus khyer yag yog red” (when one dies, you have something [religion] to carry) and “zhe gyi ma red.” (you are not afraid to

157 die). In other words, they would have religion to guide them through when they die, and thus they will have no fear during their death.

Despite religious participation being of utmost importance for an elderly person, the evidence for the religious status of the elderly is also mixed. On the one hand, the elderly had the resources and were encouraged by their co-residing children to participate in religious activities. On the other hand, some elderly did not have time or were not healthy enough to devote to religious activities as much as they would have wished. The most common religious activity was to chant prayers, while spinning prayer wheels and counting beads of their rosaries at the same time. This activity could be done while sitting or walking, and all elderly

(100%) did it whenever they had time (i.e. hands were free).

The other two common religious activities were to go to pilgrimage trips or attending the month-long intensive prayer session in winter.

However, only 9 elderly (37%), a minority, said they were satisfied with the time they could spend on all three religious activities. 8 elderly (33%) could not engage in religious activities, especially in terms of the last two types of

158 activities, as much as they wished because of their babysitting duties, and another 5 (29%) said they could not do so because of their health issues.11

For instance, one measure of the elderly’s religious satisfaction came from their ability to go on pilgrimage trips, which required not only time, but some pocket money. Pocket money had become a very contentious issue between the elderly and their sons- or daughters-in-law in other areas of Tibet (Childs, Goldstein, Wangdui 2011). Inability to obtain pocket money to cover the transportation expenses, tea and food at the teashops during the pilgrimage, or donations to the monetary, often prevented the elderly in other areas from going to pilgrimage trips, which had great importance for the elderly’s feeling of well-being.

However, In Dekyi, this was not a problem. First of all, the elderly did not really need money for pilgrimage trips. There were plenty of monasteries in the Phenpo area and some famous ones—Langtang and

Nalenda—were within walking distance of Dekyi, though the route leading there involved hiking uphill. When it was too far to walk to, they usually hitchhiked to get there, thus the transportation cost was minimum. They

11 There were two elderly women who were not involved in religious activities. One was the woman who has dementia. And the other one was the eccentric widow who enjoyed drinking and gambling more than praying.

159 also usually brought their tea and lunch prepared by their children to these excursions and ate picnic style, thus eliminating the need for money to eat at teashops or restaurants.

During pilgrimages, it was also important to donate some money into the donation boxes in front of the statues of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and other gods, deities, or sacred objects to enlist help from these supernatural powers. Donations in these regular visits tended to be nominal—it was customary to donate about RMB 0.1 into each donation box. In case a larger donation was needed, such as when a school child needed the help from the gods to get good grades, the household head would arrange the money for this purpose. On average, an elderly person spent less than RMB 10 (about USD 2.5) for each visit. Before their trip, they asked the household head for money, and the latter gave the elderly

RMB 50 or 100 (Chinese currency has individual bills for these amounts).

The elderly would not ask for more money until their money ran out.

No elderly in Dekyi said that they had difficulty in getting money for such trips, but 14 elderly complained that they could not go on as many pilgrimage trips as they wished because of lack of health or time. I have already discussed the physical health status of the elderly, and it was important to examine their claim of having no time. At first glance, such a

160 claim seemed implausible because the very definition of genko, or “elderly” is that the "elderly" are divested of farming and most house chores.

However, in Dekyi, for elderly women, they often assumed babysitting responsibilities which tied them to their houses. But depending on the household structure and the age gaps between parents and their inheriting children, the elderly men might also have to assume babysitting responsibilities. For instance, one elderly man of 69 years old had an adopted daughter who was about 30 years old. He was never married and did not have a wife, therefore he had to care for his newborn granddaughters while his daughter worked in the fields, fed the cows, made dried cow dung fuels, and other household chores. In general, though, elderly men were more likely to take the responsibility for tasks such as sending their primary school grandchildren to the nearby primary school in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. Healthy elderly men also took the family cows to graze in the grassland quite far behind of the village in the summer.

Among the 8 elderly who considered that they did not enough time to devote to religious activities, for 5 of them, it was because of their babysitting duties, and 3 of them needed to help with household business.

Ironically, Lhamo, because she had split with her son’s family, was the only

161 elderly who had the freedom to pray most of the time and she was the only one who could do circumambulation around village (tib. khang skor) three times per day.

Another activity for the 14 elderly who were not healthy enough or had not enough time for religious activities was the annual winter prayer session in the village, a tradition established few years ago in Dekyi, at the suggestion of a learned monk who was a native of the village. The prayer session was called manitso (tib. ma ni tshogs), and lasted for about a month in January. This carefully chosen time, right before the preparations for

New Year started and a couple of months after the harvest, i.e., during the slack season, was considered to be the least busy time of the year. Although all were welcome to participate, the regular attendees were the 8 elderly

(33%) who were healthy enough and had no babysitting duties.

During the time of the winter prayer session, the elderly borrowed an empty old house from a villager, and set up an altar in the room, hanging a thangka (tib. thang kha, scroll painting with Buddha images or other

Buddhist deities on it) depicting the Buddha of Compassion, and burned incense and butter lamps, and made offerings daily. Inside the room, three sides were arranged with old cushions on the floor for people to sit on and three short tables were placed in front of the mats on which they placed

162 their teacups, snacks, and food. Everyday, the elderly arrived around 9:30.

But before they started the chanting, they first boiled tea and made preparations for cooking lunch, which they ate together. They stayed in the borrowed room till around 5 pm in the afternoon, and then they went home or went to school to pick up their grandchildren.

