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Georgine Leung, University College London, United KingdomAbstract
This paper examines the Chinese postpartum practice of Zuo yuezi (ZYZ or “sitting the month”) in Hong Kong as a socially organised domain of care, authority and maternal identity-making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2021 and 2023, including narrative interviews with 18 mothers (and some of their family members, care workers and representatives of the postpartum goods and services industry), I analyse how postpartum recovery is organised, interpreted and managed under contemporary household conditions. This paper presents three main findings. First, ZYZ is best understood as practice-based and constantly negotiated rather than a fixed cultural script. Second, postpartum authority is constructed through a polycentric knowledge ecology that involves family elders, paid carers, healthcare workers, digital media and commercial infrastructures. Third, infant feeding is a key site where maternal identity and moral expectations converge, especially through the organisation of pumping and the labour required to ensure that the baby is fed. I argue that ZYZ is not simply a tradition and that postpartum care in Hong Kong is not a private health matter, but a socially organised and uneven field through which care routines, legitimacy and good mothering and care are made and judged.
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