Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages

ABSTRACT This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois’ temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth’s management of conflicting feelings by reworking particular experiences of time. We extend Lois’ concepts of ‘sequencing’ (strategic ordering of emotions and time) and ‘savouring’ (intentional maximizing of specific times) to include a contextualized, gendered angle, while also engaging with the additional concept of ‘supressing’. The work draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with left-behind youth from migrant households from rural migrant-sending villages in two districts in Java, Indonesia. By highlighting youth’s shifting temporal emotions and how aspirations and experiences of left-behindness are affected, our research reveals gendered strategies of temporal emotion work. Young women enact ‘sequencing’ and ‘savouring’, aspiring to stay as a means of restorative, temporal-emotional justice for their families. Conversely, young men are more inclined to enact the ‘suppressing’ of emotions while aspiring for migration. Among a generation that has grown up in the wake of parental migration, most youth conform to traditional gendered scripts within an older culture of masculinized circular migration.


Introduction
As one of the world's largest migrant-sending nations, Indonesia's migrants remitted an unprecedented USD 11.2 billion in 2018 (IOM). Accelerating from the 1990s, due in large part to government endorsements, short-term contract work for women as maids and for men in construction ballooned in oil-rich Middle Eastern states and the rising economies of East Asia. Recently, rapidly ageing East Asian societies have also engendered conditions for care-chain migration, siphoning off care labour from rural communities in Indonesia. The 'mobility imperative for rural youth' (Farrugia 2016) particularly in migrant-sending villages remains powerful.
Invisible to the economic calculus of migration, the time and emotions of left-behind youth are embedded within the 'low-cost' solutions that developed nations seek in outsourcing care and construction labour to migrants from the developing world. The 'timedeficit' and 'care-deficit' in post-industrialized economies are alleviated by shifting these deficits to source communities in developing nations, implicating family life and children's experiences. In this context, we engage the analytical lens of 'temporal emotion work' (Lois 2010) to examine youth's shifting subjectivities in the wake of parental migration and how this shapes their aspirations. We focus on youth aged 17-20 confronting transitions to adulthood. To understand how these left-behind youth manage emotions by reworking their idiosyncratic experiences of time, we draw insights from the intertwining literature on temporalities, emotions, and left-behind youthhood in migration contexts.

Left-behind temporalities and emotions
Migration scholars have noted that 'migrant family life has a distinctive temporality: a necessary attempt to focus on the present, and a putting-off of future, almost impossible plans' (Allerton 2020, 210). In particular, left-behind youth live amidst migrant adultcentric constructions of time, experiencing a range of social inequalities, including 'temporal inequalitiesembedded in human migration and social relations on a transnational scale' (Zhou 2013, 165). Yet, while Brown et al. address 'uneven temporalities' (2017, 540) among Indian rural youth aspirations for migration to cities, the extant literature has not explored the temporalities of youth left-behind by parental migration; rather, the focus has been on the temporal experiences of youth migrants, reflecting the mobility bias in migration research.
Left-behind youth experience migrant time which, like social time, is often measured by the tickertape of emotions (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013, 28). We respond to Chakraborty and Thambiah's (2018, 583) call for more research on youth's emotions ('textured emoscapes') around migration by focusing on the mutually constitutive elements of dynamic time and emotions in influencing left-behind youth subjectivities. To make sense of 'emotions on the move' (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015), the temporal is analytically significant and deserves critical attention rather than dismissed as an externality to the human condition (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013, 2). It is by attending to change over time that Francisco-Menchavez highlights the dynamism inherent in 'developing an emotional grammar during sustained separation' for left-behind youth (2018,612). Synchronically, 'feelings, in turn, reveal a series of attitudes towards time' (Cwerner 2001, 13).
In the Southeast Asian context, while there has been recent scholarship focusing on the 'emotional valences' (Carling and Francis 2018, 911) in the 'restitching [of] family in times of migration' (Yeoh et al. 2020, 4), the literature has yet to give critical attention (Baas and Yeoh 2019) to the links between emotion, temporalities and migration among young people, particularly left-behind youth who occupy lower hierarchies of temporal (Adam 2004) and migration orders. In contrast, migrant adult emotions have received selective attention Boellstorff and Lindquist 2004). Indonesia-based research has approached piety (Silvey 2007) and shame (Lindquist 2004;Beazley, Butt, and Ball 2018) as part of a repertoire of 'socializing emotions' (Röttger-Rössler et al. 2015), producing culturally-sanctioned subservience, respect or shyness. While Prusinski (2017) explored mental preparedness for emotional labour, emotional regulation and the management of stigma around low-status work by women migrants, Chan (2017) attended to parental shame, care expectations and gendered (dis)approval around youth migration/staying aspirations.