The elderly participants truly enjoyed these prayer sessions, which allowed them to leave their daily worries behind and concentrate on chanting prayers. During their bathroom and lunch breaks, the elderly exchanged news and joked lightheartedly. Sometimes, their children, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, or some other visitors would come bringing specially prepared food, snacks, or fruits, as well as news to share with all.

These gatherings strongly boosted their mood through the socializing. But most importantly, these sessions had positive impacts on the elderly because they knew that they were making efforts and progress towards a fearless death and a better rebirth. But as we see, despite the desirability of the winter prayer sessions, only 33% of the elderly could make it daily.

To sum up, the examination of the different aspects of elderly reveals that the Dekyi elderly enjoyed high social status, household status, and psychological and health status. Their authority and economic statuses,

163 however, were relatively low. Moreover, the evidence for their physical health, and religious statuses was mixed.

The mixed evidence for the different dimensions of elderly status, therefore, prompts us to view the high satisfaction the elderly expressed over their treatment with caution. In particular, the data revealed that half of the elderly had no authority over family affairs, and over half of them could not participate in religious activities as much as they wished. On the one hand, for instance, with respect to the elderly with no authority over family decisions, they sometimes became passive—several of the elderly told me that they would not voice their opinions unless they were specifically asked. The passivity of the elderly might have negative impacts on their well-being.

On the other hand, the dissatisfaction of the amount of their religious participation might pose a more severe health risk to the elderly.

Most important of all, as I mentioned earlier, religion was of paramount importance to the elderly in their old age. They needed to participate as much as possible, so that they could purify their bad deeds and make enough merits to gain a good rebirth. The lack of religious participation thus deprived the elderly the opportunity for a better rebirth. Moreover, religious participation also provided the elderly an opportunity to socialize

164 with other elderly and to keep them more physically, socially active and engaged. As such, religious participation was also critical for both the physical and psychological health of the elderly. And the lack of it might result in poor health of the elderly.

Nevertheless, especially revealing were the disparities between certain aspects of the elderly status. That is, while the elderly had low authority and economic statuses, they enjoyed high psychological health status, meaning that the elderly were satisfied with their personal situations and the care they received. In the next chapter it will be argued that this is the result of the matrilocal system in which the elderly live.

165 CHAPTER FIVE

THE PROTECTIVE MECHANISMS OF

The MATRILOCAL FAMILY SYSTEM FOR ELDERLY WELL-BEING

Lhamo’s Story - Continued from Chapter Four

Lhamo did not get along with her daughter-in-law, Pendzom, ever since she arrived 25 years ago. They had endless quarrels over petty issues.

Initially the mother had problems with her daughter-in-law’s way of doing things, telling her daughter-in-law she was not farming, cooking, or caring for the children correctly. Later, after several years, when the new daughter- in-law became more established in the family and the community, the daughter-in-law started to accuse her mother-in-law of not working hard enough. Once, in the heat of an argument over one of such thing, Pendzom, the daughter-in-law, hit Lhamo (her son was out of the village working for cash). That was the only time Lhamo went to seek help from the village

166 leaders, who duly scolded her daughter-in-law. It did not help improve their relationship much, but she was not hit again.

Finally, Lhamo could not stand it any longer and initiated the division of their household 12 years ago. Her son built her the notorious one-room mud house that villagers called og (“below”), acutely pointing out the fact that Lhamo lives “down there,” a place reserved for things or animals, not people. Except for some farm produce—the compensation for her land she gave up, she received no money from her son’s family, so in order to buy the expensive meat, butter, and clothes, she had to make do with the small pension and the annual single-child cash benefit from the state for having given birth to only one child.

In 2015, altogether, she received RMB 2,400 (USD 340) per year. She said that amount of money was tight, but enough. However, it was enough only because she had given up drinking butter tea—a beloved Tibetan drink made by churning black tea and butter together. She only drank butter tea when it was offered to her at others’ homes or at social functions. For a cheaper alternative, she now made milk tea with milk powder, which cost less. Sweet milk tea, though much loved and consumed by the Tibetans, was considered to be unhealthy. News of rampant food safety issues in

Tibet reached the ears of the rural villagers as their children and relatives in

167 the city relayed reports of fake food circulated on social media. Fear of fake milk powder was especially widespread and intense.1

Health issues aside, Lhamo’s lack of access to butter tea at home was particularly pitied by others in the village. Butter tea is not just healthier; it is the quintessential Tibetan drink. It is also often used to make pag, the staple food in Tibet. While younger villagers eat rice regularly now, older villagers normally still ate pag at every meal and they liked to have their pag mixed with butter tea. Thus, the lack of butter deprived Lhamo of not only a highly valued and symbolic Tibetan drink, but also an authentic, appropriate Tibetan meal cherished by the elderly. In addition, she ate very little meat. And she seldom had new clothes. Villagers often pitied her but did not wish to confront her daughter-in-law directly. From rom time to time, other villagers smuggled some butter or other small food stuff to her during her daily circumambulations around the village.

Besides not providing Lhamo with enough food, her daughter-in-law

Pendzom also did not show Lhamo much respect. They avoided each other

1 Food safety issues in China have become a serious problem that threatens public health and undermines social trust. In particular, the two notorious milk powder and infant formula scandals in 2004 and 2008 brought the food safety issues to public awareness. The commercial markets in Tibet are also flooded with cheap, low-quality, and fraudulent food items.

168 at great length, both at home and at social functions, and when they did encounter each other, they ignored one another. Their only significant interaction was limited to 3 or 4 days during the Tibetan New Year when

Lhamo was invited to spend the New Year celebration with her son’s family, a ritual they started after the split. During this time, for 3 or 4 days every year, she was served with meat soup, beef dumplings, and hearty noodles.

She could spend her whole day spinning the prayer wheel under the warm sun sitting on the spacious balcony, or watching TV—TV was trickier though because her grandchildren love to watch TV programs in Chinese and she did not understand that at all.

