J Fam Econ Iss (2010) 31:382–386
DOI 10.1007/s10834-010-9217-0
ORIGINAL PAPER
Intimacy and its Denial: When Sons and Daughters Talk
About Fatherhood, Marriage, and Work
Kwok-bun Chan
Published online: 11 August 2010
 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Abstract In this article, I want to offer two vignettes to
show the internal workings, or the psycho-social interiors,
of the Chinese family. How are the private, the personal,
the internal, the local, and the familial being affected by the
public and the global, by the external forces in the midst of
globalization—and, of course, vice versa? One vignette
concerns children: sons and daughters, talking about their
own fathers and about fatherhood in Singapore. The other
vignette concerns daughters and single women in Hong
Kong talking about men, intimacy, sexuality, marriage,
family, and, more importantly today, work. The two post-
colonial societies are similar and different in a number of
ways.
Keywords Denial
Fatherhood
Intimacy
Marriage

Work
Allow me to begin by introducing myself and my relations
with this association. I first met Professor Xiao Jing Jian a
few years ago when he visited the Department of Sociology
at Hong Kong Baptist University. That was the first time
that I noticed ACFEA and the Journal of Family and
Economic Issues that he is editing. Some of you may know
that I subsequently edited a special issue for the journal on
A keynote speech given at the eighth Biennial Conference of the
Asian and Family Economics Association on July 2–4, 2009,
Centcore Hotel, Yamaguchi, Japan, co-sponsored by Yamaguchi
University, Yamaguchi Prefecture Convention Centre, and Houyou
Society.
K.-b. Chan (&)
Chair Professor of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University,
Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong
e-mail: ckb@hkbu.edu.hk
123
the subject of Chinese families in Hong Kong. Two months
ago, with Professor Xiao’s recommendation, I was awarded
by Springer a contract to edit an international handbook on
Chinese families. This handbook will contain 26 original
research essays. A few days ago, I decided to call the book,
which will be published in 2011, International Handbook
of Chinese Families (Chan 2011).
Of the 26 essays in the handbook, I want to focus on two
pieces today. I want to offer two vignettes, to show the
internal workings, or the psycho-social interiors, of the
Chinese family. I want to look at how the private, the
personal, the internal, the local, and the familial are being
affected by external forces in the midst of globalization—
and, of course, vice versa. I will refer especially to the
interplay between the private on the one hand and the
public on the other, which lies at the core of what
C. Wright Mills (1959) calls ‘‘the sociological
imagination’’.
One of these vignettes concerns children: sons and
daughters, talking about their own fathers and about
fatherhood in Singapore. The other vignette concerns
daughters and single women in Hong Kong talking about
men, intimacy, sexuality, marriage, family, and, more
importantly today, work. So, I am handling two post-colo-
nial societies that are similar and different in a number of
ways.
I would like to focus for a while on what I call the
‘‘historical sociology of colonialism’’ in Singapore and
Hong Kong, while looking at the sociology of women,
children, family, and marriage, over three generations. I
want to look at marital and familial matters from the points
of view of the less powerful members of the family. More
specifically, I want to find out how these not-so-powerful
family members talk about the more powerful ones. Thus,
we have children talking about their fathers, and women
J Fam Econ Iss (2010) 31:382–386
and daughters talking about their men, including ‘‘would-
be’’ husbands and boyfriends. By adopting the vantage
point of the victims, the underdogs, I want to turn families
and the family stories upside down; so, I am venturing
down a radical path. I also want to keep my analytical
focus very firmly on gender politics, the power game that
lies at the heart of the family drama, whether the family
is Chinese or not. (Chan and Wong 2005; Tsun and
Lui-Tsang 2005)
For my first vignette, I borrow some of my analysis from
the author of one of the chapters in my book, Hing Ai Yun
(2011). In Singapore, a post-colonial society, the traditional
role of the father as the keeper of family order has over the
generations been, and remains to this day, very resistant to
change. New forms of the father-child relationship have
also been slow to materialize. The immigrant fathers dis-
cussed in Hing’s chapter were described by their children
as uncaring, unloving, ungiving, vulgar, crude, and irre-
sponsible. These children described their fathers as having
no concept of what a father is, meaning that the children
suffered and lived with the consequences. Now that the
children themselves have become fathers, they want to
construct a new image of the father. Living under the
economic conditions of colonial Singapore, the immigrant
fathers found it difficult to provide for their families
without help from their wives, whose contribution to the
home was not properly appreciated by the formal economy
or at home. As a consequence, in Singapore, you have the
persistence of the myth of the male breadwinner, the pro-
tector, the family head, the decision maker, even though
around the 1990s, mothers or wives contributed close to
40% of household incomes. Although these mothers’ and
wives’ contributions have never been given public or pri-
vate recognition, it is fair to say that their husbands actually
took the roles assigned to them by society quite seriously;
they were assigned these roles, and they performed them
without question. One son interviewed by Hing recalled his
father saying, ‘‘It’s only fair. I have done my provider role,
she (my wife) must play her homemaker role accordingly’’.