Apart from the growing body of work on adult subjects interrogating the links between emotions and migration, research has also turned attention to (younger) children's emotions in migratory contexts. Focusing on adolescents, Beazley et al. examine their complicated emotions with respect to their parents' transnational migration, revealing that 'whether they 'like it or don't like it', they have no choice but to acquiesce ' (2018, 591) to parental absenteeism resulting from serial migration (see also Hoang et al. 2015;Lam and Yeoh 2019). However, on the cusp of adulthood, youths, have relatively greater agency to transform their natal and future family paths with respect to participating in or refusing migration in their own lives. Left-behind youthhood as a temporalemotional turning-point in the life-course is hence important to understanding youthhoods under migration. Youth emotions are central to 'doing' family, not mere accompaniments to migration but are formed and morph during interaction with others within the household, community and culture. While '(t)here is scope for more work looking at the emotional consequences of temporal suspension for migrants' in general (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013, 218), this is particularly urgent for comprehending the lives of left-behind youth who have to navigate childhoods and youthhoods in prolonged waithood. In order to build an analytical frame linking migration, temporality, emotions and left-behind youthhood, we turn next to Jennifer Lois' (2010) conceptualisations of 'temporal emotion work'.
Temporal emotion work of left-behind youth … a subclass of emotions … temporal emotions … can only be felt by crossing timeframes … While all emotions can be felt in the present, remembered in the past, or anticipated in the future … fewsuch as nostalgia, regret, disillusionment, ambition, hope, optimism, and dread -… cannot be felt without bridging the present to either the past or the future. (Lois 2010, 440) Lois' 'temporal emotion work' brings 'temporalities' and 'emotions' into a single conceptual frame. We employ specific aspects of this lenssequencing and savouring to overcome temporal-emotional strugglesfor our analysis. In her work on how mothers with home-schoolers reconcile the immense and intensive amount of time spent with their children, 'sequencing' is described as 'the strategy of compartmentalizing phases of life according to children's development ' (2010, 434). Extending this, we use sequencing to describe the intentional ordering of time and emotions by youth who spend considerable time in the absence of their migrant parents, an absence inflicted by stringent migration regimes. Lois explains that '(o)n a temporal level, savouring is the opposite of sequencing ' (2010, 437). 'Savouring' points to an attentiveness to the present to appreciate the good times. However, '(o)n an emotional level', both sequencing and savouring are intertwined and 'savouring [is] derived from sequencing ' (2010, 437). In contradistinction, suppressing, we offer, is a silencing (Chan 2018) of certain emotions to be able to function in gender-coded, appropriate ways. Suppressing involves outwardly negating emotions as part of gendered performances of Indonesian left-behind youthhood. As Beazley et al. note with respect to concealing emotions among children in Lombok, suppression of feelings is a 'tactic' in a context when they are 'expected to show deference and conform, by expressing culturally appropriate emotions to avoid feelings of malu [shame] ' (2018, 599). In sum, 'temporal emotion work' denotes the process of attempting to reconcile 'troublesome feelings' (frustration, resentment) through 'manipulating … subjective experiences of time' (Lois 2010, 422). As 'unique tools in managing the emotional difficulties inherent in the trajectories of some identities' (Lois 2010, 421), 'temporal emotions' offer insights in understanding left-behind youth's experiences, shedding light on how they 'choose' to emotionalize in relatively choice-less situations. This analytical frame enables a centrestaging of the crafting of agentic, temporal responses to emotionally fraught conditions.
Youthhood and left-behindnessespecially for youth who have parents with 'permanently temporary' contracts abroad, and whose return is seemingly forever provisionalis a 'time-sensitive identity' (Lois 2010, 441). The emotionally stressful temporal experience of left-behindness requires work from youth to 'manage turbulent hearts' (Wikan 1990), placating themselves privately, occasionally confiding in a close family member or friend, and presenting themselves publicly in a socially acceptable manner (see also Chan 2018). Where quantitative time-use is curtailed by external familial, societal or structural inequalities, youth remedy this by silently changing qualitative temporal experiences within themselves as a means of emotional self-protection. Before turning to the 'temporal emotion work' among young women and men in our study, we sketch the research context of rural Java and explain the methods we used to ensure that a critical, reflexive lens informs our analysis.

Research context and methods
Youth as a demographic category has doubled in Indonesia in recent years (Naafs 2013(Naafs , 2349. In 2010, 'Indonesia's 62 million youth represented one in four of Indonesia's total population' (UNFPA 2014, 12), a figure projected to grow. For youth from economicallydepressed, developing rural regions, migration factors prominently in their lives (Punch 2015). Since 2000, the Indonesian economy and household livelihoods have become increasingly reliant on migration remittances, which has been experiencing doubledigit growth (World Bank 2019, 15). As labour migration increases steeply, a culture of migration (Chan 2018) has taken root in many rural areas. Notably, it has become increasingly common for young women to migrate in search of work (Lindquist 2004, 502). This so-called feminization of migration is fuelled by the increasing demand in developed economies for feminized domestic and care labour, the 'growth of transnational migration infrastructure' facilitating the mobility of women to low-skilled work abroad, as well as the attraction of 'higher wages overseas compared to agricultural and factory work in Indonesia' (Chan 2017, 249).
