Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora

Abstract In this article I examine the role of education in the family strategies of recent East Asian migrants, contributing to intellectual debates around transnationalism and the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Empirically, the article provides an insight into the experiences and objectives of an often‐neglected group within studies of Chinese migration – students. I also attempt to understand the particular role that children play within a wider family project of capital accumulation. Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu, I emphasize the significance of different forms of capital in underpinning the spatial strategies of East Asian families. The research for this article was conducted in Vancouver, Canada and Hong Kong, involving in‐depth interviews with university students, recent graduates and their families. In conclusion, in the article I maintain that a geographically informed theory of ‘cultural capital’ and its relationship to the family unit can help elucidate recent patterns of trans‐Pacific, transnational mobility, moving beyond more common ‘political’ and ‘economic’ interpretations of this contemporary migration.     

DOUBLE NEGATIONS: HONG KONG CULTURAL IDENTITY IN HOLLYWOOD'S TRANSNATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS

This article attempts to develop a critical understanding of the reconstitution of Hong Kong identity in Hollywood productions involving Hong Kong film talents. It argues that the ‘local’ in the city's historical context of the nineties no longer refers to any entity pertaining to a particular locality and culture but is always already determined by the framework of the transnational, which structures the perception of its local social reality. In particular, the paper suggests that the remaking of Hong Kong cultural identity in Hollywood films could be grasped in terms of the notion of a double negation. While the formation of such an identity is based on a negation of Chineseness, Hong Kong's transnational crossing to Hollywood initiates another negation that negates the very symbolic realm common to Chineseness. Jackie Chan's Hollywood blockbuster, Rush Hour, is used to illuminate the ways in which Hong Kong film stars and directors working for the global entertainment syndicate re-appropriate their agency in the production of a transnational narrative of their identity.     

Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: imaginaries,intimacies and strategic intents

Abstract In this introductory article, we emphasize the significance of considering the politics and practices of transnationalism as they impinge on the social morphology of transnational ‘Asian’ families. Three strands of work in this arena are discussed. First, transnational families draw on ideologically laden imaginaries to give coherence to notions of belonging despite the physical dispersal of their members; these imaginaries may in turn act as a conservative force exerting control over particular female members, an increasing salient issue given the feminization of various streams of labour migration. Second, transnational families are also realized through lived experiences, where variants and degrees of intimacy are negotiated across transnational spaces with both ‘regular’ members and ‘irregular’ others. In the process, social identities may be reinforced or reconfigured. Third, families may assume transnational morphologies with the strategic intent of ensuring economic survival or maximizing social mobility. In this context, children's education has emerged as a particularly important project which provides strong impetus for families to go transnational.     

Seeking identity: the transborder lives of mainland Chinese families with children born in Hong Kong

Between 2001 and 2013, Hong Kong regulations permitted pregnant women from mainland China to travel to Hong Kong to deliver their babies. In this article, based on 30 in‐depth interviews, I explore the transborder lives and identities of these mainland Chinese families who, motivated by cost considerations, citizenship and anticipated benefits for their children, chose to give birth to their babies in Hong Kong. In some cases, family networks providing flexible residential practices and family care, supported these transborder activities. However, the complexities of transborder life reveal the diverse ‘identifications’ within Hong Kong society and mainland families. Because neither administration totally accepts them, they are not full members of either society and so the identities they form are both plural and fragmented.     

