Paradoxical Emotional Intimacy: Negotiating Filial Emotion and Family Well-being in the Liminal Space of Chinese Intergenerational Travel

Abstract

Intergenerational family travel in China provides a distinctive lens for understanding how cultural values, emotional practices, and relational expectations are negotiated across generations. While family tourism is often portrayed as a harmonious pursuit of ‘happy family time,’ its more ambivalent dimensions remain underexplored, especially in contexts shaped by filial piety (xiao) and relational ideals of harmony. This research study addresses this gap by investigating how Chinese families experience and interpret intergenerational travel, focusing on how filial duty, emotional negotiation, and relational ethics influence the pursuit and perception of family well-being. Guided by a constructivist grounded theory methodology (CGTM), this research study, which combines individual and family group interviews, employed a whole-family approach that enabled multiple generations to co-construct meaning through conversation. This relational and multi-voiced design was further enriched through auto-driven photo elicitation, which evoked emotion and memory, deepening engagement. Reflexivity was embedded throughout the process, and interpretations were continuously revisited and refined through open and focused coding, constant comparison, and memo writing. These iterative analyses traced how emotions, moral reasoning, and cultural scripts interacted within what was theorised as a liminal emotional space, a temporary and transformative setting where familial ties, cultural scripts, and moral understandings of happiness converged and were reconfigured through emotional practice. The theorisation that emerged from this process reveals that intergenerational family travel experiences were characterised by emotional complexity and ambivalence. Aspirations of care and intimacy coexisted with obligation, sacrifice, and conflict. These tensions extended beyond contrasts between ‘wanting to’ and ‘having to’, appearing as misalignments between generations and through shifting hierarchies of authority and the gendered emotional labour. Such recurring tensions reflected deep cultural logics through which intimacy, hierarchy, and happiness were continually reconstituted. Within the liminal emotional space of travel, these logics were both reaffirmed and transformed, showing how Confucian ideals of filial duty interacted with contemporary values of autonomy and emotional expression. This research study theorises about paradoxical emotional intimacy, proposing intergenerational family travel as a liminal emotional practice where emotion and morality intersect to reshape kinship ties. This theorisation is supported by four interrelated pillars: the cultural ambiguity of filial piety (xiao), the cultural structuring of emotional experience, conflict as liminal emotional practice, and paradoxical well-being. Together, they illuminate how intergenerational relationships are not fixed entities but dynamic processes sustained through emotional negotiation and cultural interpretation. Empirically, the research study situates family well-being within Chinese cultural frameworks of filiality and relational ethics. Conceptually, it demonstrates that emotion is a relational and moral practice through which cultural meanings are reinterpreted. Methodologically, it exemplifies the value of a relational, multi-voiced CGTM approach that integrates dialogue, visual elicitation, and reflexive engagement to capture family emotional complexity. In a society where traditional moral language coexists with modern aspirations for self-realisation, intergenerational travel becomes a space where families reimagine what it means to love, care, and be happy together. The theory of paradoxical emotional intimacy illuminates the interweaving of culture, emotion, and morality in the continual shaping of family life and its meanings.