Jingyi Wang | Virtual Parenting: Chinese families in speculative future

 
In today’s China, 61 million children live without their parents. This demographic makes up more than 20% of total Chinese children. They are called left-behind-children, whose one or both parents migrate to big cities, pursuing money and career, leaving them behind to be taken care of by grandparents.
This issue causes various problems for the children, including but not limited to mental disease, suicidal tendency, learning difficulties, crime, as well as antisocial personality. At a larger scope, the negative effect of “left-behind-children phenomenon” in China goes beyond the individual level. Socially, it leads to millions of broken families and one unsettled society.
Technically speaking, this phenomenon started when the first migrant worker came into being. However, it only became severer as the Chinese economy blooms from the 80s, influencing more than 3 generations (Gen Y, Gen Y, and Gen Alpha).
This issue is normalized. While to a certain extent, the migrant workers have no choice but to leave home and pursue better fortune, the toxicity of this situation is overlooked. Every day, more and more children are separated with parents, due to poor policy, economic inequality, peer pressure and comfort from other migrant families, as well as people’s reluctance to change.
As a left-behind-child myself, I feel the urge to speak up. As I see more people than I ever imagined are influenced by this situation, I want to start making a difference. This project is created for a broad audience, including those who can personally relate to this experience. For educators, policymakers, employers, social workers, entrepreneurs– for anyone who is economically and socially capable to make a small difference on this matter, this is the opportunity for a voice to be heard.
This project is inspired by the experience of a left-behind-child Tingting, yet it goes beyond one character’s reality to a projection of a speculative future, where facilities and spaces are designed to enable Chinese families to raise children without the parents’ physical presence and companionship. This dystopian 3D design explores the concept of “Virtual Parenting”, which outlines the state where parents only involve in children’s lives through telecommunication, and aims to ultimately prove the inefficiency of this concept.
The audience enters the space through the first person perspective of a girl Tingting, who grows up alone in the house and only communicates with her parents through telephone. The audience is taken through a normal day of Tingting’s life, during which she eats scheduled food, watches programmed television, forcedly plays with selected toys, and eventually, studies standardized ideology.
The media content and interior design inside this ideological house are carefully curated, to make a cultural connection with Chinese gen XYZ, to maintain intentional distance with the audience, to make a sarcastic comment on standardized education, and to create the mixed feeling of absurdness, captivity and isolation. During the process of ideation and media production, I struggled in making a linguistic choice, yet eventually convinced by the power of language, media context and collective memory. I am convinced that certain messages can only be delivered in the mother language of myself, my target audience, and the represented group.