The Age of Asian Migration : Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility Volume 1 1443859028, 9781443859028, 1443887242, 9781443887243

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The Age of Asian Migration

Review Board Yuk Wah Chan, City University of Hong Kong Heidi Fung, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan David Haines, George Mason University Yuko Hamada, International Organization for Migration Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, National University of Singapore Long S. Le, University of Houston Jonathan H. X. Lee, San Francisco State University GraĪyna SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz, University of Warsaw Rimi Nath, North Eastern Hill University Willem van Schendel, University of Amsterdam Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang, University of Texas at Austin

The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility Volume 1

Edited by

Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines and Jonathan H. X. Lee

The Age of Asian Migration: Continuity, Diversity, and Susceptibility Volume 1, Edited by Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines and Jonathan H. X. Lee This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Yuk Wah Chan, David Haines, Jonathan H. X. Lee and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5902-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5902-8 As a two-volume set: ISBN (10): 1-4438-8724-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8724-3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... ix William Lacy Swing General Introduction ................................................................................... 1 Asian Migration: Issues, Migrants, and Regional Updates Yuk Wah Chan Part I: Northeast Asia: Coping with Diversity in Japan and Korea Chapter One ............................................................................................... 18 Introduction: Migration and Diversity in Japan and Korea David Haines Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Damunhwa: The Korean Search for Multiculturalism David Haines and Timothy Lim Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 46 The Trajectories of Family-Making through Cross-border Marriages: A Study of Japanese-Pakistani Married Couples Masako Kudo Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 60 Achieving Local Citizenship in Japan: Filipina Wives in Organised Activism Keiko Yamanaka and Takeshi Akiba Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 83 Ethnic Korean Returnees from Japan in Korea: Experiences and Identities Sug-In Kweon

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Part II: East Asian Chinese Migration: Taiwan, Hong Kong and China Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 106 Introduction: Hong Kong-Taiwan-China in Migration Relations Yuk Wah Chan and Dominic Meng-HsuanYang Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 114 From a Refugee Port to a Migration Hub: Hong Kong’s Immigration Practices and Hierarchy Yuk Wah Chan and Gloria Ko Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 131 Forced Migration and Imagined Homeland: Nostalgia and Return of the Chinese Mainlanders in Taiwan Dominic Meng-HsuanYang Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 150 From a “Borrowed Place” to a “Graduated Diaspora”: The Return Hong Kong Diaspora and Hong Kong-China Relations Yuk Wah Chan Part III: Vietnamese Migration and Diaspora Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 170 Introduction: The Formation of the Global Vietnamese Diaspora Long S. Le Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 180 One Family, Multiple Diasporas: Exploring Unity and Diversity in Vietnamese Migration Long S. Le Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 189 Vietnamese from Eastern Europe as a Transnational Migrant Community GraĪyna SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 211 Vietnamese Marriage Migrants and the Changing Public Discourse in Taiwan Heidi Fung and Tsai-Ping Wang

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Part IV: Cambodian, Lao and Hmong Diaspora and Settlement Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 244 Introduction: Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Diaspora in the United States Jonathan H. X. Lee Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 256 Singing Our Lives with His Words: R. J. Sin, Cambodian American Musician Strumming History, Pain, and Subjectivity Jonathan H. X. Lee Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 268 Three Decades of Cambodian American Political Activism in Long Beach, California Karen Quintiliani and Susan Needham Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 282 Lao American Migration and Resettlement: Past, Present, and Future Stacy M. Kula Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 296 Hmong Americans Three Decades Later: Taking a look at the On-going Barriers and Challenges Yeng Yang Part V: Singapore: New Immigrants and Return Migration Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 318 Introduction: Immigration, Emigration, and Return Migration in Singapore Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 327 The Desirability of Asia? Logics and Geographies of “Return” Migration by Singaporean Transmigrants in Diaspora Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho and Lin Weiqiang Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 342 A Question of Identity: Ethnic Chinese from the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Singapore Jason Lim

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Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 358 Diasporic “Unbelonging” to Malaysia and Singapore: Second-generation Malaysian-Chinese Migrants in Singapore Sin Yee Koh Part VI: South Asian Migration and Diaspora Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 374 Introduction: South Asian Migration Updates Rimi Nath Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 382 Migration from South Asian Nations (Pakistan and Nepal): A Literary Perspective Rimi Nath Chapter Twenty-Five ............................................................................... 396 University Boom in Ethiopia and Professional Abundance in India: A New Wave of High-Skill Migration to Africa? Sophia Thubauville

Contributors ............................................................................................. 411

FOREWORD WILLIAM LACY SWING DIRECTOR GENERAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR MIGRATION

It is a pleasure to introduce the volumes on Asian migration, both personally and as Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). I was fortunate enough to attend the conference held at the City University of Hong Kong in September 2013, a significant event for IOM that I am happy we could co-sponsor: IOM’s office in Hong Kong has been established for over 60 years and, as such, is IOM’s oldest office in Asia. I am especially mindful of the valuable vantage point that Hong Kong has been in viewing the political and economic forces that have propelled Asian migration in so many directions since the Second World War. The rapid publication of the conference’s insights in this book will be of value to many, and much credit must go to the conference organizers, including the City University of Hong Kong, to the participants for their important new perspectives on global impacts of Asian migration, and to the editorial board. This volume, and its companion to be published soon hereafter, makes a number of valuable contributions to our understanding of historical migrations and the more recent mass Asian migrations in the second half of the 20th century. Rarely has this full span of global Asian migration been studied as a whole, from the historical to the contemporary, and from the perspective of the continent as a source and destination of global migration, with the complex interplay of migrants moving within Asia, from Asia further afield, and from virtually everywhere in the world to Asia. This book’s wide-ranging inquiry into Asian migration shows the incredible complexity, unpredictability and dangers of migrants’ lives. For some, especially those with financial assets or other human capital, migration has been a positive experience. For others, migration becomes a source of vulnerability, whether workplace problems for labor migrants, adjustment difficulties for marriage migrants, or the full set of threats to life, and spirit that all too often mark the refugee experience. Exploring the different kinds of migration and migrants in this volume helps us to move

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beyond common but contrasting stereotypes of migrants as victims or free agents: hazards put even the most voluntary of migrants in danger, and even the most desperate of forced migrants seize opportunities. IOM’s interest in Asia runs deep: the regional office in Bangkok and many Asian offices have handled myriad cases of migrants of all categories and have provided analyses and responses for migration governance in the context of regional economic and political changes. The contributions to this volume overlap in a useful manner with the policy and program issues at the core of IOM’s work and further contribute to IOM’s goal of nurturing academic interest in and partnerships on migration. The volumes’ structure reminds us of the drivers and results of migration, and of the need for a historical perspective on the individual and social consequences of human mobility and the ways we experience diversity. In concluding, I would like to emphasize that this wide-ranging approach highlights the need for continued exchange between policymakers, practitioners and academics to keep each other abreast of developments in migration, and to cultivate open minds in approaching the complexity of migrants’ experiences and the challenges of migration governance.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION ASIAN MIGRATION: ISSUES, MIGRANTS, AND REGIONAL UPDATES YUK WAH CHAN

The setting International migration in Asia has become a central concern to both academic researchers and the policy community. It is also an issue closely interwoven with wider discussions of globalisation, transnationalism, and diaspora (King 2010; Castles 2007; Vertovec 2009; Cohen 1996; Castles and Miller 1993). Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colonial rule, political turmoil, and poverty resulted in frequent, volatile, and complex movements of Asians within their own countries, across countries within Asia, as well as from Asia to other parts of the world. Perhaps the most prominent movements concerned the Chinese and Indians (Brown and Foot 1994), but the upheavals affected many different Asians, such as Vietnamese to other French colonies, or Koreans to a Japan that needed their labour in the heartland. New waves of migration swelled at the end of World War II and in the wars for independence and internal struggles that convulsed Asia during the 1940s. These waves lessened over time but often remained unresolved (as with a division of Vietnam that lasted until 1975 and separations of Korean and Chinese territory which continue today). The result has been an Asia with many pressures for migration. For example, a large portion of Hong Kong’s population in the late 1940s and 1950s was formed by refugees and migrants from mainland China. Refugees from there continued to flock to the border in the 1960s and 1970s due to political turmoil and economic deprivation (Chiu and Lui 2009; Mathews, Ma and Lui 2008; Chan 1991; Lee 2005; Wong 1988). Taiwan also saw a major influx of mainland Chinese in the late 1940s, which reverberated in the following decades as the Chinese/Taiwanese rift widened, a rift which

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would have major repercussions on Taiwan’s national politics as well as global politics (Schubert and Damm 2011; Ngo and Wang 2011; Tsai 2007). That intertwining of politics and migration re-emerged in 1975 with the collapse of the American-supported governments in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Those flows, especially from Vietnam, were then amplified by the China-Vietnam conflicts in the late 1970s that prompted hundreds of thousands of Chinese-Vietnamese to leave the country. Such existing migration flows have often induced chain migration through migration networks, but newer migration streams have also developed since the 1980s in the forms of migration for education, labour, investment, marriage, refuge, retirement, or a kind of extended tourism that blurs into permanence. These newer migration patterns sometimes overlap in destination countries which may find they have Vietnamese as refugees, labour migrants, students, business people, and marriage partners. The flows also increasingly go both ways: Koreans, for example, continue to go abroad for study and business, but many other Asians now go to South Korea for exactly the same reasons. Perhaps most intriguing of all are the many return migrants who search for cultural roots and economic opportunities in the country of their ancestors, or where they themselves were born. This volume seeks to examine these major currents of Asian migration that were formed in the post-World War II period, and that have since expanded to include other kinds of migration over the ensuing decades. Adding to the earlier Chinese and Indian diasporas formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, post-WWII waves of Asian migration certainly accelerated and added to the complexity of Asian movement and migration dynamics. Whatever the reasons, Asians have been active movers both within their own countries and in the border-crossing migration that is the focus of this book. The most updated figures from the United Nations (UN 2013a) show that Asia is now the second most popular destination region with 71 million international migrants, just one million less than Europe. With the emergence of more advanced and rigorously developing economies, intra-regional migration is expected to grow rapidly in Asia. International migration in Asia, then, has two main components, within and outside the region. In 2010, 43 percent of migrants in Asia and the Pacific moved within the region (IOM 2011). In 2013, 76 percent of foreign born persons in Asia were living in the major region they were born (UN 2013b). Yet, Asians represent the largest diaspora group living outside Asia; a total of 38 millions lived in Europe, Northern America and Oceania (UN 2013b). This duality of migration patterns appears for almost

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all Asian countries. Filipinos appear in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan, just as they appear in North America and Europe; Japanese businessmen are in Shanghai while Chinese businessmen are in Tokyo; millions of Bangladeshi are in India while almost the same amount of Indians are in UAE. This book is the result of many people’s efforts. Most of the chapters are based on papers originally presented at the conference “Asian Migration and the Global Asian Diaspora”, co-organised and sponsored by the Southeast Asia Research Centre and the Department of Asian and International Studies of City University of Hong Kong, and the International Organisation for Migration in 2013. That conference and this resulting book positioned Asian migration against the backdrop of the rapidly changing political economies in Asia. Within the last half century, Asia as a region has been radically transformed both economically and politically. While political turmoil and instability (such as that in Indochina and China from the 1940s–70s) had once pushed many out of their birth places, economic opening and development since the 1990s has drawn many others to the region, and often drawing back to the region those who once left it. To have the conference held in Hong Kong, a citystate largely built by migrants and undergoing radical political changes at this particular moment, may allow us to further expand our imagination about the possibilities and susceptibilities of migration. Many of the authors are themselves members of the discussed diasporas, thus making this book stretch far beyond the limits of academic debates.

The issues and updates Asia has become a good setting from which to consider migration more generally. As the region producing most migrants in the world, a number of its places, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, have become fully developed advanced economies since the 1980s. These places, together with Japan which developed earlier, are among the major receivers of migrants. They provide a “ready-made” comparison group to the advanced economies of North America and Europe. Considering the proportion of migrants as part of the total population, Asia shows interesting dynamics. Compared to the migrant population of the United States, the world’s top migrant receiving country (14.2% of the total population), a number of places in Asia—Macau (54.7%), Hong Kong (38.8%), Singapore (40.7%) and Brunei (36.4%)—actually show a much higher proportion of migrant population (IOM 2010). Other countries in Asia have generally been more migrant-sending than migrant-

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receiving. However, many of these are now receiving labour migrants from their neighbours: for examples, Malaysia receives many migrant workers from Indonesia, and Thailand is now the residence for over a million voluntary and involuntary migrants from Myanmar (IOM 2010). Malaysia on the other hand sends many of its own elite to Singapore, and India continues to host millions of temporary and long term migrants from its neighbours. Such countries also provide a comparative set for other developing countries which are shifting from being migrant-sending to migrantreceiving, or simply having a balance of the two. Since much of the migration moves on different migration pathways are actually with neighbouring places, Asia also provides useful contrasts to some of the more studied border relations between well-developed and developing countries, such as the Mexico-U.S. border, or all the routes of migration from, to, and through Turkey. As shown by IOM calculations (by using UNDP figures, citied in IOM 2013; also see APMM 2012), the global migrant stocks on the South-North and South-South migration pathways were actually equal (41%). With the emergence of a number of increasingly active and open economies in Asia, we expect to see even more dynamic South-South movement in Asia the coming decades. The disparity in the political economic landscape in Asia, the aftermath of national and Cold War struggles, and the new economic realities since the 1980s provide in Asia a very rich mix of old and new migration topics, issues, and quandaries. Much of this is seen in complex and shifting policy regimes which share many practical issues (such as the general desire to control migration and concerns for trans-border relations) but approach those issues through varied governmental and private sector approaches. These have led to new portals of entry and exit policies regulating both regular and irregular movements, and shifting trans-border politics. Such policies are often related to national measures for labour and management of human resources, while the politics often entails hierarchies of rating Asian migrants. Accelerated intra-regional migration has inevitably incurred new interactions between sending and recipient Asian communities. In general, as a result of the opening markets for labour migrants in Asia, there has been a significant increase in the migrant population in a number of Asian countries in the two decades from 1990 to 2010. For example, Japan’s foreign population increased from 1 million to 2.1 million. That represents an increase of migrant proportion from 0.88 to 1.72 percent. The migrant population in Singapore also rose from 24.11 to 38.67 percent in the same period (UNESCAP 2011). Foreign residents in Korea increased to 1,158,866 by the end of 2008 (Korea

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Immigration Service cited in Belanger, Lee and Wang 2011). Taiwan’s migrant stock was boosted significantly with an amalgam of increased cross-border marriages and labour immigrants. Cross-border marriages stood at 485,714 in 2013, and the major sources of Taiwan’s foreign spouses are China (65%) and Vietnam (18%) (National Immigration Agency of Taiwan 2014). Taiwan’s foreign workers also showed a record high at 485,714 in 2013 (Council of Labour Affairs of Taiwan 2014). Other active migrant recruiters include Thailand (1.157 million immigrants), Malaysia (2.358 million), Hong Kong (2.742 million), Singapore (1.967 million) and India (5.4 million) (World Bank 2011). This volume on Asian migration, together with the second volume which also resulted from the conference, addresses not only Asian concerns but an entire range of often heated debates on entry and exit policies, trans-border dynamics, host-migrant interaction, migrant governance, transnational identity, and migrant integration. The continual arrival of new migrants is synchronous with the adjustment experiences of former migrants. The crafting of policy and rhetoric around the issues of multiculturalism is thus especially difficult. How Asians shape their multicultural societal interactions, perceptions, and institutions can provide vital comparative cases for those studying similar issues in the West (Castles 2003). This is also part of the global governance of movement, mobility, and image of place in an age that must take account of Asian migration. While there has been continuation of movement linked to previous waves of Asian migration, we also see much “susceptibility” in migration relations, whether between old and new migrant groups, or between “root” countries and “route” communities. In migration, every move is an immediate “separation” and “connection” in diversifying forms. Different moves may induce different corresponding attachments and detachments. Migrants’ relationships with “home” may be strengthened or weakened over time under changing political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Migrants themselves may also be radically changed. For example, some political refugees from Asia have, after a few decades, become “patriotic economic heroes” for the country from which they once fled. Previous political grudges can be sealed over with new political propaganda and changing economic agendas. Amidst rapidly changing global migration politics and transnational relations, diasporic communities evolve, flow, and ebb. The term “susceptibility” employed in the title points to how migration, whether considered as a livelihood strategy or a political choice, is constantly subject to the “sway and swing” of the macro-

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changes in politico-economic relations between sending and recipients states, and between overseas migrant communities and origin states. This volume thus provides broad considerations of continuity, diversity, and susceptibility of Asian movement and mobility and does so in a way that facilitates broader consideration of contemporary global migration. The material of the following chapters bears on such varied issues as the following: x x x x x x x x x x x x x

the trends and patterns of Asian migration seen in light of historical developments and current global economic forces; highly variegated types of Asian diaspora both within and outside Asia; the nature of intra-regional migration flows from developing countries to developed countries and vice versa; the relationship between old and new migrant groups of the same origin in the same country of destination migration (and migrant) impacts on economic and political development of countries of origin and settlement; identity formation and development of diasporic groups with considerable internal variation in terms of background and reasons for migration (e.g., economic versus political); shifting state attitudes and policies towards migrants, combined with great variation among the governance frameworks of those states; shifting relationships between migrants and root countries; the way migration decisions shift over time (e.g., between temporary and permanent, between labour and marriage); the dynamics of negotiating migration politics and relations among regional and sub-regional entities; migration and its relationship to the political economy of regions and sub-regions; the emerging rhetoric of multiculturalism (including how the word is translated and implemented); and the social management of diversity more generally.

The Asian migration landscape since the 1980s With the vibrancy of migration in the region, Asian migration studies and literature are on the rise. In 1991, Oxford University organised a seminar series on Asian migration which has resulted in a volume edited

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by Judith Brown and Rosemary Foot (1994). It summed up the history and development of two major Asian migrant groups, the Chinese and the South Asians. During the 2000s, especially in the latter half, we witnessed an exponential rise in the number of migration workshops, conferences, and academic discussions of Asian migration. As a result, many books have been published (Lai, Collins, and Yeoh 2013; Yeoh and Huang 2013; Haines, Yamanaka and Yamashita 2012; Neubauer and Kuroda 2012; Rahman and Ahsan Ullah 2012; Neubauer and Kuroda 2012; Chan 2011; Heikkilä and Yeoh 2011; Yang and Lu 2010; Wang and Hsiao 2009; Huang, Yeoh and Rahman 2005; Jatrana, Toyota and Yeoh 2005; Wong 2004; Iredale, Hawksley and Castles 2003; Charney, Yeoh, and Tong 2003; Yeoh, Graham and Boyle 2002; Hirano, Castles and Brownlee 2000). Rather than seeing this volume as yet another conference/workshop production, we regard this book as a carefully crafted volume with an ambition to bring our readers to an overall understanding of migration trends that are related to previous waves of migration, such as the Cold War induced Indo-Chinese (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and Chinese (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) migration. We provide updates of the situations of these diaspora communities and at the same time tap into the new channels of migration in Asia as well as the regional migration dynamics that has emerged since the 1980s. The following sections do not mean to exhaust all migration patterns in Asia; they provide a general guidance for readers to grasp an overview of Asian migration paths and issues.

Chain migration Previous migration has often led to a continuation of outflows of migrants because of “chain” effects. With personal connections to overseas co-ethnic migrant communities and thus migration information and resources, aspirants of migration often find it easier to find the right path to migrate. Southern Chinese, such as the Fujianese, have continued to migrate to the West through legal and illegal means with the assistance of former emigrants (Chu 2010). Overseas Vietnamese communities have also formed rings of auxiliaries that help to send people from Vietnam. As found by Thai (2008) and Chan (2011), overseas Vietnamese refugee migrants have played a major role in accelerating migration of the Vietnamese in the 1990s and 2000s.

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Marriage migration Marriage migration is a popular channel for Asian women from less developed countries to move to developed countries within and beyond the region. It also provides an alternative for Asian and Western men who have a “low market value” for marriage in their own countries. Lowincome countries such as China and Vietnam have been actively sending out Asian brides to their Asian counterparts, while Thailand and the Philippines have been providing Asian wives for the West (Piper and Roces 2003). As mentioned above, marriage migration is also often connected to co-ethnic migrant communities abroad. Thai (2008) uses the concept of the “global diaspora marriage market” to describe how overseas Vietnamese men go on a “wife search” back in Vietnam while Chan (2011) points out the refugee-induced marriage model for new rounds of Vietnamese migration. Commercial match-making agencies have also been thriving in Asia and have directly contributed to the booming commercial marriage market linking Asian brides and grooms (Wang and Chang 2002; Wang and Hsiao 2009; Yeh 2010; Tran 2010; Yang and Lu 2010).

Labour migration Since the 1980s, there has been a growing trend of intra-regional movement through labour migration. Advanced economies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan attracted large numbers of Asian migrant workers, especially in the field of care and domestic work, while Malaysia and Thailand receive many contracted as well as irregular manual workers from neighbouring countries. While labour migrants are supposed to return home after the termination of their work contracts, many have continued their moves through obtaining new contracts and entering yet another migrant landscape, constituting a “grasshopper” style of marooned migration. Being on contracts, Asian migrant workers often see overseas work as an opportunity for further permanent migration plans.

Education and elite migration Many Asian students studying overseas have considered their studies across the border as a kind of stepping stone for settlement or further migration. Asian students studying in the West and becoming immigrants after finishing their study has been a long-term phenomenon. With an increasing number of Asian students studying across borders within Asia,

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intra-regional student migration is on the rise. Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea have been receiving increasing numbers of Asian students from China and other parts of developing Asia. Overseas study is thus often a precursor for trans-border migration; it is also an eminent part of other forms of elite and professional migration.

Return migration Many from Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea who migrated to other regions have returned to home in the 2000s. This has to do with the changing global economy. The case of return migrants is particularly revealing in Hong Kong. From 1985 to the late 1990s, not less than 800,000 had left; yet, the majority had returned to seek jobs by the 2000s (Sussman 2011). Indeed, unlike the British and Europeans in the Great Migration era in America, emigrants today are swiftly recycling their moves and thus we are seeing more people returning through “revolving doors”. Some Vietnamese refugees who once risked their life on makeshift boats to flee from Vietnam in the 1970s found themselves back in Vietnam for work, investment, or retirement in the 1990s and 2000s. The Vietnamese government has been enthusiastically making summary calls for the Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese), who were once considered dissident subjects, to return home (ve que) to contribute to its economy and development (Chan and Tran 2011). Some migrants began to wonder why they had taken such a big turnaround in such a short time. Policies issued by the state to its overseas subjects to call for their return have been one specific feature of “migration governance” in Asia. It will be interesting to look into the returning currents of migration, and the evolving relationships between homeland governments and overseas subjects.

Refugee migration Adding to the complexity of Asian migration and diaspora is the continuous flows of border-crossing refugees and semi-legal migrants (who overstay their tourist visas and make themselves claimants of torture). Though not as prominent as in the 1970s and 1980s, refugee migration is still a popular way through which many from different turbulent territories in the world end up stranded in Asian places. At the same time, human trafficking has often been intertwined with various forms of refugee movements (Ford, Lyons and van Schendel 2013).

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The organisational plan Two volumes are planned from our project on Asian migration. This volume is basically region-based, while the second volume is themebased. In this first volume, we organise the chapters into six sub-regional parts and related diasporas—Northeast Asia (Japan and Korea); East Asia (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan); Vietnamese diaspora; Cambodian, Lao and Hmong diaspora; Singapore with Malaysia; South Asia. The issues discussed in each region are not all the same and the emphases in each part have distinctive contextual implications. The second volume is organised in terms of key themes, including the increase in female migration, remittances, borderlands, refugees, and human trafficking. More details will be provided later on in the introduction of the second volume. The aim of the first volume is not to provide equivalent information for each region, but to highlight what are the especially crucial migration dynamics and new issues that have characterised each of those regions over roughly the past half-century. An introduction to each part will help readers to understand the latest migration trends and most debated migration issues related to the particular regions, and then introduce the broader historical context of that region. Individual chapters will function as illustrative cases, with each chapter unique and complete in its own analysis, but linked to each part’s overall focus. Part I concerns Japan and South Korea. It seeks new ways of understanding migrant flows through a detailed comparison of two countries that share many features culturally and as East Asia’s most fully developed economies. The purpose is comparative yet attentive to each country’s uniqueness, and it will focus on new migration patterns while acknowledging the durability of much Japanese and Korean migration and migration policy. Particular emphasis is placed on the overall issue of cultural diversity, the nature of international marriages (which are creating the most rapid changes in cultural diversity), and the new dynamics of return migration. Korea and Japan probably represent the cases that are most useful for comparative work in understanding the commonalities and differences between the Asian, North American, and European migration situations and policy responses. Part II then turns to East Asia and, in particular, the migration relations between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Often marked as “Greater China”, Taiwan, and Hong Kong were never considered by the Chinese state as “separate” parts of China. Yet, through migration regulations and relations, the three places are definitely three separate territorial entities. The migration of a political regime to Taiwan and the migration of

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hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese migrants and refugees to Hong Kong led to the formation of three substantial “Chinese” territories in the post-WWII era. Chapters in this Part will relate China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong through the lens of migration, and examine the different development of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the “post-exile” era. One crucial result is a new slant on diasporic identity, home, and new divisions in homeland-diaspora relations. Parts III and IV also reflect the pervasive effects of Cold War politics on migration patterns in the post-World War II period. Part III focuses specifically on the Vietnamese who surged out of the country with the fall of Saigon in April 1975, and who continued to flee over the next two decades for a variety of shifting political, economic, and familial reasons. The major Vietnamese out-migrations, at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and around the time of the 1979 China-Vietnam border war, formed the first and the second “boat people” crises. Since the 1990s, new rounds of Vietnamese migration have occurred through labour export (mostly within Asia) and marriage migration (both in Asia and with Vietnamese already in the West). There were also a large number of overseas Vietnamese returning to Vietnam for work and investment. The individual chapters address these different flows and the resulting changing nature of the Vietnamese diaspora. The flow of Vietnamese through both communist and capitalist networks (for examples, to Poland and the United States during the Cold War) makes the Vietnamese diaspora a complex and instructive case. Part IV then deals with Indochinese refugees from Cambodia and Laos. These refugees have tended to receive less attention, and their experiences are often conflated with those of their neighbours from Vietnam, from whom they differ greatly in historical and cultural background, and in religious and social values. One crucial issue in these cases has been the erratic availability of exit opportunities, caused by changes in funding policies and resettlement resource allocations in the West. Those changes and discontinuities have continued to undermine the situation of Cambodians and Laotians (whether ethnic Lao or the Hmong) in the West. This Part, in exploring resettlement patterns of Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong refugee communities, interweaves the topics of cultural (re)productions, religious expressions, refugee subjectivity, political activism, transnational connections, and social justice movements. In so doing, it raises another variation on what diaspora can mean in the contemporary world. Part V addresses the Malaysian and Singapore cases as societies which are inherently multicultural and also migrant-receiving and migrant-

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sending. In the Singapore case, the migration relations with neighbouring countries and its own return migrants are unique. Singapore’s management of Chineseness has also led to a distinctive segregation between old and new Chinese migrants and even a sort of “racism” against mainland Chinese. As an important migrant-receiving port in Asia, migration regulations and practices in Singapore will provide good and bad exemplars for the governance of migrants internally and the handling of migration relations externally. The Malaysian-Singaporean case provides an example of specific trans-border “multiculturalism” in Asia. While receiving a big amount of migrant workers from Indonesia, Malaysia’s particular pro-Malay (Bumiputera) policy has promoted continuous outmigration of the Chinese Malaysians, many of whom consider Singapore (a city-state with a majority of ethnic Chinese) a “career outlet”. It is in this sub-region that one sees the mix of incoming and outgoing migrants, the hallmark of migration relations induced by domestic ethnic policies, crossovers of labour migration and religio-ethnic relations, interaction between new and old migrant groups, and interdependence of advanced and expanding Asian economies. Finally Part VI concerns South Asia, thus bringing the book all the way through Asia, uniting the East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian experiences that are so frequently separated. In the sub-region of South Asia, migration relations have been shaped by colonialism, the post-World War II struggle for independence, the convulsions of partition, and reshaped again with the unequal development of Asia as a whole. Here again one sees the interdependence of affluent and poor Asia, overlapping waves of migration to Western countries and in Asia, as well as an emerging trend of south-south migration conducted by elite Indians to Africa, forming yet another kind of Asian diaspora.