Concurrently, the increasing migration of women as transnational breadwinners for their families runs counter to gendered identity constructions that have long underpinned rural Indonesian society. The gendered script of kodrat (essentially gendered duties) that normalizes complementary feminine caring and reproductive responsibilities, versus male breadwinning via/and merantau (traditional male circular migration), continues immanent. Even as merantau becomes less of a male rite of passage but is 'increasingly associated with wage labor and the consumption of modernity' (Lindquist 2004, 502), it continues to be inscribed with gendered meaning. Robust social and cultural restrictions are placed on young women rather than young men's mobility (Naafs 2013) while moral panics have developed around both the risks faced by female migrants abroad as well as their children growing up in their absence (Chan 2018, 87;Somaiah et al. 2020). Particularly for left-behind youth with migrant-mothers, they have to contend with conflicting gendered discourses which sanction women's work abroad for uplifting the family's economic welfare, while also censuring absent mothers for jeopardizing their own morality, and that of their children's.
In Javanese culture, while '(t)he mother is seen as a bulwark of strength and love to whom one can always turn … the father is distant and must always be treated respectfully' (Geertz 1961, 107). Customarily, the father's relationship with the child from early childhood till the child is approximately five years old changes 'from one of affection and warmth to one of distance and reserve' (Geertz 1961, 110). Politically, gender ideologies became more heightened and codified with Suharto's New Order regime in the 1990s. The Bapak (father figure) became an exalted figure, 'entitled to exercise dominance because of his God given wisdom, self-control and mastery of emotions' (Nilan et al. 2008, 220). Tackling transitions to being ideal youthful subjects by navigating circumscribed Javanese family norms and gender ideologies, youth face the challenge of enacting appropriate emotion in the presentation of selves to maintain the integrity and honour of their migrant parents and families.
Our field-sites, Ponorogo and Tulungagung (East Java), lie within the top twelve national migrant-sending regencies in Indonesia (BNP2TKI 2018, 5). They, like other rural 'source' villages increasingly connected developmentally to the international neoliberal world order, are sited within 'peripheral temporalities' (Zhou 2013)  Gender, household migration and wealth status were taken into consideration when initially selecting a sample of 28 households where the CHAMPSEA team conducted paired yet separately conducted (out of ear-shot from each other for privacy of participants' views to be maintained) life-story interviews with youth aged 17-20 and their parent/guardian within the household. After explaining the aims of the research with copies of participant information sheets, verbal and written consent was sought when inviting potential participants to be interviewed. As an all-women research team (which included three mothers including both authors), we were sensitive to how our participants presented themselves within a cultural framework with strict norms around gender, age and filial piety.
Interviews were conducted in Indonesian (including by the first author) with the aid of local field assistants (aged below 35 to aid in rapport-building) and averaged around 60 minutes. Alert to our positions as 'adult researchers within an Asian cultural context, where generational respect shapes many child-adult encounters' (Chakraborty and Thambiah 2018, 585), emotionally challenging experiences were constituent of the fieldwork. Nightly debriefing sessions among the research team on-site kept us hyperaware of our positionalities and power imbalances inherent within the interview encounter. We endeavoured to reduce these as much as possible through prioritizing youth's opinions and adopting an informal conversational interview style. Empathy while maintaining composure was sought when some women cried during the semiguided conversational style interviews. The option to decline to respond to interview questions was highlighted before and during the interview, as was the option to halt entirely. Interviews closed with a 'protection umbrella' exercise (adapted from Beazley et al. 2005) to ensure that participants left the interview on a positive, if not neutral note.
After transcription, interviews were translated into English and anonymized. Inductive thematic analysis on all the transcripts revealed youth's emotions around parental migration, time and aspirations as salient analytical classifications. Rounds of further analysis shored up differently gendered responses to these. While we analysed all youth interviews, we give priority to the narratives of six left-behind youththree women and three men (Table 1).
These select six best exemplify how 'emotion cultures', 'display rules' and reflexive interview encounters (Ryan 2008) intersect in the temporal emotion work narrated by our interviewees. Prioritizing these six, enabled us to firstly illustrate how youth construct and present their temporal emotions in the interpersonal engagement of the interview encounter and secondly honour the complex socio-temporal-emotional universes shared with us replete with paradoxes, protests and plans. As the accounts below illustrate, not only do youth work to control difficult emotions around left-behindness for specific ends, they deploy temporal emotion work in a distinctly gendered manner.