Both Lhamo and Pendzom claimed they were much happier since the split. They could both do whatever they wanted without worrying about, or angering the other party. Other villagers and elderly I talked to also agreed that it is better for them to live apart considering the belligerent relationship the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law had. However, this did not prevent the more outspoken villagers from claiming that the daughter- in-law was sdug cag, or “very bad,” rather than the softer word yag po mi

‘dug, “not good.” Virtually all villagers considered that Lhamo was being mistreated by her daughter-in-law, though some attributed the

169 mistreatment as Lhamo’s las ‘bras, or karma. More often, villagers also blamed Lhamo’s misfortune precisely on her having no daughters.

Emic Views on Daughters’ Care

According to the Dekyi villagers, matrilocal marriage protects the elderly. First, by keeping a daughter at home and bringing a husband for her, they believe they eliminate the presence of the most contentious potentially relationship between family members—the relationship between mother- and daughter-in-law—within the same household. One

Tibetan scholar who was a Phenpo native even claimed to me that this is

“the ultimate solution to mother and daughter-in-law conflict.”

Secondly, it enhances the chances of the elderly being treated well as they get old, because daughters are considered more loving than sons and daughters-in-law. These explanations, though appealing, fail to answer some central questions regarding sons-in-law. Occupying a seemingly parallel position as daughters-in-law, the relations between sons-in-law’s and their parents-in-law are equally important. Are there son-in-law and father-in-law conflicts? If daughters-in-law have problems treating parents-

170 in-law well, how do sons-in-law treat their parents-in-law? I argue that the answers lie in the differences between matrilocal and patrilocal family systems.

Matrilocal versus Patrilocal Family Systems

In the literature of family and family care in China and East Asia, the difficult relations between daughters-in-law and parents-in-law, especially mothers-in-law, are well documented. For example, earlier anthropological studies on Chinese family system brought our attention to the lowly position of young daughters-in-law in their husbands’ patriline and their vulnerability to abuse from their mothers-in-law. (Cohen 1976; Wolf 1985;

Hsu 1985, Hu 1995). Later scholarship, however, suggests that there has been a reversal of the power between the daughters-in-law and mothers-in- law— the mothers-in-law are now often the one being abused by their newly empowered daughters-in-law (Hu 1995; Yan 2003; Wu 2011). This dramatic shift of power is illuminated by Hu’s study on patterns of suicide in China. He remarks that in the 1980s, "[T]he suicide rate for young women has dropped. However, the decline of the relative position of elderly women

171 as mothers-in-law in the family [is] also reflected in their high suicide risks”

(Hu 1995, 208).

However, very little is known about sons-in-law. In popular assumptions and scholarly work, sons-in-law are often assumed to be the gendered equivalent of daughters-in-law. But a survey of literature on family and family-based care reveals little about the sons-in-law: they are rarely mentioned. This partly lies in the fact that post-marital patterns in

Asian countries are predominantly patrilocal, so there are not many sons- in-law co-residing with their parents-in-law; partly it lies in sons-in-law’s general insignificant role in providing day to day care. Even in Northern

Thailand where matrilocal marital practices are prevalent, the literature tends to emphasize the women’s prominent role in family life, paying little attention about their husbands—the sons-in-law (Delaney 1977;

Thanakwang et al. 2012; Aulino 2016).

However, in order to render an accurate picture of the differences between the matrilocal and patrilocal family systems, it is important to investigate the roles of sons-in-law systematically rather than simply assuming they are just the male version of daughters-in-law. In light of the data on sons-in-law’s roles and relations in the matrilocal households in

Dekyi village, borrowing from Audrey Richards (1950), who famously

172 pointed out that matrilineal systems are not mirror images of patrilineal systems, I also argue that in Dekyi, matrilocal families and patrilocal families are not simply mirror images of each other. This is because in matrilocal and patrilocal systems, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law have very different roles in family life and relations with other family members.

In-law Interactions

As has been shown throughout the dissertation, in rural Tibet, married men continue to migrate to work until their children can replace them to bring cash income home. In addition, in accord with the gender- based division of labor, village men usually work and socialize outside of the house even when they are in the village. As a result, they spend a considerable amount of time outside of the household working or socializing. Contrarily, for married women, they spend most of their time at home, working at household chores, cooking or relaxing. In the context of extended families, generations of married women often work and relax together at home.

What this means in the matrilocal family system is that daughters and their mother often work together, whereas the sons-in-law do not spend a lot of time at home and in turn, do not have a lot of interactions

173 with their parents-in-law. This is in stark contrast with the situation in the patrilocal family system. There daughters- and mothers-in-law spend most of their time at home working together and interacting with each other. To a certain degree, the structure of the matrilocal family significantly

“minimizes” the interactions between the parents-in-law and sons-in-law, whereas the structure of the patrilocal family “maximizes” the interactions between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law. The quality of in-law relations, in turn, is impacted by the amount of interaction the sons-in-law and the daughters-in-law respectively have with their in-law parents. This is encapsulated in my conversation with my landlord.

My landlord did not marry into a Dekyi household as a magpa. He said that being a magpa was difficult because of the expectation for a magpa to be capable and hardworking. He did not consider himself to have such qualities, so he told his wife before their marriage:

If I am coming as a magpa to live with your parents, I won’t come. I will only come if we establish our own family. I am not a capable man at all. I do not know how to do farm work properly.

