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Missing Wives and Daughters: Gender, Migration, and Family Separation among Border-Crossing Asians
Organizer and Chair: Vanessa L. Fong, Harvard University
Discussant: Josephine Smart, University of Calgary
This panel examines how gender and family roles shape and are shaped by the border crossings of Asians and their families. The panelists look at the painful dilemmas experienced by the families of a diverse set of Asian migrants, ranging from Sri Lankan women who do domestic work in the Middle East (leaving their husbands and children behind), to Chinese businesspeople who immigrate to Latin America (leaving their daughters behind), to Chinese daughters studying and contemplating marriage in Europe (leaving their parents behind), to Chinese men who work in the United States (leaving their wives behind). Transnational migration causes prolonged separations that are particularly devastating to those left behind. Husbands left behind in Sri Lanka suffer low self-esteem and increased alcohol use; parents left behind in China risk being left alone in their old age; wives left behind in China face temptations and rumors of adultery; and daughters left behind in China risk becoming culturally different from their emigrant parents and brothers. Decisions about which family members migrate and which stay behind are based partly on pre-migration gender and family roles, and partly on the gendered assumptions underlying local and transnational markets for labor, capital, sex, and marriage. Yet processes of transnational migration can invert gender hierarchies, transform gender expectations, and create new, different risks and opportunities for those who migrate, as well as for those left behind. Such risks and opportunities often contradict the very gender and kinship ideologies that led to the migrations in the first place.
Split Family Migration among Chinese Families in Latin America: Immigrant Daughters and their Reunification Struggles
Lok Siu, New York University
More than 3.5 million Chinese currently live in Latin America. While the history of their 19th century labor migration is well documented, little is known about their contemporary situation. This paper explores a form of "split family" migration exercised by some Chinese in this region. Faced with limited resources, many Chinese families that immigrate to Latin America often do so in two separate groups. Often, the parents and sons immigrate first, and once they are able to establish themselves and accumulate sufficient capital, they send for their daughters. This paper explores what happens when these daughters reunite with their families abroad and examines how they are reintegrated into their families. Based on ethnographic research with Chinese in Latin America, I show that these immigrant daughters face extreme difficulty reintegrating into the family. In fact, they experience discrimination as second-class citizens in comparison to their more Hispanicized siblings. While gender is the key reason for their separation from the family in migration, their status within the family is now mediated not only by gender but also by their cultural difference as newcomers lacking the "right kind" of cultural capital. Drawing on specific examples, I will discuss how these immigrant daughters experience these "split family" migrations and respond to the unexpected conditions of family reunification. I will examine how many have remigrated elsewhere, constructed their own networks of fictive kin, and redefined their meaning of "family.
How Can I Marry a Foreigner when My Parents are in China? The Dilemmas of Filial Chinese Daughters Studying in Europe
Vanessa L. Fong, Harvard University
This paper looks at the dilemmas faced by young Chinese women studying in Europe who feel torn between their desire to marry European citizens and their desire to fulfill their obligations, as filial only-children, to eventually return to China to provide care and companionship to their parents in their old age. Though marriage to a European can bring much-prized and difficult-to-attain European permanent residency rights, it can also entail a commitment to live the rest of their lives in Europe, with only brief, occasional visits to China, where their parents are likely to stay due to the legal, financial, and cultural obstacles that make it difficult for elderly Chinese parents to immigrate. Though they can and sometimes do draw on old Chinese ideologies that minimize women’s filial obligations, the Chinese women migrants I know are also concerned about violating newer ideologies of female filiality that emerged after China’s one-child policy, which enabled them to grow up as brother less daughters and experience the parental investment and expectations for old-age support traditionally reserved for sons. Such ideologies were often the basis for the significant parental investment that enabled them to study abroad in the first place. Chinese women’s decisions about whether to marry Western men are thus based not only on considerations of their compatibility with those men and their desires for permanent residency in Western countries, but also on where they and their parents stand with regards to conflicting Chinese ideas about the relationship between gender and intergenerational contracts.
Of “Ducks” and Women: Rumors of Male Prostitution in a Transnational Chinese Village
Julie Y. Chu, Wellesley College
In the rural countryside outside Fuzhou city in China, mass emigration of working-age adults over the past two decades has resulted in rampant gossip about affluent but lonesome housewives and their propensity to “eat duck” (chi ya) in their husbands’ absence. In local stories, “ducks” (yazi) referenced the companions of adulterating wives; men who were largely perceived as unproductive sexual charmers with no talents other than draining lonely women of their overseas remittances. While the sexual transgressions of overseas husbands were no secret, rumors of “ducks” and women sparked an unusual combination of disapproval, embarrassment and humor in the telling of these tales. In this paper, I examine the local buzz around “eating duck” in relation to other kinds of sex talk concerning overseas men and their salacious old fathers in the village. I pay particular attention to the very public nature of these “secrets” of sexual transgression and explore the different ways people construct silence in the very act of gossip. By highlighting the role of silence in the circulation of these stories, I analyze how performances of non-talk—as hushed secrets and quiet gossip—structure the production of knowledge concerning gender, sexuality and family separation in Post-Mao China and in the larger transnational social network of these Fuzhounese villagers.
Home Wars: Gendered Consumption Struggles over Alcohol and Migrant Remittances among Transnational Sri Lankan Families
Michele Gamburd, Portland State University
Currently one million Sri Lankans hold jobs in the Middle East. Two-thirds of Sri Lanka's migrants are women, the majority of whom work as housemaids. Most of these women are married, and many leave behind small children. A migration stream of this magnitude necessarily affects social dynamics in the communities left behind. This paper, drawing on ethnographic data gathered over the past fifteen years, examines gendered consumptions struggles between migrant women and their place-bound spouses over how to allocate household finances. When women go abroad, local men (particularly migrants' unemployed or underemployed husbands) suffer a crisis of self-esteem because they are unable to fulfill their culturally designated role as breadwinner and they take over female-gendered domestic tasks at home in their wives' absence. Changes in activities disrupt older gender roles. Since alcohol is an exclusively male beverage, some men turn to liquor consumption to reassert their masculinity. Changing global economic circumstances are altering the relationship between the sexes in Naeaegama, giving women more control over money and making wives more skeptical about their husbands' prerogative to drink. These twin trends put men and women on a collision course for disputes over alcohol consumption. Poverty, financial insecurity, lack of economic opportunities, and international inequality all influence consumption choices. While examining the relationship between female migration and male alcohol use, this paper explores issues of household economics, gendered rights and obligations, domestic violence, and divorce.