Art,climate change and (other) eco materials: rethinking the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization with Ulrich Beck

Based on fieldwork in Japan and Hong Kong, I ask how methodological cosmopolitanism, as formulated by Ulrich Beck, may afford new and highly needed modes for grappling with climatically concerned art and aesthetic practices across geographical regions. I will argue that methodological cosmopolitanism serves as an important framework for approaching such art practices, and suggest that two overall intertwined strands concerning aesthetic practices engaged in global issues of climate change, emerge from this – the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and, reversely, the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization. Departing from my fieldwork among farming artists in the Hong Kong countryside and in the Japanese satoyama – rural mountain – areas, I will, on the one hand, argue that art practices are ‘cosmopolitanized’ by the awareness of global risks, manifested in anticipation of the comprehensive climatic changes (in)discriminately affecting across nations and regions. At the same time, and importantly, art practices are actively attending to this ‘risky’ cosmopolitanization, giving aesthetic voice, form and ‘visuality’ to unfolding climatic issues and concerns and hereby practising what I will call an ‘aesthetics of cosmopolitanization’.     

Back to Hong Kong: return migration or transnational sojourn?

Abstract In this article we reconsider the meaning of return migration in a period of growing transnational practices. In its conventional use, return migration conveys the same sense of closure and completion as the immigration‐assimilation narrative. But in a transnational era, movement is better described as continuous rather than completed. Focus groups held in Hong Kong with middle‐class returnees from Canada reveal that migration is undertaken strategically at different stages of the life cycle. The return trip to Hong Kong typically occurs for economic reasons at the stage of early or mid career. A second move to Canada may occur later with teenage children for educational purposes, and migration at retirement is even more likely when the quality of life in Canada becomes a renewed priority. Strategic switching between an economic pole in Hong Kong and a quality‐of‐life pole in Canada identifies each of them to be separate stations within an extended but unified social field.     

Bridges to learning: international student mobilities,education agencies and inter‐personal networks

International education is a fundamentally transnational project. It relies on the movement of individuals or knowledge across national borders, disturbs the centrality of the nation‐state in educational reproduction, and is facilitated by economic and social networks that act as bridges between countries of origin and education. In this article, I address this latter point through reference to research conducted with South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand. In particular, I discuss the emergence of transnational social and economic activities that are facilitating the movement of international students from South Korea to Auckland — activities that might usefully be understood as forming ‘bridges to learning’. These include the activities of education agencies, immigrant entrepreneurs and the interpersonal relationships with which many students engage in the negotiation of their transnational lives. In a broader sense I illustrate how the emerging mobilities of international students cannot be viewed as independent of other phenomena but must be seen as embedded within transnational processes that take place at different geographic and social scales.     

CINEMA 3: TOWARDS A 'MINOR HONG KONG CINEMA'

This article canvasses the way Hong Kong cinema became modern, at the moment and the place when/where it had to come up with new cinematic images in response to new geo-historical situations. I call it a ‘minor Hong Kong cinema’ in the sense that it is a cinema that deterritorializes within the heart of what is considered major. This minor cinema is not at all just a cinema at the margin. It is rather a strategy to conceptualize and develop certain suggestive examples in order to respond to specific geo-historical situations. While this minor cinema cannot represent the whole of Hong Kong cinema, it also highlights the potentialities of Hong Kong cinema that cannot be covered by dominant discourses on Hong Kong. This article focuses upon the films of Fruit Chan. In Fruit Chan's ‘Hong Kong 1997 Trilogy’, 1997 is neither the beginning of recollections nor the end of Hong Kong. These films dwell upon the failed, the vanished, and the underrepresented to make Hong Kong appear at the intriguing moment of 1997. They explore new perspectives for re-channelling Hong Kong and its histories.     

Transnational communities and business systems

The paper examines the concept of ‘transnational communities’ as a way of understanding globalization practices in business and management. It argues that ‘transnational communities’ are emergent properties of the internationalizing of economic activity. Three specific aspects of this process are considered in detail: the development of multinational companies; the development of international regulatory bodies; and the development of cognitive and normative frameworks through the practices of business education, management consultancies and other global professional service firms. It is argued that in each case, transnational spaces are emerging; within these spaces, transnational communities are developing. The article calls for more research into the diverse nature of these spaces and communities as a way of avoiding the sterile polarities of what Held et al. (1999) refer to as the ‘hyperglobalists’ and the ‘sceptics’.     