References APMM (Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants). 2012. Global Migration Report for 2012: Trends, Patterns and Conditions of Migration. Hong Kong: APMM. Bélanger, Danièle, Hye-Kyung Lee, and Hong-Zen Wang. 2010. “Ethnic Diversity and Statistics in East Asia: ‘Foreign Brides’ Surveys in Taiwan and South Korea.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33 (6): 1108-130. Brown, Judith M., and Rosemary Foot. eds. 1994. Migration: The Asian Experience. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Castles, Stephen. 2007. “Twenty-first-century Migration as a Challenge to Sociology.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (3): 351-371.

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—. 2003. “Migrant Settlement, Transnational Communities and State Strategies in the Asia Pacific Region.” In Migration in the Asia Pacific: Population, Settlement and Citizenship Issues, edited by Robyn Iredale, Charles Hawksley, and Stephen Castles, 3-26. Northampton, MA.: Edward Elgar Publishing. Castles, Stephen, and Mark J. Miller, eds. 1993. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. Hampshire: Macmillan Press. Chan, Yuk Wah. ed. 2011. The Chinese / Vietnamese Diaspora – Revisiting the Boat People. New York: Routledge. Chan, Yuk Wah and T. L. Thu Tran. 2011. “Recycling Migration and Changing Nationalisms: Vietnamese Return Diaspora and Reconstruction of the Vietnamese Nationhood.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (7): 1101-117. Chan, Wai Kwan. 1991. The Making of Hong Kong Society, Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Charney, Michael W., Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Tong Chee Kiong. 2003. Asian Migrants and Education: The Tensions of Education in Immigrant Societies and Among Migrant Groups. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chiu, Stephen Wing Kai, and Tai-lok Lui. 2009. Hong Kong: Becoming a Chinese Global City. London: Routledge. Chu, Julie. 2010. Cosmologies of Credits: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham: Duke University Press. Cohen, Robin, ed. 1996. Theories of Migration. Brookfield, Vt.: E. Elgar. Council of Labour Affairs of Taiwan. 2014. “Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Various Type.” www.cla.gov.tw/cgi-bin/siteMaker/SM_theme?page=49c05774. Ford, Michele, Lenore Lyons and Willem van Schendel, eds. 2012. Labour Migration and Human Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Haines, David, Keiko Yamanaka, and Shinji Yamashita, eds. 2012. Wind over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context. New York: Berghahn Books. Heikkilä, Elli K. and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, eds. 2011. International Marriages in the Time of Globalization. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Hirano, Kenichiro, Stephen Castles, and Patrick Brownlee, eds. 2000. Asian Migration and Settlement: Focus on Japan. Quezon City, Philippines: Scalabrini Migration Center.

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Huang, Shirlena, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Noor Abdul Rahman, eds. 2005. Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic. IOM (International Organisation for Migration). 2013. World Migration Report: Migrant Well-being and Development. Geneva: IOM. —. 2011. “Asia and the Pacific: Regional Overview.” www.iom.int/cms/en/sites/iom/home/where-we-work/asia-and-thepacific.html. —. 2010. World Migration Report: Migrant Well-being and Development. Geneva: IOM. Iredale, Robyn, Charles Hawksley, and Stephen Castles, eds. 2003. Migration in the Asia Pacific: Population, Settlement and Citizenship Issues. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar. Jatrana, Santosh, Mika Toyota, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, eds. 2005. Migration and health in Asia. London: Routledge. King, Russell. 2010. People on the Move: an Atlas of Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lai, Ah Eng, Francis L. Collins, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, eds. 2013. Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Lee, Pui-tak, ed. 2005. Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Mathews, Gordon, Eric Ma, and Tai-lok Lui. 2008. Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation. New York: Routledge. National Immigration Agency of Taiwan. 2014. “Statistics on Foreign and Mainland Spouses in Taiwan (ROC) by Cities and Counties.” www.immigration.gov.tw/lp.asp?ctNode=33106&CtUnit=17834&Base DSD=7&mp=s002. Ngo, Tak-wing and Hong-zen Wang, eds. 2011. Politics of Difference in Taiwan. London and New York: Routledge. Neubauer, Deane E., and Kazuo Kuroda. 2012. Mobility and Migration in Asian Pacific Higher Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Piper, Nicola and Mina Roces, eds. 2003. Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration. Lanham: Rowmand and Littlefield. Rahman, Mizanur, and Ahsan Ullah, eds. 2012. Asian Migration Policy: South, Southeast and East Asia. Hauppauge, N.Y.: Nova Science Publishers. Schubert, Gunter, and Jens Damm, eds. 2011. Taiwanese Identity in the Twenty-first Century: Domestic, Regional, and Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

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Sussman, Nan. 2011. Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, A Hong Kong Case. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Thai, Hung Cam. 2008. For Better or for Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Tsai, Chang-Yen. 2007. National identity, Ethnic Identity, and Party Identity in Taiwan. Baltimore, Md.: University of Maryland School of Law. Tran, Xuyen. 2010. “Vietnamese-Taiwanese Marriages.” In Asian Crossborder Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues, edited by Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu, 157-178. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. UN. 2013a. “Press Release—232 Million International Migrants Living Abroad Worldwide—New UN Global Migration Statistics Reveal,” 11 September. Http://esa.un.org/unmigration/wallchart2013.htm. UN. 2013b. “International Migration 2013: Migrants by Origin and Destination.” Population Facts, no. 2013/3, September 2013. UNESCAP. 2011. Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific 2011. Geneva: United Nations Economic and Social Commissions for Asian and the Pacific. Vertovec, Steven. 2009. Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Wang, Hong-zen, and Chang, Shu-ming. 2002. “The Commodification of International Marriages: Cross-border Marriages Business in Taiwan and Viet Nam.” International Migration 40 (6): 93-116. Wang, Hong-Zen, and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, eds. 2009. Crossborder Marriages with Asian Characteristics. Taipei: Academia Sinica, Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies. Wong, Siu-Lun, ed. 2004. Chinese and Indian Diasporas: Comparative Perspectives. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, the University of Hong Kong. —. 1988. Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. World Bank. 2011. Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011. www.econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDEC PROSPECTS/0,,contentMDK:21352016~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64 165026~theSitePK:476883,00.html. Yang, Wen-Shan, and Lu, Melody Chia-Wen, eds. 2010. Asian Crossborder Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Yeh, Yu-Ching. 2010. “Foreign Spouses” Acculturation in Taiwan: A Comparison of Their Countries of Origin, Gender, and Education Degrees.” In Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues, edited by Yang Wen-Shan and Melody Lu Chia-Wen, 201-220. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Yeoh, Brenda and Shirlena Huang, eds. 2013. The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia. London: Routledge. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Elspeth Graham, and Paul J. Boyle, eds. 2002. Migrations and Family Relations in the Asia Pacific Region. Quezon City, Philippines: Scalabrini Migration Center.

PART I: NORTHEAST ASIA: COPING WITH DIVERSITY IN JAPAN AND KOREA

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: MIGRATION AND DIVERSITY IN JAPAN AND KOREA DAVID HAINES

The history of migration in Northeast Asia is, as Yuk Wah Chan notes in her introduction for Asia overall, marked by a progression from political factors in the immediate post-World War II period to the predominance of economic factors from the 1980s and onwards. In 1945, “Year Zero” as Buruma (2013) calls it, nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki quite definitively ended the Japanese empire and simultaneously liberated its colony, Korea. American soldiers streamed into both Japan and the southern part of Korea, and remain a presence today. Reciprocal movements of Japanese and Koreans to the United States as wives and students, businessmen and permanent migrants, developed. The end of the Japanese empire also reshuffled the fortunes of Koreans in Japan and many returned to Korea, just as many Japanese returned to Japan from Korea and other parts of the former empire. The solidification of communist control in China, North Korea, and Russia largely cut off migration flows to and from those countries. But, by the late 1980s, the political changes in the communist world opened up migration channels again and the surging economic development of Japan and then South Korea brought about new and wider migrant flows from and to nearly all areas of the world. It would be possible to cast a wide net in considering contemporary migration to, in, and from Northeast Asia. That net might well include the Asian part of Russia and at least some parts of China. The China/Russia border is now an active one, like the more southern Chinese borders discussed elsewhere in this volume. Even North Korea has well-developed migration streams with China, and a flow of refugees that is small but important. Akaha and Vassilieva (2005) have shown very well how effective that broad regional definition of Northeast Asia can be in

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considering migration. In this volume, however, we have chosen to focus on Japan and South Korea as the most advanced economies in the region and the ones that may be most helpful in integrating Asian migration studies with the still far more voluminous literature on migration in North America and Europe. Whatever the specific historical causes and trajectories, then, Japan and South Korea are now experiencing many of the migration patterns of the fully developed economies of North America and Europe. Both have witnessed increased flows of labour migrants, business people, students, international spouses, their own returning citizens, and former emigrants and their descendants. One crucial effect is an increased social and cultural diversity that is creating new, but varying realignments of public policy and social values. Conversely, both countries are contributing to many outbound forms of migration, from burgeoning flows of tourism, to foreign students, business migrants, and still many permanent migrants. Japan and Korea have both now entered the status of being at the origins, destinations, and way points of an increasingly fast, complex, and unpredictable world of human mobility.1 It is on these two countries, then, that the chapters in this section focus.

The diversity issue There are many crucial issues that Japan and Korea face regarding migration. But perhaps the most pressing is the new societal diversity that results from migration. One consistent problem both countries have faced is their relative lack of experience dealing with such cultural diversity, even if it involves the return of people of Japanese and Korean descent, or even Japanese and Koreans who have merely lived abroad. Both countries are now seeing in-migration of people from a very broad range of countries, cultures, and socioeconomic backgrounds. New migrants from mainland China are a major presence in both countries, complementing older streams of Chinese migration. Koreans from different periods and places in Korea have been in Japan since colonial times, but are now joined there by migrants from a South Korea that is far stronger politically—and a very effective competitor in economic and cultural products. In both Japan and Korea there are also overlapping sets of recent migrants from other places in Asia and beyond, whether labour migrants, business entrepreneurs, or marriage partners. The percentage of marriages that are with foreigners, for example, had risen by 2010 to five percent for Japan and 11 percent for Korea (Jones 2012).

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That migrant-fuelled diversity remains substantially less than is the case in North America and Europe: both Japan and Korea have “foreigner” populations of around two to three percent (depending on definitions) compared to figures well above 10 percent in North America and most Western European countries.2 But the numbers are growing and, lacking much prior experience with such societal diversity, may pose greater challenges for Japan and Korea. “Diversity” for both countries is very much a project-in-the-making rather than a set of established ideas and practices for social organisation. As a result, the two countries provide an especially useful setting in which to understand a societal diversity that derives largely from relatively recent migration. In these two countries, then, we have the opportunity to reassess what diversity might actually mean and whether it does, should, or could be managed in the same way in different places, countries, and regions of the world. The recent situation in South Korea has been especially volatile. The number of foreign residents in the country surged from fewer than 400,000 in 1997 to over 1.0 million in 2007 and to perhaps some 1.4 million at the end of 2012. Chung Ki-Seon, a researcher at the Korea Migration Research and Training Center (a joint effort of the Korean Government and the International Organization for Migration), has stressed that “one of the most notable characteristics of the foreign population is its diversity in terms of social categories, such as low skilled workers, students and foreign wives who married Korean men.”3 That increase and diversity have been accompanied by increases in other more temporary flows. There has, for example, been a phenomenal increase in tourism to Korea; 2012 saw the number of in-coming tourists cross the 11 million mark. While full integration into Korea by migrants and their children remains difficult, there has also been at least some progress and the occasional case of a press-worthy immigrant success story. In 2012, for example, Jasmine Lee became the first elected member of the Korean general assembly coming from a non-ethnic Korean background: she was born in the Philippines, married a Korean, moved to Korea, and subsequently naturalized. Overall, then, South Korea—like Japan—has been facing greatly increased mobility and diversity. The word “multicultural” is ever-present. That multiculturalism is about social and economic categories as well as cultural ones, and about multiculturalism within families, not simply between them.4 The governmental efforts to address issues of immigration and multiculturalism are sometimes criticised, but there is no doubt that both governments have been attentive to these emerging trends of mobility and diversity. In that effort, they generally have the support of the business community and at least some of the public. On the other hand, the results

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of governmental and private efforts have often been frustrated. Perhaps nowhere is that clearer than with refugees from North Korea (invariably referred to in the official literature as “defectors”) whose progress in adjusting to South Korean society remains limited despite rather generous public assistance, or with the Nikkeijin “returning” to Japan from Latin America whose children are often lost to the Japanese educational system (Linger 2001; Roth 2002; Tsuda 2003). While the topic of multiculturalism is potentially wide-ranging, much of the governmental and public interest has focused on children and youth. With refugees, for example, there are full higher education scholarships for children of refugees who can make it through the Korean secondary schools. More generally, there is an explicit recognition that the number of school children of mixed heritage is rising while that for children with two Korean parents or two Japanese parents is dropping. The number of such mixed children is now significant and will continue to rise. Perhaps even more important than the overall numbers are the impacts on particular localities, especially rural areas, where the proportions of children with mixed parentage are even higher—as in the area discussed by Yamanaka and Akiba in this volume.

Migrants as people Migrants are, of course, human beings. But the recognition of their full personhood is often a laborious legal process. Much of the recent academic and policy discussion of immigrant integration has focused on granting legal rights (especially citizenship) and on how immigrants take on participation in their new society (often framed as social citizenship). The Korean and Japanese cases suggest a somewhat different logic by which the status of being a full person is less about the migrant’s own activities than an after-the-fact reflection of how migrants assume personhood through parenthood. Since children are viewed inherently as people (or people-to-be), therefore their parents achieve personhood by refraction. The children, after all, cannot simply be fodder for work since children are not accepted as appropriate labour in advanced industrial economies. The position of their parents, at least retroactively, cannot be wholly that of labour either—although the parental role often seems relegated to lower importance than the educational system. Such policy considerations are especially persuasive in societies (like Japan and South Korea) that explicitly consider the demographic implications of public policy. This path toward acceptance through children suggests some interesting twists on how public policy on

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immigration might be developed. For example, one might imagine that immigrants who have children could be eligible for a new kind of “investor” visa since their children represent an invaluable demographic investment for a very, very low-fertility urban East Asia. Both Japan and Korea are, after all, well below replacement fertility; the 2012 total fertility rate estimates were 1.4 for Japan and 1.3 in Korea. One can also see how useful could be a revision of citizenship laws toward some kind of birth citizenship, followed by some kind of “trailing” citizenship (or at least legalised permanent residence) for the parents of those with birth citizenship. Such changes will not come easily in either Japan or Korea, but such changes may be necessary to resolve a fundamental policy problem: the recognition of personhood after parenthood described here is simply so retroactive as to undermine its very effectiveness. The situation of immigrant children in both countries, after all, is not very good. Recent statistics from Korea, for example, suggest that although the number of multicultural children is rising rapidly (about five percent), school nonattendance is very high (from a third for elementary school to over twothirds for high school), as is the incidence of bullying for those who do attend (over a third according to one survey).5 Similar reports come from Japan. The fate even of Japanese children returning from abroad has long been problematic (Goodman 1990; Goodman et al. 2012). Such problems with children and youth do not respond well to after-the-fact policy responses. Public policy must inevitably be proactive rather than reactive and retroactive. It must address the adults who will produce the children, not simply the children. The argument for an early policy recognition of full migrant personhood is thus consistent both with a humanistic notion of migrant wholeness and with the practicalities of public policy on migration, on diversity, and on viable economic and demographic futures in Japan and Korea.

The chapters The chapters that follow examine in more detail the societal diversity created by migrants in Japan and Korea and how it is managed both by governments and by people. In “Damunhwa: The Korean Search for Multiculturalism”, Timothy Lim and I examine the increasing ethnic and racial diversity in South Korea and the emerging government rhetoric of multiculturalism. The specific case involves a set of “multicultural” awards and how a combination of government offices and private companies formulated a framework for designating awards for multicultural youth.

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There are limitations and internal contradictions in the resulting rhetoric, but it does introduce a new cultural logic into South Korean society. The effects may sometimes be unintended, but nevertheless have far-reaching social and political consequences. Moving from rhetoric about migrants to strategy by migrants, Masako Kudo explores family-making among Japanese-Pakistani couples in “The Trajectories of Family-Making through Cross-border Marriages”. Crossborder marriages are a growing part of migration in the advanced economies of Asia and here is a case that, unlike the majority, involves immigrant husbands rather than immigrant wives. Having followed these families for many years now, Kudo is able to use longitudinal data to shed light on the ways in which gender, religion, and socio-economic elements intersect in family-making that, in turn, generates new border-crossings. In particular, she discusses how Japanese wives negotiate their roles as their families develop both in Japan and in Pakistan. Here then is a negotiation of migrant identity and personhood that extends across borders and through time. In “Achieving Local Citizenship in Japan”, Keiko Yamanaka and Takeshi Akiba address the more common case of immigrant brides in Japan, particularly in rural areas. Their focus is on how these Filipina women actively participate in community affairs as residents, wives, and mothers. The result is at least partial social citizenship and some sense of belonging. Yet questions remain about the extent to which the wives can assert full “citizenship” while retaining a transnational identity, and whether this alternative kind of citizenship can fill in the gaps caused by the lack of full legal citizenship rights. While there is seeming acceptance, there is still separation and still uncertainty about the future. Yet again on the more positive side, the reciprocal collaboration between these new Japanese and established local community activists is rather impressive. Finally, in “Ethnic Korean Returnees from Japan in Korea”, Sug-In Kweon focuses on the experience of returnees in Korea, their reception, identity, and sense of belonging. As an ethnic minority group within a nation-state, ethnic Koreans in Japan are highly assimilated to Japanese culture, although with a low level of structural assimilation. On their return to Korea, they have limited Korean cultural competence and face high levels of cultural intolerance because of that incompetence, leading to disillusion with the “homeland” and thus further identity changes. The discussion underlines how complicated so-called return migration can be and provides a particularly good example of how the earlier politicallyinfluenced migrations of the immediate post World War II period continue

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to reverberate through the more economically-motivated flows of recent decades.

Notes 1. For general discussions of migration to, from, and within Northeast Asia, see the edited volumes by Akaha and Vassilieva (2005), Constable (2005), Douglass and Roberts (2003), Yamashita, Minami, Haines, and Eades (2008), Graburn, Ertle, and Tierney (2008), Haines, Yamanaka, and Yamashita (2012), and Zhang and Duncan 2013). Special journal issues by Roberts (2007) and Shipper (2010) also help set the stage. The extensive work on returning Nikkei from South America to Japan also deserves note (Linger 2001; Roth 2002; Takenaka 1997; Tsuda 2003). 2. See IOM (2011), OECD (2015), and UN (2008) for the standard figures but note that the definition of “foreigner” is variable (especially with “foreigner” Koreans who were actually born in Japan) and that both countries have the same difficulties as other countries in estimating non-legally resident migrants. 3. The Korea Times, 1 November, 22. 4. One of the critiques is that the governmental effort focuses specifically on foreign brides and is less about promoting a multicultural society of different groups than about easing the transition of these brides into Korean society. Kim (2010, 124), for example, notes that the “so-called multicultural policy in Korea is predominantly aimed at producing Korean-conformity and there has been widespread discrimination against non-Koreans, in whatever forms and nature, especially toward other Asians.” 5. See the following for a useful compilation of statistics on multicultural families in Korea: http://groovekorea.com/article/numbers-multiethnic-families-korea.

References Akaha, Tsuneo, and Anna Vassilieva, eds. 2005. Crossing National Borders: Human Migration Issues in Northeast Asia. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Buruma, Ian. 2013. Year Zero: A History of 1945. New York: Penguin. Constable, Nicole, ed. 2005. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Douglass, Mike, and Glenda S. Roberts, eds. 2003. Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Goodman, Roger. 1993. Japan’s ‘International Youth’: The Emergence of a New Class of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Goodman, Roger, Yuki Imoto, and Tuukka Toivonent, eds. 2012. A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs. New York: Routledge. Graburn, Nelson, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney, eds. 2008. Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Haines, David, Keiko Yamanaka, and Shinji Yamashita, eds. 2012. Wind over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context. New York: Berghahn. IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2011. World Migration Report: 2011. Http://publications.iom.int/bookstore/free/WMR2011_English.pdf. Jones, Gavin W. 2012. “International Marriage in Asia: What Do We Know and What Do We Need to Know?” Singapore: Asia Research Institute. Kim, Andrew Eungi. 2010. “Korean Multiculturalism: The Genealogy of the Concept, Shifting Meanings, Issues and Implications.” Asian Studies [㙸㉬㙸㜤Ạ] 53 (2): 102-129. Lim, Timothy C. 2003. “Racing from the Bottom in South Korea? The Nexus between Civil Society and Transnational Migrants.” Asian Survey 43 (3): 423-442. —. 2009. “Who is Korean? Migration, Immigration, and the Challenge of Multiculturalism in Homogeneous Societies.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 30: 1-9. Linger, Daniel Touro. 2001. No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). 2013. International Migration Outlook 2012. Roberts, Glenda S., ed. 2007. “Labor Migration to Japan: Comparative Perspectives on Demography and the Sense of Crisis.” Japan Focus/The Asia-Pacific Journal. http://japanfocus.org/-Glenda_S_Roberts/2519. Roth, Joshua Hotaka. 2002. Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Shipper, Apichai W. 2010. Citizenship and Migration. Special issue of Pacific Affairs 83 (1). Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2003. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. UN (United Nations). 2008. International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision. Http://esa.un.org/migration/.

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Yamashita, Shinji, Makito Minami, David W. Haines, and Jerry S. Eades, eds. 2008. Transnational Migration in East Asia: Japan in a Comparative Focus. Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology. 2008. Zhang Jijiao and Howard Duncan, eds. 2013. Migration in China and Asia: Experience and Policy. The Netherlands: Springer.

CHAPTER TWO DAMUNHWA: THE KOREAN SEARCH FOR MULTICULTURALISM DAVID HAINES AND TIMOTHY LIM

One of the key differences between Northeast Asia and North America involves the level of diversity in society, the kinds of diversity, and the ways in which diversity is viewed and managed. Of course, neither of the countries—Japan and South Korea—discussed in this section entirely lacks social and cultural diversity (e.g., Akaha and Vassilieva 2005; Douglas and Roberts 2003; Graeburn et al. 2008; Yamashita et al. 2008; Haines et al. 2012). In Japan, the Ainu at last have legal recognition as a minority. Furthermore, both countries have seen extensive in-migration of other East Asian groups. Many Koreans from different periods and places in Korea have settled in Japan, and Japanese are now often in South Korea. In South Korea, there has long been a small, but firmly embedded Chinese community (referred to as Hwagyo), which reached a peak of 65,000 in 1937 (Kim 2006). In addition, since the early post-war period, thousands of “mixed blood” children (honhyol), usually born to Korean women and U.S. soldiers, have endured a hardscrabble existence in South Korea. More recently, both countries have seen a rapid and dramatic increase in migrants from other places in Asia and throughout the world, whether male labour from mainland China, female labour from the Philippines, “ethnic migrants” from South America, or marriage migrants from Vietnam. Nevertheless, in Northeast Asia diversity is noticeably less in volume than is the case in North America, or even than generally in Western Europe. This means that “diversity”—particularly in the sense of multiculturalism (damunhwa in Korean)—is currently a project-in-themaking rather than a set of established ideas and practices for social organisation. This Northeast Asian experience thus provides the

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opportunity to rethink what diversity might mean in different contexts, and whether it operates (or even should operate) in the same way in different places, countries, or regions of the world. As an illustration, this chapter discusses a recent case in which the political and business community in South Korea attempted to deal with the issue of diversity by organising a program of awards for multicultural youth, and then uses that discussion as a springboard to consider more broadly the evolution of multiculturalism in Korean society and policy.

