Jobless, but home for the holidays

Shanghai Morning Post reported earlier this week that an office worker in Shanghai resigned from her job so that she could return home for the Spring Festival. In an op-ed for the Mirror, Tang Ziwen, a program host with China Radio, writes about the choice workers face when they find themselves far from home as traditional holidays approach.

As the New Year approaches, many people are making celebration plans, but for young people working in other places, this one-a-year return home comes at a price.

According to a report in Shanghai Morning Post, Zhang Lei, a young woman from Harbin working in Shanghai, quit her job so that she could return home to spend the New Year with her parents. Quitting to observe the New Year – is this an expression of filial piety, or is it treating a job like a kid’s game? Is such a price worth it?

There are reasons for everything; Zhang Lei had no other recourse, for her company only gave five days of vacation for the Spring Festival. Newly married, she had to visit two sets of parents in different cities, so “even taking a plane would require at least three days travel time.” It is a rare thing to return home, so naturally one cannot leave out paying respects to parents, visiting family and friends, and gathering to reminisce! Rather than running oneself ragged and having no enthusiasm for the New Year, it may be better to simply resign and enjoy the time spent with family to the full. Perhaps for Zhang Lei, paying that price is worth it.

Chinese people place great emphasis on filial piety. When their parents get on in years, children are not often with them, so they hope to take the Spring Festival to return home and demonstrate their filiality. This seems to have become a sort of complex, but working two areas simultaneously, taking care of a job as well as family matters, is easier said than done!

Under the present employment situation, is it a simple matter to find another job after resigning a position? Quitting to return home for the New Year seems more than a little careless. Quit this year, quit next year – couldn’t this easily become an annual occurrence? This is acting irresponsibly toward employers.

In addition, the difficulty of purchasing train tickets during the holidays and the exhaustion of the round trip journey gives pause to those people who want to return home. But if you do not go home, your parents get older every year – how much more time do you have left to be filial? We cannot let our parents pass the New Year alone year after year.

How should this contradiction be resolved?