Writing a Literature Review

Writing a literature review is often the most difficult part of research for those of us who are not native users of English and remain on the periphery of knowledge production. The literature in English is not very friendly to us as it often contains a lot of jargon, difficult words, and obscure concepts. For those whose theoretical background is not based on North American or Western European knowledge, it takes a long journey to grasp a general idea in the English literature because we have no knowledge of the context of the theoretical debate at all. This kind of background knowledge may be dated a long time ago, and may not even be mentioned in every paper, as it taken for granted by Western authors and their readers. So, it depends on luck if you come across the ‘right’ literature. 

However, it is not the case with writing a literature review for the DemiKnow project. We are asked to ‘dig’ the literature in our own language! It aims to know how family is defined and understood in the Chinese culture! How great to know that our own knowledge is also valued! We are no longer required to adjust our knowledge to fit with English concept or literature. In addition, the literature is not confined to academic articles only. Even Weibo (a Facebook-like platform in China) posts, movies and the like are encouraged to be included. All these initiatives have made writing literature review a much easier and happier task. And more importantly, it helps us ponder what family really means in our culture (not to bend our knowledge in order to better fit English-based concept) and how it is implicated in family decision making (here as migrating to other cities to live and work…). Compared with the western culture, the family in China is often an extended one (including grandparents). Functionally, the Chinese family often expects the grandparents to give a helping hand with raising grandchildren (such as picking them up from school and taking them home) and at the same time the children are supposed to assume the responsibility of taking care of their parents. These kinds of structural and functional features of Chinese families hence have implications for family decision making on migration.