Background The number of foreign residents in South Korea surged from fewer than 400,000 in 1997 to over 1.0 million in 2007 and to some 1.4 million at the end of 2012, or about three percent of South Korea’s total population.1 The influx of both low-skilled workers and foreign brides is particularly significant for the nature and implications of diversity in South Korea. The foreign workers now come from many places around the world. Up until the late 1980s, the large majority of foreign residents in South Korea were skilled professionals or students, and were primarily from a handful of richer countries and regions: Japan, the United States, and Western Europe. By contrast, the upsurge of foreign residents since then has brought in poorer and less skilled workers from China, South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal), Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam), Central Asia, and Africa. This has made dealing with “diversity” much more challenging to South Koreans, since there are not only many more cultural and social differences with which to contend, but also sharp socioeconomic distinctions. Furthermore, the increasing number of foreign brides, who come primarily from China, Vietnam, and the Philippines, means that increasing diversity cannot simply be ignored as a transient phenomenon. After all, many South Koreans might think, foreign workers will eventually leave. For foreign brides, this is obviously not the case. Perhaps even more important in a policy sense, the increasing number of international marriages (approximately 14 percent of all 2013 marriages in South Korea) results in more “multicultural” children. There are about 150,000 such children today (Kim 2013). Although not subject to outright marginalisation and discrimination (as were the honhyol), these new multicultural children are not generally viewed as “true Koreans”. As such, they represent another very important aspect of diversity within South Korean society.

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The increase in the numbers and diversity of long-term foreign residents has been accompanied by increases in other more temporary flows of people. There has, for example, been a phenomenal increase in tourism to Korea: 2012 saw the number of in-coming tourists exceed the 11.4 million mark, a dramatic increase from just a decade earlier when South Korea had about 4.7 million tourists (Korea Tourism Organisation 2013). Given South Korea’s total population of around 50 million, an annual inflow of 11.4 million tourists (and other short-term visitors) is a remarkable number. This number suggests that South Koreans have become quite accustomed to seeing “outsiders” in their midst. That familiarity, however, has not translated into full acceptance. Low-skilled foreign migrant workers, in particular, are still barred from settling in South Korea, primarily on the presumption that they cannot be assimilated or integrated into Korean society. That unwillingness to accept low-skilled workers as long-term residents can be seen in South Korea’s current foreign worker employment system, known as the Employment Permit System (EPS). Under that system, low-skilled foreign workers are permitted a maximum stay in South Korea of four years and ten months–– exactly two months less than the five-year minimum required to apply for permanent resident status. On the other hand, there has been a much greater willingness to accept foreign wives, to encourage their effective assimilation, and to applaud their successes. Jasmine Lee, the first elected member of the Korean general assembly coming from a mixed ethnic background, provides one such example. She was born in the Philippines but as a young woman married a Korean seaman in 1995, moved to Korea, and subsequently naturalised. That she was subsequently a mother, a TV personality and movie actress, and a widow, further dramatized her case. There are also broader signs that South Korean society is becoming more accepting of diversity. A 2010 poll, for example, showed that 56 percent of Korean respondents approved the extension of South Korean nationality to immigrants from Southeast Asia, a dramatic increase from 1998, when only 16 percent approved (cited in Mundy 2013). It is in this changing context that Jasmine Lee was able to achieve her electoral success. She has been further lauded for her willingness to push for legislation that allows unskilled foreign workers to be joined by their families (Mundy 2013). She herself is thus bringing together the two key Korean immigration issues of foreign wives and foreign workers. South Korea has thus been facing greatly increased migration and diversity, which have become impossible to ignore. One particularly salient indication of this is that the word “multicultural” is everywhere.

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For example, between 2005 and 2008, according to research by Kim HuiJung (2009), there were at least 99,000 articles in Korean vernacular newspapers that featured the term “multiculturalism” (damunhwa). Throughout the entire 1990s, by contrast, “multiculturalism” appeared a scant 235 times. Still, these figures do not tell us what multiculturalism means. Is multiculturalism about social and economic categories as well as cultural ones? Is it a process that goes on within families, rather than simply between them?2 These remain difficult questions but ones with which the Korean government has tried to grapple. The government’s efforts to address issues of immigration and multiculturalism are sometimes criticized but there is no doubt that the government has been attentive to the emerging trends of migration and diversity. While the topic of multiculturalism3 is potentially wide-ranging, much of the Korean governmental and public interest has focused on children and youth. There is a clear recognition that the number of school children of mixed parentage is rising. The number of such mixed children is now, as noted earlier, about 150,000; moreover, this figure is expected to rise to roughly 10 percent of at least the elementary school population by mid-century.4 This emphasis on children and youth is not, however, an exclusive one. As will be discussed later in this chapter, there is also a broadening discussion in Korea about general issues of human rights and how they should be applied to foreign workers (e.g., J. Kim 2003, N. Kim 2009; Lee 1997; Lim 2003; Seol and Han 2004; Seol and Skrentny 2004). One of the practical policy problems posed by this new diversity in Korea is that, lacking any very clear historical precedents,5 the very nature of diversity in society has to be conceptualised from the beginning. In Korea, this new diversity is usually described as damunhwa (␘ⱬ䞈),6 a perfectly legitimate Korean word meaning “many cultures” but one which was only called into use in recent decades to match the English word “multiculturalism”. The English word “multicultural”, however, does not reflect the extent to which issues of culture, race, and nationality are intertwined in South Korea—as elsewhere in East Asia. In the English language press in Korea, for example, the words “multicultural” and “multiracial” are often used as apparent synonyms, with the frequent variant “multiethnic”. That fluidity in linguistic usage may suggest some uncertainty about whether this new diversity should be characterised as cultural, racial, or ethnic, or may simply reflect a desire to phrase issues of diversity in the least objectionable way, and perhaps the most internationally conventional way as well.

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An awards program The South Korean case thus provides an opportunity to reconsider what “multiculturalism” might be both as a description of social interaction and as a public policy objective. As a specific example, consider a set of awards launched in 2012 by The Korea Times, the major English language Korean daily, in cooperation with the Korean government, several voluntary organisations (e.g., the Seoul YMCA), and the foreign diplomatic community.7 In these awards, multiculturalism was invoked as a general concept, but the specific target population was children, and even more specifically, children in schools. The awards thus simultaneously addressed new diversity in Korean society and the state’s interest and responsibility in positive channelling of that diversity in and through the educational system. The wording of the awards program deserves some comment. The awards were for “multicultural” youth and the basic program goal was to help promote “diversity” and support children from “multiethnic” backgrounds. The variant term “multiracial” did not appear in the first official program announcement as printed in the newspaper, but the online announcement did include that term, noting the goal of the program to “honour interracial students who serve as role models for young people by demonstrating outstanding talent in such areas as language, sports, the arts and academic works.” There were also to be awards to volunteers who had made “efforts to eliminate racial discrimination.”8 The initial listing of the award categories in the paper also included race-related terminology, noting the program’s goal to “honour interracial students who serve as role models”. An accompanying article on the same page emphasized the need to avoid discrimination by race; another stressed the right to education of all children by virtue of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That latter article used the example of a stateless Mongolian who had been expelled from Korea. Here again, there was considerably fluidity in wording, but the mix of articles suggests that the fluidity was not merely sloppiness or avoidance but rather an attempt to address how different contexts represent varying and overlapping issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, migration status, and perhaps even class.9 A similar range of terms is seen in the final published list of award recipients. The word “multicultural” was ensconced as the title of the awards program, but otherwise was used only twice in the description of the awardees, as compared to three uses of “multiracial”, two of “interracial”, and one of “biracial”. The race-related terms were used despite the fact that there was only one non-Asian student awardee (a

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Nigerian).10 The others included one Taiwanese immigrant awardee and six children of marriages between Korean fathers and Asian wives: two Japanese, two Chinese, one Filipina, and one Vietnamese.11 The awards ceremony itself was held in the early evening of 13 December 2012 in the Korean press building in downtown Seoul. The organizers were uncertain about attendance, but the showing was reasonable for the room, and the effort and cost of the arrangements were manifest: large photos on easels along the corridor leading to the room, an elaborate stage, engaging young MC’s, good representation from the diplomatic corps, a congratulatory message from the soon-to-be elected president of the country, and an ample post-ceremony food offering. The highlight of the event was a performance of Psy’s break-away hit Gangnam Style by one of the awardees, nicknamed Little Psy, who had also performed in the Gangnam Style video. He is the child of a Korean father and a Vietnamese mother.12 It was an enthusiastically received performance including the famous ripping-off-the-shirt (which Psy had done in his mega-return-concert in Seoul). The details of the event show the same fluidity in terminology already discussed. Damunhwa (␘ⱬ䞈) was prominently on the banner at the front of the room and frequently invoked in the many speeches. Furthermore, the other more race-related terms were not used on this occasion. Instead, the frequent usage in other contexts of “multiracial families” and “biracial children” was switched to a uniform damunhwa standard: multicultural children in multicultural families in a multicultural society. Rep. Jasmine Lee read the entirety of soon-to-be-President Park Geun-hye’s message on the awards and multiculturalism in general, and the English word itself cropped up in the otherwise largely Korean language proceedings. But the simpler point is the overall emphasis on children and youth, and education as at the heart of the public policy construction of multiculturalism and diversity in contemporary South Korea. This is where the state knows it must step in. The soon-to-be president herself noted in the message read by Rep. Lee, the hardships faced by those with cultural differences “while fighting loneliness and prejudice” and how this broke her own heart when she heard of the “hardships suffered especially by children”. But in that recognition that children are people and that one is instinctively drawn to their suffering, there is also the implicit recognition that children live in families and that their parents, by extension, might also be people too.

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The passage to personhood Much of the recent general discussion of immigrant integration has focused on granting legal rights (especially in the form of full citizenship) and on how immigrants take on participation in their new society (often discussed as a kind of social or participatory citizenship). The case here suggests a somewhat different situation in which people achieve status not directly through their own actions but through that of their children. In the eyes of Korean government and society, the adults assume personhood through parenthood. Since children must almost automatically be viewed as people (or people-to-be), their parents also become people by refraction. This vignette of the Korean multicultural awards thus illustrates one important path by which immigrants come to be viewed as people and not simply labour. That path suggests some interesting twists on how public policy on immigration might be developed. For example, one might imagine that migrants who have children should receive special consideration as long-term immigrants because their children represent a demographic bonus that is vital to a country with plummeting fertility rates. One can also see how useful would be a revision of citizenship laws toward some kind of birth citizenship, followed by some retroactive legalisation of the parents of those with birth citizenship. This is an issue both of the content and timing of public policy. If the legalization of children born to migrants is delayed, it inevitably contributes to the wellknown problems of newcomer children in Korean society. The state pays a great cost by this delay: high rates of school non-attendance, low achievement rates, and frequent bullying. Such problems are best addressed earlier than later, proactively rather than retroactively. This awards program thus underlines the importance of addressing the issues of children and youth and at least hints of the need for earlier and more effective assistance to mixed families. But there are also lessons from the awards ceremony about the broader logic by which immigrants can achieve personhood from the Korean perspective. In the awards ceremony, that logic appeared in a series of analogies. The first three speakers made a variety of comments about the importance of newcomers, but the fourth launched on a more comparative discussion. He anchored his argument in the success of Korean-origin U.S. citizens. Such people as golfer Michelle Wie, U.S. ambassador Sung Kim, and World Bank President Young Kim “bring glory to our country too”. He then noted the case of Rep. Lee as someone who had, analogously, become a pillar of Korean society by becoming a legal national. For further effect, he invoked the armies of the “sixteen multicultural countries” who had aided

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South Korea during the Korean War. The next speaker continued in a similar vein by noting how second-generation Korean immigrants in the United States were not only successful but provided links back to Korea. She indicated her conviction that “our children of multicultural families” in Korea will also do an “excellent job in the fields of foreign affairs and trade”. The hope that these children with foreign background can indeed contribute to Korea thus rests upon a point of Korean national honour: how well Koreans have done when they have gone to other countries.

The broader policy context This awards ceremony is but one illustration of the broader evolution of social attitudes and policy formulations about diversity in contemporary South Korea. Perhaps the most important aspect of that broader context is that these issues of migration and diversity are indeed recent ones without great historical basis in Korea itself. In that vacuum of prior experience, the South Korean state has demonstrated a proactive reaction to its new multicultural reality. In some respects, this reaction has been no different than in other countries that have faced increasing immigration, and is especially similar to the reaction of other democracies. But there is also a very compressed and accelerated character to the Korean government’s response that makes South Korea stand out. Most generally, once significant immigration began in the 1990s, South Korea embraced the discourse of multiculturalism much more quickly than would seem warranted by the limited scale and scope of immigration and the country’s relatively mono-cultural heritage. Consider, on this point, a country such as Germany. Despite a very large influx of foreign workers beginning in the 1950s, the German government steadfastly eschewed the principle of multiculturalism. As late as 2000, German officials refused to acknowledge that Germany was a “country of immigration”, in large part because of a normative commitment to an exclusionary German identity.13 The Korean government’s rapid discursive shift, it is important to note, was followed up by concrete, albeit limited, policy changes. Much about this compressed and accelerated process in South Korea might be explained as a consequence of the “late migration” process that is playing out in a number of countries. From a policy perspective, perhaps the most crucial aspect of late migration is the availability of the experiences of other countries that have already gone through large-scale immigration. In this regard, late migration provides hindsight that governments (and people) would not otherwise have had. For policymakers this is particularly important in that

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they can derive their basic ideas and strategies on immigration and social policy from the experiences of other states, and also justify those policies based on past experience. Consider South Korea’s First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy (Korean Immigration Service 2009), released in June 2009. It is clear from this plan that Korean policymakers not only considered policy responses made by other countries toward immigration, but also incorporated “lessons” from these responses into the Basic Plan. The plan noted, for example, that South Korea needed to avoid the social conflicts that occurred in other countries that lacked a viable “social integration policy” (4). Korean policymakers, in short, understood that exclusionary and heavy-handed assimilationist policies have generally not worked well, and therefore would likely not work well in South Korea. This is not meant to suggest that “hindsight” provides a trouble-free or unproblematic policy path (it certainly does not); rather, it merely suggests that hindsight tends to narrow the range of policy choices and provide a ready justification (and defence if needed) for the choices that are made. The same is true for the way late migration links cross-border migration to human rights and similar international norms. Unlike previous eras, crossborder migration now takes place within an increasingly strong and increasingly globalised rights-based context. People—regardless of nationality, ethnicity, or socio-economic status—are assumed to have certain fundamental rights. And all states, especially democratic ones, are expected to observe and protect these rights, as will be addressed in more detail below. Non-governmental societal actors can also learn from the experiences of other countries: they can better understand the often unstated intents and implications of various policy options. In South Korea, this has been especially apparent in the efforts by foreign workers and civil society organisations to challenge the Korean government’s restrictive immigration policies toward low-skilled labour. In the early 1990s, for example, the Korean government established the Industrial Training System (ITS), which was explicitly modelled after a similar program in Japan. The ITS was ostensibly designed to provide hands-on industrial training for workers from “developing countries”, while simultaneously helping local Korean firms obtain hard-to-find workers. It was clear to everyone, however, that this was not a training program. Instead, the ITS was designed to institutionalise very low wages (the basic “stipend” was set far below prevailing wage rates and was even substantially lower than what undocumented foreign workers received for doing the same work) and to provide an effective and convenient way to “manage” unskilled foreign labour (under the ITS, foreign workers were limited to one-year

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stays and were prohibited from moving to another company). Understanding the intent of the ITS, foreign workers took advantage of the program to gain easy entry into South Korea, but then largely ignored the restrictions. They “abandoned” their positions, found work in other factories, and stayed in South Korea for extended periods of time. In conjunction with civic organisations in South Korea, moreover, foreign workers challenged the legal basis of the ITS: they argued that they were not “trainees”, but full-fledged workers and, as such, they deserved the same basic labour rights as domestic Korean workers. Remarkably, they won this battle. Their “victory” was reflected in the establishment of the Employment Permit System (EPS), which, for the first time, legally opened South Korea’s borders to unskilled foreign labour. Under the EPS, foreign workers were recognised as workers and accorded the same labour rights as South Korean workers. Despite this victory, opposition continued. Foreign workers recognised —based on their understanding of similar processes in other countries— that the EPS was only a partial resolution of their situation. Indeed, despite efforts by the South Korean government and civic organisations to portray the EPS as a great leap forward from the previous existing industrial trainee system (which it was in many ways), a number of foreign worker groups (in particular, the Migrant Trade Union) vehemently and unrelentingly protested against it. They particularly objected to the threeyear provision, which was explicitly designed to prevent the right to longterm or permanent settlement in South Korea. Immigration law in South Korea stipulates that a foreign resident must maintain five years of continuous residence in the country to qualify for permanent residency. The three-year limit was subsequently extended to a four-year, ten-month limit that still achieved the effective denial of permanent residency. The highly formalised procedures of the EPS were also viewed as trapping foreign workers in vulnerable positions under the guise of a “fair” and “just” employment system. Interestingly, these same foreign worker groups have been largely silent on South Korea’s multiculturalist turn. This raises another very general point about the broader context of multiculturalism in South Korea, that the state can indeed focus on more specific immigrant groups than was formerly possible. In the Korean case, that focus is on exactly the children and young people who were the subjects of the multicultural awards program. As Nora Kim (2009) has argued, the foreign workers understand very well that the “way [official] multiculturalism is practiced in Korea sends a strong signal to the migrant workers that they do not belong to Korea. Only marriage migrants [and their children] are invited to

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be members of a new multicultural Korea” (112). Foreign workers—and the organisations that support them—thus recognise they have concerns and destinies that are quite different from those of marriage migrants. But while they diverge from the goals of official state multiculturalism, they nevertheless understand the importance of defining multiculturalism on their own terms. The situation of foreign workers compared to marriage migrants thus underscores how the very definition of multiculturalism becomes a matter of social import and political contestation. In South Korea, then, multiculturalism has often been quite narrowly defined. It tends to be linked, at least from the governmental perspective, to marriage migrants and to social integration of those marriage migrants and, even more importantly, their children. It is limited to exactly the issues and phrasing of The Korea Times multicultural awards. Han GeonSoo (2007, 49), for example, marks the beginning of South Korea’s official multiculturalist turn in April 2006, when the government announced comprehensive measures for marriage-based migrants. As Han and other critics have pointed out, these measures are primarily aimed at the immigrants rather than at Korean society; they are thus largely about migrant assimilation rather than societal acceptance. The issue of multiculturalism thus boils down to the failure of marriage migrants to properly adapt to Korean society. Consider, on this point, comments in the First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy (46) that marriage immigrants need assistance because: the “failure of immigrants through marriage to adapt to Korean society undermines the foundation of families and incurs major social costs”; despite long residence, they “lack sufficient knowledge of Korean language and culture”; that lack of knowledge exposes them to “discrimination and human rights abuse” and their children to problems in school; and they have “problems in raising their children because of the depression they suffer from their radical change in environment and social isolation.” To resolve these problems, the Basic Plan proposes a “social integration program” that will provide standardized education to marriage migrants, access to multi-language websites and counselling services, improved social services (including childcare and support during pregnancy), employment services, and the facilitation of “self-help groups”. The programs have many merits, but they do suggest a strong underlying commitment to cultural assimilation, and to foreign brides—or perhaps more specifically to the foreign mothers of the children at the focus of The Korea Times multicultural awards. As Kim (2009), Han (2007), and others have noted, the state’s muliticulturalist policies have indeed tended to target marriage migrants to the exclusion of other

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immigrant groups.14 The implication is that multiculturalism in Korea, despite its expansion and broad potentialities, remains focused toward the social and cultural incorporation of just one stream of contemporary migration to Korea. This does not mean that the state’s view will remain unchanged, still less unchallenged. There are already competing interpretations or conceptions of multiculturalism both outside and within South Korea. The First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy itself has some discussion of a more general societal sensibility about migration and diversity, and the need to incorporate that into the education system, beginning at the preschool level. These include revising textbooks to “enhance understanding of a multicultural society”, providing teacher training courses “dedicated to multicultural education”, inviting “immigrant lecturers” to teach classes on multicultural understanding in elementary and junior high schools, and raising awareness “through social education”. The awards ceremony described here is again an almost exact match for these broader policy goals.

The human rights parameter While it may be tempting to emphasise the limitations in the current Korean conceptualisation of multiculturalism, the term still represents a broadening of the ideas about what Korean society can and should be. This raises a final crucial point about Korean approaches to migrants and diversity, and that is the interweaving into Korean policy of international norms, especially those concerned with human rights (Cortell and Davis 2000). This too is an aspect of “late migration” and one that was at least noted briefly in The Korea Times awards ceremony. There is little firm evidence that international norms about human rights directly affect domestic policy decisions. As Joppke (2006 [1998], 528) notes, “the international human rights regime is not so strong as to make states fear and tremble,” since it consists only “of the soft moral power of discourse”. But Joppke himself notes that is “better than nothing,” and Gurowitz (1999) argues in a similar vein that the effects of norms may be indirect and variable, but can nonetheless be very important in specific contexts. Furthermore, there are certain countries that, owing to their particular histories and desire for status in the international system, are more sensitive to international norms than others. South Korea is one of these. The Korean concern to conform to international norms is seen in many areas. These norms may directly affect public policy or simply “make room for new voices by altering contexts and making new types of action possible” (Gurowitz 1999, 418). In terms of migrants in Korea, for

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example, the key transition began in the early 1990s, when foreign workers began to press for basic labour rights, an issue discussed at length in Lim (2003). In this process, workers and their domestic allies intentionally and strategically infused an international human rights discourse into their demands for more protection and more humane treatment, both from employers and from the state. The movement was successful in defining the workers as “as rights-bearing individuals”, and was particularly successful in cultivating support within the mainstream media, which indefatigably reiterated the link between human rights and the treatment of foreign workers in South Korea. Indeed, even undocumented (or “illegal”) workers in South Korea are now provided basic labour rights.15 Thus, in very short order—in a period spanning less than two decades—foreign workers in South Korea have gone from having essentially no labour rights and protections to having the full protection of Korean labour laws. The Korean state’s own concern with human rights is reflected in the First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy (2009). Despite the reservations about the Basic Plan noted earlier in this chapter, it does include “protecting foreigners’ human rights”, ranging from protection from discrimination to better treatment for those held in detention. Furthermore, the Basic Plan links human rights and multiculturalism, noting the need for Korea to develop into a “more mature, multicultural society where human rights are respected” (12). Such statements reflect a Korean desire to respond to how Korea is viewed from the outside. In this case, one can note how the phrasing in the 2009 Basic Plan responds directly to a 2007 U.N. recommendation (in a report by the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [CERD])16 that the Korean government “adopt further measures, including legislation, to prohibit and eliminate all forms of discrimination against foreigners, including migrant workers and children born from inter-ethnic unions.”17 This aspect of “late migration”—the existence of established international norms—helps explain the very quick embrace of “multiculturalism” in South Korea. That embrace may be less encompassing and complete than some critics would prefer, but at least the idea is on the table. Furthermore, it is on the table as a rather fluid concept that is open for considerable negotiation. Once introduced and embedded into the social and political environment, it can no longer be easily controlled by the government or by any particular segment of the society. The evolution of its meaning will inevitably reflect other shifts in Korean society and, given the experience of the last two decades, that evolution may be very rapid indeed.

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Considerations The awards program that was the core of discussion in this chapter thus lies in the midst of a vortex of changes in Korean society that include a range of migrants and a range of ways in which they have challenged and continue to challenge Korean society and Korean governance. This awards program’s construction of what multiculturalism is, and what multicultural awards should be for, suggests four central points that have particular relevance for the broader Korean search for multiculturalism. First, the most fundamental issues involve children, who must be effectively included in, and supported by, the educational system. Second, to reach those children it is also necessary to reach the parents, especially foreignborn mothers. They too must be included and supported. Third, the recognition of these immigrants provides, along with general human rights concerns, the basis for also considering the inclusion of migrant workers as well. Fourth, it turns out that Korea does have very extensive and successful experience with immigrants, but that experience so far largely involves Koreans in other countries rather than immigrants to Korea. That construction of the good Korean immigrant in other countries provides a vanguard analogy by which issues of diversity and human rights can be reformulated within Korea. This Korean case has some rather interesting implications both for comparative analysis within East Asia—especially with the advanced economies of Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—and more broadly with North America and Europe. Those implications have much to do with “late migration” and the way in which social contexts, public responses, and policy formulations are tracking fluid situations which may, at times, reflect the previous experience of more migration-based societies, but which may, at other times, reflect the different trajectories of how migration and diversity are rewoven into social values and policy responses. The Korean case furthermore suggests that multiculturalism— however defined and however translated—is reordering even countries that still have quite limited immigration. While it is hard to fault the critiques that emphasize the narrowness of multiculturalism as a strategy that only deals with specific parts of some people’s lives,18 it is also difficult to dismiss the potential of events like The Korea Times multicultural awards program to reformulate Korea’s future toward more acceptance of social diversity. The very flux in the use of the term multicultural, after all, shows fluidity and change, and thus potentially progress.