He was not being modest. Having been a monk during his formative years and spending a few years in India doing odd jobs, he was not known for his ability in farm work. Instead, his monastic training made him the most sought-after figure in the village to read sutras and chant prayers at

174 religious functions. However, despite his considering that being a magpa is difficult because of the work expectations, he insisted this it was nowhere near as difficult of being a daughter-in-law because of a male’s constant absence from home. He explained:

We are very different [being a son-in-law and being a daughter-in- law]. Men seldom stay at home. We are out working. Even if there are some sorts of conflict, it is not as hard for men because we can go out. When we are out, we are free to do whatever we want.

Other villager men echoed this sentiment and readily told me that they would not want to be a son-in-law, were it not for their custom of matrilocal marriage. One middle-aged man told me:

I do not want to be a magpa. It is difficult because unlike at my natal home, I have to work really hard. I have to obey my parents-in-law. I cannot sleep in in the mornings or just idle if I am feeling lazy. I cannot talk back to my parents-in-law as I do sometimes with my own parents. But the relationship with my parents-in-law is not difficult because I am usually not home.

Village women tell a similar story, saying that life as a magpa is much easier than that of a nama, because men simply do not spend a lot of time at home, whereas daughters-in-law have to work with their mothers-in-law all the time. If you remember, in the story of Lhamo and Pendzom (the daughter-in-law), according to Pendzom, the origin of their conflicts was because of their different ways of doing things. Initially, when Pendzom just married into Dekyi village, it was Lhamo who tried to bend her to do things

175 her way. But later, when Pendzom became more established in the village, it was she who started to pick on Lhamo’s way of doing things. Eventually, they split.

What these conversations tell is that villagers believed that sons-in- law conflicts with their in-laws were not as pronounced as the daughters- and mothers-in-law conflicts. And evidence from Dekyi and other patrilocal areas lends support to this claim.

First, an intra-village comparison between the patrilocal and matrilocal marriages shows that the rate of conflicts arising between daughters- and parents-in-law is slightly higher than that between sons- and parents-in-law. Among the 17 patrilocal marriages, 2 (11%) had daughter-in-law and parents-in-law conflicts. By contrast, out of the 45 matrilocal marriages, there were 2 cases (4%) of sons-in-law and parents-in- law conflicts. The two cases of daughters- and parents-in-law conflicts included the one between Lhamo and Pendzom, which we are now familiar.

The other case was between Pemo and her parents-in-law, Tashi and Budri, the elderly couple who lived alone. Their conflicts were less serious due to the fact that they had never co-resided, thus preventing their relationship from deteriorating further.

176 Regarding the two cases involving conflicts between sons-in law and parents-in-law, I have already discussed one case—Gyaltsen and Lobsang— in Chapter 4. Conflicts arose between them mainly because both father- and son-in-law were strong-headed, a risk factor in in-law conflicts. The other case, however, demonstrates the vulnerability of a young son-in-law.

This most infamous in-law conflict involving a son-in-law ended in the son-in-law’s “escape.” Penpa was the son-in-law in question. He married into a Dekyi household about 10 years ago when he was around 25. He lived in a household with his wife, a widowed mother-in-law, and a younger brother-in-law. The marriage was arranged by a relative of Penpa. I never met Penpa (because he had left 5 years earlier before my arrival), but other villagers told me that Penpa was mistreated by his mother-in-law who did not feed him sufficient food. His poor relationship with his mother-in-law was exacerbated by an equally poor relationship with his younger brother- in-law. In addition, the marriage between he and his wife was arranged and there was not much affection between the two, so his wife sided with her family during their conflicts. It was said that one summer day, on the pretense of going to see a horse race festival in a nearby village, he walked out of his home in his best and most expensive attire, the chupa (tib. phyu

177 pa), a home-spun Tibetan style woolen garment he was given as his dowry at his marriage, and never returned.

What we see from the two cases above is that conflicts between sons-in-law and parents-in-law did happen. But as was demonstrated above, the frequency of conflicts in matrilocal households (4%) was lower than that in patrilocal households in Dekyi (11%). However, if the situation in Dekyi is compared with the patrilocal areas, the low frequency of conflicts in matrilocal households is even more striking. For instance,

Childs, Goldstein, and Wangdui (2011) report that many elderly in patrilocal areas had difficult relationships with their daughters-in-law. Such conflicts were still higher among the Han Chinese—Yan (2003) states that bad relations between parents and their married sons and daughters-in-law was

“a most universal circumstance at the end of the 1990s” (180). The latter comparison, however, has to be viewed with caution because of the cultural differences between Chinese and Tibetan society.

Nevertheless, from my analysis above, we could at least conclude that the relationship between sons-in-law and parents-in-law differ from that between daughters- and parents-in-law in terms of intergenerational interaction. And this difference has partially contributed to the low prevalence of conflicts between sons- and parents-in-law.

178 Eldercare in Matrilocal and Patrilocal Family Systems

In contemporary rural Tibet, division of labor remains largely based on gender. In Dekyi, women were responsible for domestic work including caring for the elderly, and raising the children while men were responsible for two main activities: (1) the physically hard part of farm work, mainly plowing the fields with animals or nowadays using machinery during harvest, and (2) work outside of the household. However, women also engaged in substantial farm work when their husbands were out working for cash. Men on the other hand, were only occasionally involved in domestic work when circumstances required it.

The implication of the domestic work arrangements is that in the matrilocal family system, sons-in-law are rarely involved in preparing for food or providing direct, daily care of the elderly. Instead, daughters are the ones who prepare food and care for the elderly. In contrast, in patrilocal family systems, food preparation and eldercare are mainly the responsibility of the daughters-in-law and sons are not expected to partake in such responsibilities. In other words, in the matrilocal family system, food and care is provided by one’s kin—one’s daughters, whereas in the patrilocal family system, food and care is provided by daughters-in-law, largely perceived as “outsiders” in Tibetan culture.

