Anonymous illustrator in late 19th century Germany. William Ely Hill (1887 – 1962), a British cartoonist, produced a later, well-known version.

Author: Sheba Mohammid

In Trinidad and Tobago, we may not have Ponce De Leon’s fountain of youth, but we do have a pool. It’s technically an offshore sandbar, but we’ll save that ecology lesson à la David Attenborough for another time. In local folklore, taking a dip in our Nylon pool, can take 10 years off your appearance. But then what is age appearance, or biology, when as many of our research participants say they simply “do not feel their age”.

Here as elsewhere there are many popular clichés as to how sixty is the new fifty, or thirty the new twenty. It is not so much that people think they can transcend age, but frustration with the inelasticity of these categories, a revelry in defying expectations and complicating the linearity associated with ageing as fixed numerically and cumulatively in its standardisation of set expressions.

In fact, the group that emerged in my study as most commonly defining themselves as ‘old’ was actually twenty-something year olds who would regularly complain to me about their feelings of “getting old”. They brought up the topic of ageing more than any other group. Mona sighed with disbelief and exasperation when she told me she had turned twenty-eight that year. There was a shared feeling among many twenty-something year olds that when they crossed 25 and especially as they approached thirty, they were approaching a major milestone that marked the end of their youth. Whether this past phase of their twenties was enraptured by the indifference often associated with youth was not the point so much as the sense that they were leaving something intangible behind that was gone faster than they could ever quite grasp what it was. Much of this had to do with ideas of ageing being linked to ideas of responsibility, domesticity and stability and anxieties of being able to perform these. Many people felt that they had not reached as far as they were supposed to in starting a family, securing a house or finding a foothold in a career trajectory. These feelings were buttressed by feelings of being delayed even further in their prospects by the Covid-19 pandemic.

You may have noticed the picture at the start of this blog, William Elly Hill’s rendition of Young Woman, Old Woman Ambiguous Figure first created by an unknown German cartoonist in the late 19th Century. It is an illusion where if you stare long enough you will see an old and young woman in the same picture. This was the image that came to mind, a metaphor of sorts for the disruption of thinking of ageing as linear and a questioning of the convenient packaging of dichotomies and what they exclude in their delineations.

In my research it was commonplace for both male and female participants of all ethnicities aged 26 to 29 to say “I’m getting old” not ironically but as an exclamation of ageing as unwelcome, unwanted and certainly coming too fast. This discourse is part of a complex lexicon surrounding ageing in Trinidad and Tobago. Maturity embodied in terms like “getting big” or “being a big woman” were met with positive associations but the idea of “getting old” and ageing were often sources of dread. Twenty-something year old’s expectations of ageing were defined in opposition to a general sense of physical fitness and mental freedom from responsibility that they ascribed to youth. They saw this as their experience during school days bringing nostalgia to this period. “Getting old” was reflected in having additional responsibilities and growing weaker and out of shape. By comparison they simultaneously noted that their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles or neighbours “looked young for their age”. These tensions regarding perceptions about “getting old” problematised the term and underscored the challenges of neatly ascribing age groups as categories and ageing as linear.

How these perceptions of ageing intersect with and impact health are also complex and often problematic. Firstly, when I talked to participants about their feelings of mental wellbeing, they often expressed anxiety and distress surrounding ageing and its negotiations. Secondly, participants often equated “being old” with “being sickly”. These constructions of ageing and health are laden with further tensions and contradictions. For example, participants in their twenties often express that they are “getting old” but do not equally lay claim to feeling that they need to be aware of health with a poignant “yet” often attached to their statements. Similarly, participants upwards from their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and beyond often do not want to think about getting their blood sugar or blood pressure tested as these associations of ageing and illness are a downer and at odds with the Trinidadian sentiment that “Yuh have to live yuh life” with a subtext of clinging to vitality of youth rather than falling prey to the perceived trappings of ageing. Getting “sugar” (diabetes) or “pressure” (hypertension) are often framed among participants as diseases linked with senescence and not something to concerned about until bothersome or threatening symptoms appear. Doctors we spoke to argued that these beliefs delay testing and preventive health care, as they are seeing rising numbers of lifestyle diseases like pre-diabetes, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and hypertension among all age brackets. They also express concern regarding indications of these rising undiagnosed, “silent” killers as people admit that they do not get tested or only attempt to adjust their lifestyle factors like diet when they have fallen seriously ill.