These fathers worked very, very hard, sometimes on more
than one job at a time: they were caught up in what I call
the ‘‘money chase’’. Work in colonial Singapore was
stressful, even dangerous, but the fathers took pride in it,
and they were very happy to be able to say to themselves
that their ‘‘children can sleep soundly at night’’. Their hard
work earned the money that allowed them to support a
‘‘respectable family life’’.
Work in the face of today’s intense global competition
continues to be stressful (Astone et.al. 2010; Lin and Chen
2006). What about second-generation fathers in Singapore
then? These fathers continued to maintain what I call
‘‘indirect relations’’ or ‘‘no relations’’ with their children.
On the one hand, they clung to an ‘‘authoritarian model’’ of
383
fatherhood. On the other hand, they also wanted to enjoy
the emergent desire within them for closeness and intimacy
with their children. We are talking about a transitional
model of fatherhood, one that falls between the old and the
new ways of being a father. This new desire for intimacy
with one’s children evoked a new emotion that these
fathers found difficult to handle. They were actually afraid
of this new emotion. So what was the result? Fathers and
children communicated with each other indirectly, through
women, the third party, the conductor. Fathers were
dependent on women to communicate with their own
children. These women, mothers, sisters, daughters, and
grandmothers, thus played a very pivotal, mediating role.
Children saw their fathers making selfless sacrifices for
them and their families. They praised their fathers; they
considered them to be good providers. The children
respected their fathers, treated them with deference and
even approached them with fear. But, at the same time,
they felt unloved and neglected. They complained about
the absence of the father. Sometimes, fathers beat their
children in an attempt to maintain discipline and family
order. They disciplined them by caning them or leaving
them in a corner to repent quietly. The underlying goal was
to instil unquestioning obedience and conformity in the
children. The children of these second-generation fathers
told Hing that they had sworn to themselves that they
would never become like their fathers. They would never,
ever become the dictators their fathers had been if they
were to marry and have children.
In a post-colonial Singapore society governed by
authoritarianism, these fathers did not feel confident that
they were doing the right thing while practising a more
liberal parenting style. The result was that they ended up
flip-flopping, vacillating between the old model of tough-
ness and the new model of tenderness, which caused a lot
of confusion both for their children and for themselves.
There were a lot of confused children and confused fathers.
I now turn to a third model and the third generation. This
generation has witnessed the emergence of greater confi-
dence on the part of fathers in striking a balance, in
articulating and arbitrating between strictness and disci-
pline on the one hand, and reasoning, caring, and loving on
the other. They have endeavored to try out such concepts as
empathy, nurturing, dialog, and communication with their
children, and begun to show a deep desire for closeness
with their wives. But even now, in the third generation, we
cannot find true communication between fathers and chil-
dren. Idealized mutual disclosure, the so-called reciprocal
disclosure between members of a dyad, is still not widely
practised in Singapore. The primary mode of relating to
another in a close domestic relationship is silent intimacy,
not vocal closeness: I want to be intimate with you, but I
won’t tell you this; I don’t know how to tell you this. This
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type of silent intimacy is opposed to what Western liberal
practice calls ‘‘disclosing intimacy’’, that is, revealing the
self and working at knowing and emphasizing the other.