179 Therefore, though it is usually said that sons and daughters-in-law are responsible for eldercare in patrilocal extended families, it is in fact the daughters-in-law who are the ones providing daily practical care that has the strongest impact on the elderly well-being. Hu (1995) directly links this

“hidden” fact to the high suicide rate among Chinese elderly. This point is well understood in Dekyi. Villagers pointed out that sons were virtually useless in terms of providing daily care even if they were capable and willing to provide care because sons were expected to work outside of the farm to bring back cash income, leaving their aging parents in the hands of their wives.

Once, I asked Lhamo if she was worried about her future when she could not take care of herself anymore. In reply, she told me:

I am not worried at all. When I get very sick and need nursing care, my son will take care of me. I am not worried.

I asked other villagers hypothetically whether it was possible for

Lhamo’s son to care for her as it seemed the relationship between Lhamo and her daughter-in-law was beyond remedial, and they replied that they did not believe his son would be in a position to provide care for her because that was a woman’s job to do so, and he had a wife. I later broached the topic with Lhamo’s own daughter-in-law, asking her what would

180 happen when Lhamo became invalid and whether she or her husband would care for Lhamo. She said that she would be the one to care for her no matter what happened between them in the past. The discrepancy between

Lhamo’s wish and the general view shows clearly that caregiving is considered essentially a woman’s job.

The data from this investigation, therefore, shows that the division of labor, together with the pattern of in-law interactions in matrilocal family system, contribute to the elderly’s general satisfaction regarding the care they receive. And these characteristics of the matrilocal family system translate to what I would call its protective mechanisms for the elderly.

The Matrilocal Family System’s

Protective Mechanisms for the Elderly

As we have seen, in Dekyi, all elderly were satisfied with the care they received from their co-residing children even though half of them did not have any control over economic resources, which was very different from the situation in patrilocal areas. The elderly claimed that it was because daughters were better caregivers because they were more loving. In

181 addition to this explanation of "loving daughters," I argue that the matrilocal family system provides the protection to the elderly through three main mechanisms. First, women's economic power in matrilocal family system enables them to provide satisfying care and support to their parents. Second, the lack of conflicts in matrilocal stem households greatly promotes elderly well-being. And third, the ease of getting food, money and care from daughters further contributes to enhance the elderly's satisfaction with the care they receive.

“Women Power”

In Dekyi’s matrilocal families, co-residing daughters in Dekyi could provide the desired support and care to their parents because often times women are the laoban—a Chinese loan word Tibetans commonly use— meaning boss, of the household. As I have discussed in detail in Chapter 3, for reasons such as household structure, the cultural perception of men as wasteful, and women's economic contribution to the household (i.e. inheritance, farm work and house chores), a large proportion of the Dekyi households were headed by women. Specifically, of the 65 households in

Dekyi, 50 (77%) had female household heads. And further analysis of the 16 stem households that had at least one elderly, 6 households (38%) were

182 headed by an elderly woman, 8 households (50%) were headed by a daughter, and just 2 households (12%) were headed by a son-in-law.

Therefore, in stem households where most elderly lived, either the elderly themselves or their daughters were the household heads. As Tibetan household structure was corporate in nature, the household head controlled the entire household income, so when other family members were in need of money, they had to ask the household head for it. The daughters’ control of money, thus gave them the economic power they could wield in the provision of care to their own elderly parents.

Family Harmony and Psychological Well-being

The second mechanism by which matrilocal marriage contributes to the well-being of Dekyi elderly, is through promoting family harmony. The importance of harmonious social relations on mental well-being have been clearly shown by various studies (Sung 1995; Lai 1995; Zhang and Yu 1998;

Sastre 1998; Ingersoll-Dayton et al. 2001; Liber, Nihira, and Mink 2004;

Silverstein, Cong and Li 2006). In Dekyi, due to the cultural ideal of harmony within the family and the community, achieving harmony itself is psychologically and religiously satisfying. Lau (2010), in his study of Tibetan diaspora in northern India, writes that the ideology of harmony derives

183 from the Tibetan’s religious beliefs that intra-familial disharmony would offend the gods which in turn would bring misfortune to the family. My informants expressed similar ideas, saying that having angry feelings are especially harmful for family relations, and it itself is a sdig pa, demerit/sin, for the ones expressing such negative feelings that in turn cause family disharmony.

I have already discussed earlier how son-in-law and parent-in-law conflicts are minimized in matrilocal households. Here, I will discuss how daughter and parent dynamics further promotes family harmony. One crucial aspect in women’s relations within a household is that married village women spend most of their time working together at home or on the farm. Not surprisingly, the extended co-presence and frequent contact between two unrelated women make their relationship difficult and prone to conflicts. My informants identified two main factors that might strain mothers- and daughters-in-law relationship, but had less impact on daughter and mother relations.

First, in the management of daily domestic affairs in an extended household, women of an older generation inevitably needed to give orders to women of the younger generation (tib. las ka bkod dgos red). It was said that giving orders was hard because nobody liked to be told what to do,

184 especially when there was in fact endless housework—as well as farm work—to do. Giving orders to a chimi (tib. phyi mi), or an outsider, such as the daughters-in-law or sons-in-law, was considered to be especially difficult. For example, when giving an order to a daughter-in-law, it was easy to generate ill feelings if a daughter-in-law felt that she was given an unfair share of work, or she was ordered to work in a certain manner that she did not like (such as with Lhamo’s daughter-in-law).