This is one of the reasons when Daniel Miller and I thought of an applied project, we made the decision to be inclusive about ages and target a wide range of Trinis (Trinidadians) as our research demonstrates that many of the health challenges are linked to wider socio-cultural and systemic issues that are certainly not packed up into neat demographic categories of ageing. At first there was an urge that in studying ageing, I should focus on retired individuals or at least start with those aged over forty but in researching perceptions of Trinis, it became clear that understanding ageing, mobile phones and health necessitated deeper inquiry into a wider network of demographics. On the other hand, many people we spoke to about the potential project urged us to focus only on school children for our nutrition education campaign as they felt it was too late for everyone else who had already built their habits and would not be interested in learning or sharing ideas. We also want to challenge that assumption. Instead, we plan to create enjoyable formats that move away from top-down pedagogies and embrace learning from each other at all ages.

Author: Xinyuan Wang

The recently released seventh national census in China shows that today’s China not only has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world (on average Chinese women are expected to have 1.3 children each throughout their lives, compared to the UK  where in 2020 it was 1.58), but also is facing ageing crisis where 149 Chinese cities are now classed as ‘deep ageing’. What do these figures mean to ordinary Chinese households? What does that mean to the very experience of ageing among older people in China?

As observed during my field work in Shanghai, a striking feature of this older generation in China is, what I call, a ‘new sandwich generation’. The concept of a sandwich generation used to refer to middle-aged people who are burdened by taking care of their young children and parents. But what is the new sandwich generation? To show what this means for ordinary Chinese people, I would like to introduce one of my key research participants Fangfang and her four-generation family.

Fangfang’s four generation household. Infographic by Xinyuan Wang

As shown on the chart, Fangfang is the second generation compared to her 89-year old mother, represented by the top bar. Fangfang’s daughter, the third bar from the top is 36, and has two young children, aged 9 and 2, who were born just after the thirty yearlong one-child policy was abolished in 2015.

Fangfang’s mother Hui was born in 1929 and belongs to the generation that suffered long periods of war and poverty. Hui fled into the former French concession in the city centre with her family to avoid shelling when Japan invaded Shanghai in 1937. During this period of time (from 1937 to 1949) the Sino-Japan war and civil war took place in China. For a brief period, life for Hui seemed to be less constrained as she married into a relatively well-off family, however, soon after the establishment of communist New China, the family business started to decline. All private businesses were cracked down on becoming state or collective owned and whole households were persecuted during various political struggles.

The second daughter in her family, Fangfang was born in 1949, just after the revolution. In the 1950s, the Party encouraged high fertility rates, as the population was regarded as the essential force of revolution and production, and women with many children were officially rewarded as ‘honourable mothers’ (guangrong mama). Despite limited life resources, Hui gave birth to seven children (from 1948 to 1965) and six of them survived to adulthood. During her childhood, Fangfang witnessed how her mother struggled to raise young children during a time of pervasive scarcity and uncertainty, and how her young brother, who suffered from congenital heart disease, only survived seven days due to the lack of medical treatment in 1950s.

Fangfang’s own life changed drastically when the Cultural Revolution started. All the schools closed, and urban youth nationwide were sent to the countryside to receive education from farmers. In 1966, when 17-year-old Fangfang said goodbye to her family in Shanghai, she did not expect she would be ‘stuck’ in the countryside for 12 years. In 1978, when Fangfang finally got transferred back to Shanghai, working in the factory where her father used to work, she was already 29 years old, she then married one of her former neighbours, and their daughter Lan was born in 1982.