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Notes 1. The Korea Times, 1 November 2012, 22. 2. Inevitably, there are critiques of what is actually intended by so-called multicultural policies. In the Korean case, for example, much of the governmental effort focuses specifically on foreign brides, and is less about promoting a multicultural society of different groups than about easing the transition of these brides into Korean society. Kim (2010, 124), for example, notes that the “so-called multicultural policy in Korea is predominantly aimed at producing Koreanconformity and there has been widespread discrimination against non-Koreans, in whatever forms and nature, especially toward other Asians.” 3. Multiculturalism is, as noted, usually translated as damunhwa [␘ⱬ䞈]. Some of the linguistic issues are discussed later in the paper. The lexicon of migration can have some strange twists in translation. It is also the case that many such terms are neologisms created for political or governmental purposes (e.g., “Hispanic” in the United States), which then take on a cultural life of their own. 4. There has been a recent spate of scandals involving which Korean students are eligible to attend so-called “foreigner” schools, the general limitation being returning Korean students from abroad. The fall of 2012 witnessed a full scale scandal of Korean students being fraudulently enrolled in these schools by parents eager to expose them to an international, English-language environment. 5. There is, nevertheless, a search for, and invocation of, precedents for cultural diversity in Korean society. For example, a jointly sponsored museum exhibit opened in Daejeon in Fall 2012 which sought to document the new Korean multiculturalism and also to indicate that Korean society has never been as homogenous as is generally assumed. This point is increasingly made in the Korean media. 6. See Kim (2010) for a review of the genealogy and usage of the term. Note that the term, while having the literal meaning of “many cultures,” is largely a recent fabrication, heavily government supported, and used to address the social issues caused by increasing population diversity. The rapid growth in the use of the term is worth noting. Kim’s figures for Dongailbo, for example, show the word mentioned 11 times in 2000, 15 times in 2001, 8 times in 2002, 6 times in 2003, 10 times in 2004, 16 times in 2005, 60 times in 2006, 100 times in 2007, 298 times in 2008, and 947 times in 2009. (There are similar patterns for other major newspapers.) Also note that there are alternative words used such as or daminjok (␘ⴰ㦥). The way the alternatives are used is discussed later in the paper. 7. The official list of sponsors is as follows: Ministry of Education and Science Technology, Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Asian Friends, Korean Association for Multicultural Education, Global Village, Seoul YMCA, Rep. Jasmine Lee, Embassy of the Philippines, and Embassy of Sri Lanka. As previously noted, Rep. Lee is a Philippines-born, naturalised Korean citizen and the first such person to be elected to the national assembly. Furthermore, several other ambassadors served on the jury panel and attended the awards ceremony,

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including those from Brazil, Paraguay, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan. There was also embassy representation from Nepal and Nigeria. 8. For the printed version of the announcement, see The Korea Times, 15 November 2012, 1. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2012/12/177_124731.html. 9. See http://www.ktimes.co.kr/www/news/people/2012/11/178_125059.html. 10. Before the awards ceremony, the newspaper published a profile of this Nigerian girl, the only one of the eventual awardees who was not Asian. She was described as a princess, because her father had been elected king of the Nigerian expat community in Korea. The emphasis of the article was a fire that had engulfed the family’s home in Seoul. The father had been away on business and the mother and two children (the awardee and her younger brother) were trapped in a back room, barely survived, had serious burns (especially the awardee), and were as a result also burdened with large medical bills for procedures beyond those covered by the national health insurance. The rationale for the nomination lay with the girl’s endurance, that the tragedy “could not take away her smiles and passion to serve others.” See The Korea Times, 27 November 2012, p. 1 (short introduction of the award) and pp. 10-11, for longer discussion of the recipient and the two accompanying articles. There was also another article on the front page regarding an apparently racially motivated attack on a Korean in Australia, a reminder of the range of ways in which race, culture, ethnicity, and nationality are intermixed in the news of Korea and of Koreans abroad. 11. Further work is needed to indicate the rules by which these different terms are chosen, but a preliminary consideration suggests that the standard array of usages is “multicultural” for society, “interracial” or “biracial” for marriages, and “multiracial” for children. Note, however, that Kim (2010, 111) suggests that multicultural is indeed the conventional Korean way to describe both marriages and children and that the use of “multiracial” and “biracial” reflects Western rather than Korean practice. 12. We had the good fortune that Young Kim of George Mason University was able to transcribe the ceremony in Hangul and also translate it into English. There is also a published version of Park Geun-hye’s congratulatory message translated into English. We follow that as the “official” English version of her message. 13. For further discussion, see Lim (2008). 14. Han notes, for example, that the government has also stressed “multicultural education for multicultural family members so that various programs would not simply force marriage-based migrants to assimilate into Korean society” (2007, 50). 15. The extension of labour rights actually began in the early 1990s. Over the next decade, labour rights were gradually extended to foreign workers—typically as a result of cases brought before Korean courts. The creation of the EPS, however, did away with the fiction of the industrial trainee system, which essentially had classified full-fledged workers as “trainees”. As trainees, according to the logic of the program, the foreign workers were not entitled to standard wages and full labour protection.

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16. Cited in “UN CERD Urges the Republic of Korea to Take Effective Measures in Order to Eliminate Discrimination Against Foreigners”, 23 August 2007. Available on the International Federation for Human Rights website at http://www.fidh.org/UN-CERD-urges-the-Republic-of-Korea-to-take. 17. These issues also surface in the national press. Consider, for example, this Korea Herald response to that same CERD report: “In the committee's recommendations, there is much to heed for the Korean government, civic groups and general citizens alike, such as a call for the inclusion of human rights awareness programs in the nation's official education curriculum to increase public understanding of societies with multiple ethnic/cultural backgrounds. People should be taught from an early age to treat all races as equal and this sense of equality should be extended to children from international marriages living next door and those studying in the same classroom and to workers in Korean factories that produce our daily necessities. A sense of national identity is valuable but it should not be confused with racial supremacy, particularly over people from less affluent parts of the world. Ethnocentrism, which is an enemy of world peace, could now harm domestic harmony as more and more foreigners make Korea their home” (“Accepting Diversity”, 22 August 2007). 18. One might compare it, for example, to the emphasis on students in current U.S. debates about legalization. As with Korea, it is the young, promising, and guiltless who form the best vanguard for addressing broader chasms in immigration policy.

References Akaha, Tsuneo, and Anna Vassilieva, eds. 2005. Crossing National Borders: Human Migration Issues in Northeast Asia. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Chung, Kiseon, and Hyunho Seok. 2000. “Culture and Social Adjustment: Migrant Workers in Korea and Local Workers in Overseas Korean Firms.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 9 (3): 287-309. Cortell, Andrew P., and James W. Davis, Jr. 2000. “Understanding the Domestic Impact of International Norms: A Research Agenda.” International Studies Review 2 (1): 65-87. Douglass, Mike, and Glenda S. Roberts, eds. 2003. Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Graburn, Nelson, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney, eds. 2008. Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. Oxford and New York: Berghahn. Gurowitz, Amy. 1999. “Mobilizing International Norms: Domestic Actors, Immigrants, and the Japanese State.” World Politics 51: 413-445.

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Haines, David W., Keiko Yamanaka, and Shinji Yamashita, eds. 2012. Wind over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context. New York: Berghahn. Han Geon-Soo. 2007. “Multicultural Korea: Celebration or Challenge of Multiethnic Shift in Contemporary Korea?” Korea Journal 47: 32-63. Joppke, Christian (2006 [1998]) “Why Liberal States Accept Unwanted Immigration.” World Politics 50: 266-293. Reprinted in The Migration Reader: Exploring Politics and Policies, edited by Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Kim, Andrew Eungi. 2010. “Korean Multiculturalism: The Genealogy of the Concept, Shifting Meanings, Issues and Implications.” Asian Studies [㙸㉬㙸㜤Ạ] 53 (2): 102-129. Kim, Hui-Jung. 2009. “Immigration Challenges and ‘Multicultural’ Responses: The State, the Dominant Ethnie and Immigrants in South Korea.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI. ProQuest/UMI. UMI Publication No. 3384154. Kim, Hyung-in. 2006. “No ‘Real’ Chinatown in S. Korea.” Hankyoreh (online), August 29. Http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/152641.html. Kim, Jasper. 2013. “Korea’s Immigration Problem.” Wall Street Journal (online), 11 June. Http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732463430457 8538443521970514. Kim, Joon. 2003. “Insurgency and Advocacy: Unauthorized Foreign Workers and Civil Society in South Korea.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 12 (3): 237-270. Kim, Nora Hui-Jung. 2009. “Framing Multiple Others and International Norms: The Migrant Worker Advocacy Movement and Korean National Identity Reconstruction.” Nations and Nationalism 15 (4): 678-695. Korean Immigration Service (KIS). 2009. The First Basic Plan for Immigration Policy, 2008-2012. Seoul: Ministry of Justice. Korea Tourism Organisation. 2013. “Visitor Arrival, Korean Departures, Int’l Tourism Receipts & Expenditures.” Key Facts on Tourism (online table). http://kto.visitkorea.or.kr/eng/tourismStatics/keyFacts.kto. Lee, Hye-Kyung. 1997. “The Employment of Foreign Workers in Korea: Issues and Policy Suggestions.” International Sociology 12 (3): 353371.

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Lim, Timothy C. 2003. “Racing from the Bottom in South Korea? The Nexus between Civil Society and Transnational Migrants.” Asian Survey 43 (3): 423-442. —. 2008. “Will South Korea Follow the Germany Experience? Democracy, the Migratory Process, and the Prospects for Permanent Immigration in Korea.” Korean Studies 32: 28-55. Mundy, Simon. 2013. “S Korea Struggles to Take in Foreign Workers.” Financial Times (online), 17 September. Http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afcdefd4-1c1c-11e3-b67800144feab7de.html#axzz2nllQDtE6. Seol, Dong-Hoon, and Geon-Soo Han. 2004. “Foreign Migrant Workers and Social Discrimination in Korea.” Harvard Asia Quarterly 8 (1): 45-50. Seol, Dong-Hoon, and John Skrentny. 2004. “South Korea: Importing Undocumented Workers.” In Controlling Immigration: Global Perspective, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, Takeyuki Tsuda, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield, 481-513. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yamashita, Shinji, Makito Minami, David W. Haines, and Jerry S. Eades, eds. 2008. Transnational Migration in East Asia: Japan in a Comparative Focus. Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology.

CHAPTER THREE THE TRAJECTORIES OF FAMILY-MAKING THROUGH CROSS-BORDER MARRIAGES: A STUDY OF JAPANESE-PAKISTANI MARRIED COUPLES MASAKO KUDO

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to explore the trajectories of family-making among Japanese-Pakistani married couples. This type of cross-border marriage has increased in Japan since the late 1980s when Japan experienced an incoming wave of labour migrants from Islamic countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Iran, as well as from other countries within and outside of Asia. Using longitudinal data, this chapter sheds light on the ways in which the lives of mixed couples have transcended national boundaries as their lifecycle progresses. More specifically, the chapter examines the ways in which Japanese women try to negotiate their familial roles in the transnational space in relation to child-raising and caring for the elderly, and also how such processes are intertwined with power relationships determined by gender, religion, and the socioeconomic circumstances in which the women find themselves. This chapter first addresses the changing socio-economic circumstances of the Japanese-Pakistani couples, drawing on interview data collected since the late 1990s from forty women both in Japan and in countries where they migrated. This is followed by one in-depth case study which illustrates how care for the family shapes the trajectory of transnational family-making. All names that appear are pseudonyms. In order to protect their anonymity, their personal details are partially altered to the extent that this will not hinder understanding of the socio-cultural contexts in which they live.1

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Cross-border marriages between Japanese women and Pakistani migrants The number of cross-border marriages in Japan has increased rapidly since the 1980s. The percentage of marriages in which one of the spouses is foreign rose from 0.9 percent in 1980 to 3.5 percent in 1990, and further rose to 6.1 percent in 2006.2 While the majority of cross-border marriages during the 1990s were those between Japanese men and foreign women, —largely Filipino and more recently, Chinese women—the number of cross-border marriages between Japanese women and foreign men including those from Islamic countries increased considerably over the same period.3 Pakistani-Japanese marriages, which I focus on in this paper, steadily increased in number from the 1980s, following a wave of labour migrants from Pakistan to Japan which peaked in the late 1980s. The migrants from Pakistan, like those from other Muslim countries including Bangladesh and Iran, were predominantly men in their twenties and early thirties who obtained short-term visas upon arrival due to the visa exemption agreement that then existed between Pakistan and Japan.4 The men often laboured without work permits because Japan does not officially allow “unskilled migrants” to enter the country. They provided “cheap and flexible labour” for the then booming Japanese economy. Although the incoming number of migrants from Pakistan to Japan decreased in the early 1990s due to tightening immigration laws and also the worsening economic recession in Japan, considerable numbers remained by overstaying their visas. During the 1990s, an increasing number of Pakistani men legalised their stay by marrying local women. The number of those who registered under the visa category of “Spouse or Child of Japanese National” increased from 112 in 1984 to 1,630 in 2000 (JIA 1985-2001). Although the male-to-female ratio and the age groups of the residents classified under this category are not provided in the statistics, it is assumed that these residents consist predominantly of men married to Japanese women.5 During the 1990s, the number of Pakistani men who acquired the visa status of “Permanent Resident” also increased. Apparently, many gained this status after staying in Japan with a spousal visa. Thus, a considerable percentage of Pakistani male migrants in Japan are assumed to be married to Japanese.

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Transformation after cross-cultural marriage Changes and shifting power balances There were major socio-economic and other changes that affected the lives of the couples after marriage. First, a strong tendency was noted among the Pakistani men who married local women to start a business of their own. Becoming self-employed was a means for the men to overcome their marginal position in Japan as “foreign workers”. Many became engaged in the business of exporting used-cars, an economic niche found among the Pakistani diaspora in Japan. Other much less frequent choices were halal (religiously permitted and lawful) food and restaurant businesses. The majority of the women in my study became full-time housewives after marriage although many informally helped with their husbands’ businesses while looking after their children.6 For example, at the beginning stages of the businesses, the Japanese wives often helped to take care of business documents written in Japanese. Some wives also asked their parents to become guarantors so that their Pakistani husbands could acquire membership in car auctions, which was crucial for maintaining their businesses. In addition, the Japanese wives’ roles in the early stages of marriage included dealing with immigration documents to obtain and renew the legal status for their husbands and also to apply for visas for the husbands’ relatives. This meant that, although the wives became economically dependent on their husbands, they could exert a certain degree of power because of the important role they played to formalise and facilitate their lives in Japan. Hence, the power balance between the husband and the wife at an early stage of marriage was shaped by a complex interplay between gender, nationality, and economic factors. After marriage, many husbands continued to send remittances to their joint families in Pakistan: sending money home was one of the main reasons for them originally coming to Japan, although the method and amount appear to have changed because of the need to support a wife and children in Japan. The strong responsibility that Pakistani men feel for taking care of their joint families was a trait that initially attracted some Japanese women to marriage with these men. After marriage, however, the women came to realise that the husbands’ notion of “family” was quite different from their own and many wives felt it a burden to have to regularly send money to Pakistan.7 The subsequent acquisition of Japanese citizenship for the husband may present a paradox for the Japanese wife. While it can be beneficial to the lives of the family in Japan, the wife’s negotiating power, vis-à-vis the husband, when discussing the sensitive issues that emerge after marriage

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such as the remittances to Pakistan and where to educate their children, may weaken. However, the husbands’ lack of linguistic and social capital in Japan, as well as subtle forms of social discrimination, 8 may continue to negatively affect the socio-economic status of the family amidst the deepening global economic recession. In this context, the socio-linguistic resources of the Japanese wives are crucial for sustaining the economic base of the household, and this gives them considerable power within the home.

Conversion to Islam and the reconstruction of their lives The husbands’ religion brought varying degrees of change to the women’s lives. The majority of the women became Muslim converts upon marriage due to the religious requirement involved in formal marriage procedures. Many of the women I interviewed, however, did not think deeply about their newly acquired Muslim identity at the time of conversion. However, as they developed networks of mutual help with other Japanese Muslims married to Pakistanis, particularly as regards to child-raising, the women tended to share their personal experiences with other women in the same circumstances and to reflect upon what it meant for them to be Muslim. Such tendencies may have been particularly strong among the women who congregated in the mosques built by Pakistani migrants in Japan,9 which were the main sites where I recruited my research participants at the initial stage of my fieldwork. However, there was a great diversity among the women as far as their religious ideas and practices were concerned. Furthermore, the follow-up data I have collected over the last decade demonstrates that the ways in which the women perceive and practice religion have in many cases undergone significant changes as the women followed their own journeys of crafting their religious selves throughout their lifecycle (Kudo 2007; Kudo 2011).

Formation of transnational families After legitimising their legal status by marrying local women, 10 the Pakistani husbands were able to reconstruct their ties with their families in the home country. In some cases female Pakistani relatives visited Japan to help with house chores and other domestic tasks when the Japanese wives gave birth. Much more commonly, the husbands’ male relatives, mostly brothers and sometimes nephews, joined in the newly established family businesses in Japan. There were also a number of cases in which Japanese wives and their infant children stayed with the joint family in Pakistan on

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a long-term basis, where the children learnt the basics of Islam and/or the husbands’ mother tongue. As the children approached school age, other forms of transnational practices emerged. In some cases, the Japanese wives moved to Pakistan or a third country for the education of their children, while their Pakistani husbands continued doing business in Japan (Kudo 2009, 2012). My longitudinal research results reveal that among the forty informants I initially interviewed, at least twelve have lived in Pakistan where their children went to local schools, and four have stayed in a third country such as New Zealand, Malaysia, or the United Arab Emirates (UAE).11 The motives behind this transnational movement include nurturing an Islamic identity for their children. In particular, bringing up daughters in an Islamic environment was a strong desire noted among the husbands of the women I interviewed. This relates to the notion of female sexual modesty that is at the centre of the practice of sexual segregation called parda in Pakistan.12 In many cases, the acquisition of the English language and/or the husbands’ mother tongue was also a reason for transnational practices of child-raising.13 Many of the children who relocated to Pakistan were sent to prestigious schools where classes are taught in English.14 In the cases where the family relocated to a third country, the children studied either at international schools in the UAE and Malaysia or local schools in New Zealand. My study found that the forms of the transnational family are not uniform since the priorities and the circumstances of each family vary greatly.15 More importantly, the movement of such transnational families can be fluid and ephemeral, affected by various economic and other factors. About half of those who relocated abroad returned to Japan or to another country.16 The reasons include political instability in the areas of Pakistan where the husbands come from, as well as the difficulties with renewing the visas of a third country. The form of the family can also be transformed as a result of negotiations between spouses over what it means to be a family and how best to raise their children. One of my informants, Mrs Javed, moved to Pakistan with her children while her Pakistani husband continued his business in Tokyo. However, the family reunited in Japan after a few years. The reasons behind her decision to return to Japan were complex; this included experiencing limited physical mobility as a woman in Pakistan. She also explained that although her husband prioritised raising their children in Pakistan so that they could maintain their Islamic identity, after relocating, she realised that their lifestyle in Pakistan was not necessarily

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in accord with what she perceived to be the “true” teachings of Islam (Kudo 2007). She then decided to return to Japan. Although her husband was not happy with this, she persuaded him by arguing that she learnt to recite the Quran in Arabic while in Pakistan so that she would be able to teach it to her children. After she and the children returned to Japan, she made efforts to take the children to a nearby mosque every evening for after-school lessons in the Quran, which further pacified her husband. While Mrs Javed initially accepted her husband’s wish to educate their children in Pakistan, she was able to convince her husband of an alternative way to develop the children’s Islamic identity in Japan. Further, after returning to Japan, she complemented the income of her husband by working in a local shop as a non-permanent employee. In her interview, she stated, “Perhaps my earnings enabled my daughters and myself to stay on in Japan. If my husband earned enough and I did not have to work, I might have succumbed to the pressure to take my daughters to the joint family in Pakistan and live there with them.” Because her work hours extended as her children grew older, while her husband’s business was hard hit by the worsening recession, her income contributed significantly to her husband’s remittances to Pakistan. This was another crucial factor which enabled her to successfully negotiate her ideals for her family with her husband.

Changes in family-making and the trajectories of care17 Currently the oldest of these women’s children are in their early 20s. Most of the husbands have now acquired permanent residency and some have been naturalised. While a number of them have been quite successful in their businesses, the prolonged economic recession, the high appreciation of the Japanese yen, and the Japanese earthquake in 2011 and its aftermath hit some of these businesses severely. Besides the economic challenges, issues relating to educating the children and/or caring for ageing parents on the part of the Japanese wives have shaped the processes of family-making in the transnational space. To illustrate the complex trajectory of family-making and the changing role of the Japanese wife, I will next present an in-depth case study of Aisha.

The case of Aisha Aisha is in her 40s and has been living in Pakistan with her four children for over ten years. Her husband runs a business in Japan and sends remittances to their joint family in Pakistan. The main reason for her

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relocation was to educate the children—the daughters in particular—in an Islamic environment. The first two times I interviewed her, she was visiting Japan during the summer. The third time, she was staying at her parents’ house in a rural city far from Tokyo. The main purpose of this trip was to care for her ailing parents, both of whom became ill during the past few months. Aisha has a sibling in Japan who was not able to be a carer for their parents because of his own failing health. After my visit, Aisha stayed on in Japan for nearly one year to take care of her parents while her children were looked after by the joint family in Pakistan. Aisha’s husband, Bilal, has three brothers, two of whom joined him in Japan to help him with his business. In their absence, Bilal’s eldest brother remained in Pakistan and acted as the head of the joint household, which consisted of Bilal’s parents and the wives and children of the four brothers, including Aisha and her children. Because of the norm of sexual segregation practiced widely among the middle class of Pakistan, Bilal’s brother takes care of almost everything to be done outside the home, including daily grocery shopping for the entire household. He also takes charge of the remittances from Bilal, pays the bills, and allocates the rest of the money among the household. According to Aisha, her roles in Pakistan are focused on several areas. One is to cook Japanese meals for her own children while the other wives cook together for the rest of the household. She does laundry for herself and her children, while the cleaners take care of her quarters in the house. Another important role for her is to provide a high quality home teacher for her children by treating the teacher cordially and paying him well. Aisha occasionally gives massages to Bilal’s parents, but mostly the family pays a professional masseuse. When her father-in-law became ill, one of her sisters-in-law took charge of caring for him. When Bilal visits Pakistan, she does not do much for him because he prefers the local food to the Japanese meals she cooks. When she returns to Japan every summer on her own,18 she feels like she is on holiday because she no longer has to do all the chores. She is not involved in her husband’s business as much as she used to be. Now, if he needs to deal with documents written in Japanese, he turns to his Pakistani friends who hire Japanese locals. Thus, an ethnic network that he has developed in Japan partially complements the absence of his Japanese wife. Compared with the case of Mrs Javed raised in the previous section, Aisha’s case seems to involve little tension and conflict between husband and wife. However, she states as follows:

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Time has stopped for the husbands who migrated to Japan. They left the country when they were very young, and their feelings and emotions for their family back home have not changed since then. For this reason, they tend to fantasize about and idealize their families without facing everyday reality and conflicts going on within their present household. That is why husbands do not understand when their Japanese wives, who have relocated to Pakistan with the children, tell them that things were not as they once were.

In fact, Aisha faced great difficulties in Pakistan and even thought of divorce at one point, but after she gave birth to her third child, she was determined to face any struggles within her marriage. As her stay in Pakistan continued, her relationships with her husband’s family members, in particular Bilal’s eldest brother, changed. She stated that while the other wives in the house were quite submissive to him and did not dare to voice their questions and opinions concerning important family issues, she herself was a little different.19 In the beginning, Aisha accepted the authority of her brother-in-law as a senior male figure in the household, but now she openly tells him what she thinks especially when it comes to matters relating to the education of her own children. In explaining her change of behaviour, she states, “After all, those with money have a say. If someone has better economic means, he and his wife and children are given higher status in the household.” This implies that her husband, with her support in the initial stages of his business, is the one who is supporting the livelihood of the joint household. However, this does not mean that Aisha always tries to exert control over issues. She feels that she cannot always influence the situation to her advantage, because of the various needs and desires of the members of the joint household that have to be balanced and reconciled. As she sees it, the boundary between the will of the individual and the will of the collective is often blurred within the joint household. Aisha carefully chooses when to challenge the status quo and when not to do so in pursuing her role as a mother.

Gendered division of labour in care work Three key points emerge from the case study of Aisha. First, as the family stretches across national boundaries, gender divisions of labour are also transformed. It may seem at first that a much clearer gender division of labour exists within this type of transnational family where the husband is the breadwinner in Japan and the wife looks after the children in Pakistan. However, careful examination reveals that the familial roles are

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far more complex. There is a division of labour among the men in the joint family. While Aisha’s husband and his brothers work in Japan to sustain the livelihood of the joint family in Pakistan, the eldest brother assumes the role of the head of the joint family by acting as moral authority, managing the remittances from Japan, and controlling the family finances. Regarding Aisha’s role in Pakistan, she mostly engages with being a mother, 20 giving priority to tasks such as cooking Japanese meals for her children and managing the home teacher. The rest of the household chores are either carried out by the services purchased with the remittances from Japan or shared between the women in the house. Thus, the process in which the gender division of labour is reorganised involves not only the husband and the wife, but also a wider network of kin and non-kin across national boundaries.21 Second, when performing her maternal role, Aisha is able to challenge the existing power hierarchy within the joint household, which is otherwise determined by gender and seniority. Her empowerment comes from her relatively high status as a Japanese wife who has positively contributed to the livelihood of the joint household.22 On the other hand, Aisha is aware that her position within and outside the household can be vulnerable due to her multiple marginalities as a woman, a foreigner, and a wife who married in from outside the family (whereas the marriages of her husband’s brothers were arranged within the kin group). Thus, Aisha’s new role as a mother in Pakistan reflects the ambiguity of her position which is both privileged and marginalised in multiple ways. As a foreign mother, she is unable to utilise the cultural and social capital she developed in Japan. Therefore, hiring a good home teacher with not only academic ability but also with good knowledge of the educational system in Pakistan is crucial for her children’s academic success. Third, Aisha’s case demonstrates that the forms that families take are heavily influenced by emerging care requirements, for example, the desire to bring up children in certain ways and the need to care for ageing parents. The married couples deploy various ways of resolving the issues of caring for ageing parents, depending on the resources available to them at the time.23 Aisha’s temporary return to Japan to take care of her ailing parents was made possible because her joint family in Pakistan looked after her children in her absence. She states that even if she had based her family in Japan, she would not have been able to look after her parents without anyone to care for her children on a long-term basis. Aisha appreciates the childcare help of her husband’s joint family, although she feels emotionally torn between her sense of obligation to look after her aged parents in Japan and her wish to return to Pakistan to be with her children.

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Conclusion The cross-border marriages between Pakistani men and Japanese women have followed various trajectories of family-making across national boundaries. In some cases, the mixed couple remained in Japan while keeping ties with their joint families through remittances and other means. Other couples scattered across national boundaries in order to educate their children in Pakistan or a third country. The ways in which families are formed across national boundaries reflect not only the strategies of the families to better their lives economically, but also the manner in which the family members interpret who they are and what they wish their children to become. For many Pakistani husbands, nurturing their children’s (and especially their daughters’) Muslim identity, is their top priority. Another priority is to mould their children into cosmopolitan middle class citizens with high competence in English, in keeping with their global aspirations. The families I studied mobilised different resources to reach their mutual dreams and to overcome the problems and constraints they confront in the transnational space (Kudo 2010). However, there may be conflicting interests within a family. The wife may challenge the husband’s wishes by contesting the meaning of being Muslim and the ideals of the family, and by interpreting Islam in new ways. The wife’s income from work gives her additional power for negotiation. Thus, the shifting forms of transnational families are an outcome of both the changing strategies to overcome socio-economic constraints, and the processes of negotiation between the husband and the wife. Finally, the case of Aisha demonstrates that, as its life cycle progresses, the family crosses national borders in order to perform care and to maintain family ties. Her case illustrates the formation of an interdependent web of finances and care across national boundaries. In these circumstances, women continue to be the main carers for children and the aged. However, the way in which care work is organized now stretches across national borders. Moreover, care becomes divided between women who occupy different positions in terms of ethnicity and class, thus forming a global chain of care. In such processes, the women married to migrant men struggle to negotiate the ideal form of their family and their familial roles while situated in a complex intersection of factors such as gender, religion, and ethnicity.