Some parents adopted the strategy of relaying orders to their in-law children through their own children to alleviate the potential tensions arisen from giving orders directly to the “outsiders.” But they admitted it was hard to do this if it involved daughters-in-law. Sons were often out of the village working, and therefore were not always available for relaying orders. More importantly, there were so many things for the women to do that relaying orders between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law simply was not a viable option. So ironically, order-relaying as a strategy to alleviate tension was least feasible when it was the most needed—the communications between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Contrarily, it was assumed that order giving would not strain the mother-daughter relationship as much. My failed trip with my best friend

Wangmo to the County Seat was a case in point.

185 Wangmo’s Endless Work

As mentioned earlier, Wangmo was the chosen inheritor in her household. Her mother, Lhadron, was in her middle fifties and was now actively distancing herself from farm work so she could devote more time to religious activities to prepare for her rebirth. This had the effect of making

Wangmo shoulder the majority of housework and farm work.

One early morning in the summer of 2015, I went to meet her at her house so she could drive both of us to the county seat on her motorbike.

We were talking about going to do some shopping together for a long time—she wanted me to help her with choosing some skin care products whose instructions were all in Chinese that she did not understand.

However, since she had been extremely busy juggling irrigation and housework, we did not get a chance to make our shopping trip yet. Thus, one day, taking the opportunity of a short break between the hectic irrigation cycles that would restart in a couple of days, we decided to make a trip to the county seat. But soon after I arrived, it became clear our plan would not work.

Wangmo did not tell Lhadron about our trip in advance, since the short excursion to the county seat was often decided on the spur of the

186 moment and required little prior planning. But her mother did not think it was a good idea. Instead, Wangmo was told that it would be better for her to collect weeds from the fields as fresh fodder for their cattle, an activity that had been neglected for a while, as the women were busy with watering their fields. Both Wangmo and I were disappointed, but Wangmo did not dare to disobey her mother’s order. She then asked me to stick around to go to work with her, hoping we could still make a short trip to the county seat after her weeding task.

The work, however, took much longer than I had thought, because besides weeding, it also involved transporting the large quantity of the cut grass from the field back to her house. And by using a small cart as the transportation tool, it took seemingly forever to get it done. Also, afterwards, she needed to wash the fodder before she could store and feed it to the cattle. By the time we finished, it was already early afternoon and we rushed back to get a quick lunch her mother had made for us, still harboring a slight hope that we might eventually make it to the county seat.

But our last hope was crushed when Lhadron told her she should continue to do the weeding in the afternoon. Wangmo again did not dare to openly disagree with her mother, but as an acute observer with a quick wit, she immediately joked and commented to me, “Wang Jing [my Chinese name],

187 see; if I were a daughter-in-law, it would be so much harder. [My mother] always tells me to do this or to do that. I am a yogpo [tib. gyog po, meaning servant]."

I often heard daughters joking that they were yogpo of their parents, an appropriate and effective way for them to vent out their displeasures over their large share of work without offending their parents. But the daughters-in-law did not have such a luxury. During my whole stay in the village, no daughters-in-law used the word yogpo for themselves. This certainly did not mean that daughters-in-law had less work to do. Rather, it revealed the more formalized and less intimate relations between mothers- and daughters-in-law, so they could not use joking to alleviate the inevitable tensions between them. It was, again, ironic that such a mechanism that could alleviate familial tensions was less viable when it was most needed as between mothers- and daughters-in-law.

Secondly, villagers identified another major factor that made the mother and daughter relationship easier than mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law—the ill feelings generated between the former tended to be weaker and easier to dissipate. Villagers said this is because there is tsedung, [tib. brtse dung], or love, between mother and daughter. Therefore when conflicts arise between a mother and a daughter, it is easier to let

188 them go. Mutual love, however, does not exist “naturally” between mother- and daughter-in-law. It can be developed, though this is said to be difficult.

Thus, ill feelings between mothers- and daughters-in-law are easy to generate but difficult to dissipate.

And the lack of mutual love between mother- and daughter-in-law is not helped by the fact that women are considered to be bsam blo rgya chen po btang shes gyi ma red, which, translated literally, means that women do not know how to think big. Or more colloquially, women are considered to be petty and narrow-minded.

This tendency was vividly described to me by a talkative young woman in her late twenties who had married as a nama into her husband’s family in another region of Tibet. She told me that she was not happy as a nama because “whenever I had quarrels [with my in-laws] or over some petty things, I would be sad for a long time. I simply stayed by myself quietly, thinking I was wronged and brooded over it again and again. And my husband was seldom at home [to comfort me] because he had to [be outside of the village] to work for money. So I am not happy. I don’t like being a daughter-in-law.”

Lhamo and her daughter-in-law Pendzom’s story which I have related in full, was almost a textbook example demonstrating the difficulty

189 of “letting go.” Even 13 years after their split, which both of them claimed to be helpful in improving their relationship, they were still not on speaking terms and they avoided each other whenever possible. The case of Pendzom and Lhamo, though an exception, was a living proof of the nightmare which were imagined by the villagers about dreaded daughters-in-law, but which few had personally experienced.

Ease of Asking for Food, Care and Money from one’s Daughter

Through women’s roles as food preparers and nursing care providers in general, matrilocal marriage provides the third mechanism to protect the elderly from abuse and promote their well-being. This feature is striking when compared with the patrilocal areas, where food is often the source of contention—for example, elderly not being provided enough food or the food provided to the elderly is inferior. Nursing care is also more difficult in patrilocal areas because the elderly often feel uneasy to ask “strangers”— such as their daughters-in-law to perform “dirty” toileting care.

First, women are primarily responsible for controlling, preparing and distributing food in the household. The provision of food and the manner it is provided are a critical aspect of elderly care. The elderly in Dekyi often expressed their satisfaction with old age life in terms of food, “now we can

190 eat whatever we want to eat.” They felt this was in stark contrast with their parents who led a pitiful old age life because they could not serve their parents delicious food. The elderly’s parents grew old during a time of extreme poverty and societal disturbance during the height of collectivization and the Cultural Revolution (Yeh 2008, 2013; Choeden

1978).