Lan was the only child in the family, since the one-child policy had been enforced since 1979 in urban areas. Lan was born in a rather different era, when the egalitarianism that characterised the period of the planned economy had started to collapse because of the market-orientated economic reforms, which started in 1978. Fangfang clearly remembered how things were getting more competitive both at work and at Lan’s school.

When Fangfang’s granddaughter Joy was born in 2009, Lan only took half of her maternity leave and went back to work straight away to keep her promotion at work. At that time, Fangfang had just retired and in her words quite ‘naturally’ stepped into the role of being the mother of little Joy. In 2014, ‘only-child’ couples (meaning both the wife and the husband were the only children in their family) were allowed to have a second child in Shanghai and Lan gave birth to a boy in 2016. This time, Joy’s paternal grandmother (nai nai) had to come to help with raising the baby as Fangfang was too busy with taking care of the girl and her own mother.

According to ‘filial piety’ (xiao) principles found in Confucian ethics, adult children are supposed to take care of their old parents in order to pay back the ‘care debt’ they owe to their parents. Previously, in Chinese agricultural society, children were regarded as the ‘pension’ of the family. As the old Chinese saying goes ‘children are reared to provide support in old age’ (yang er fang lao). When Fangfang’s mother fell ill and needed intensive care, she made it clear that she did not want to be taken care of by non-kin so as not to ‘lose-face’, as that would suggest she raised ungrateful, or ‘unfilial’ (buxiao), children.

Therefore, Fangfang and her siblings, who are in their 60s and 70s have to take care of their mother in turns. Fangfang’s 70-year-old older brother fell ill himself because of the taxing labour of caregiving. He sighed,

‘You know in old days; I am already in the age of enjoying ‘filial piety’ from my children…but now I am still fulfilling ‘filial piety’ towards my mother. My mother is very fragile, but given medical treatments nowadays, she can easily live for another five years or longer…but I don’t know how long I can hold on…I am just emotionally and physically tired.’ 

According to Fangfang, all her siblings, including herself and her husband, can imagine themselves spending the last stages of their lives in a care home, being taken care of by care workers, so that their own children will be free of the ‘unbearable burden’ of elderly care.  They are pretty sure they will be the last generation in China to practice the traditional ‘in the way of providing actual elderly care labour. Another background fact is that, In China, the national pension scheme was first introduced in 1950s. In a way, retirement is an unprecedented life experience for the generations who lived in urban China.

‘We are struggling to take care of our mum, but at least we have siblings that we can share this burden with…it is 6 households with 12 people altogether, all taking care of one old person…our children are unlucky because they are part of the only-child generation…that is to say that at some stage, a couple with an only child will need to take care of old parents from both sides, which is four old persons. Can you imagine what kind of burden our generation will become to our children?’ Fangfang asked, rhetorically.

Furthermore, Fangfang thinks her daughter’s family could not even take care of their children without her support, not to mention their ability to support her in the future.

As Fangfang’s story shows, the new sandwich generation refers to retired people in their 50s to 70s who are simultaneously burdened with heavy care commitments for both their elderly parents and their grandchildren. This is partly a consequence of the extended life expectancy, the decades-long one-child policy, relatively early retirement, and the significantly improved health situation of older people. It is also an outcome of a multi-generational household strategy to deal with the intense social competition inherent in contemporary China. The situation of older people actively engaging with grandparenting is not unusual across the world as observed by the ASSA project, however, the heavy labour of care weighed on the shoulders of the older generation in urban China is rather pronounced. This is a vastly different situation from the connotations of ‘retirement’, which literally means ‘step back and rest’ in Chinese. In practice the experience is closer to the phrase ‘lean-in and be busy’, especially when taking care of both elderly parents and young grandchildren.