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Notes 1. I would like to express my gratitude to all those who have participated in my study. This chapter is a partial outcome of the following two research projects: (1) Joint research at the National Museum of Ethnology, “Anthropological Studies of ‘Work’ with a Gender Perspective” (2008-2012), Coordinator, Professor Ayami Nakatani, Okayama University; (2) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) #232510006 “Marriage/Divorce Migration Network in Asia,” (2011-2013), Principal Investigator, Professor Kayoko Ishii, Toyo Eiwa Jogakuin University. 2. After 2006, the percentage of international marriages gradually dropped from 5.6 percent in the following year to 3.9 percent in 2011 (MOHLW 2013). 3. For an analysis on the numbers of cross-border marriages between foreign Muslim men and Japanese women, see Kojima (2006 and 2012). 4. However, these agreements with Pakistan and Bangladesh were suspended in 1989, and then later with Iran in 1992. 5. The two main basis of this assumption are: First, of the total number of Pakistanis registered during the 1980s and 1990s the majority were males. Second, the number of Pakistanis registered under the category of “Spouse or Child of a Japanese National” did not include children born to Japanese women who were married to Pakistani nationals, since the children are given Japanese nationality according to the amendment to the Nationality Law of 1984. 6. In fact, only seven out of the forty women kept full-time jobs. The women’s decision to stay at home was influenced partly by their husband’s religio-culturally derived value of gender segregation. However, it is also important to note that there has been a general trend among Japanese women to leave their careers during the period of child-rearing and return to work later on in life, often as part-time workers (Kudo 2012). 7. Referring to the sending of money to Pakistan, one woman who was due to give birth to her first child said that the couple had been sending money to Pakistan, but felt that they were no longer able to do so once they had a child. She added that they were thinking of bringing the husband’s younger brother to Japan so that he could work and send money to the family in Pakistan. She and her husband were hoping that the brother would be able to send a monthly sum of around 20 to 30 thousand (Japanese) yen (Kudo 2007). 8. In many cases, the women too were confronted with difficulties with discrimination against their husbands in searching for housing and also the husbands’ jobs after marriage. 9. Pakistani migrants in Japan played an active role in building new mosques in and outside Tokyo, hence making it possible for them to reconstruct their lives as Muslims in a migrant context (Sakurai 2003). 10. However, not all the husbands of the women interviewed were overstaying their visas at the time of marriage, particularly before 1989 when the visa exemption agreement between Japan and Pakistan was in effect. 11. For detailed discussion on relocation to the UAE, see Takeshita (2008, 2010). 12. While the practice of parda is widely observed in South Asia, it tends to be legitimized in terms of Islam by Muslims in South Asia. The practices and ideals

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of parda may vary according to class, region, ethnicity, and other factors. Also, it has been undergoing a dynamic transformation within Pakistan. 13. Escape from discrimination and bullying at Japanese schools was also cited in some cases. 14. Many Pakistani husbands value an English education for their children. Although there are international schools in Tokyo, attending these is not an option for most of the children for a number of reasons, including the economic situation of the family. For the migrants, sending their children to prestigious schools in Pakistan is a much more affordable option in that the family can make the most of the favourable exchange rate between the two countries. 15. For example, there are cases in which only the children are sent to the joint families in Pakistan, and the parents travel between the two countries on visits. 16. In three cases, the couple divorced after the wife returned to Japan with the children. 17. The term “trajectories of care” is used in Kofman (2012, 142). The term refers to the diverse circuits of migration, in particular, that of labour and the family, which arise to provide the care needed to reproduce individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and non-migrants. The case of Aisha I present in this section is used to illuminate the complexity of care trajectories by taking “an approach that follows longitudinally and spatially the migrant so as to capture care giving and receiving” (Kofman 2012, 153). 18. In my last interviews with Aisha, she explained that her children had not been back in Japan during summer for a few years partially because she and her husband did not wish them to see or be influenced by the local people who do not properly cover their bodies in accordance with Islamic norms. 19. On the other hand, Aisha observes that the other women in the household have subtle skills and strategies to achieve their personal goals and to control situations within the domestic sphere without openly challenging the existing power relationships determined largely by gender and seniority. 20. Aisha focused on her maternal roles after relocating to Pakistan, whereas her role as wife became far less important even as her symbolic tie with her husband was strengthened by the fact that Aisha relocated to Pakistan to bring up their children in an Islamic environment. 21. Working mothers in Taiwan redefine their domestic roles by hiring foreign domestic workers, and this is intertwined with the women’s perception of motherhood and self in shifting socio-economic environments (Lan 2006). 22. Aisha’s skill in negotiating her roles within the joint household also helped her to navigate her new life in Pakistan. 23. For example, one couple lives separately in Japan in order for the wife to look after her ailing parents. In this case, the children live with the wife in Tokyo and the husband lives with his compatriots in the outskirts of Tokyo to continue his business. In another case, the couple sent their children to the joint family in Pakistan to be educated, but the wife and the husband remained in Japan. The wife explained that she remained in Japan in order to be able to look after her parents in Japan in time of need.

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References JIA (Japan Immigration Association).1985-2001. Zairyu-gaikokujin Tokei [Statistics on Foreigners Registered in Japan]. Tokyo: Japan Immigration Association. Kofman, Eleonore. 2012. “Rethinking Care Through Social Reproduction: Articulating Circuits of Migration.” Social Politics 19 (1): 142-162. Kojima, Hiroshi. 2006. “Variations in Demographic Characteristics of Foreign ‘Muslim’ Population in Japan: A Preliminary Estimation.” The Japanese Journal of Population 4 (1): 115-30. —. 2012. “Correlates of Cross-Border Marriages among Muslim Migrants in Tokyo Metropolitan Area: A Comparison with Seoul Metropolitan Area.” Waseda Studies in Social Sciences 13 (1): 1-17. Kudo, Masako. 2007. “Becoming the Other in One’s Own Homeland? The Processes of Self-construction among Japanese Muslim Women.” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 8: 1-28. —. 2009. “Pakistani Husbands, Japanese Wives: A New Presence in Tokyo and Beyond.” Asian Anthropology 8: 109-123. —. 2010. “Making Use of Religio-cultural Resources in Global Circulation: A Case of Pakistani-Japanese Muslim Couples.” A paper presented at the 109th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans. —. 2011. “Keeping Track of Changing Selves: Writing Ethnography on Conversion of Japanese Women Married to Pakistani Muslim Migrants.” A paper presented at the 110th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, QC, Canada. —. 2012. “Mothers on the Move: Transnational Child-Rearing by Japanese Women Married to Pakistani Migrants.” In Wind Over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context 炷 Foundations in Asia Pacific Studies, Volume 2, edited by David W. Haines et al., 150-160. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MOHLW (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare). 2013. Jinko Dotai Tokei [Vital Statistics of Japan] 2011. Tokyo: Health, Labour and Welfare Statistics Association. Sakurai, Keiko. 2003. Nihon no Muslimu Shakai [Muslim Community in Japan] (Chikuma Shinsho 420). Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo. Takeshita, Shuko. 2008. “Muslim Families Comprising Pakistani Fathers and Japanese Mothers: Focusing on the Educational Problems of Their Children.” Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic

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World 6: 202-224. —. 2010. “Transnational Families among Muslims: The Effect of Social Capital on Educational Strategies.” In Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues, edited by WenShan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu, 221-239. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

CHAPTER FOUR ACHIEVING LOCAL CITIZENSHIP IN JAPAN: FILIPINA WIVES IN ORGANISED ACTIVISM KEIKO YAMANAKA AND TAKESHI AKIBA

Introduction On 12 October 2012, the Sampaguita Association celebrated its twentieth anniversary in Yuzawa City, Akita Prefecture, in north-eastern Japan. Named after the national flower of the Philippines, the Association is a voluntary organisation dedicated to providing support for immigrant wives and international cultural exchange, and is open to both Filipino and Japanese residents of Yokote Valley in the south-eastern part of the prefecture. More than seventy people attended the formal event. Conspicuous among them were nine Filipino women in colourful Filipino dresses who stood up one by one and made a brief speech in fluent Japanese. Frequently pressing their flowing tears with their fingers, each of them stated how happy she was to witness this day that marked her long-term residence in the area they called home. Every one of them attributed her success to her family and the Association for their unwavering support. Each speech met with enthusiastic applause from the participants seated at large round tables with lavish festive food. Among them were the special guests who occupied the first and second rows of the tables, including a National Lower House member, a Prefectural Council member, the Yuzawa City mayor, the Yuzawa City Council chairman, the Yuzawa Educational Board chairman, and many other local notables. The event closed with a lively chorus of Filipino songs by the Filipinas standing arm in arm on the front of the stage. This study begins with this memorable ceremony that highlights solidarity of the Filipino women—all married to local Japanese men— with the support of the Japanese participants, many of whom were distinguished local figures. Since the late 1980s throughout Japan, Filipino

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women have married Japanese men, forming transnational families and frequently engaging in a variety of organised activism. However, over time, many organisations lost vitality or folded as members and communities changed. With its long survival and strong support from locals, the Sampaguita Association attests to the fact that this is not always the case. To find what contributes to the long life of the association in Yokote Valley, we set out to investigate with interviews, surveys, and actual participation in their community affairs. Results of the study suggest the importance of a set of themes relevant to an analysis of immigrant women’s activism, including history of migration, agency of migrant women, support of locals, and policies of social incorporation— the themes that commonly underlie Asia’s rising feminised migration and transnational activism. In this study, we focus on these themes by using the concept of local citizenship as social practice in everyday life in order to explain how their organised activism helped the Filipinas be recognised as legitimate members of their communities. We find that: (1) the formation of a formal association in collaboration with Japanese contributed to social recognition of the immigrant wives; (2) increasing ethnic diversity motivated local citizens and governments to promote international cultural exchange programs; and (3) Japanese language classes served as a key mechanism through which the immigrants not only learnt Japanese but also enabled trust to be built up with local citizens and authorities.

Local citizenship The search for alternative concepts to formal citizenship has gained momentum in international migration studies when an influx of foreign workers arrived in non-traditional immigrant countries (Tsuda 2006). In post-war England, T. H. Marshall (1950) conceptualised citizenship as comprising formal citizenship which is what defined actual membership and substantial citizenship which is the contractual relationship between the state and citizens (i.e., entitlements and obligations). In a time of global migration, however, with large numbers of non-citizens residing in a territory as immigrants and refugees, such classic notions of citizenship no longer meet the reality of a nation state. In East Asia where governments are mostly concerned about economic development, permitting foreigners to work only on short-term contracts, their social incorporation into the host society is not on the national policy agenda (Seol and Skrentny 2009). Despite restrictive immigration policies, many non-citizens continue to reside in their adopted country for an extended period. Contradictions between formal and informal membership grow,

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generating a vacuum of the fundamental rights protecting immigrant workers and residents. It is in this context of increasing foreign populations in East Asia that the concept of local citizenship has emerged as an alternative form of citizenship in order to reconcile these contradictions. Defined as “the granting, by local governments and organisations, of basic socio-political rights and services to immigrants as legitimate members of these local communities” (Tsuda 2006, 7), the concept takes into account residence, status, and participation of noncitizens in everyday community life as alternative to formal membership. A question arises regarding the ways in which immigrants are recognised as legitimate members of, and socially incorporated into, their local communities. This question matters greatly to the marriage migrants examined here who enter the communities as spouses of Japanese citizens. Their legal residence and formal status automatically entitle them to basic rights and public services on an equal footing to the locals. Nonetheless, the local communities do not readily accept these cultural strangers as equals. For immigrant wives, the process of social incorporation is thus not only cultural adaptation but also that of political mobilisation aimed at raising public recognition. In this process, as detailed below, immigrant wives actively organise informal networks and formal associations in order to enhance their sense of belonging. In this undertaking, immigrant groups often collaborate with local citizens forming a transnational coalition and together they directly influence local policy decision-making. As such, the process of achieving local citizenship entails a two-way interaction comprising the horizontal relationships among residents of different status and the vertical relationships between authorities and residents (Siim 2000, 4). At the intersection of these two relationships, the immigrants raise public recognition while forging a sense of belonging. By engaging in the socio-political rights in this way, the immigrant wives challenge the mainstream discourse that renders them as disempowered foreign women from a “third” world country. In short, local citizenship as social practice provides a useful analytical tool in understanding the dynamic process of social incorporation in which the immigrant wives renew collective identities and accrue collective resources for social change (Shah 2012, 8). Such changes, however, occur in the context of a rapidly changing economy and demography of local communities that draw a small but steady stream of highly gendered and racialised migration from the Philippines to Japan.

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Gendered and racialised migration In the advent of the new millennium, the Philippines and Japan stand at the opposite ends of international migration. The Philippines is one of the world’s largest labour exporters while Japan is one of the world’s smallest labour importers. The Philippine government is known for its brokering role in systematically sending massive numbers of its citizens to work abroad for remitting their earnings home (Rodriguez 2010). Japan is known for its strict border control in preventing foreigners from entering, working, and settling down (e.g., Douglass and Roberts 2003; Tsuda 2003; Shipper 2008). The two countries are nonetheless tied heavily to each other through migration. Gender, class, and ethnicity play a critical role in this uneven relationship. In the Philippines, because of increasing demands for reproductive labour workers in East Asia and the Middle East, women predominate out-migration, the majority of whom work as domestic helpers (e.g., Piper and Yamanaka 2003; Parreñas 2003). In Japan, beginning in the late 1970s acute labour shortages in the sex and entertainment industry drew an influx of foreign women, a majority of whom were Filipino women (Ito 1992). Most of these women arrived in the country as “professional” entertainers or talents, but in practice they worked in bars and snacks as hostesses singing and dancing in both urban and rural areas throughout the country (Suzuki 2000; Faier 2009; Parreñas 2011). Entering into this unequal structure is an uneven impact of the rapid industrialization and ageing population on different regions within Japan since the 1950s. While large metropolises, such as Tokyo and Osaka, have gained a net increase of population due to in-migration, peripheral regions, such as Tohoku, Hokuriku, and Sanin, have met a net decrease of population due to out-migration. A glaring outcome of this regional inequality is a vicious cycle of an accelerated ageing population and declining economic vitality in rural areas where agriculture remains the primary industry. Adding to these large structural changes over decades are changing ideas and practices of family and marriage among the younger generation who prefer modernity to tradition. In the agriculture-based rural areas where the traditional three-generation household system is still maintained, women’s preference for a modern lifestyle directly puts a set of men in a disadvantaged position in the marriage market (Naito 2004). Typically, such men include those who are the oldest sons of the families designated to not only inherit the household property and occupation but also the obligation to take care of their parents in the old age. By the mid-

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1980s, a “bride shortage” phenomenon in rural areas became widely publicised by the mass media throughout Japan (e.g., Shukuya 1988). Much is written about immigrant wives of Japanese men in rural areas since their first arrival in the 1980s (e.g., Shukuya 1988; Sato 1989; Kuwayama 1995). Most writings have focused on cultural adaptation or assimilation of these foreign women into traditional farming family life as young brides. Upon arrival, Asian wives encounter enormous pressure in the face of families’ expectations of them to become “Japanese wives” as quickly as possible. They are supposed to cast off their third world culture and identity in an effort to become a member of the “first” world modern society. Recent studies, however, turn attention to the immigrant women themselves. Instead of assuming them to be passive or vulnerable under assimilation pressure, these studies regard them as the subjects who exercise their own will and shape their life chances through migration at both origin and destination (e.g., Satake and Da-anoy 2006; Burgess 2008; Faier 2009; Takeda 2011; Saihan 2011). They acknowledge the fact that international marriage is the site of multicultural interactions where both marriage partners, as well as the families, face different cultural values and practices in everyday life. Furthermore, by recognising inequality based on their gender, ethnicity, and class, these studies shed light on women’s own interests in, and decisions about, migration from their homeland, marriage with foreign men, and raising children in their husbands’ culture and communities.

Intersection of gender, ethnicity and class Based on their gender, ethnicity and class, immigrant women are subject to multiple forms of inequality and exploitation in the host society. By being females, women are likely assigned to reproductive labour valued low in patriarchal and capitalistic societies. By being foreign-born, immigrants are categorically treated as outsiders of the nation state who are unable to be assimilated to the majority culture. As a result, immigrant women are marginalised in the labour market, taking low-status and lowpaid jobs shunned by locals, especially women. All the negative effects of their gender, ethnicity, and class, make immigrant women highly vulnerable to sexism, racism, and exploitation in the host society. Despite these superimposed layers of disadvantages, nonetheless, recent feminist literature recognises more nuanced and contextualised forms of contradictions and opportunities presented to immigrant women that reside at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class (Espiritu 2008; Shah 2012).

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Take, for example, gendered and racialised international migration in the Asian context. As discussed above, women outnumber men in outmigration from Southeast Asia to East Asia and the Middle East (Piper and Yamanaka 2003). Despite many constraints against them, women seek employment abroad hoping to improve their own and their families’ living standards and future opportunities. In this process, women take charge of their own life by contacting labour brokers, working alone in an unfamiliar environment, and remitting their hard-won earnings to their families back home (Parreñas 2003; Rodrigues 2010; Lindquist 2010). They become not only the main breadwinners of their households, but also empower themselves with the renewed sense of pride and confidence (Yamanaka and Piper 2005). It is at this complex intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class that unexpected contradictions and opportunities are presented to them, generating a chance of turning disadvantages into advantages. In the context of the bride shortage in rural Japan, international marriage presents one such chance for immigrant women workers who are already being employed and familiar with the language and culture in the host society. By marrying local men, the women acquire a category of visa available for spouses of Japanese citizens or as a member of a Japanese family entitling them to the rights and privileges unavailable for labour migrants on contract, including access to public services and employment. Nonetheless, immigrant wives upon marriage face a new set of challenges in marriage, family, and community. While their legal status and rights improve, they still remain vulnerable in the process of settling down based on their gender, ethnicity and class.1 Being married to Japanese men, they are now expected to act and behave like Japanese wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law by speaking Japanese and accepting Japanese cultural norms. Explicit in this expectation is acceptance of the Japanese family system in which the new bride adopts her husband’s family’s traditions and ways of life by leaving behind those of her natal family. In the case of foreign wives, the pressure to assimilate tends to rise if she is from a less-developed country, thus forcing her to relinquish her native tongue and culture. All of these pressures can result in immigrant wives’ maladaptation causing serious cultural and psychological problems, especially in rural areas where the traditional three-generation family still exists (Kuwayama 1995). Moreover, in the case of Filipino wives, there is an additional layer of problems unique to them. Prior to marriage, the majority of Filipino women had worked as bar hostesses, drinking, singing, and dancing with, and for, their male clients. This widely prevailing image of them being bar hostesses continues to haunt them even after they are married to Japanese husbands and become mothers of

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school-age children (Suzuki 2000).

Immigrant wives in Akita Historically agriculture, and to a lesser extent lumbering and fisheries, have dominated the economy of Akita Prefecture. Over past decades, however, because of a decline in agriculture leading to decreasing economic opportunities, the prefecture suffered heavily from outmigration. In addition, of all prefectures in Japan, Akita has the highest proportion of people aged 65 years old and over to the total population. This proportion is 30.7 percent as of 2012, and expected to reach a staggering 43.8 percent by 2040 according to government estimates (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan 2013). In 1990, Akita Prefecture had a total of over 1.22 million residents according to the national census conducted that year. But the figure has gone down to 1.05 million as of 2013 according to an estimate provided by the prefecture. Recently the prefecture has been losing its population at a rate of about one percent of its population every year, which is the highest rate of net population decrease among Japan’s 47 prefectures. Further, a national research institute has recently released predictions that the prefecture will lose more than 1/3 of its population by 2040, as compared to 2010 (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research 2013). This predicted decline is also the highest among all the prefectures. In the context of Akita’s precipitous population decline, it is significant to note that the numbers of foreign residents rapidly grew from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. As shown in Figure 4-1, three nationalities accounted for this increase: Korean, Filipino, and Chinese. Of the three, the majority of the Koreans are descendants of pre-WWII colonial immigrants from the Korean Peninsula most of whom were “Special Permanent Residents”. The other two nationalities were newcomers, the majority of whom were women married to local men. Up to the late 1980s, international marriage was rare in the Tohoku region. However, as the bride shortage became so severe as to threaten the very survival of rural communities, international marriage attracted the attention of individuals, families, and even policymakers. Consequently, the number of international marriages skyrocketed. In 1975, six prefectures in the Tohoku Region had only a total of 134 international marriages. In 2005, this number went up nearly 15 times to 1,945 (Takeda 2011, 65). In the case of Filipinas, the highly gendered and racialised migration as discussed above led to an unexpected (or expected) result: a rapid increase in the number of Filipina-Japanese marriages. Frequently, couples met in the bars, fell in

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love, and tied the knot. In Akita, Filipinas arrived in two waves. In 1989, their number was 169, quadrupling to 642 in 1994. After a sharp drop in the mid-1990s, the number quickly picked up again to reach 825 in 2000, peaking at 939 in 2004. Since then throughout the late 2000s, the number stayed in the 600s. In contrast, the increase of the Chinese population, which included students and trainees as well as brides, was dramatic. In the early 1990s, their total number was in the 100s, but ten years later it grew to more than 2,000, peaking at 2,507 in 2004. After that year it declined somewhat but stayed at more than 2,200 throughout the 2000s. Unlike Filipinas, Chinese wives arrived through pre-arranged marriages by matchmakers, and as a result, their marriages are reported to suffer from many serious problems, a topic unexplored in this study.2 Figure 4-1: The number of foreign residents in Akita Prefecture, 1989 to 2009

Source: Bureau of International and Academic Affairs, Akita Prefecture, 2010.

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Research methods This study focuses on Filipino women residing in the southern region of Akita Prefecture, more specifically the Yokote Valley, home to an estimated several hundreds of Filipino and other nationality women, mostly Chinese. They and their transnational families live throughout the Valley, scattered around the two major cities, Yokote and Yuzawa, and many other smaller towns and villages such as Ogachi and Omagari. According to Yokote City (2013), in 2011 the city alone hosted a total of 102 registered Filipinos, of whom 62 held “permanent residents” visas and 23 the “spouses of Japanese” visas. Adding to the unknown numbers of those living in many neighbouring municipalities, the total number of Filipinas in the Yokote Valley would easily exceed 200 as of 2013. The present study began in June 2012 when the Akita International University (AIU) and the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) launched a joint project to provide a six-week course on international migration for a class of selected students from both universities. The course is scheduled to take place in UCB and AIU in the summer of the year 2014. As part of preparation for the course, the authors began preliminary research on international marriage migration in the Yokote Valley in June 2012. From then until July 2013, we conducted interviews with the area’s public officials, Japanese language teachers, and leaders of the Filipino wives’ communities. In October 2012, we also attended the twentieth anniversary of the Sampaguita Association as described at the beginning of this chapter. Over the year we gradually became acquainted with many Filipino women living in the Valley. Since January 2013, with these Filipinas’ cooperation, we distributed a two-page questionnaire in the places where they congregated, including their private homes and a Catholic Church. By July 2013, a total of 15 questionnaires were returned to us. Although the small number does not permit us to generalise the results to a wider population, it still provides us with valuable information about the Valley’s Filipino women regarding their demographics, migration, family life, and daily activities, to which we now turn.

Filipino-Japanese couples The survey, with a total of 15 Filipinas, reveals that they arrived in two waves: in the early 1990s and the early 2000s (see Table 1). This is consistent with the statistics on foreign residents at the prefectural level as discussed above. Ten of the 15 came between 1987 and 1996, whereas the remaining five came between 2000 and 2010. Demographics of the two

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arrivals indicate that the two groups constitute two separate age groups. The earlier-arrived group is characterised by the older average age at 45.6 years and larger number of children, with an average of 2.2 born to them. A high proportion, eight out of ten, is married to husbands who are the first sons of the family and, thus seven out of ten live with at least one parent-in-law in their households. Of the ten women, one is divorced and one is widowed. In contrast, the later-arriving group is much younger in age at 33.8 years on the average with a smaller average number of children, at one child only. All but one of the five recent arrivals are currently married, but only two live with their husbands’ parents in the same households. Despite their different stages in the family lifecycle, the two age groups of Filipinas have other important demographic, socioeconomic, and political characteristics in common. Most conspicuously, their Japanese husbands are on the average more than ten years older than they are (wives being 41.9 years old vs. husbands who are 55.1 years old). But in education, wives from the Philippines are much better educated than their Japanese husbands. Specifically, eight of the 15 wives had more than two years of college education; four had high school education; and three had vocational training. Of the 15 husbands, only two have received more than two years of college education, the majority, eight, are high school graduates, and five went to vocational school.3 These Filipino women and Japanese men commonly met at the women’s workplaces (i.e., bars and snack bars) where they worked as professional entertainers, with the exception of six couples encountered at other sites. Despite their long-term residence, most Filipino wives, except for two, kept their Filipino citizenship staying in Japan as long-term residents. Outside the Philippines and Japan, they have relatives living in the United States, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, revealing their transnational connections.