‘Ink Art’ as strategy for Hong Kong institutions

Abstract

In both their wider cultural dimensions and the institutional practices they stem from, the practices of ink art in Hong Kong manifest themselves in a variety of discourses ranging from the ‘traditionalism’ of the conservative nativists to the ‘contemporaneity’ of artists and institutions often identified as being closer to ‘Western’ culture. Even though the most influential discourse about ink art in Hong Kong has clearly been produced by official institutions, like the future museum of visual culture called M+ and the already existing Museum of Art, it has also been profoundly influenced by private associations whose influence has been far reaching. The most visible of these private associations in Hong Kong is the Ink Society, whose founding members and their affiliates and friends have played a central role in the early debate about the nature of ink art in the history of local arts. Through an analysis of a failed attempt by the Ink Society to bid for the right to manage a historical site, this paper attempts to unravel some of the ideas that support the notion of ink art in Hong Kong.     

Life and death in Hong Kong in an age of cosmopolitanism

Recent events in Hong Kong direct attention to a disturbing trend – the neglect of (selected) life. The society is increasingly discarding its policies and practices concerning immigrant workers, foreign pregnant women and impoverished men and women, whom it deems unworthy of protection or assistance. In this article, I argue for a radical cosmopolitanism that would entail a commitment not only to preventing the taking of life and building a non‐killing society but also to the elimination of the structural conditions that disallow life to the point of death. Drawing on recent bio‐political debates in Hong Kong, I consider the sovereign right over life and death within the neoliberal state. I argue that the state predicates neoliberal sovereignty on a systemic indifference to life; it calculates its bio‐political decisions according to a bio‐arithmetic of economic productivity and social responsibility; and it allows those whom it deems unworthy ‘to die’. As a potential counter discourse, I outline the coordinates and discuss the implications of a commitment to a radical cosmopolitanism.     

Organizing “Below and to the Left”: Differences in the Citizenship and Transnational Practices of Two Zapatista Groups

This article examines the political transnational practices—that is, both the physical and symbolic border‐crossing political practices—of two Zapatista groups. This study seeks to contribute to the existing body of literature on transnationalism and citizenship by focusing on immigrants’ political transnational activities in the global South, as well as transnational activists’ practices in the global North influenced by the global South. I argue that transnational ideological and political influences are bidirectional, that is, influences also flow from the global South to the global North. In addition, I argue that different transnational practices are strongly shaped by structural opportunities and constraints on activists, in this case, by citizenship status and economic class. My arguments are drawn from fieldwork and in‐depth interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area with two Zapatista groups, which I name the Localizers and the Globalizers.     

‘Equally at home on Beacon Hill and Hill 16’? Transnational identities among Irish‐born return migrants from the United States

In this article, I examine the transnational identities that return migrants create upon resettlement in their country of origin. Specifically, I draw on interviews with Republic of Ireland‐born return migrants from the United States between the years 1996 and 2006. The analysis shows that return migrants – like other migrant groups – maintain and establish translocal identities and practices that straddle ‘here’ (Ireland) and ‘there’ (United States) upon return. However, the article goes further, asking why returnees develop such border‐spanning social fields. Some recent scholarship suggests that some migrants develop transnational identities as an adaptive response to a hostile receiving society. The analysis here shows a similar process at play for certain return migrants in the post‐return environment. Doubtless, for some returnees, a transnational identity is a natural outgrowth of having spent several years in the United States. Yet for others, one can better explain this transnational identity as a coping strategy to buffer resettlement anxieties and disappointments.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

Negotiating multiple boundaries: diasporic Hong Kong identities in the United States

The 1997 return of the British colony Hong Kong to mainland China has prompted the largest exodus of Hong Kong migrants to western countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. While the transnational capital accumulation and life strategies of Hong Kong business elites has been well documented, little has been written on pre-1997 Hong Kong immigrants who are from non-elite backgrounds. Based on ethnographic research in Chicago, this article explores the flexibility and multifarious nature of identity construction among two generations of Hong Kong immigrants: those who arrived in the United States during the 1960s-1970s and those who did during the 1980s -1990s. I identify class positioning in the Chinese disaporic community and racialization experience in the larger U.S. society as two important factors in mediating the boundary making strategies of different groups of Hong Kong immigrants.     