Fathers, even in the third generation, feel inadequate about
‘‘doing intimacy’’, and so they concentrate on what they
are very good at, which is work. They are not good at
expressing emotion, and so they turn to something that they
have been very good at since childhood—working. They
hope that by working hard, by earning a good income,
everything will fall into place. But, unfortunately, not
everything falls into place. I will tell you why later.
As a result of the intensification of work under global-
ization and the vulnerabilities that result from erratic
business cycles in the wake of such events as the Asian
financial crisis and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and
other investment banks, a new divide has very quickly
replaced the old chasm of unloving fathers on the one hand
and unloved children on the other. Fathers’ continued
attempts to play the role of provider fit in very well with
silent intimacy, and, together, they produce what sociolo-
gists call the ‘‘commodification of love’’. Love is com-
modified and has become a product. Something we call the
‘‘ATM father’’ has been created: children approach or
contact their father only to ask him to visit the ATM
machine and take money out of his bank account. Mean-
while, the father remains little understood.
The common experience of the Chinese child in the 21st
century, I argue, is one of loneliness and solitude. Let me
quote from one of these children, a child from a poor
family, who said this about his father: ‘‘I feel a wall is
building between us, but it is impossible that he does not
work. We are not rich. I feel bad that despite his age, he
still has to work so hard.’’ And this from the child of a
well-to-do business family: ‘‘He always gives me money;
my father always gives me money … sometimes I wonder
if I am his son or a commodity that can be satisfied with
material goods. He is using money in exchange for love,
which is why I am spending so much now, hoping he will
scold me, so that father and son at least have an opportunity
to argue. Even television tells us money cannot buy love.’’
I reckon this type of neglect of the child is a universal
social problem, but is probably more intensely so in the
Chinese family.
The New Age Father remains a nominal fiction. Only a
few upper-middle class fathers who have surplus money,
may—although they also may not—succeed in attaining
intimacy with their children. If they do, then these New
Age Fathers are very special people indeed; they are
nominated by their children as models for emulation. This
new kind of father is what his children would desire to
become. What about the working class children? The pic-
ture here is very grim indeed. Their fathers cannot provide
even the minimum for their children. They feel shame and
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J Fam Econ Iss (2010) 31:382–386
humiliation and, because of this, they gradually lose con-
trol over their children whose respect they lost long ago.
The status of these men may be even lower than that of
their wives if they fail to put food on the table. More
acutely, their children are keenly aware that their father is
poor. Both the children and the father himself know it. This
scenario is pervasive in any rapidly changing and upwardly
mobile society in which each generation seems to be more
educated and affluent than its predecessors. As a result,
fathers feel ashamed of themselves because they cannot
keep up with their children. Richard Sennett probably had
this phenomenon in mind when he wrote about the ‘‘hidden
injuries of class’’ (Sennett and Cobb 1993).
What about fathers’ relationship with their daughters? I
think this relationship has traversed the farthest in Singa-
pore and in many other Asian and Chinese societies
because, unfortunately, patriarchy has not been dismantled,
only remade. Patriarchy has been reinvented. Daughters in
Singapore are discovering their new role of production, but
they are also reminded by their fathers and Asian society
that this new role must remain secondary to their original
role of reproduction. Fathers tell their daughters, ‘‘You
must never forget that’’. As a result, society places these
women in the secondary labour market and bestows upon
them a secondary status. When daughters go out to work, to
labour, they begin to lose touch with their mothers, and
their fathers.
