Growing responsibilities and growing differences

This chapter presents informants’ late childhood and adolescence experiences. It focuses on minors’ agency and care roles and their experiences of growing up as Chinese migrants’ descendants in Spain in which the notion of ‘difference’ is key. In parallel, it presents a still minority but emergent pattern: adolescents, descendants of Qingtianese migrants in Spain, who are still living in China nowadays. Their present-day accounts and preferences, together with their lifestyle and living conditions, challenge the left-behind discourse predominant in migration research.