Sequencing and savouring
They extrapolated these past negative experiences onto the future, and that gave them the willingness to continue sequencing -to do everything they could now to avoid regret later. (Lois 2010, 435) Many young women in our interview group experienced parental labour migration as a time of private, heartfelt loneliness. Coupled with the burden of work expected of them to replace migrant-mothers' household labour, this time of waiting was one accompanied by strong emotions. Reflecting the chief sentiment among our women interviewees, Fatma (20 years old) said, 'I feel like my heart is being knocked'. For these women, sequencing and savouring were drawn upon as strategies to temporally and emotionally sort phases of left-behindness viz-a-viz parental migration and personal aspirations.

Sequencing to orient with migrants' emotions
If mum's happy … when she sent … photos going to the seashore with her employer's children, I'll be happy too … but … once she sent me a photo of her twisted ankle … I was sad, [I] cried … I pitied her … she had worked hard. (Lani,19 years old) Despite the long-distanced separation, Lani reflected the emotionality of her long-term migrant-mother, sharing a parallel emotional coexistence. Lani's emotion work echoed what Zhou referred to as migrants' 'double grounding ' (2013, 164) where they experienced being simultaneously immersed back home and abroad. In this case, her emotional 'doubleness' stemmed from her vicarious identification with her mother's life abroad. Tears were not triggered by photographs of her mother with other children but by her injury. As a left-behind daughter, Lani chose to internalize her mother's emotions, without separating these from her own. Vicarious emotion work was part of a sequencing strategy to deal with her mother's long absence, opening space to anticipate emotional connectedness when her mother returned. With the final return of her long-term migrantmother a year prior, Lani's emotion work changed. Previously Lani had to explicitly manage her emotions, concealing for instance sadness while speaking to her migrantmother on the phone -'If I'm on the phone, I didn't dare [expose emotions] … I'm scared [that] … I'd cry'. Now, 'we can live as it is … when we get older we can share our experiences, when times are tough, so-so or happy'. For Lani, the long awaited reunion heralded a more spontaneous sharing of emotional togetherness.
Over there, the employer's child may make her happy everyday … she has to regard [him] like her own child … However, I know [the feeling] to be far from family. … Over there may be fun, but not as fun as here, right?
Temporal emotion work was also evident in the interviews we conducted with other left-behind daughters. Nabila (19 years old) manipulated unpleasant emotions such as jealousy and possessiveness for her mother's love by emphasizing temporal quality rather than quantity, rationalizing to herself that her mother's diverted mothering was temporarily forced by circumstances. Nabila managed her emotions, recognizing the impermanence of her sadness as a transitory time-sequence. She felt the sadness of her childhood, but reasoned that '[she was] still young [when Mother first migrated]' and that '[she] knew from friends that finally it'll be forgotten … time will pass'. Henceforward, more ideal time sequences are anticipated. Nabila told herself that 'if the disadvantages [of migration] are thought of continuously, then in the end anger follows'. Evanescent family time needed to be protected in the 'now' of less-than-ideal circumstances.
Sequencing to resign oneself to modified personal aspirations Lani sequenced by modifying her relationship to time and emotions. First, she adjusted her ambitions regarding gaining economic dependence through temporarily delaying her own aspirations vis-à-vis her parents' expectations. Second, she refashioned her frustration of financial dependence into the respectable femininity of dutiful daughterhoodone which prioritized parental wishes. Lani also sequenced by anticipating that she would contribute economically to the family in time, accepting the present constraints by altering her temporal and emotional expectations of the future. This entailed considerable emotional struggle to reconcile her own desires with her parents' expectations.
Instead of pursuing her own interest in psychology (without clear job prospects in sight), Lani enrolled in local pre-school educator training as this pathway offered the security of finding a job easily. Repaying her migrant parents' sacrifice meant staying the course to bring remittance-funded education projects to fulfilment in accordance with parental wishes rather than pursue economic autonomy like her friends with nonmigrant parents, who started work earlier in order to contribute sooner to the family income. Lani was open to the idea that her future husband might migrate for work overseas. However, projecting temporal-emotional experiences of sadness from her leftbehind self onto future time-sequences, she aspired to combine homemaking and working locally to be with her own children. The heavy toll of sequencing has left her reluctant to bequeath similar emotional time-sequences to her future children.