‘Going to Brazil’: transnational and corporeal movements of a Canadian‐Brazilian martial arts community

In this article I use a case study of capoeira (an Afro‐Brazilian martial art/dance/game) in Canada to bring together sport and transnationality literatures. I show that understandings of transnationality can be extended through both investigating people born and raised in the North, since they play an important role in creating transnational spaces, and attending to the corporeal means that people deploy to connect to a homeland or ‘travel’ to a foreign country. Through adopting a particular racialized/ national style of movement, those who ‘stay put’ in the North can ‘move’ across ethnic boundaries, if not geopolitical borders. Real (international), imagined (virtual and emotional), and corporeal (embodied) ‘travel’ to Brazil are key experiences of the senior capoeirista (capoeira devotee). Sporting activities provide an exceptional window onto transnationality studies, given that ways of moving are fundamental to social, cultural and national identities.     

Reformulating tradition and modernity: Moroccan migrant women and the transnational division of ritual space

In this article I analyse the rituals that transnational migrants who live and work in Europe (mainly Italy) perform in Morocco during their return there for summer holidays. The transnational dimension of rituals and ceremonies reveals the diverse ways in which Moroccan families gain social recognition across transnational space. I explore how migrants construct and display their identities contextually and in opposition to multiple Others. By performing the traditional rituals associated with important turning points in their lives in Morocco, migrants seek to reintegrate themselves and maintain their membership of their community of origin. At the same time, however, these performances bring to the surface a hidden agenda: the assertion and exhibition of migrants’ differences with respect to those who have stayed behind. These rituals, which provide a perspective through which to analyse the intersection of global and local interconnections, also reveal complex and shifting interpretations of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, and the practices in which these are embedded. I conclude by suggesting that, in this process, migrants develop a creative interplay with ‘traditional practices’ by subverting, reformulating and giving new creative shape to their meaning and content.     

Salvadoran Migrants in Australia: An Analysis of Transnational Families’ Capability to Care across Borders

In this paper, I focus on the transnational care practices of Salvadoran refugees living in Perth (Western Australia) and who care for their ageing parents who have remained in their home country. The analysis is based on a conceptualization of transnational care as a set of capabilities that include, but are not limited to, mobility, social relations, time allocation, education and knowledge, paid work and communication (Merla and Baldassar, 2011). I focus in particular on the impact of Salvadoran refugees’ difficult access to, and use of, these capabilities on their capacity to fulfil their culturally defined sense of obligation to care for their ageing parents. Results show that extended transnational kinship networks play a major role in helping migrants overcome obstacles to transnational caregiving.     

The transnational work of kinship and caring: Bengali–British marriages in historical perspective

Abstract In this article, based on ongoing research carried out in Bangladesh since the mid‐1980s and field‐work in London in the late 1990s, I take a historical approach to the analysis of transnational Sylheti marriages. By showing how the form of these marriages has changed since the mid‐twentieth century, I argue that transnational migration is itself highly fluid. The role of wives in maintaining transnational links is central to the account. I focus in particular on the wives of ‘first‐generation’ migrant men who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose families were generally reunited in Britain by the 1980s. By describing the household and caring work of these wives both in Sylhet and London, I demonstrate that rather than being ‘dependants’ of their migrant husbands, women have been central to the success of migrant households. The rewards of transnational connectedness have, however, come at a cost — long‐term separation from loved ones. Isolation and loneliness have been hallmarks of the experiences of these earlier generations of women.