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Table 4-1: Selected demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of wives and husbands

Selected Characteristics Year of Arrival 1985 to 1989 1990 to 1994 1995 to 1999 2000 to 2004 2005 to 2010 Total Occupation at Arrival Entertainer Other Total Age 25-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 60-69 70-79 Total

Number

Wife Early Arrival Number

3 6 1 1 4 15

3 6 1 0 0 10

0 0 0 1 4 5

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

9 6 15

7 3 10

2 3 5

n/a n/a n/a

1 4 8 2 0 0 15

0 0 8 2 0 0 10

1 4 0 0 0 0 5

0 0 3 8 3 1 15

Average Age Education 4 Year College or More 2 Year College High School Vocational School Total Number of Children 0 1 2 3 4 Total

41.9

45.6

33.8

55.1

5 3 4 3 15

3 1 3 3 10

2 2 1 0 5

1 1 8 5 15

1 6 4 3 1 15

0 3 3 3 1 10

1 3 1 0 0 5

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

Average Number of Children

1.8

2.2

1

n/a

All

Husband Recent Arrival Number

Number

All

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Wife Husband Is First Son Yes No Total Living with Husband’s Parent Yes No Total Wife’s Current Occupation Housewife Business Employee English Teacher Total Husband’s Occupation Auto-related Factory Worker Carpenter, Electrician Company Employee Business Medical Other Total

Husband

10 5 15

8 2 10

2 3 5

n/a n/a n/a

9 6 15

7 3 10

2 3 5

n/a n/a n/a

6 2 5 2 15

4 2 2 2 10

2 0 3 0 5

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a

3 3 3 3 1 1 1 15

In the areas of private and public life, these Filipino wives are very active. Upon marriage, almost all have raised or are raising children, while taking employment on and off. They work in factories, hotels, and other service establishments. Others with professional skills are self-employed teaching English or dance classes. Their husbands work in a variety of occupations as mechanics in automobile-related jobs, electricians, carpenters, business owners, and company employees. Almost all of these wives took or are currently taking a Japanese language class, self-rating their speaking ability as four or five out of a scale of one to seven. Their relative confidence in Japanese explains the fact that 11 of the 15 informants possess a Japanese driver’s license, which is an accomplishment itself and crucial to enhancing geographical mobility for themselves and their families in the rural areas. In their community life, as parents, neighbours, and women, they have belonged to the Parent Teacher Association, the Neighbourhood Association, or the Women’s Association. In their religious life, as Catholics, all Filipinas participate or have participated in a Sunday mass at the local church. Some use their spare time to volunteer

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for church maintenance. In their private life, whenever they have a free time, these women get together with other Filipinas to celebrate birthdays, to sing in Karaoke bars, or to simply chat in their native tongue.

Organised activism for local citizenship In the sections that follow, based on our research and the existing literature, we analyse Filipino wives’ organized activism intended to increase public recognition as legitimate members of their local communities.4 Our data suggest that their collective activism heightened during the first half of the 1990s in which the early arrival group was in the midst of raising their first and second child. This indicates that the volume and intensity of the women’s collective actions vary over time according to their stage of their family lifecycle on the one hand, and the changing socio-political landscape of local communities as a result of their arrival since the late 1980s on the other. It was then not coincidental in the 1990s that throughout Japan there was a growing interest in international cultural exchange often supported by local administrations (Abe 1995). Until then, it had been educated upper class citizens and their organisations that enjoyed the privilege of interacting with foreign nationals through sister city and educational programs. By the early 1990s, however, the new trends of cultural exchange began spreading to the grassroots. The “internal internationalisation” (uchinaru kokusaika) was the catchphrase referring to an increasing public awareness of ethnic diversity within Japan (Hatsuse 1993). It was this period that saw an influx of guest workers and marriage migrants arriving in regions that until then had never hosted large numbers of foreigners except Korean permanent residents. In response, citizens’ volunteer groups engaged in a variety of activities to assist immigrants with cultural, legal, medical, and other programs (Graburn, Ertl, and Tierney 2008; Yamanaka 2012). Similarly, many local governments launched their own innovative programs addressing internationalisation at the grassroots (Tegtmeyer Pak 2003; Haig 2009; Ertl 2008). Similarly, in understanding immigrant women’s collective activism, it is important to take into account the history of gendered and racialised migration in which immigrant women arrived as independent workers on short-term contracts. Contrary to the submissive image of women following in the steps of their male relatives, these Filipino women were agents of their own action choosing employment abroad away from home. Working in Japan, Filipina entertainers formed a comforting ethnic enclave in which they maintained their Filipino identity. Upon marriage,

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however, each woman’s life environment changed drastically. She was no longer with other Filipinas but was instead left alone with her Japanese husband and in-laws in their private home. There she was the only “internal other” (Ogaya 2004, 33) surrounded by Japanese who spoke only Japanese. An intense loneliness in the early stage of settlement eased when she met other Filipina wives in town, networking and becoming friends with them. In the early 1990s, as many more Filipinas married Japanese and settled down in both urban and rural areas, there was a surge of Filipino organisations aimed at consolidating unity and enhancing rights throughout the country. Over time the informal networks frequently developed into a formal association with specific objectives, leaders, and structures. These organisations vary in history, goals, membership, leadership, and relationships with local citizens and governments, but it is possible to classify their activities into the eight main categories according to the existing studies (Ogaya 2004; Sadamatsu 2004). These are: (1) selfhelp and social networks; (2) support and consultation; (3) Japanese language class; (4) Japanese and Filipino cultural events; (5) local volunteer activities; (6) recreation and leisure activities; (7) charity activities for Filipino causes; and (8) funding campaigns. The proliferation of Filipino associations in Japan is not surprising given the fact that Filipinos work and live in every part of the world but they are well connected to each other through extensive networks and organised activism (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Parreñas 2003). As women comprising the majority of the Philippine’s “transmigrants” (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994), Filipinas engage in a variety of activities at their destinations. In such a place as Hong Kong where public organizing is tolerated for immigrant workers, Filipinas mobilize their compatriots for political and economic goals (Yamanaka and Piper 2005). Behind their active transnational networking and activism is the Philippines’s long history of civil and political movements for democracy including feminist movements (Silliman and Noble 1998). It is in this global and domestic context that Filipinos overseas, including the wives in this study, are motivated to empower themselves by organising public activities. In the case of Filipinas in the Yokote Valley, when the early arrival group came in the late 1980s, they found very few Filipinas in the region. These pioneers were loosely connected with one another through networks at churches, employment, schools, and other places. However, no matter how helpful these informal networks were at the personal level, they were limited in their capacity and power in solving problems arising from cultural differences and institutional barriers they

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met every day. Many wives felt that they needed a formal association that would address their common problems in more systematic and resourceful ways than informal networks ever could. Learning about a plan to establish such an association among the Filipinas, Miyako Miyahara, the manager of a snack bar where some Filipinas worked, became interested in helping them (Asahi Shimbun 1993a). After a few months’ preparation, in April 1992, Miyahara and her collaborators successfully launched the Association in a hotel in Yuzawa City with the attendance of 30 Japanese and Filipino members (Akita Sakigake Shimbun 1992; Yomiuri Shimbun 1992). This was the beginning of the Sampaguita Association that would celebrate its twentieth anniversary in October 2012. Aiming at promoting cultural exchange and friendship between Japan and the Philippines (Association Bylaws 2 and 3), the Association selected Hisako Ogawa, known for her dedication in international exchange, and Hideo Suga, a Yuzawa City public official, as the president and the vice-president, respectively. In addition, 12 members, including two Filipino-Japanese couples, agreed to serve as the board of directors. Once in place, in the next few years, the Association grew larger with more than eighty members actively participating in a variety of organised activities. These included: supporting Japanese language courses; holding an annual Christmas party for cultural exchange; selling Filipino goods and crafts at the annual summer festival; collecting used clothes for charity in the Philippines; inviting parents from the Philippines; and organising funding campaigns for future programs (Akita Sakigake Shimbun 1993a, 1993b). As these activities drew large crowds, the local news media publicised them referring to increasing ethnic diversity and growing multiculturalism in Akita Prefecture (Kahoku Shimpo 1993; Asahi Shimbun 1993b).

Japanese language classes Of all the activities in which the Sampaguita Association had engaged in the Yokote Valley since its inception, Japanese language classes proved to be most beneficial to the Filipino members. As described in the introduction to this chapter, in her speech at the Association’s anniversary ceremony, every Filipino woman emphasised the importance of learning Japanese for them to develop a sense of belonging to the community. The growing need for Japanese language education was particularly urgent for wives with children reaching school age and those who lived with ageing in-laws who spoke only Japanese. In the rural areas where public

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transportation is limited, passing the drivers’ license examination in Japanese was imperative for their own and family’s geographical mobility. In the early 1990s when Yokote Valley witnessed an increasing number of marriage migrants, the Sampaguita President Hisako Ogawa found it necessary for the local government to sponsor Japanese language classes for the new arrivals. Before her presidency, Ogawa had long served as the main officer for the Yuzawa Branch of the Women’s Association to Promote International Exchange (WAPIE). In the past, she and her colleagues travelled to many foreign countries on international cultural exchange programs. With growing ethnic diversity in their city as a result of the immigrant wives’ arrival, the WAPIE officers turned their attention to an internal internationalization project. The Yuzawa municipal government was responsive to the WAPIE’s proposal to host a Japanese language course in partnership with the organisation, the Sampaguita Association, and the Akita International Association (AIA). The first Japanese language class began in 1992 with an instructor commuting from Akita City. Next year the Yokote Branch of WAPIE followed suit, opening its own Japanese language class.5 As these classes succeeded in drawing students of diverse nationalities in these cities, demands for more resources to expand the programs and secure trained teachers increased (Sasaki and Miyamoto 1997). In 1995, to meet such demands from the citizens’ groups, the Akita Prefectural government adopted the Japanese language program under its wing. After six years of expansion and revision, the prefectural government in 2001 entrusted the responsibility of running Japanese language classes to the local governments of the cities and towns with a high demand for the classes, many of which continue to today. In Yokote Valley, Filipina wives, many of whom were leading members of the Sampaguita Association, continued to attend Japanese language classes available in their localities. In contrast, members’ participation in other activities declined significantly over time reflecting changes in their cultural integration and family lifecycles.6 Today the Association meets only once a year to celebrate Christmas with Filipino cultural shows, which still draw large numbers of Filipinos and Japanese including elite citizens (Akita Sakigake Shimbun 2011). As the survey results show, however, in their daily lives, the Filipina wives are active participants in events and programs organised by local communities including the Parent Teacher Associations, the Neighbourhood Associations, and other institutions. The Filipinas are now well accepted as legitimate members of these organisations.

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Conclusion This study of Filipina wives of Japanese men in Yokote Valley demonstrates the importance of organised activism as social practice for them to achieve social recognition of their communities. In the period of increasing ethnic diversity in rural Japan where multiculturalism is yet to arrive, immigrant activism in collaboration with local citizens has served two major goals: enhancing these wives’ rights to be included in the communities and raising public awareness for growing cultural differences within the communities. In the absence of a national policy of social incorporation, local governments are responsive to such grassroots activism intended to increase sociocultural integration of the immigrants. They accommodated the Japanese language courses as part of their internal internationalisation projects. For the Filipina wives, participation in such classes is also the process of reconstructing their collective identity as trustable partners in the local communities that once looked down upon them as bar hostesses from a less developed country. By actively engaging in organised activism in everyday life, be it learning Japanese in classrooms or dancing and singing Filipino songs in the annual Christmas Party, the immigrant wives have challenged the deep-seated stigma and prejudice in Japanese hierarchy based on nationality, gender, and class. In so doing, they have renewed a sense of belonging while contributing to emerging multiculturalism and social justice for all. Although this study presents a success story of social incorporation of immigrant wives into local communities, it also exemplifies a case of a nation in denial of the fact that growing numbers of immigrants reside, work and raise families in the territory without formal citizenship. In the absence of social incorporation policies at the national level, local governments implement their own policies, such as Japanese language programs, in the name of international cultural exchange. In the time of rapid ageing and precipitous population decline in many rural prefectures, such as Akita, this is not only vastly inadequate to boost social incorporation, but also it is unjustifiable to treat long-term residents as temporary foreign guests. As shown in this study, an arrival of a large number of immigrants, especially marriage migrants, has been a blessing to many small towns and villages of these prefectures that would have otherwise lost social and economic vitality. Upon arrival, these foreigners become family members, local residents, productive workers, and potential future citizens. In short, instead of turning a blind eye to the reality, it is time for Japan as a nation to develop a comprehensive policy of immigrant incorporation at both national and local levels. Toward this

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goal, the collaborative and reciprocal relationships among immigrants, citizens, and administrations in the Yokote Valley suggest a promise for expanding local citizenship rights to long-term immigrants based on residence and participation.

Acknowledgement We thank Louella Bascon Shoji, Hisako Ogawa, Hideo Suga, Eriko Suzuki, Yoriko Sasaki, Reverend Martin Oman, Mitsuya Watanabe, Toshiko Watanabe, Hiroshi Takahashi, and staff members of the Yokote Japanese Language Class for their assistance to this study. We are also indebted to many Filipinas and their families without whose cooperation in interviews and surveys this study would have been impossible.

Notes 1. For cultural and legal problems that Filipino women face in their marriage and family in Japan, see Sadamatsu (2002). 2. For studies of Chinese marriage migrant women in rural Japan, see Saihan (2011). 3. The gap in educational attainment between Filipina wives and Japanese husbands may be a result of the structural inequality between Japan and the Philippines, attracting diverse class backgrounds of Filipino women, including a group of relatively resourceful Filipino women, to migrate to Japan. For discussions on global hypergamy, see Constable (2005). 4. Information in the next two sections is drawn from personal interviews with Filipino and Japanese members of the Sampaguita Association, Japanese language teachers, local government officials, local citizens, newspaper and magazine articles, and academic publications. 5. In the Yokote class, the administration provided a childcare program so that immigrant mothers would concentrate on language lessons. 6. The existing studies also report diminished frequency of organized activism or even disappearance of organisations among Filipino wives in Japan (Ogaya 2004; Sadamatsu 2004).

References Abe, Mitsuru. 1995. “Akita-ken ni okeru Kokusai Koryu no Genjo” [The present status of international exchange in Akita Prefecture]. Akita no Shogai Gakushu [Lifelong studies in Akita] 29: 2. Akita Sakigake Shimbun. 1992. “Nayami ya Sodangoto wo Uchiakeaou— Sanpagita no Kai Chikaku Setsuritsu” [Sharing troubles and needs: the Sampaguita Association to take off soon], 7 January.

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—. 1993a. “Sanpagita no Hanayome (Ue): Chumoku Atsumeru Shinsoshiki, Sokoku no Hahaoya Shotai mo Kettei” [Brides of the Sampaguita Association, part 1: the new organisation attracts attention, decision made to invite mothers from the homeland], 2 July. —. 1993b. “Sanpagita no Hanayome (Shita): Oya wo Anshin sasetai, raigetsu 5-7 nichi ni raijitsu ka” [Brides of the Sampaguita Association, part 2: want to assure parents, they may come the 5th to 7th of the next month to Japan], 16 July. —. 2011. “Hikoku Hanayome to Ayumu: Sanpagita no Kai 20-nen, shita: Soncho shiau Kokoro Tsukuru” [Walk with Filipino brides: two decades of the Sampaguita Assocation, part 2: constructing mind to respect with one another], 10 December. Asahi Shimbun. 1993a. “Sanpagita no Kai: Yorisou Kokoro, Fudangi no Kokusai Koryu” [Sampaguita Association: helpful mind, international exchange in everyday clothes], 15 January. —. 1993b. “Firipinjin-tsuma Shien no Dantai—Tsuma no Oya Maneite Parti-” [The citizens’ group in support of Filipina wives: offered a party for the invited parents], 3 September. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Basel, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Bureau of International and Academic Affairs, Akita Prefecture, 2010. “Gaikokujin Torokusha no Suii” [The change in numbers of foreign residents]. Obtained from Yokote City, 22 June. Burgess, Chris. 2008. “(Re)constructing Boundaries: International Marriage Migrants in Yamagata as Agents of Multiculturalism.” in Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Borders Within, edited by Nelson H. H. Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney. New York: Berghahn Books. Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. 2013. Heisei 25-nen-ban Kourei Syakai Hakusyo [2012 White paper on aging society]. Http://www8.cao.go.jp/kourei/whitepaper/index-w.html. Constable, Nicole, ed. 2005. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Douglass, C. Michael, and Glenda S. Roberts, eds. 2003. Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society. Honolulu: the University of Hawai’i Press. Ertl, John. 2008. “International Peripheries: Institutional and Personal Engagements with Japan’s Kokusaika Movement.” In Multiculturalism

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in the New Japan: Crossing the Borders Within, edited by Nelson H. H. Graburn, John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney. New York: Berghahn Books. Espiritu, Yen Le. 2008. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Second Edition. Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Graburn, Nelson H. H., John Ertl, and R. Kenji Tierney, eds. 2008. Multiculturalism in the New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within. New York: Berghahn Books. Haig, Ken. 2009. National Aliens, Local Citizens: The Politics of Immigrant Integration in Japan in a Comparative Perspective. PhD dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Hatsuse, Ryuhei. 1993. “Jichitai no Kokusaika Seisaku—Jumin tono Kanren” [Internationalization policy of local governments: its relevance to residents]. Kokusai Kyoryoku Ronshu 1 (2): 1-15. Ito, Ruri. 1992. “Mou Hitotsu no Kokusai Rodo Ido—Saiseisan Rodo no Cho-kokyoteki Idou to Nihon no Josei Ijusha” [Another international labour migration: extra-territorial movement of reproductive labour and immigrant women in Japan]. In Gaikokujin Rodosha-ron: Genjo kara Riron he [Debates on foreign workers: from reality to theory], edited by Iyotani Toshio and Kajita Takamichi. Tokyo: Kobundo. Kahoku Shimpo. 1993. “Shiawasena Musme no Sugata ni Anshin—Firipin Shusshin Hanayome no Fubo wo Shotai” [Assured to witness happy daughters: invited parents of Filipino brides], 3 September. Keck, Margaret E., and Kathryn Sikkink. 1998. Activities beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kuwayama, Norihiko. 1995. Kokusai Kekkon to Sutoresu: Ajia kara no Hanayome to Henyo suru Nippon no Kazoku [International marriage and stress: brides from Asia and transforming Japanese families]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Lindquist, John. 2010. “Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry.” Pacific Affairs 83 (1): 115-132. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naito, Takashi. 2004. Noson no Kekkon to Kekkon-nan [Farming villages and marriage difficulty]. Fukuoka: Kyushu Daigaku Shuppankai.

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National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. 2013. Nihon no Chiikibetsu Shourai Suikei Jinkou [Predicted future population by regions in Japan]. Http://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-shicyoson/j/shicyoson13/1kouhyo/gaiyo.pdf. Ogaya, Chiho. 2004. “Tainichi Firipin Josei no Shakai Katsudo no Tayosei: Nihon ni okeru ‘Imin/Ido no Joseika’ no Kontekusuto kara no Ichi-kousatsu” [Diversity of social activities of Filipinas in Japan: an examination from the context of ‘feminization of immigrants/immigration’ in Japan”]. In Gendai Nihon Shakai ni okeru Kokusai Imin to Jenda no Kankei no Saihen ni Kansuru Kenkyu: Josei Ijusha no Enpawamento to Atarashii Shutai Keisei no Kento ni Mukete [Studies on international immigrants and reconfiguration of gender relations in contemporary Japanese society: toward empowerment of immigrant women and formation of the new subject], edited by Ruri Ito. Tokyo: Gender Study Center, Ochanomizu University. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2003. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford University Press. —. 2011. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Piper, Nicola and Keiko Yamanaka, eds. 2003. “Special Issue: Gender, Migration and Governance in Asia.” Asian Pacific Migration Journal 12 (1-2). Rodriguez, Robyn. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sadamatsu, Aya. 2002. “Kokusai Kekkon ni Miru Kazoku no Mondai— Firipinjin Josei to Nihonjin Dansei no Kekkon, Rikon wo Megutte” [Problems observed in international marriage: marriage and divorce between Filipino women and Japanese men]. In Henyo suru Nihon Shakai to Bunka [Transforming Japanese society and culture], edited by Miyajima Takashi and Kano Hirokatsu. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai. —. 2004. “Zainichi Firipinjin Josei no Soshikika to Hisoshikika ni Miru Yoin Bunseki” [Factor analysis of institutionalization and noninstitutionalization of Filipina residents in Japan]. In Gendai Nihon Shakai ni okeru Kokusai Imin to Jenda no Kankei no Saihen ni Kansuru Kenkyu: Josei Ijusha no Enpawamento to Atarashii Shutai Keisei no Kento ni Mukete [Studies on international immigrants and reconfiguration of gender relations in contemporary Japanese society: toward empowerment of immigrant women and formation of the new

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subject], edited by Ruri Ito. Tokyo: Gender Study Center, Ochanomizu University. Saihan, Juna. 2011. Kokusai Ido Jidai no Kokusai Kekkon: Nihon no Noson ni Totsuida Chugokujin Josei [International marriage in the age of international migration: Chinese women married into Japanese farming villages]. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo. Sasaki, Yoriko, and Ritsuko Miyamoto. 1997. “Akita-ken ni okeru Nihongo Shido no Arikata—Genjo to Mondaiten” [A study of language learning support activities for non-native speakers of Japanese in Akita Prefecture]. Akita Daigaku Kyoiku Gakubu Kenkyu Kiyo 52: 113-123. Satake, Masaaki, and Mary Da-anoy. 2006. Firipin-Nihon Kokusai Kekkon: Iju to Tabunka Kyosei (Filipina-Japanese intermarriages: migration, settlement, and multicultural coexistence). Tokyo: Mekon. Sato, Takao, ed. 1989. Mura to Kokusai Kekkon [Villages and international marriage]. Tokyo: Hyoronsha. Seol, Dong-Hoon, and John Skrentny. 2009. “Why Is There So Little Migrant Settlement in East Asia?” International Migration Review 43 (3): 578-620. Shah, Bindi V. 2012. Laotian Daughters: Working Toward Community, Belonging, and Environmental Justice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shipper, Apichai, W. 2008. Fighting for Foreigners: Immigration and Its Impact on Japanese Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Shukuya, Kyoko. 1988. Ajia kara kita Hanayome: Mukaerugawa no Ronri [Brides from Asia: logics of the receivers]. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Siim, Birte. 2000. Gender and Citizenship: Policies and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silliman, G. Sidney, and Lela Garner Noble, eds. 1998. Organizing for Democracy: NGOs, Civil Society, and the Philippine State. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Suzuki, Nobue. 2000. “Between Two Shores: Transnational Projects and Filipina Wives In/From Japan.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23 (4): 431-444. Takeda, Satoko. 2011. Murano Kokusai Kekkon Saiko: Kekkon Iju Josei to Noson no Shakai Henyo [Reconsidering international marriage in villages: international marriage migrant women and social transformation in farming villages]. Tokyo: Mekon. Tegtmeyer Pak, Katherine. 2003. “Foreigners are Local Citizens, Too: Local Governments Respond to International Migration in Japan.” In Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a

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Multicultural Society, edited by C. Michael Douglass and Glenda S. Roberts. Honolulu: the University of Hawai’i Press. Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2003. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2006. “Localities and the Struggle for Immigrant Rights: The Significance of Local Citizenship in Recent Countries of Immigration.” In Local Citizenship in Recent Countries of Immigration, edited by Takeyuki Tsuda. New York: Lexington Books. Yamanaka, Keiko. 2012. “Immigration, Policies, and Civil Society in Hamamatsu, Central Japan.” In Wind Over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context, edited by David W. Haines, Keiko Yamanaka, and Shinji Yamashita. New York: Berghahn Books. Yamanaka, Keiko, and Nicola Piper. 2005. Feminized Migration in East and Southeast Asia: Policies, Actions and Empowerment. Occasional Paper 11, the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva. Yokote City. 2013. Firipin, Chugoku Kokuseki Zairyushasu [Numbers of Filipino and Chinese nationals], 22 June. Yomiuri Shimbun. 1992. “Firipin Hanayome Hagemaso—Shinboku Hakaru Kai wo Setsuritsu” [Let’s encourage Filipina brides: establishment of friendship association], 26 April.

CHAPTER FIVE ETHNIC KOREAN RETURNEES FROM JAPAN IN KOREA: EXPERIENCES AND IDENTITIES1 SUG-IN KWEON

Introduction This work examines ethnic Korean return migrants from Japan focusing on their experiences in Korea, the reception they receive while living in Korea, and the perception of Korean society about them. It also explores how the returnees’ experiences in Korea affect their ethnonational identities, sense of belonging, and loyalty. I confine my discussion to “old-comer” ethnic Koreans in Japan who migrated voluntarily or involuntarily to Japan during the Japanese colonisation of Korea and their descendants.2 Among the overseas ethnic Korean groups, a distinct feature of ethnic Koreans in Japan is that their history originated from the Japanese colonisation of Korea and Koreans’ attitudes toward them are profoundly influenced by the (post)colonial relationship between Korea and Japan which has been not always congenial. Because of this (post)colonial relationship, many Koreans maintain negative attitudes—from simple prejudices to extreme abhorrence—to Japan, Japanese, and Japanese culture and these negative feelings are often projected on ethnic Korean returnees from Japan. Reception of Korean returnees from Japan is much more influenced by the historical relationship between Korea and Japan than other factors including cultural differences and socio-economic positions that are often considered as major factors in other cases of ethnic return migration. Another characteristic of Koreans-in-Japan as an ethnic minority group within a nation-state is “a high level of cultural assimilation coupled with a low level of structural assimilation” (Kashiwazaki 2000, 53). Most of the

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second and third generation returnees keep the legal nationality of Korean; in other words, they are legally foreigners in Japan, their country of birth and residence. However, they are inept in Korean culture including language; Japanese is their mother tongue. For them, Korean culture and language is something to be acquired, not subconsciously learned and embodied qualifications. For many Koreans, however, who tend to think Korean blood, culture, and nationality are all that is required to make “a proper Korean”, the cultural incompetence of the returnees is hard to understand. What is worse, the native and embodied culture and language of the returnees in this case is none other than Japanese. Thus, Korean people are often highly intolerant toward any Japanese cultural trait the returnees bring with them, and hesitate to include them as fellow Koreans. The returnees, on the other hand, come to think of themselves as “foreigners with legal nationality” in their homeland, or chaeilgyop’o (⛐㖍⁹傆: overseas ethnic Koreans in Japan) who do not belong to the category of Korean. The negative experiences in the ethnic homeland and following reformulations and renegotiations of ethnic identities are frequently pointed out in other studies of ethnic return migration (see Iglicka 1998; Levy 2003; Tsuda 2003, among others). Ethnic return migrants often get more favours than other international migrants regarding legal reception in their ethnic homeland, and ethnic connectedness and loyalty in addition to economic considerations often influence their choice of destination countries. However, this connectedness and loyalty do not guarantee favourable reception and positive experiences in their ancestral homeland, and the case of Koreans in Japan under study here illustrates this very well. Even though they are returning from a more advanced country, ethnic Koreans from Japan, unlike, for example, a Korean-American returnee, are very vulnerable to severe prejudice and discrimination in Korea and their sense of belonging undergoes changes through this complicated and often painful return journey.