Sequencing too scaffolded Nabila's deferred aspirations and her plans for both the near-term and longer-term future. Initially aspiring to be a university graduate, she rationalized that choosing technical education allowed her to achieve job security through swiftly securing overseas factory work, enabling her migrant-mother to return from overseas without affecting the household's income. At the point of the interview, she was in the process of embarking on replacement migration so that her mother could return for the sake of her younger brother (in senior high school) whom she pitied, wanting to 'let him feel that he's taken cared of by Mother'. Ultimately, however, Nabila was adamant that she did not want a repetition of negative feelings of left-behindness for her future children, aspiring to be a physically present mother who savoured hands-on mothering. By approaching time's sequences proactively, Nabila harnessed time and emotions as a resource to facilitate her mother's return so as to allow her brother to receive the hands-on mothering she was denied. She agentically channelled her temporal emotions, not just to fulfil piety, but as a tool for change to resist the recurrence of parental serial migration in her generation. She envisaged, I'm still young … [I can] go wherever as far as possible … But when it's time, I'll go home … when I reach the right age it's time to get married … become a mother, then it's okay to … not go anywhere … Let's see the situation here … I don't wish that later my children feel Nabila, like many other young women interviewed, positioned her temporal-emotional situation in relation to significant imagined others whose emotions she considered in advance. Choosing to return 'when it is time', she would cherish caring for her children, prioritizing their emotions and family time. Her option for migration before marriage was a negotiated position within a patriarchal context where she still required permission from her father to migrate (as opposed to her husband once she married). Migrant women are positioned as dutiful agents of development only in relation to the families they remit for (Silvey 2007), and following this logic, women's 'mobility prior to marriage was acceptable if migration protected and/or improved marriage prospects' (Khoo and Yeoh 2017, 708).
While our male interviewees also engaged in sequencing time, they did so differently. Unlike the young women whose narratives we recounted above, young men rarely elaborated on their feelings about any of the topics around migration's impact on themselves or their present or future households. Instead, they tended to move quickly to the realm of practical action. While Hendra (18 years old) would have preferred to work overseas in South Korea because of the high wages, his migrant-mother insisted that he attended vocational high school. Pausing momentarily to describe his acquiescence by acknowledging that he was 'not quite the filial child' he desired to be, Hendra went on to discuss his action plans to either find work or pursue college education overseas after finishing vocational school. Like Hendra, Bandiman's (18 years old) discussion of his migration aspirations was centred on making plans for his future rather than his feelings in relation to his natal or (future) marital family. He had also told his parents about his wishes to migrate to South Korea for higher salary jobs. However, as his parents were not able to afford the high upfront costs (technical skills-training for factory work and language-school fees), Bandiman was considering migrating to Malaysia (a more affordable destination) first, then save up for Korea. As he was 'still waiting for funds', he was also considering paying the language school in instalments. He had little to say about his experience as a child with a migrant-father apart from receiving toys and chocolates from abroad, and was more forthcoming in revealing his aspirations in the long run to start his own brickmaking or convenience store business. Unlike the young women, the young men tended to circumvent talk of emotions (particularly negative feelings) while sequencing time in 'pragmatic' ways to advance life goals and career futures in line with culturally-approved, rational masculinity.

Savouring to amplify time in-between migrations, and on return
Everyday … every second … I miss Mother … She telephones so often … her employer is good … We communicate everyday … the difference is only her body isn't here … that's my feeling … I imagine Mother's very tired … Since I was young, [Mother] has been sacrificing herself … actually [she] wants [to be with] her children … but … Mother can overcome it … Although I rarely meet Mother, she always says ' … (D)on't do weird things, hanging out … ' … I want to become a strong woman like Mother. (Nabila) For Nabila, identifying with her migrant-mother's heroic strength and sacrifice helped her in her sequencing work, allowing her to simultaneously aspire towards specific ideals modelled after the exemplary figure of her mother while dealing with the temporalemotional dissonances experienced by many left-behind youth. Sequencing is thus often accompanied by the emotion work of savouring intense moments, as seen in Nabila's accentuated longing for her mother's physical presence. Despite the everydayness of her long-distance communication with her mother, intense feelings of missing a loved one had not dissipated; instead, Nabila transformed her sense of loss into a deeper appreciation of her mother's sacrificial virtues. By allowing herself to savour the heightened emotions of the presentboth the heartache of loss and the fortifying sense of love and sacrifice -Nabila was able to imagine her own future as a woman of strength like her mother. I mostly spend my time at home rather than going out … people would think, 'her mother's away … and she's just hanging out like this' … I don't want my parents to be subjected to people's words … I don't want to embarrass him [her left-behind father] with anything I do outside.
For Nabila, the inspiration she drew from her mother also powerfully motivated a conscious sense of self-surveillance to dissociate herself from the gendered risks and stigmatization attached to having a migrant-mother. As part of her temporal emotion work, Nabila took care to perform dutiful daughterhood in the now, communicating actively with her mother to avoid misunderstandings, while protecting her father from shame by monitoring her own behaviour in the public sphere. This deliberate management of emotions to present themselves as dutiful daughters in the wake of their mothers' migration could also be seen in other left-behind young women we interviewed.