In addition, when asked about why they had a tradition of keeping a daughter at home, the most common answers were “daughters treat their parents well,” and “it is easier to get food from the hands of a daughter than from the hands of an outsider.” Here the outsider, chimi, referred to daughters-in-law. It is generally believed that the daughters-in-law, as unrelated outsiders, would not be as generous to their parents-in-law with food and money as would daughters. This also has to do with the corporate nature of Tibetan families. Once the elderly relinquish their rights as HH upon getting old, they relinquish their control over food and money.

Sons, moreover, are not very helpful with regards to the provision of food, for even if one wanted to help or interfere with an abusive daughter- in-law’s bad treatment of his parents, he could not do much about it because of his frequent absence from home. Alternatively, a potentially

191 abusive son-in-law can hardly interfere with the provision of food to the parents-in-law also because of his constant absence.

Finally, the division of work also means that women share more responsibility for caregiving for the elderly. Having a daughter to care for oneself is for most Dekyi elderly preferable to having a daughter-in-law perform the task. Simply put, in terms of nursing care, if an elderly becomes an invalid, Dekyi villagers believe that daughters are much better than daughters-in-law because they will not think it is dirty.

Additionally, a daughter’s nursing care is desired because daughters provide care with love. Sangmo, whose story I have told earlier, said:

When an old mom gets sick, her daughter-in-law perhaps would simply ask the elderly to take some medicine and that’s it. But were she a daughter, besides the medicine part, she would certainly ask about her mom’s well-being many times during a day and cook special food for her mom during the illness. Between a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law, there is simply no natural love. And love makes a huge difference in the quality of care.

For the same reasons that restrict sons’ role in food preparation, sons are not expected to be the main caregiver if daughters-in-law are available.

Caregiving is considered to be the exclusive terrain of women. I was told that sons needed to engage in economic activities outside of home, so they were unable to provide nursing care, even if they were capable and willing to provide nursing care.

192 The last dimension is the relative easiness to ask a daughter for money, just like the village saying that, “it is easy to get food from the hands of daughters.” This largely eliminates the anxiety over getting pocket money for teashop visits, buying favorite snacks, pilgrimages, etc., which, as shown earlier, has been a contentious issue in patrilocal areas. As mentioned in the last chapter, the ability to go to pilgrimage when one is physically healthy is of great importance to the elderly’s sense of well-being, and going on pilgrimage trips often needs financial assistance from the household. Even in Dekyi, where the nature of pilgrimage practices and the closeness of pilgrimage sites meant that the elderly did not need a lot of money to make such trips, it still helped when the elderly knew that they could easily get money from daughters and food would be prepared for them to take on such trips. Moreover, the sense of financial security itself relieved stress and promoted mental well-being.

Summary

This chapter presents the central thesis of my dissertation, namely, how the matrilocal family system protects the elderly from receiving poor

193 support even when they have relinquished being the head of their households and therefore do not have control over resources and financial means. In order to do this, this chapter goes beyond simply examining the eldercare provided by daughters to their parents, and examines the larger picture—the systematic differences between matrilocal and patrilocal family systems. This reveals a more nuanced picture of intergenerational relations and eldercare in a matrilocal system. In particular, it demonstrates that through women's economic power, the lack of conflicts between parent- and son-in-law and between daughters and mothers, as well as the ease to ask for food, care, and money, the matrilocal family system provides protection to the elderly.

Though we are now familiar with the beneficial effects of the matrilocal marriage to the family and the elderly, we still do not know the origin of the matrilocal marriage. It has little to do with the sex ratio as some scholars may suggest. According to the 2010 census data in Tibet, the overall sex ratio of the entire TAR is 105.70, whereas the sex ratio of

Lhündrup County (or Phenpo) is 107.18 (Duoji 2012, 2). This shows that there is no significant imbalance between the number of males and females.

Therefore, as I stated earlier, we have to assume that this is simply an area with a different and distinctive marriage custom. And because the

194 matrilocal marriage custom has served the Phenpowas well, they continue to adhere to their custom and practice the matrilocal marriage, even though they have had chance to switch to other forms of marriage as the Tibetan society changes dramatically in the past few decades.

195 CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION

This dissertation has demonstrated that certain features of matrilocal stem households provide protective mechanisms for the elderly in Tibet at a time of rapid socioeconomic transformation that have tended to undermine the traditional power and authority of the elderly. Through an ethnographic case study of Dekyi village, it has provided a detailed account and analysis of how socioeconomic changes have impacted intergenerational relationships in a matrilocal family system differently from that in patrilocal family systems, and how that, in turn, has impacted the care the elderly received and their well-being. In particular, this dissertation answers the central questions regarding matrilocal family systems, eldercare, and the status of the elderly. Is adherence to filial piety really intact in matrilocal family system and is the status of the elderly higher? Do the elderly co-residing with daughters have their own cash, do they exercise influence in their families, and do they have access to

196 appropriate health care? Is conflict with sons-in-law the functional equivalent of conflict with daughters-in-law in the patrilocal system, and if not, why? Do sons-in-law become the heads of matrilocal families and do they willingly support their elderly in-laws?

As has been shown in Chapter 4, the cultural ideal of Tibetan filial piety remains intact, though when translated into practice, there are a few exceptions in which elderly are not well cared for, and more significantly, not well respected. It is especially illuminating when analyzing the different dimensions of the elderly status. This analysis of elderly status reveals that the elderly in Dekyi enjoy high social status, household status, and psychological health status, while they have low authority and economic status. This is significant in that in similar situations where the elderly’s power, authority, and economic bases have become eroded, it usually does not bode well for them as have been amply demonstrated in patrilocal areas.