Historical overview of the return from Japan Birth of Koreans in Japan: colonial legacy The presence of ethnic Koreans in Japan today traces its origin back to the early twentieth century when Korea was under Japanese imperial rule. In particular, after the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, Koreans began to migrate to Japan en masse. The border-crossing group included students and officials, but the majority were from rural regions of Korea

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who were impoverished more seriously by colonial exploitation. After Japan entered the war against China in 1937, many Koreans were drafted as wartime labourers and sent to coal mining, construction sites, or machine industries in various areas of the Japanese territory including Karafuto Prefecture (present-day Sakhalin). When Japan surrendered and Korea became an independent country again in 1945, about two million Koreans were residing in Japan. Among these, about 1.4 million Koreans returned to Korea through the GHQ-led repatriation programs that continued through the end of 1946. In other words, about 600,000 Koreans remained in Japan. Some of them did not have any economic footing in Korea, and for some others, the uncertain condition of the Korean peninsula became a major background for not choosing to make an immediate return. They were allowed to carry only up to 1,000 Yen per person, and this restriction also discouraged many Koreans from returning (Kweon 2000). Those who remained in Japan for one reason or another became “resident foreigners” deprived of legal status as Japanese nationals and the painful post-World War II history of ethnic Koreans in Japan began.

Return to North Korea The North Korean political leaders were ahead of those in the South in showing their concern and support for the Koreans in Japan. With Kim Il Sung’s official support, the North Korean government moved forward with a plan to repatriate Koreans from Japan. Against the South Korean government’s wishes, an agreement was signed between the North Korean Red Cross and the Japanese Red Cross in 1959 regarding details of the repatriation procedure. Since the first group boarded the famous ship Man’gyǂnbongho at Niigata in December 1959, about 90,000 ethnic Koreans “returned” to North Korea by the end of the 1960s.3 Diplomatic normalisation between South Korea and Japan (1965) officially ended with the repatriation program in 1967. As the economic difficulties of North Korea became known, and the plight of North Korean people including those who returned to the North became publicised, unofficial returns to the North also came to an end. Some repatriates escaped from the North and “returned” (again) to South Korea receiving an extraordinary welcome. Reflecting the differing attitudes and official positions of the pertinent countries toward it, the repatriation program is called differently in the three countries: kikan ( 㬠 怬 : repatriation) in Japan, kwiguk (㬠⚳: returning to one’s nation) in the North, and puksong ( ⊿復: sending to the North) in South Korea. The differing terms illustrate

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very well the complicated ideological landscape in which ethnic Koreans in Japan are situated.

Return to South Korea Prompted partly by the North Korea-initiated repatriation program and partly responding to the demand by ethnic Koreans in Japan who were affiliated with the South, the South Korean government also started returnrelated programs from the beginning of the 1960s. Most programs were intended for a return or a visit of limited, not permanent, period of time, and carried out with strong ideological and nationalistic implications. To name just a few, such programs as the Ancestral Grave Visiting Program, Studying-in-Homeland Program, and Summer School for Ethnic Korean Students in Japan started to give Korean residents in Japan opportunities to visit and study in their homeland. At the same time, special efforts were made to solicit investment by successful Korean businessmen in Japan. One program that has worked as a major route for return is the Studying-in-Homeland Program. This program started in 1962 as a response to the strong request by Mindan, the pro-Seoul Federation of Korean Residents in Japan, and granted admission to overseas Koreans to Korean colleges as supernumerary students. While being the major route for a return to one’s homeland, however, this program could not be free from the dominant ideological topography of the Korean peninsula and contributed to the circulation of peculiar images about ethnic Koreans in Japan, particularly during the 1970s. In the extreme ideological confrontation between the two Koreas, returnees from Japan often became vulnerable prey to the anti-communist political campaigns of the South Korean regimes. Even until the early 1980s, the most frequent news reports about returned Koreans from Japan were so-called “Koreans-in-Japan student spy cases”, not, for example, about the discrimination they faced in Japan. The typical story went: The students came to South Korea disguised as students and worked as spies for the North by getting orders through Choch’ongryǂn, the proP’yǂngyang League of Korean Residents in Japan. It is only after the late 1980s that ideological precautions against North Korea and Choch’ongryǂn-related Koreans in Japan weakened considerably. In addition, with the economic rise of South Korea and increasing recognition of the difficult circumstances which ethnic Koreans have faced in Japan, perceptions of ethnic Koreans in Japan appear to have changed somewhat. Thus, today’s Korean returnees from Japan seem to

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arrive at the point where nationalistic prejudices and paternalist gazes intersect.4

Vignettes of returnees from Japan In this section, I introduce several cases of ethnic Korean returnees from Japan to illustrate the motivations and background of the return, and the general attitudes, images, and prejudices of the Korean society toward them. They are in a sense historical, i.e., representative cases from different time periods that many Koreans remember or have heard of. They also show the dominant representation of Koreans-in-Japan in Korean society very well.

Red Spies: the Sǂ Sǎng / Sǂ Chunsik brothers (1968/1969) As mentioned above, the fierce ideological confrontation between the two Koreas has seriously affected the lives of Korean residents in Japan and contributed to the precarious environment that some returnees have had to face in Korea. The Sǂ brothers are famous examples. Born as second-generation Koreans in Japan, Sǂ Chunsik, the younger brother, and Sǂ Sǎng, the elder, entered Seoul National University in 1968 and 1969, respectively. After visiting North Korea, the brothers were arrested in 1971 on the suspicion of being North Korean spies. Sǂ Sǎng was sentenced to death at his first trial, life imprisonment at his second trial, and was finally freed in 1990 after 19 years in prison. Sǂ Chunsik was sentenced to seven years in prison, but was imprisoned until 1988 because he rejected writing a conversion statement after the seven years. The case is well-known as a representative human rights violation by a despotic regime and the most symbolic of the so-called “Koreans-in-Japan student spy cases”. The brothers also illustrate the strong identification with their ancestral homeland that many returning first or second generation Koreans from Japan maintained. Among the later generations, unconditional identification with the homeland is much weakened.5

A rich and successful Korean-in-Japan: Sin Kyǂkho (1971) Until recently, Japan appeared as a rich country for many Koreans and this image was projected onto Korean residents in Japan. And there were some Koreans including Sin Kyǂkho, who succeeded in building fortunes in Japan, thus contributing to the image that Koreans-in-Japan were rich. The first son of ten children from a poor family in Ulsan, South Korea, Sin

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migrated to Japan in 1941 at the age of 19. He achieved a great success in Japan after World War II by establishing the Lotte Corporation. Accepting President Park Chung Hee’s request to invest, Sin Kyǂkho started a business in Korea in 1971. In 2013, the Korean Lotte Group is the fifth largest among the major Korean conglomerates, and Sin is known as a person who made a fortune in a foreign country and invested in his homeland. He is also known, maybe until Softbank’s president Son Masayoshi emerged, as the most successful overseas Korean inscribing among many Korean people the image of “rich Korean residents in Japan” and is one of the exceptional few who were granted dual citizenship.

A red sniper: Mun Segwangr (1974) The scandal of Mun Segwang was another famous case that dramatised the severe ideological conflict on the Korean peninsula in which some overseas Koreans were implicated. Known as the “Mun Segwang Shooting Case”, this was a powerful political scandal in the 1970s. Mun, who was reported as a resident Korean in Japan, entered Korea with a forfeited Japanese passport and attempted to assassinate Park Chung Hee at the Liberation Day national ceremony on 15 August 1974. The president was saved but the first lady was killed by a stray bullet. Mun was reported to have planned the shooting meticulously with the pro-P’yǂngyang League of Korean Residents in Japan while getting orders from the North. Some doubts have been raised regarding the historical truth of this case, but when the Japanese government’s diplomatic documents were released in 2006 that supported the original accusation, the debate was concluded at least officially. For many Koreans in general, the case symbolised the imminent and intimidating threats by the North that could be enacted through ethnic Koreans in Japan.

A vulnerable returnee: Yu-hǎi (1989) Even though returnees from Japan made big news from time to time, their anguished experiences and emotional distress were hardly heard in Korean society until the late 1980s when Yu-hǎi returned. “Yu-hǎi” is the protagonist in a novel with the same title written by Yi Yangji, a second generation Korean resident writer in Japan. With this novel, Yi Yangji became the 100th recipient of the prestigious Akutagawa Award of Japan in 1989 and began to be read widely among Korean readers, as well. The novel is a story about an ethnic Korean student who returned to her

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homeland Korea and tried to learn about Korea and confirm her identity as a Korean. Depicted as an insecure young female attending the prestigious “S University”, Yu-hǎi was a novelistic personification of the writer herself who actually returned to Korea and studied Korean language and literature at Seoul National University in the early 1980s. In Yu-hǎi’s desperate efforts to become a “true” Korean, her inner self clashes with her idealised homeland, repeatedly and painfully. Everyday life in Korea disillusioned Yu-hǎi’s idealised vision of her homeland and she discovers acutely her Japanised self and confesses that she cannot identify with her homeland. Agonizing over the betrayal by her homeland and herself, Yu-hǎi ends up journeying back to Japan. This story of Yu-hǎi’s return and frustration, while being fictional, provided Korean readers with a rare chance to hear the complicated inner voices and emotional conflicts of the returnees from Japan.

A national hero: Kwon Hǎi-ro (1999) Kwon Hǎi-ro’s case attests very well to the lingering and easily incited anti-Japanese nationalistic sentiments of Korean society through which returnees from Japan should navigate. Kwon has experienced severe discrimination since childhood. In 1968, he killed two Japanese gangsters who hurled discriminative and insulting words at him while demanding payment of his debts. He held guests of an inn as hostages in Shizuoka, and this hostage situation lasted four days while the confrontation was broadcast live throughout Japan shocking Japanese audiences. After eight years of trials, he was sentenced to life imprisonment but was freed in September 1999, after 31 years in prison. Korean mass media showed enormous interest in every detail related to his release stimulating heated nationalistic sentiments. He became an instant national hero and returned permanently to Korea, a country he had never visited before, receiving an extraordinary welcome and attention. However, he was soon forgotten from the memory of the general public.6

Returnees with North Korean affiliation: Kim Kapsik and An Yǂnghak (2005-2006) Under the ideological tensions of the Korean peninsula, North Koreaaffiliated ethnic Koreans’ returns to the South from Japan were permitted only exceptionally. The student reported in mass media as Kim Kapsik, a pseudonym, became the first person who was admitted to a Korean college

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while maintaining his “North Korea affiliation” (㛅歖䯵: Chosǂnjǂk).7 His admission to Yonsei University was approved by the Korean Ministry for Unification. Under Korea’s present law, Chosǂnjǂk people are classified as North Korean residents. An Yǂnghak, who is also with North Korean affiliation, is a soccer player. He participated in the final preliminary regional match for the 2006 German World Cup as a player on the North Korean national team. He also made news in South Korea when a South Korean soccer club recruited him.8 Many Koreans expressed their perplexity, confusing An as a North Korean. Obviously, the two returnees illustrate the much-eased ideological confrontation on the Korean peninsula and weakened precautions against ethnic Koreans in Japan affiliated with the North.

Ethnic Korean returnees from Japan: experiences and identities In the section below, I explore distinctive experiences and (re)negotiations of identities of the ethnic Koreans from Japan who “returned” to Korea since the late 1990s. Major data for my analysis draws on my in-depth interviews with eleven returnees from Japan who were introduced to me through snowball sampling. Each interview session lasted for two to three hours and was tape-recorded. I carried out the interviews between 2006 and 2007 at my office or cafes on/off campus. In the summer of 2013, I had two more returnees review my work in order to check whether there have been significant changes over the last couple of years. Among the eleven interviewees, nine are in their twenties studying in colleges and language institutes, one is a housewife in her thirties, and one is a visiting professor in his fifties.9 All the interviewees have South Korean nationality, and except for the two who had attended North Koreaaffiliated ethnic schools, the remaining nine had attended only Japanese schools before they came to Korea.10 Except for the two who were over thirty, all the other interviewees were in their twenties, third or 2.5 generation Koreans in Japan. They went to schools in Japan through the 1980s and 1990s, and came to Korea during the last fifteen years. Put together, they are recent cases of ethnic return from Japan and illustrate what young returnees from Japan experience in South Korea and how they renegotiate their identities through their lives in the homeland. Juxtaposing these cases of young returnees with the historical vignettes reviewed above, I also deal with changes in socio-political circumstances which affect ethnic return from Japan to Korea.

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Causes of return Ethnic return from Japan to Korea belongs to the type where diasporic migrants move from the First to the Third World, and thus, it provides a good comparative perspective for exploring the issue of ethnic return migration. In contrast to international labour migration in general, ethnic causes, in addition to economic consideration, affect ethnic return migrants’ decisions regarding destination countries. Ethnic connectedness itself might be a strong motivating factor, but various immigration policies favouring ethnic relationships can also provide a relatively easy way for return movement. Classic examples include Jewish and German ethnic returns (Münz and Ohliger 2003). Besides them, ethnic Japanese return migrants from Latin American countries and ethnic Korean returnees from China and the former Soviet Union are also good examples of international labour migrants who take advantage of their homeland’s policy favouring ethnic connectedness. Ethnic returnees coming from poorer Third World countries to First World ancestral countries are often motivated by economic considerations as much as by ethnic ones. And very often, the economic status of the ethnic return migrants’ country-of-origin and the jobs they take up in their homeland, i.e., the so-called “3-D work”11 considerably affect their reception in homeland. Coming from an economic superpower, most returnees from Japan run businesses, have middle-class jobs—teaching Japanese at schools or white collar jobs in a company—or are college students in Korea. Also, their return to Korea does not necessarily enhance their economic opportunities. In fact, none of my interviewees mentioned economic considerations as a significant reason for their decision to come to Korea, and this is a good contrast to other ethnic Korean return migrants from China or the former Soviet Union. In the case of students, their own or their parents’ wish to study Korean language and history/culture, and thus become a more “true” or “proper” Korean was frequently cited as a major motivation for return. Yang Sǂk, who attended North Korea-affiliated ethnic schools through his sophomore year in university notes: I quit the ethnic Korean university after attending two years. I wanted to know a wider world and get out of Japan. I worked at a company for three years to save money and went to Australia in 2001. There, whenever asked my identity, I answered that I am a Korean. But I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t speak Korean well and knew almost nothing about Korea. So, I

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Chǂng Yuri who is studying Korean language and art crafts in Seoul also mentioned that from around her high school days, she felt ashamed since she could not speak Korean even though she had Korean nationality. Kim Nara’s case is a bit different in that it was his father who initiated (“enforced”) Nara’s return: Since I was a small kid, my dad repeatedly told me that I am a Korean and should not be defeated by the Japanese. So I studied very hard, pledging myself not to be outdone. My father somehow put me in Japanese schools. When I graduated from high school, my dad told me that I should go to Korea for college education. I had been preparing for the entrance exam for Japanese colleges. But at the same time I also had a vague feeling that I should go to Korea. People around me including my teachers and friends strongly opposed this idea. My dad, however, was very firm. I guess he wanted to raise me as a true Korean.

On the other hand, we cannot conclude definitely that ethnic Koreans from Japan are motivated solely by ethnic causes. At least until the 1980s when they were severely discriminated against, people often said that ethnic Koreans had little positive prospects for their future in Japan. Yi Sǂnhǎi’s case below illustrates that some Koreans in Japan still choose Korea, in addition to their ethnic motivation, in order to better their chances of fulfilling their dreams:12 I was a very active kid enjoying a lot of extracurricular activities and acted as a student leader. I wanted to work on the international stage, and thus, decided to become a diplomat. But I learned from an ethnic Korean teacher at my high school that I could not become a diplomat in Japan. Upon graduating from high school, I was weighing Japanese against Korean colleges and eventually chose the latter thinking that I should learn about Korea. Also, I was planning to take the examination to become a diplomat in Korea.

Obstacles, difficulties, and prejudices While many returnees from Japan come to Korea in order to become “true” Koreans in their homeland, Korean society’s reception of them is not always welcoming or favourable. Once they arrive in their homeland, returnees from Japan encounter various obstacles, prejudices, and discrimination. Facing these difficulties, they feel disappointed, get angry,

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or feel sad about Korean society, and are forced to reconsider and reformulate their self-identity.

The resident registration card: institutional barriers All the interviewees singled out one institutional barrier which frustrates them in everyday life and seriously mars their ethno-national identity—the Resident Registration Card. Koreans are issued this card when they reach seventeen years old from the local administration office. With one’s name, photo, address, and unique number, this card functions as the most important proof of one’s identity in Korea. Ethnic Koreans from Japan do not have this card even though they have Korean nationality. If they remain in Korea over 30 days, they have to register, just as other foreigners do, at the local immigration offices and are issued a Resident Card for Overseas Koreans. Each resident card for domestic Koreans has a unique 13-digit identification number: a combination of 6-digits representing birth year/month/date followed by a unique seven-digit number. The problem is the different numbering format for overseas nationals. The 7-digit identification number starts with 1 for males and 2 for females on a Resident Card, whereas for overseas nationals, the number starts with either 5 or 6. Even though they obtain the card through cumbersome procedures and with the expectation of a more stable resident status, all the interviewees admit that the card turned out to be of little use. With their number, they could not register on Internet sites, purchase cellular phones, or even fill out an entry form for a marathon. They need extra paperwork just as other foreigners do. Kim Nara, a university student, feeling deadly pain in his eyes, took a taxi at 3 a.m. to an emergency room only to be rejected since he did not have the “proper” registration card number. He had to go to another clinic and plead for medical treatment. Yang Sǂk, another student, mentions: “Whenever I run into the message ‘It’s not a proper number’ or ‘There is an error in your number. Please check it again’, I feel like I am drifting farther from Korea.” Park Hyesǂn also comments regarding the resident card: “I’m a complete foreigner, a foreigner with nationality! I felt that way. I’m again a foreigner here as I was in Japan! I came to think that way.” In order to get the same Korean resident card, they have to give up their hard-earned right of permanent residency in Japan. Given the undecided future for most returnees, however, this is far from a simple choice.

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Korean language: a cause of fear and frustration For the ethnic Korean returnees from Japan, one difficulty they experience most often in daily lives is related to their Korean language skills. Because most Koreans think that it is natural for any ethnic Korean to have Korean language ability, returnees from Japan become vulnerable to reprimands, suspicion, and questions from Korean people the moment they land at the airport. Very often, the immigration official at the airport is the first person to signal the not-so-congenial reception of the returnees to Korean society. If they are lucky enough at the airport, taxi drivers will interrogate them or attempt to “teach” them Korean. Or, even a small kid at the boarding house expresses his/her innocent curiosity. With one voice they ask, “Why can’t you speak Korean when you are a Korean?” Their frustration worsens partly because they also share the essentialist linguistic nationalism to some extent. As mentioned above, many of the young generation of Koreans in Japan are assimilated to Japanese culture including language. When they become conscious of their ethno-national identity as a Korean, they often feel ashamed about their ineptitude in Korean, and enhancing their Korean language proficiency is one of the major motivations for their return. Thus, facing their inability in Korean language and Korean people’ responses to that, returnees wrestle with complicated feelings—hurt, shame, anger, frustration, and/or sadness. When asked why they cannot speak Korean, they think of it as one-sided criticism which does not take into account their difficult history in Japan but, at the same time, agree that they should be better in Korean. Returnees from Japan face a distinctive dilemma regarding linguistic practices in daily lives. If they speak broken Korean and fluent Japanese, Korean people quickly conclude that they are Japanese, which the returnees do not like to hear. If they confess that they are Koreans from Japan, Korean people doubt their identity asking “How can’t you speak Korean then?” As a result, speaking Korean is a big challenge or a source of great fear, particularly at the beginning of their stay in Korea. Some choose a strategy of not speaking in public places and passing as a “domestic” Korean. This attempt to pass reminds them, as one interviewee mentioned, of their strategies in Japan where they use Japanese names rather than Korean “real” names in order to pass as Japanese. Beneath the returnees’ diffidence regarding their language ability and Korean people’s impatience with the returnees’ inept Korean lies the fact that returnees from Japan speak Japanese, the former coloniser’s language, as their mother tongue. Even when they can speak Korean, returnees from Japan, as native Japanese speakers, often speak Korean with distinctive Japanese accents and pronunciations which many Koreans dislike or

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ridicule. Sǂ Kyǂngsik, the youngest brother of Sǂ Sǎng and Sǂ Chunsik, expressed the linguistic dilemma that ethnic Koreans in Japan face as “prisoners of the mother tongue”. Even when they become conscious of the colonial context in which their minority status has been formed and try to build/strengthen their ethno-national identity, Sǂ commented, Koreansin-Japan have no choice but to resort to Japanese, the coloniser’s language. For those who attended a Korean ethnic school run by the proP’yǂngyang League of Korean residents in Japan, frustration with their Korean becomes twisted once more. Since the official language at these schools is Korean, attendees of the school are much better in Korean than others.13 But their Korean is a variant of the North Korean language which is different from that of the South in vocabulary, intonation, and accent. The distinctive linguistic features of the North Korean language have become objects of satire and mockery in South Korean society, and returnees from Japan with a North Korean language background become vulnerable to discrimination from Korean society. Facing these unexpected responses, Yang Sǂk points out, returnees become hurt and angry since they take them not just as criticism about their language habits but also as negating their whole lives in Japan.

A half Jap or a rich overseas Korean: prejudices in everyday life In addition to these institutional barriers and linguistic difficulties, returnees from Japan face various prejudices they had not expected, and these prejudices are certainly implicated by the strong anti-Japanese sentiment of Korean society. The term pan-tchokbppari (half Jap), for instance, best illustrates the anti-Japanese sentiments projected onto ethnic Korean returnees from Japan. The word tchokppari (Jap) is known to have originated during the Japanese colonisation of Korea. Seeing Japanese people wearing traditional socks that are divided into only two parts, Koreans began to liken Japanese people to “pigs’ feet”(chokpal). The term has very negative and pejorative nuances condensing Korean people’s strong anti-Japanese sentiments in it. The returnees from Japan are prone to be called pan (half)-tchoppari the moment they disclose any Japanese cultural trait. Or, it might be said that they are, regardless of their nationality, ethnic consciousness, and competency in Korean culture, vulnerable to the negative denomination only by the fact that they are from Japan.14 There is one factor which can offset the image of being “half Japanese”. For many Koreans, Japan appears to be an economic superpower and a former colonising country at the same time. In particular, during the 1960s

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and 1970s, when a huge gap existed between the Japanese and Korean economies, the prevailing image/prejudice in Korea was of “rich ethnic Koreans in Japan”. In other words, ethnic Koreans in Japan have projected double images in Korean society. They have simultaneously been regarded with both scorn and envy. Although this double representation continues, the image of “rich ethnic Koreans in Japan” has weakened considerably with the recent economic rise of South Korea. Thus, Sǂ Kyǂngsik even comments: “I guess the young returnees from Japan these days will find it harder in Korea than before. In the 1960s and 1970s, Korean people at least thought we were well off, but I wonder if they are now seeing ethnic Koreans-inJapan simply as ‘an object of compassion’.” Yang Sǂk describes what he has felt during his six year stay in Korea. I feel that Korean society is more closed than Japan. For ethnic Koreans in Japan, it would be easier to live in Japan, I guess. People here have a peculiar sense of “we-ness”. Once you’re inside the “we,” it’s really comfortable; but it’s damn difficult to get in…. I’ve idealized Korea thinking that it would be a country without discrimination and with generous and open-minded people. But the reality is far from it and that makes me sad. I still hear people call me half Jap. Or, they say “You must be rich since you’re from Japan”.

Of course, not everything the returnees find in Korea is negative. Despite all the prejudices and shortcomings, Yang Sǂk says he likes South Korea and might reside in Korea permanently. He comments that people are warm-hearted, each person is full of energy, and the society is very dynamic. Two interviewees have Korean boyfriends with whom they plan to marry in the near future. The other two interviewees in their twenties have not decided yet where to live, but want to find work they can do that traverses Korea and Japan.

Identities Ethnic Koreans in Japan are tomatoes. Tomatoes that have grown up in the fruit land. One day I felt I was not a fruit. In the fruit land, they scatter salt when they eat tomatoes [assuming tomatoes are vegetables]. Wanting to be accepted as it was, the tomato went to the vegetable land, the homeland. People in the vegetable land, however, treat tomatoes as fruits sometimes. Moreover, they scatter sugar over tomatoes (Chǂng Kumi 2005: 157-158).