Echoing Nabila's desire to emulate her mother to become a strong woman, Adiratna's (19 years old) appreciation of the maternal remittances that funded her education led her to desire repaying her parents through achieving success in her chosen career. Majoring in teacher-training, even her boyfriend 'knows … I have my own commitment [to higher education and employment], so I must ensure that I do it [for my family]'. Adiratna (19 years old) invests in temporal emotion work to self-regulate her behaviour such that familial relations are sustained and the family's standing in the community is safeguarded.
For left-behind daughters we interviewed, savouring also featured as an emotionintensive strategy to cope with migrant parents' cycle of home visits and subsequent departures. Overcome when recalling the recent reunion when her mother finally returned after protracted maternal separation, Adiratna cried, remembering emotional departures when her mother had to leave for overseas work after one-month breaks back home. Like Nabila, Adiratna deeply missed her migrant-mother's presence, despite being able to speak to her on the phone daily. Her mother's short visits home were moments of overwhelming yet precarious joy -'I'd be scared that she'd go back … ' She cried, recollecting, 'I didn't want her to work overseas again'. Notwithstanding, allowing herself happiness and emotional vulnerability during her mother's timelimited visits was a means to amplify time together, helping her overcome loneliness before and after her mother's home-visits. For her, the emotional intensity of having her mother home, even if for a short while, was a source of strength and comfort for the longer stretches of time spent in her mother's absence.
Adiratna was 'very happy' when her mother finally returned for good after 17 years working overseas. Determined to salvage lost family time, Adiratna engaged in savouring through an outpouring of emotion. She clung to her mother, desperate not to be separated again else she 'wouldn't have any friends (cries)'. Her decision to savour, rather than block her emotions towards her homecoming mother, allowed her to 'do family' in an augmented way, marking the beginning of a long-anticipated time of togetherness. By the end of the interview, we were joking and laughing together with Adiratna, soon joined by her mother too. We could only hope that being actively listened to was a cathartic experience for her.
While some young men also sought time with their migrant parents when they returned on short trips between contracts, our male interviewees did not allude to amplifying the emotionality of time spent in the way the women did. Hendra, for instance, remarked that these brief reunions were akin to meetings between strangers ('like we've never met [before] … feels awkward'). Yet, he saw the return of his migrantmother as a restoration of the family to its natural state, underpinned by more harmonious relations between family members. His migrant-mother's home visits hence heralded a time of 'more freedom' to indulge in youthful masculine behaviour ('freer to hang out … happier … more zeal') away from the moral censure attached to mother absenteeism and its assumed negative effects on their children's behaviour. Next, we give greater attention to the way young men enact temporal emotion work through the notion of 'suppressing'.

Supressing
Lois quotes Flaherty's notion of time work in relation to 'promote or suppress a particular temporal experience ' (2010, 434). We take this idea of suppressinga bottling up and silencing around emotions (particularly disagreeable ones)which is implicit in Lois' work, and extend it by emphasizing the gendered aspects that became evident from our fieldwork.

Suppressing emotions to cope with ambivalent migrant futures
As recounted during his interview, Hidayat (19 years old) was sad, but did not cry, when his father migrated. 'I was mad back then … I shut myself in a room and didn't leave'. When his father migrated, 'He seldom talked with me … I didn't want to talk to him … It's the same … then until now, I never want to talk to him on the phone'. During Hidayat's teenage years, the emotional distance between father and son was exacerbated by communication problems. Hidayat dropped out of secondary school with the hope of joining him in Malaysia, but his father returned with no plans to migrate again. Furthermore, he disallowed Hidayat to migrate alone. Thwarted in his plans, Hidayat stifled his frustrations, 'stay[ing] silent … I only sit silently'. Looking back, Hidayat regretted leaving school early as he now faced unemployment. He longed to migrate but all pathways to overseas work appeared blocked; he was thus unsure how to proceed. Up against an uncertain future, Hidayat used silence as a strategy of self-control and mastery over unruly emotions.
Like Hidayat, Bandiman never told his migrant-father he missed him even though he felt 'sad' that he had been 'left-behind continuously'. Instead, he emphasized that he had 'never ever cried … if cry never ever', rationalizing that his father's migration was a way of 'finding money for me'. Reflecting a sense of masculine reserve expected in Javanese society, neither father nor son had ever exchanged photos while the father worked in Malaysia, and even during short reunions when the father came home on holiday, they did not spend time together. Like other young men we interviewed, Bandiman harboured aspirations to follow in his father's footsteps and work overseas in order to 'save up for the future' but had not communicated these plans to his father. In fact, he had intentions to accompany his father to Kalimantan on his next visit home, but had not informed his father. He did not offer a reason for his non-communication; his only comment was that 'Don't have time, everyday working by himself'. He laughed curtly when it was suggested if he could call him at night. Within his village he observed overseas parents 'don't take [good] care of their child usually'. He described himself as obedientperhaps so to avoid imposing on his migrant-father's time, wanting to 'immediately work … make parents happy … obey only'.
