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“I tried to control my emotions”: nursing home care workers’ experiences of emotional labor in China
(2022)
Despite dramatic expansions in the Chinese nursing home sector in meeting the increasing care needs of a rapidly aging population, direct care work in China remains largely devalued and socially unrecognized. Consequently, scant attention has been given to the caregiving experiences of direct care workers (DCWs) in Chinese nursing homes. In particular, given the relational nature of care work, there is little knowledge as to how Chinese DCWs manage emotions and inner feelings through their emotional labor. This article examines the emotional labor of Chinese DCWs through ethnographic data collected with 20 DCWs in one nursing home located in an urban setting in central China. Data were analyzed using conventional content analysis and constant comparison. Participants’ accounts of sustaining a caring self, preserving professional identity, and hoping for reciprocity revealed implicit meanings about the often-conflicting nature of emotional labor and the nonreciprocal elements of care work under constrained working conditions. Importantly, the moral-cultural notion of bao (报 norm of reciprocity) was found to be central among DCWs in navigating strained resources and suggested their agency in meaning-construction. However, their constructed moral buffers may be insufficient if emotional labor continues to be made invisible by care organizations.
This project explores Tan Yunxian's journey of becoming a female doctor in the Ming dynasty. Among all the surviving Ming medical books, Tan Yunxian's medical case book is the only one that was written by a woman. It seems natural, considering she had both scholar-official and medical family backgrounds. Yet, social expectations consider it more suitable for a lady to remain in the household, and not treat patients outside. To legitimize Tan Yunxian's pursuit of a medical career, she applied several strategies to resolve potential criticism toward her and her family. These strategies are analyzed through her autobiographical preface in her medical case book. The project also explores Ming male literatis' perspectives toward Tan Yunxian, the factors that contributed to the preservation and publication of her medical case book, and examined her medical cases under the social-historical and micro-history contexts.