This presentation reflects on understandings of care embedded in expectations of filial support in two, very different, but conventionally marginalised situations in China. It moves away from an emphasis on care as a series of acts undertaken by a person, or an institution, on behalf of people in need of care. It also moves away from an analysis of the China’s ‘crisis of care,’ defined mainly with reference to the deficits in healthcare, child and elderly care, partly engendered by the commercialisation of care services. (Steinmüller 2023, 2). Instead, inspired by Michael Lambek’s ordinary ethics, I turn to an ordinary ‘ethics of care,’ in the mundane relationship between parents and children. A cross-generational sense of filial responsibility in China refers to one of the most deeply embedded expectations of reciprocal caregiving between parents and children. In the popular imagination it points to a culturally specific dimension of kin relations in China. In recent years, the extent of filial practices of care of the elderly has been a contested issue in a rapidly changing social and market environment. Anthropologists continue to debate the reach or efficacy of expectations of filial support as guides to or determinants of children’s decisions to ‘care for’ their parents in their later years (Yan, Guo, Evans). Whatever the argument, the emotional pressures on children to perform filiality for their parents continue to be a dominant aspect of the formers’ experiences in negotiating their adult path through the contending demands of work, marriage and childbearing. The experience of such pressures in contemporary China transcends class, ethnic and sexual differences, with varying effects on young people's life choices as well as on affective relations between parents and children. Examining an ethics of care embedded in social and kin relationships also foregrounds an unexplored dimension of anthropological knowledge.