With migrant-mothers, left-behind son respondents seemed to feel the need to manage the emotional quotient in their relationship as they approached the cusp of adulthood. Hendra, for example, admitted that he would feel happy if his mother decided to return home for good, but added that he would feel 'normal' should she wish to go abroad again as he was already used to the idea of being 'left-behind since a long time'. Adopting a non-committal stance provided left-behind sons with a strategic presentation of self that transcended the realm of emotions. To be visibly and emotionally unaffected by maternal migration surfaced like a defence mechanism that facilitated presenting themselves as capable and rational men in accordance with the expectations of Javanese masculinity.

Supressing emotions to conform to gendered migration
With regard to whether men or women make ideal migrants, left-behind young men in our cases invariably espoused traditional gendered male breadwinning ideology. Hidayat, who lived hand-to-mouth earning a daily wage, asserted that men were better migrants because they 'work hard abroad' while Hendradespite being provided for by maternal migrationbelieved that men made preferred migrants, being stronger, whereas women 'think by using [their] emotions'. Similarly, Bandiman's breadwinning and family goals were temporally tethered to gendered expectations: as a masculinist livelihood strategy, migration was better suited to men while women should stay at home. Assuming that he would eventually fulfil his vision of migrating for work, Bandiman also took it for granted that his future wife would acquiesce in being left behind; in his words, 'she should want [to stay while he migrates], [it is] for her also right'.
As a familial livelihood strategy, migration had little to do with emotional desires and instead relied on the assumed gendered compliance of Bandiman's future wife. While he would be supportive of his wife working overseas or away from home to 'add to their income' before the children arrived, once the children came along, '[the wife] cannot work overseas [or even be away from home], [she should be] at home only to take care of the children'. Ignoring his own emotions and experiences of having an absent migrant-father himself, Bandiman stuck to a traditionally gendered male-migration template that bracketed off the realm of emotions.
By conforming to gendered templates of migration, left-behind young men in large part circumvented the need to do active temporal emotion work. Suppressing was a means to pave over problematic emotions with a mask of stoicism, a means of dealing with the pains of left-behindness in a socially acceptable way. While we encountered left-behind youths of both genders who were emotionally 'quiet' in a culture that privileged respect for and approval by elders rather than mutual communication between parents and children, emotional silence seemed starker among the young men compared to their women counterparts. In part, this could be due to the gender dynamics inherent in an all-women research team, compounded by a cultural context where silence safeguards family honour which is at risk of being compromised through mothers' migration (Chan 2018).

The gendered contours of temporal emotion work
Temporal emotion work takes place within a context where left-behind children seek to be good moral subjects (Beazley, Butt, and Ball 2018). Postponing their own desires through sequencing while fashioning themselves accordingly to fulfil parental goals required temporal emotion work. Whilst sequencing enabled the temporal 'shift to the past and future to gain a broader perspective', savouring enabled an emotional foregrounding of the focal point of experiencing the fullness of the present (Lois 2010, 437).
Embedded within the strategy of sequencing where present pain was endured for future gain, savouring involved giving full meaning to even short times spent with the migrant parent, creating traces of memorable times that could be remembered and treasured during significant periods of parental absence. Many youth, particularly daughters, had an imperative sense of reclaiming their migrant-mothers, striving to make the minutes count when mothers returned for short trips between contracts. There was an intense enjoyment of temporally-contained experiences during the returns home, even though the joys of reunion could only be short-lived. For left-behind daughters, happiness at welcoming their migrant parents home was double-edged, seared with the knowledge that their parents would soon leave again. Unlike many young men who maintain a silent stoicism in the face of parental comings and goings, most of the young women we interviewed were articulate in expressing their feelings, choosing not to numb their feelings while remaining open to the gamut of emotions experienced. Savouring time with migrant parents also facilitated a continued appreciation of the migrant's sacrifice, which in turn extended into a longer, more sustained gratitude towards their parents' migration. The distressing aspects of parental migration also led many young women to aspire differently for their own future families and children, where happier times might be found without submitting to the emotional toll of recurring loss and gain inherent in serial parental migration.