Unfortunately, their physical health is also less than ideal mainly due to economic constraints, their unfamiliarity with the modern medical system, as well as the relatively low standard of rural healthcare facilities.

Their religious status is also at best average since over half of the elderly were not able to participate in religious activities as much as they wished,

197 due to health issues or time constrains. However, no elderly complained that lack of money played a role in preventing them from participation in religious activities. And as has been shown, it is largely due to their matrilocal stem family system that the Dekyi elderly’s high level of satisfaction with their living situation, the care and respect they have received has occurred despite the fact that most of them do not have control over family affairs and financial resources.

In the matrilocal stem family system, the elderly feel secure even if they have passed down the headship to their children because they feel it is easy to ask for food and money from their daughters—their kin— as opposed to asking for money from daughters-in-law. This sense of security is further facilitated because in Dekyi, the majority of the households are headed by women, either elderly women themselves or the daughters of the elderly. Therefore, the daughters have economic resources to provide care to their parents.

Contrastingly, conflicts between fathers- (or parents-) and sons-in- law are not as pronounced in matrilocal family system as the notorious mothers- and daughter-in-law relationship in patrilocal systems. The lack of conflicts in family life has a positive impact on the overall well-being of the elderly, but particularly, it perhaps allows the sons-in-law to willingly

198 support their parents-in-law as shown in the two cases with sons-in-law as household heads. In addition, because of the division of labor, sons-in-law are rarely involved in the daily care of the elderly. This also has the effect of strengthening the case that elderly in matrilocal system receive care from their kin—their own daughters.

This dissertation has two main implications. First of all, it demonstrates the importance to apply scrutiny to different aspects of the status of the elderly. Through this approach, we found that in the matrilocal family system in Dekyi, the elderly can have low authority and economic power, but are satisfied with the care they receive and have high psychological health. And further exploring these discrepancies, we find out certain characteristics of the matrilocal family system vis-à-vis the patrilocal family system have provided protection to the elderly, even at a time when their economic power and authority have been weakened as is also the case for the elderly in patrilocal family systems.

Second, it reveals subtle aspects of the elderly’s agency. The elderly in Dekyi are in general well protected by the matrilocal family system, thus there is not much necessity for the elderly to strive to adopt innovative strategies to ensure they have the desired care, such as helping their daughters to establish a business and marry neolocally as found in the study

199 of Childs, Goldstein, and Wangdui (2011) or the many innovations (meal rotation) found in patrilocal areas of China. Nevertheless, the elderly exercised their agency when their well-being was under threat.

As discussed earlier, though an ideal old age in Dekyi entails an elderly living in an extended household with his or her daughter, the elderly sometimes break up the extended family and live alone as was seen in the case of Lhamo and Pendzom. After years of conflicts, Lhamo decided it was enough and initiated the split. She lived alone and had a frugal and less than ideal life in her one-room mud house, but at least she had peace in her daily existence rather than unending conflicts with her daughter-in-law.

And she was the only elderly who had the luxury to devote most of her free time to religious activities because she did not need to help her daughter- in-law with housework she otherwise would have to do if they lived together. In another case, the outspoken elderly woman whose co-residing daughter died during childbirth, convincingly persuaded the village cadres to get her a spot in the county nursing home even though she still had a live son.

A more subtle example of elderly agency, lies in the way the elderly’s newly earned pension is used. As I discussed in Chapter 4, the majority elderly did not keep their monthly pension of RMB 120 to themselves.

200 Because of the small amount, I had expected that the elderly might keep it as their pocket money, but only very few elderly did so. The elderly gave many reasons for why they contributed their money to the household budget. Some claimed that their children did not have enough money, so they gave the children their money to help. Others claimed that they were one family, so they should use their money together. Still others pointed out to me that it was exactly because the money was so little—it would not be enough for them to live on the pension alone—it was better to contribute it to the common budget. Though all these explanations were plausible, the communal use of the elderly pension might actually be a subtle strategy—maybe latent for some—by which the elderly increased their leverage in the household. This may have significantly contributed to the ease the elderly feel regarding asking their household heads for money when needed, which in turn has positive impacts on elderly well-being.

Potential Problems in the Future.

Despite the generally positive picture of the status of elderly in the matrilocal family system in Delyi, more changes are under way and they may have detrimental impacts for the future elderly.

201 One such change directly attacks the matrilocal system.

Demographically, the birth rate is steadily declining in Tibet. For the generation of women between 20-39, most told me two children are enough.1 As the number of potential successors is declining, education is taking more children away from farm, and this latter effect is relatively permanent. After years of schooling, it is almost impossible for the school children to return to the farm to work. The shortage of successors is already manifesting itself in the village. Despite matrilocal marriage as a preferred form of marriage, some middle-aged villagers tell me frankly they do not expect they will be able to keep a daughter home like their parents did because their daughters are in school. In some cases, marriages of adult children are postponed in order to see whether their younger siblings could make to school because based on that information, a better decision could be made regarding who to keep at home and what types of marriage could be arranged.

Another change that might have unfavorable impacts on the future elderly is also related to education. As children receive more education and make living outside the farm, the generational gap between parents and

1 One child policy was not strictly enforced in Tibet (Goldstein and Beall 1991, Childs et al. 2005)

202 children will be likely to widen. For this current generation of elderly and their co-residing adult children, their views and their lifestyles are similar.

In this context, the matrilocal family system provides sufficient protection to the elderly well-being. However, will the matrilocal family system provide the same sort of protection to the middle-aged parents when they age against widening generational gap? Only future research can tell.

203

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