I now want to move away from this picture of sons and
daughters talking about their fathers to a second picture:
why do Hong Kong women marry or not marry, and how
do they talk about men in Hong Kong? I want to deal with
sexuality, intimacy, romance, marriage, relationships and,
most importantly, work. To work or not to work. To marry
or not to marry. Here, I re-state some of the arguments by
the May Partridge (2011), who contributed a chapter to my
aforementioned handbook. In this period of late modernity
or post-modernity, there is insistent demand for all of us,
both men and women, to be reflexive, to be liberated as
social actors because changes are so quick and so profound
that explanations of any given change today may no longer
be relevant tomorrow. My explanation for today remains
valid only until midnight. Tomorrow is another day and
presents another picture. This constant change, the accel-
erated pace of change in today’s globalized world,
demands that human beings be totally and comprehen-
sively reflexive so as to make sense of their own lives. And
so we are presented with a very deep existential question:
How is one to know how to get on with life when every
undertaking, large or small, continually requires adjust-
ment? How do I go on living when what makes sense today
may not seem to tomorrow?
In this respect, I would like to work toward a historical
sociology of Chinese women in Hong Kong or other
J Fam Econ Iss (2010) 31:382–386
Chinese societies, on whose part there is a growing
unwillingness to surrender their emotional needs for com-
munication and intimacy simply in order to be married.
This represents the first part of my focus. The second part is
the increasing unwillingness to sacrifice the self and the
body to either work or family. These two themes have very
profound implications for marriage and work. Let me
remind all of you that modern marriages locate themselves
in a social world where work is done over which self or
family has very little control. In fact, family and self must
adjust to work; they must ‘‘play second fiddle’’ to work, to
industry, to capitalism, to production.
Let me now turn quickly to the stories of three Hong
Kong women narrated by Partridge. Woman A, when
Partridge interviewed her, said things like ‘‘something is
wrong with our world, our globe, the ‘bigger picture’’’
because she and her partner struggled against exhaustion to
find time, any time, to achieve intimacy. Her solution was
to avoid marriage. She said she was tired of looking for a
man who could make himself available emotionally and
offer her love. Woman B had discarded the classic dis-
course on marriage and viewed it instead simply as a
friendly, temporary association that should last only as long
as it worked for both parties—not as a lasting bond.
Woman C, in her early forties at the time of the interview,
had given up on any form of marriage or other mutually
supportive relationship. She also presented a very profound
paradox: she told Partridge that she was now looking to her
relationships at work for emotional sustenance. She had
discovered that she could have a deep relationship with her
boss, whether male or female, and that this relationship
would motivate her to work even harder—for capitalism.
Work is becoming for many adults the primary, if not
the only, source of satisfaction in their lives, which reminds
us of Arlie Hochschild’s book (1989) on the ‘‘second
shift’’. Work has thus become a refuge, a haven, as intimate
relationships are seen as messy and miserable. This sin-
gular, one-dimensional emotional dependence on work, on
production, is dangerous and makes people vulnerable, as
conditions at work can suddenly change for the worse, due
to, for example, market collapse, job loss, retirement,
retraining or underemployment. There is also a temptation
for women to blame men for the latter’s lack of love or
emotional availability. Indeed, women in Hong Kong do
hold men responsible in this way. They complain that men
do not feel responsible for their partners’ emotional well-
being. There is a new divide between men and women in
Hong Kong.
Allow me to perform a Marxian analysis here. In our
post-modern world, middle-class males, and now females
also, have recently moved back to working in sweatshops,
although these sweatshops are electronic sweatshops. This
is a world, a social world, created around a story, a myth, of
385
how ‘‘real’’ men should work, and must work, as rational
actors unswayed by feelings. We can talk about the irra-
tionality of rationality or, the rationality of irrationality.
And so we have a methodology built around a story made
up by owners and managers, bureaucrats and politicians,
who are the beneficiaries of this story, who have the power
to create economic competition and who are now in the
position to benefit from exploitation, from the capitalist
system.