We offer the idea of male suppressing of emotion as a default gendered cultural response. Left-behind sons avoided discussing how they felt about parental migration. Family time deficits seemed to be experienced as numbed pain that could not be easily expressed. 'Nothing much' or biasa ('the usual') were the stock answers that young men tended to give when asked about how they felt about their parents' migration. Notions about ideal masculinities in East Javanese society has created a context where left-behind men not only suppressed articulating their emotions, but also experienced inertia to resist culturally accepted gender norms regarding migration-breadwinning as a male enterprise. In performing the temporal emotion work of level-headedness, they adhered to 'the elevated Javanese discourse of masculinity' based on the figure of Bapak (Nilan 2009, 332). Gendered non-disclosure of emotions by men further entrenched normative expectations of gender roles in their future families.
Maternal rather than paternal migration was thus expressed as more acutely felt by left-behind daughters in contrast to reticent sons left-behind by either parent. This is consistent with other scholarship (Graham et al. 2012) which discovered that within the cultural norms and expectations around male migration in the communities we researched in, maternal rather than paternal migration has greater emotional bearing for left-behind children. Emotional connections were expressly more cogent between mothers and daughters, rather than fathers and children.
Migration may also be tinged with shame given the perils which can befall female migrants -'(w)omen who merge with the mise en scène of modernization often risk being marked out as potentially deviant, of trading their dignity for economic gain' (Somaiah et al. 2020, 248). Youth thus conduct temporal emotion work to safeguard the morality of migrant-mothers more than fathers. Youth embody and enact respectable left-behindness as a testament to the reputability of their migrant parents, particularly mothers who risk being perceived as morally ambiguous subjects (Chan 2018). Appropriate constructions of emotional responses in alignment to assigned gender norms facilitates internalized kodrat in intimate family life. Gratitude as a response to parental sacrifice is maintained. Youths' temporal emotion work highlights the significant power of enacting respectable femininity and masculinity to maintain family harmony and honour.
Youth sculpt suitable aspirations in accordance to (re)classifications of time and expectations over the life course (Lois 2010, 425), achieving a sense of 'role harmony' (Lois 2010, 429) as filial children. Some aspire first to be a migrant blue-collar worker to amass funds for their natal family via replacement migration, delaying dreams of a university education or building an entrepreneurial career. Others bow to parental expectations of completing university education as a repayment to migrant parents who have sacrificed everything for their children's education before considering their own aspirations and desires. As Huijsmans (2014, 295) puts it, 'goals and objectives are shaped by a person's sense of obligations and perception of legitimate behaviour which are relational and temporal'.

Conclusion
We argue that youth engage in temporal emotion work including using strategies of 'sequencing', 'savouring' (Lois 2010) and suppressing in order to negotiatein distinctly gendered wayseveryday realities of left-behindness and aspiration-making. Aspirations are often inextricably linked to a desire for a restorative temporal-emotional justice for their familiesboth natal and projectedparticularly among left-behind young women. In contradistinction, some young men's aspirations were less about redressing their pasts; rather, their experiences of left-behindness were drawn upon as templates for reproducing futures of migration. By foregrounding temporalities and emotions in constructing ambitions, we offer, to the literature on youth and migration, new conceptual applications for making sense of youth's experiences of left-behindness and futurefacing plans for themselves in response to parental migration. Through sequencing youth comfort and convince themselves of their ability to pass through the present, with the knowledge that firstly, the waiting is limited by their parents' eventual return, and secondly, that a more self-determined future awaits if they can hold the course. Sequencing and savouring can help ground the flurry of 'temporal tensions' (Lois 2010, 424) of leftbehindness, gearing inner emotional compasses towards optimism rather than weariness.
Youth aspire to reclaim imaginative, temporal and emotional control over an unalterable situation. Transcendent (sequencing), immersive (savouring) and/or avoidant (supressing) temporal emotion work powerfully to help youth cross 'timeframes' (Charmaz 1991), surpassing present left-behindness to become 'future-makers'. Gendered social norms still dictate male breadwinning here via notions of merantau as a male rite of passage, and kodrat. Still, it is important to desist from cementing participants' emotions and aspirations as if these have been neatly resolved because 'cycle[s] of emotion can restart and lead down different affective paths' (Francisco-Menchavez 2018, 612). Leftbehind youth's temporal emotion work is far more fluid and nuanced than they are given credit for.
Against the constraints of 'temporary migration regimes and the indeterminacy of futures' (Robertson, Cheng, and Yeoh 2018), left-behind youth, in particular women, are able to rescript the meaning of chronic left-behindness and its attendant diffused sadness. They do this by aspiring accordingly to halt the migration cycle in their own generation, rather than allowing its recurrence and risking its emotional costs. In managing time in strategic ways, left-behind youth invest agentically in the temporal emotion work of sequencing for forbearance, savouring to heighten meaning and intensity, and supressing to minimize problematic feelings. In coping with unforgiving labour migration regimes which do not accommodate family re-unification of migrant families at employment destinations, youth exercise agency within their current means, through their relationship to time, emotions and aspirations, expressing these in highly gendered ways.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).