We are inching towards a new age of anxiety, or an age of
new anxiety, that is perhaps more omnipresent, more pro-
found than when Sigmund Freud first wrote about it in his
psychoanalysis of dreams. There are very deep emotional
consequences for the men and women, sons and daughters,
and fathers and mothers working in today’s environment of
constant unfailing global competition, now widely called
globalization, which is filled with constant threat and anxi-
ety. Hochschild (1983) told us a while ago in her book, The
Managed Heart, that only a man, and a woman, who can
manage their emotions in some way—by denial, projection,
delayed gratification, displacement, replacement—can sur-
vive. The modern construction of masculinity guarantees
that men today find it increasingly difficult to cater to
women’s newly discovered need for intimacy while, at the
same time, being unable to acknowledge such a need in
themselves. This is a denial of others that is simultaneously a
denial of self. A double denial.
As I mentioned earlier, work is intensifying: in Hong
Kong, in Singapore, in Malaysia, in China, in Taiwan, and
throughout the United States. I recently read a newspaper
article noting that Europeans, particularly the French, are
still putting up some resistance, by escaping to their
weekend cottages at mid-day on a Friday, for example, but
the Chinese continue to embrace work unashamedly. So
there is now a trend of work intensification that has become
global and omnipresent, although individuals, and some-
times even cultures, are resisting it. I am constantly
reminded of the horrors of nineteenth century sweatshops
in England. The electronic sweatshops of the knowledge
and information society are actually a throw-back to the
nineteenth century, and would not seem unfamiliar to
Charles Dickens. The effect of this tyranny of work, of the
intensification of work in the public sphere, is now being
expressed and acted out in the choices made about and the
actions taken in marriage, sexuality, intimacy—meaning
that what work is being expressed and acted out in rela-
tionships between husband and wife and parent and child.
Lamentably, nothing has changed over the past three
generations; in fact, things have actually grown worse.
Let me conclude with the observation that the univer-
sity-educated Chinese women of Hong Kong, Singapore
and elsewhere are like what Partridge calls the ‘‘legendary
frogs in the pot’’. You put frogs, women, into a pot,
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underneath which is fire, the fire of globalization. So what
do the frogs, the women, do when they feel the heat of this
fire? (The point of the frog in this pot analogy is that the
frogs may sit still and die because the change in tempera-
ture occurs too slowly for them to perceive it.) Women, and
men too, handle the intensification of work by devising
personal strategies. In other words, they find their own
ways out it. They cope with globalization individually,
personally. But as individuals, rather than as an organized
unit, they do not become what Marx called the ‘‘class for
itself’’. They become dispensable, vulnerable in times of
economic change. Men and women as individuals are now
extremely vulnerable to the ups and downs of the global
economy, and therefore must suffer the impact of these
economic ups and downs on their emotional lives, leaving
deep scars and wounds behind. If we do nothing, then we
might be left with what Habermas called the ‘‘colonization
of the life world’’. Not only will we have had the coloni-
zation of Singapore and Hong Kong, but we will all—men
and women alike—also witness the colonization of our
emotional lives. Habermas has given us a warning: In all
post-modern information and knowledge societies, work
and its norms extend themselves so ceaselessly that neither
sex, male or female, can find enough time for sex, for
emotional gratification, for children. They do not have the
time; they cannot afford the indulgence of the self. They
must devote their total selves to coping with the ‘‘injuries
of class’’. But as any sociologist will tell you, the root of
the problem lies not with individual men or women, sons or
daughters—nor with their psyches or their morality. The
root problem is, as Karl Marx reminded us, the material
conditions of work in the global economy, as well as the
many discourses that attempt to justify these conditions and
turn them into norms, myths, ideologies. To change it all,
both the material conditions of work and the justifications
of work practices and norms must be challenged.
The time to do it is now.
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J Fam Econ Iss (2010) 31:382–386
References
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Author Biography
Kwok-bun Chan is Chair Professor of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist
University. He earned his doctorate in sociology at York University,
Canada. He is former Head, Department of Sociology, and former
Director, David C Lam Institute for East–West Studies, Hong Kong
Baptist University. He is also former President, Hong Kong Socio-
logical Association (HKSA), and former Editor of Social Transfor-
mations in Chinese Societies, an official HKSA journal. An expert in
family studies, economic sociology, and migration, Chan is an author
of 60 journal articles, 55 book chapters, and 40 books. He is editing
for Springer The International Handbook of Chinese Families.
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