Before examining the returnees’ reformulations of self-identities in the homeland, a brief explanation of two key terms is necessary. When my

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interviewees talked about their identities, they frequently resorted to the expressions of chaeilgyop’o and zainichi. Chaeilgyop’o ( ⛐ 㖍 ⁹ 傆 : overseas ethnic Koreans in Japan) is the term that Koreans in Korea use to call ethnic Koreans in Japan. When in Japan, old-comer Koreans rarely call themselves by this term.15 But, as will be described below, returnees from Japan come to embrace the term as their self-identity through their experiences in Korea, and this means that they have come to terms with domestic Koreans’ perspectives on them. The Japanese word zainichi (⛐㖍: ethnic Koreans residing in Japan) literally means “residing/staying in Japan”. However, in general usage, it is an abbreviation of “Zainichi Koreans” referring to old-comer Korean residents in Japan. It is the most commonly used term in Japan by Japanese and ethnic Korean residents themselves in order to refer to them. As reviewed above, many returnees from Japan come to Korea in order to become “true” Koreans, not chaeilgyop’o or zainichi. In this section, I use the two terms untranslated when citing the returnees’ use of them to express their newly recognised ethnic identities. Yi Sǂnhǎi grew up in a neighbouring town of Hiroshima with little contact with other ethnic Koreans except her relatives. Since her mother is a first-generation Korean married to Sǂnhǎi’s father, a second-generation ethnic Korean in Japan, she has had frequent chances to visit Korea. Sǂnhǎi’s Japanese friends learned rather “naturally” that she is a Korean since she often visited Korea. Sǂnhǎi has not been discriminated against by her friends; rather they expressed envy for her “being a foreigner”. When in Japan, she never thought of herself as a chaeilgyop’o or a zainichi: She simply was a Korean. Sǂnhǎi returned to Korea in order to learn Korean language and actualise her dream of becoming a diplomat. Unlike some other interviewees, it did not occur to her that she needed to become a more “true” Korean since she never doubted that she was a Korean. Thus, when asked about her identity in Korea, she could not say the word chaeilgyop’o. She just said, “I’m from Japan”. Now, however, Sǂnhǎi considers chaeilgyop’o as a word that easily explains her identity. It is the most convenient term to express her sense of self. Many returnees from Japan, not unlike Sǂnhǎi, come to Korea believing that they are Koreans. As I mentioned above, motivations for the return are generally very complex, but most interviewees admitted ethnic reasons for their return, whether it be a search for ethnic roots or to become a more “perfect” Korean through learning the Korean language and culture. Very often, however, their firm identities as a Korean become

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shaken or fade after they arrive in Korea, and they are forced to reconstruct their identities. This discrepancy is largely a result of the lack of knowledge of most Koreans regarding the distinctive history and circumstances of the ethnic Koreans in Japan. They have little awareness about the serious discrimination and marginalisation that ethnic Koreans undergo in Japanese society, and many Koreans even have little idea about the colonial origin of the Korean presence in Japan. For many Koreans in general, ethnic Koreans in Japan are just one of the several overseas ethnic Korean groups or, at best, rich overseas Koreans who belong to a rich country. For instance, the Korean nationality that many ethnic Koreans in Japan have maintained despite a variety of difficulties, and that has functioned to ground their identity as Korean is little understood in Korea. For many Koreans, it is not easy to imagine a third or fourth generation ethnic Korean born in a foreign country maintaining their Korean nationality. Thus, Korean people judge returnees from Japan according to their own yardstick for “Koreanness”. And according to this yardstick, in order to be a proper Korean, what Harumi Befu observes as a Japanese tendency holds true, that is, the claim for “equivalency and mutual implications among land, people (that is race), culture, and language” (Befu 2001, 71). It is assumed that cultural and linguistic competencies inhere in the genes (“blood”) of the Korean who has lived on the Korean peninsula. Therefore, they find it hard to understand why a person of Korean descent with Korean appearance is unable to speak Korean. In other words, Korean nationality and consciousness as a Korean is not sufficient to make one a Korean. Or, a person of Korean descent who even maintains nationality and national consciousness but lost one’s cultural and linguistic competencies is a real anomaly. The person must be a foreigner or at best a “half Jap”. As a result, “Some people consider me to be a Korean, some Japanese, and some other chaeilgyop’o. They judge me as they please”, Chǂng Yuri notes. In addition to this unawareness and one-sided judgment, ethnic Koreans from Japan face such institutional barriers as the Registration Card system and lack of voting rights16 which hurt their self-identity as Korean. They experience bitter feelings of disillusionment, but in time come to embrace their circumstances since they feel that there is nothing they can do about it or “it’s just too much to respond every time”. They are forced to redefine their identity, and come to the conclusion that they are chaeilgyop’o or zainichi after all. For instance, Kim Nara tells his identity trajectory as follows:

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Nobody seems to think of me as a Korean, and that frustrated me most in Korea. “You’re a chaeiltongp’o? Then aren’t you Japanese?” They respond this way. If I tell them I have Korean nationality, they become perplexed. Even if I explain about my circumstances, they don’t understand me. They say it’s ridiculous that I still maintain Korean nationality and ask why I don’t acquire Japanese nationality which would make my life much easier. I just can’t find the words to answer them. It makes me feel bad and hurts my pride…Yes, that made me the most frustrated…I don’t find it easy to explain myself, and now come to think it too bothersome to do. Still, I think of myself as a Korean and answer that way when asked. But at the same time, I came to see myself as a zainichi, too. I know they are contradictory, but I am both and I have decided to accept my identity as it is.

Chǂng Yuri also notes about her case: Experiencing various difficulties with the Registration Card system, I felt that I am a foreigner with nationality in Korea. Of course, there is no nationality called chaeilgyop’o, but I came to think of myself as belonging to that category. Still, I feel bad when people call me Japanese. Some call me a Japanese, some a Korean, and some others say that I’m now qualified enough to be a Korean since I have Korean nationality and appearance and can speak Korean fairly well. It’s just too tiring, and I think it’s just enough now. It’s just okay to be a chaeilgyop’o. I’ve decided to think that way.

It is far from rare that ethnic return migrants’ self-identity based on their ethnic heritage becomes problematic and shaken after they return to their ancestral homeland. A series of recent works about JapaneseBrazilian return migration to Japan (Linger 2001; Roth 2002; Tsuda 2000, 2003; Yamanaka 1996, Yamashita 2001), for instance, show that Japanese-Brazilian returnees’ identity trajectory moves from Japanese to Brazilian as they spend time in Japan. What makes the case of ethnic return from Japan to Korea distinct from that of returning Japanese Brazilians is the returnees’ responses after they become disillusioned in their ethnic homeland. In contrast to the Japanese-Brazilians in Japan who, over time, come to “identify more strongly with things Brazilian” (Roth 2002), “act Brazilian” (Tsuda 2000), or “intensify Brazilianness” (Linger 2001) and do these as ethnic resistance, ethnic Koreans’ disillusionment does not lead to strengthened identification with Japan. Rather, they redefine their identity through “double negating”, i.e., being not-Japanese nor Korean, or accept the in-between identity. This reformulation is often manifested as admitting their identity as chaeilgyop’o. Before they returned to Korea, ethnic Koreans’ perception

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of the chaeilgyop’o identity varied, but all the interviewees, through their disillusioning experiences in Korea, have come to consider it as something positive and distinct from “the Korean”. In other words, rather than strengthening their identification with the country of origin [Japan], ethnic Korean returnees from Japan develop a new diasporic identity through their experiences in their homeland. Of course, their strengthened identity as chaeilgyop’o, unlike in many other cases of ethnic return migrants who consciously display and perform re-recognised ethnic culture, does not involve any distinctive cultural features or contents that returnees from Japan can consciously display and enact as their “ethnic” markers or resistance. Overall, their presence in the Korean society is still individualised and invisible.

Conclusion Although it is a type of transnational migration in general which is rapidly expanding recently, ethnic return migration raises important theoretical issues which make it distinct from the more general migration phenomena. Ethnic return migrants are connected to their homeland by descent, and this connection often works favourably for their return movement. This fact, however, does not necessarily prevent the marginalisation of the returnees in their homeland. If we confine our discussion in the East Asian region, return migration of the ethnic Japanese from Latin American countries and of the ethnic Korean from China would be representative cases that illustrate those theoretical points very well. Ethnic return should be understood in terms of the transnational movement, immigration policies favouring ethnic connectedness, and negotiations of ethno-national identities by various subjects involved. As discussed above, old-comer Korean returnees from Japan, not unlike many other ethnic return migrants, often come to recognise their fundamental differences in their ancestral homeland from those who were born and raised there, and are forced to rebuild their self-identity. Also, compared to cases of return migration by ethnic Koreans from other countries, ethnic and/or political causes have often strongly motivated them to return. The severe discrimination against and exclusion of ethnic Koreans in Japanese society has been important background for their return to Korea. As Sǂ Kyǂnsik comments, the return during the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, should be interpreted as “being pushed out” by Japanese society. On the other hand, with the gradual improvement of the living conditions for old-comer Koreans in Japan and the relative rise of South

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Korea in recent years, ethnic return from Japan appears to be more voluntary and practically motivated than ever. While they returned to Korea primarily searching for ethno-national identity, the returnees anticipate that with education at a Korean college, they can find a way to utilize their bilingual and bicultural competency since bicultural expertise is valued more and more these days. One of Yuki’s interviewees even comments that “If you cannot get into a good and famous college in Japan, it would be better to enter a famous Korean college [utilizing the Studying-in-Homeland Program]” (Yuki 2001, 29). For the time being at least, various ethnic reasons are thought to work as major factors for the ethnic Korean return from Japan. At the same time, however, we might anticipate that some practical and strategic considerations will motivate them more than before and more old-comer Koreans in Japan will weigh transnational strategies as an option that will enhance their life chances. How this will change the return journey of oldcomer Koreans from Japan merits further research.

Notes 1. The earlier and substantially different version of this work, “Returning Ethnic Koreans from Japan in Korea,” was published in Korean in Review of International and Area Studies 17 (4), 2008. My additional work for this chapter was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2008-362-B00006). 2. According to the data of the Immigration Bureau of Japan, 530,046 Koreans, including 377,350 with Special Residency, were registered as foreigners in Japan at the end of 2012. In 1991, old-comer Koreans and their descendants were granted Special Residency uniformly. “New-comers” refer to those who migrated to Japan after 1945. The majority of the new-comers went over to Japan since the late 1980s and their visa status varies vastly. In contrast to old-comers, new-comer Koreans in Japan rarely face similar prejudices and discriminations when they return to Korea and do not feel conflicts regarding their ethno-national identities. All these make it difficult to lump the two groups together. 3. Most of the ethnic Koreans in Japan were originally from the southern parts of the Korean peninsula (now South Korea) including Cheju Island. 4. In a recent study, Kwon Hyǂk T’ae analyses how ethnic Koreans in Japan have been represented in Korean society (Kwon 2007). Based on text analysis of movies and comic books, he points out three major “filters”—anticommunism, nationalism, and developmentalism—that formed distinctive and specific images and representations of Koreans-in-Japan in Korean society. He also points out that these tendencies have much weakened recently. 5. Many first generation Koreans-in-Japan considered their stay in Japan would be temporary and dreamed of returning to Korea in the near future. As their stay in Japan lengthened, however, later generations have realized that a return to the

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homeland would be highly implausible and began to keep a certain distance from Korea (Kweon 2000). 6. In stark contrast to the enormous attention focused on his release and “return” to Korea, few in the media showed interest in Kwon Hǎi-ro’s life after his return to Korea. He was reported to have been involved in two criminal cases, and died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 82. His death made little news at all. 7. Ethnic Koreans in Japan who are not naturalized are registered either with South Korean nationality or Chosǂnjǂk. Although many people with Chosǂnjǂk support North Korea, it should not be equated as North Korean nationality in technical or practical senses. Technically, Chosǂn is the name of Korea before the Liberation that no longer exists. When the Japanese government initiated the Aliens Registration Act in 1948, it registered Korean residents uniformly with Chosǂn as their “nationality”. The Japanese government’s official position has been that the term “Chosǂn” here is not a state name but a “sign”. In this sense, people with Chosǂnjǂk are legally stateless. Practically, too, Chosǂnjǂk includes both the people who actively maintain it as an expression of their support of the North and others who did not choose South Korean nationality after the 1965 diplomatic normalisation between South Korea and Japan. 8. Another famous soccer player who made big news and controversy in Korea recently would be Chǂng Tae Se. Having attended North Korea-affiliated ethnic schools in Japan, Chǂng wanted to play as a member of North Korea’s national soccer team even though he has South Korean nationality. FIFA accepted his wish and Chǂng participated in the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa. He is now playing as a member of a South Korean soccer club. Chǂng’s father has South Korean nationality while his mother keeps Chosǂnjǂk. During the last several years, a few soccer players who crossed the complicated borders of nationality and ethnic identity that traverses the two Koreas and Japan have made news in Korea. 9. Except for Sǂ Kyǂngsik, who is a well-known figure as a scholar and a brother of the Sǂ brothers mentioned above, all the interviewees’ names are pseudonyms. 10. Ethnic returnees from Japan to Korea have received little academic attention in Korea until recently. Various media including television and newspapers also have just begun to convey returnees’ voices and experiences in Korea highlighting the prejudices and discrimination they face in their homeland. 11. “3-D works” refer to “dirty, dangerous, and difficult” jobs which are often performed by blue-collar workers. Since many domestic workers are not willing to take up these works, they are done by foreign migrant labourers in many countries. 12. Yuki cites one ethnic Korean student from Japan who confessed, “There was no college in Japan I could get into”, and observes that some Koreans in Japan return to Korea seeking their version of the “Korean dream” (Yuki 2001, 31). 13. The pro-P’yǂngyang League runs a nationwide system of ethnic schools from kindergarten to college. The ethnic schools affiliated with the pro-Seoul Federation, unlike the Choch’ongnyǂn schools, offer a curriculum which meets the Japanese Ministry of Education’s standards for full accreditation and use Japanese as the official language. 14. An article in the ChungAng Daily (30 September 2004) shows the results of a survey conducted by two ethnic Korean students from Japan of 457 students from

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five major colleges in Seoul. One question asked which group they liked most among ethnic Koreans from Japan, the United States, and Russia. The answer was “expectedly those from the U.S.A.” To the question regarding the identity of returnees from Japan, 58 percent of the students responded “Japanese or people of unknown nationality.” One junior student is reported to have commented, “To be frank, if I run into those who are talking to each other in Japanese on campus, I can’t but think of them as being Japanese.” 15. Among various Korean terms referring to ethnic Koreans in Japan, chaeilgyop’o and chaeildongp’o (⛐㖍⎴傆) are used most often in Korea. Even though used interchangeably, they do have differing implications. As the literal meanings of the terms, i.e., “overseas ethnic Koreans in Japan” and “our brethren/compatriots in Japan”, respectively, tell, chaeildongp’o has strong ethnonational implication. Returnees from Japan come to embrace chaeilgyop’o, not chaeildongp’o, as their identity in their homeland. 16. When I was conducting interviews, many informants pointed out their lack of voting rights as one of major institutional discriminations they face in Korea. However, with the revision of the Election Law of Korea in 2009, overseas nationals were granted voting rights, and returnees from Japan could vote in the general election and presidential election of 2012.

References Befu, Harumi. 2001. Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of Nihonjinron. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press. Iglicka, Krystyna. 1998. “Are They Fellow Countrymen or Not?: The Migration of Ethnic Poles from Kazakhstan to Poland.” The International Migration Review 32 (4): 995-1014. Chǂng, Kumi. 2005. Chaeilgyop’o “Yellow Kumi’s Stories” in Korea and Japan. Seoul: An Graphics. (In Korean) Kashiwazaki, Chikako. 2000. “To be Korean without Korean Nationality.” In Koreans in Japan: New Dimensions of Hybrid and Diverse Communities, edited by Sonia Ryang. New Haven: East Rock Institute. Kweon, Sug-In. 2000. “Identities of the Ethnic Koreans in Japan: Focusing on ‘The Third Way’ Debate.” In Theory and Practice in Korean Cultural Anthropology, edited by the Publication Committee for Essays in Celebration of Professor Han Sang Bok’s Retirement. Seoul: Sowha. (In Korean) Kwon, Hyǂk Tae. 2007. “Ethnic Koreans in Japan and Korean Society: How has Korean Society Represented Ethnic Koreans in Japan.” Historical Criticism 78: 234-267. (In Korean) Levy, Daniel. 2003. “The Politicization of Ethnic German Immigrants: The Transformation of State Priorities.” In Diaspora and Ethnic Migrants: Germany, Israel and Post-Soviet Successor States in

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Comparative Perspective, edited by Rainer Münz and Rainer Ohliger. London & Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Linger, Daniel Touro. 2001. No One Home: Brazilian Selves Remade in Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Münz, Rainer, and Rainer Ohliger (2003) Diasporas and Ethnic Migrants: Germany, Israel and Post-Soviet Successor States in Comparative Perspective. London & Portland, OR: Frank Cass. Roth, Joshua Hotaka. 2002. Brokered Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Migrants in Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Tsuda, Takeyuku (Gaku). 2000. “Acting Brazilian in Japan: Ethnic Resistance among Return Migrants.” Ethnology 39 (1): 55-71. —. 2003. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. Yamanaka, Keiko. 1996. “Return Migration of Japanese-Brazilians to Japan: The Nikkeijin as Ethnic Minority and Political Construct.” Diaspora 5 (1): 65-97. Yamashita, Karen Tei. 2001. Circle K Cycle. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Yuki (Kurashige Chǂng Uhǎi). 2001. “Life and Culture of the Zainichi Students Studying in Korea.” A Master’s Thesis of Education, Seoul National University (in Korean).

PART II: EAST ASIAN CHINESE MIGRATION: TAIWAN, HONG KONG AND CHINA

CHAPTER SIX INTRODUCTION: HONG KONG-TAIWAN-CHINA IN MIGRATION RELATIONS YUK WAH CHAN AND DOMINIC MENG-HSUAN YANG

The post-World War II political reshuffling of different regimes of power led to mass population movements; those between China and Hong Kong and between China and Taiwan being among the biggest. Between 1947 and 1960, around one million1 Chinese migrated to Hong Kong, either legally or illegally. On the other side, around one million2 Chinese followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan. These movements were results of political changes in China in the 1940s as well as the economic difficulties in the subsequent three decades. While communication and movement between China and Taiwan was abruptly cut after 1949, Hong Kong, with its proximity to China, continued to face regular and irregular immigration waves from China in the three decades that followed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. In the early 1960s, over half the population in Hong Kong were born in China. Before 1980, the colonial government in Hong Kong implemented a “touch base” policy that “legally” allowed illegal immigrants who had reached the urban areas before they were caught, to stay in Hong Kong and apply for an identity card. This section mainly deals with migration relations between Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. Although these three places together with Macau are often referred to as “Greater China”, and are considered to be within one cultural orbit, these places have been very much differentiated as a result of political and economic changes as well as migration and its consequences. Yet, rarely are they understood and examined through the dynamics of people flows and the lens of migration.

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Most studies of Chinese migration have focused on the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere; Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwanese Chinese are seldom included as part of the Chinese diaspora. This is partly due to political delimitation. To China, these three places are never considered as “separate’ parts of China; people in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are labelled with the brotherly term gangaotai tongbao (Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau compatriots). The Beijing authorities will not accept Hong Kong and Taiwan to be described as being “overseas”; like the term ‘overseas compatriots’ used for overseas Chinese in Asia and around the world. Yet, with the reality of Hong Kong and Taiwan being ruled under different political regimes and the fact that diasporas are those who stay and live in places away from their country of origin, there should not be any difficulty in identifying Hong Kong Chinese and Taiwan’s mainland Chinese as two diaspora Chinese communities. The chapters in this section will relate the major development of the Hong Kong and Taiwan “Chinese diasporas” and their societies since the late 1940s. The analysis of these changes will address different concerns in migration studies.

Hong Kong-China migration relations Hong Kong was ceded from China to the British as a result of an unequal treaty in the nineteenth century and had been a colony of Great Britain for one and a half centuries. Although Hong Kong had been under colonial rule since 1842, it was never really “separated” from China. The land border between China and Hong Kong allowed free flows of people. In the first century under colonial rule, the border was mainly a nominal one, and people commuted between China and Hong Kong freely and frequently. Many came to Hong Kong because of the need to find a livelihood and trade goods. From a few thousands in the early 1840s, the population in Hong Kong grew to hundreds of thousands in the 1930s; yet two-thirds of which had only lived in the city for less than ten years (Faure 2005, 28). The flows of people between Hong Kong and China were extremely fluid and subject to socio-economic and political situations in both places. Chinese people from mainland China continued to enter Hong Kong because of poverty, political instability, and war in China. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in the late 1940s, there were massive “exoduses” of people from China to Hong Kong. Although some called these people “refugees”, considering the traditional free flows of people between the two places, one should perhaps hesitate to use the term

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in its traditional sense. The particular situation between Hong Kong and China and the general negative perception towards Chinese refugees in the West had undermined the chance of these Chinese to move further for resettlement (Peterson 2012; Madokoro 2012; Lam and Liu 1998; Wickberg 1994; Chan 1991; Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo 1989). In 1950, the Hong Kong government decided to close the border. Yet, this was unable to check the influxes of people across the border. From 1945 to 1954, a total of 885,000 political and economic migrants were recorded (Hambro 1955). Migrants and refugees played important roles in the development of Hong Kong and its economic take-off. While emigrant entrepreneurs had brought capital, machines, and skills to lay the industrial base of Hong Kong, the majority of the refugee migrants provided labour for this development. A large number of light industrial enterprises were started in the late fifties and sixties (including textile and plastic factories) (Wong 1988). In 1961, over 52 percent of the local population was China born. And in 1971, although the locally born proportion had increased to more than half (53.8%), most parents of these “locals” were migrants from China. Cantonese became the dominant language by the 1960s while a number of the older generation of migrants still spoke their hometown dialects (such as the Chaozhou dialect and Shanghainese). Many refugees originally treated Hong Kong as a “lifeboat”—to escape from political and economic turmoil and to search for a better livelihood. They were described as people who would return to their hometown in China once the situation there became better or would move elsewhere if the situation in Hong Kong took a turn for the worse. This ideology is sometimes labelled as “refugee mentality” of the Hong Kong people and denotes the “transient” nature of Hong Kong (Lau and Kuan 1988). However, it was soon found that most people in Hong Kong no longer sought a return to the “motherland”. They established their families in Hong Kong and treated the city as home, especially after the economy took off in the 1970s and Hong Kong became an international financial centre in the 1980s. The signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 brought Beijing and Britain to agree on the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Since then, a large number of middle class Hong Kong Chinese began to migrate to the West, mainly the United States, Australia, and Canada. It was estimated that around 500,000 to 700,000 people migrated in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, more than eighty percent of these outflows ultimately returned to Hong Kong, rendering their overseas sojourn extremely short (Sussman 2012, 34). From a migrant society, mainly made up of a refugee population, to a centre receiving

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migrants and re-migrants from different parts of the world, Hong Kong is a unique case study in which we can understand Asian movement vis-à-vis regional and global economic transformation and political shifts of power. It is also a useful case for illustrating the dynamics of home, root, route, and sojourn, and the susceptibility of migration.

Taiwan-China migration relations A majority of the population in Taiwan identify themselves as Hoklo while a small minority identify themselves as Hakka—people with ancestral linkages to southern Fujian and northern Guangdong. In 1895, the Qing Empire ceded Taiwan to Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War. The island was under Japanese colonial rule for half a century before Japan returned it to Nationalist China (KMT) upon defeat in World War II. Though the Japanese implemented educational policies and indoctrination campaigns to turn the islanders into loyal subjects of the emperor, before the mid-1940s, many ethnic Chinese in Taiwan still clung on to their Chinese dialects and cultural heritage as a way of resisting the Japanese. However, between 1948 and 1955, Taiwan received around one million migrants from China through the movement of the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek to the island. After the movement, the political relationship between Taiwan and China basically entered a frozen period—all communications came to a stop until 1987. Since the island’s retrocession in 1945, the imposition of high-handed policies by the KMT had produced immense distrust among the semi-Japanized local population. Anti-KMT sentiment developed quickly. Such sentiment finally led to a tragic event, the “228 Incident” on 28 February 1947. The Incident led to government-organized mass killings of the local Taiwanese, which reinforced the resentment of the Taiwanese towards the incoming mainlanders. It was said that the KMT government showed much favouritism towards mainlanders. However, among the one million Chinese who migrated to Taiwan, not all enjoyed special treatment and elevated status. The majority of mainlanders in fact were low-ranking soldiers and civil servants. Others were war refugees who ended up in Taiwan by chance. Yet, after the 228 Incident, social cleavages remained and evolved into an ethnic split between the waishenren (mainlanders) and benshenren (the native Taiwanese). In the meantime, the aboriginal communities of Taiwan remained the most disadvantaged and suppressed group in the island’s political and social landscape.

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Before Taiwan’s democratisation, the KMT ruled the island with an iron fist. Besides granting mainlander elites privileges, the Chiang regime had introduced the policy that forced the native Taiwanese to speak Mandarin, and forbade the use of the local dialects of Minnanyu (Hokkien/Taiwanese), and Hakka. This repressive language policy was compounded by covert discrimination against the native Taiwanese in education and government employment, and open discrimination against the Taiwanese in national politics. The ethnic split thus continued to grow and went hand in hand with the democratic movement in Taiwan. Since democratization, the native Taiwanese have often been linked to the political ideology of independence (independence from China), while mainlanders and their descendants are considered supporters of unification (with China). However, such a clear-cut distinction overlooks factors such as social class, generational difference, and intermarriage. Under the current president Ma Ying-jeou, who favours economic integration with China, the controversy over national identity and talk of independence have become less prominent in Taiwanese politics since the 2010s.

Alternative “Chinese” and “Chinese cultural centres” In migration studies, migrants are often treated as minorities in host societies and scholars are concerned with their settlement, assimilation patterns, and transnational connections with the root country. Experiences of those who migrated from China to Hong Kong and Taiwan and the migration relations between Hong Kong and China, and between Taiwan and China may offer a paradigmatic shift for migration studies. We offer some new perspectives to examine migrant communities. Hong Kong, as a society formed by a majority of migrant and refugees and their descendants from the 1950s to 1980s, has developed into a distinguished economic entity since the 1980s. It is thus largely a Chinese city-state formed by a young diaspora community. It was around the same time, that people in Hong Kong, especially the younger generation and the locally born second generation, nourished a local consciousness and identity—which was particularly directed towards a differentiation against the mainland Chinese. At present, the term “Hong Kong people” is the most popular identity upheld in Hong Kong, while that in Taiwan is “Taiwan people”. What has been peculiar in the migration relations between China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan is the fact that the identity politics of both Taiwan and Hong Kong has evolved around the opposition and contrasts of people of Chinese origins who migrated out of China and to the two places at different points of historical time.

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As pointed out by Wang Gungwu, Hong Kong and Taiwan are two peculiar cultural centres for the Chinese (Wang 2004, 42-43): Backed as it is by some 1.3 billion Chinese, the potential for the PRC to be that China and, therefore, to be always such a centre, need not be challenged here. From the point of view of most Chinese overseas, however, this is no longer self-evident. What can be observed among the Diaspora communities is that, during the past half century, secondary cultural centres have emerged in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and there is even the possibility of tertiary centres forming.

To Wang, many overseas Chinese communities, including the new generation of locally born Southeast Asian Chinese and the new Chinese immigrants to Western cities, have been attracted to Hong Kong to look for standards of a Chinese modernity. On the other hand, although Taiwan has a different cultural history, Wang believes that for many overseas Chinese, huaqiao, Taiwan still “has the capacity to stand for the primary Chinese heritage and could remain the major secondary centre for all things Chinese if it wanted to” (Wang 2004, 44). The chapters in this section will detail the construction and development of two Chinese diasporas; one in Taiwan and one in Hong Kong. While the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora was often described wholly as “a migrant society” before the 1980s, it has shaped itself quickly into a self-conscious alternative kind of a Chinese society to distinguish from China. Chan and Ko will show how Hong Kong has turned from a refugee port to a migration hub in Asia. Chan also conceptualises Hong Kong as a “return diaspora” since 1997. This was achieved not by the physical movement of Hong Kong people, but by the changes of the political status of Hong Kong as a whole. The point in debate is that even after this “diaspora community” returned to China in 1997, it has continued to differentiate itself from China, and Chan attempts to analyse such differentiated “return” population with this new concept—“graduated diaspora”. This “homebound” return posts an interesting contrast to the outbound migration of the KMT regime and its followers in the 1940s. Yet, though having returned, the return Hong Kong Chinese diaspora has felt uncomfortable fitting into the larger national body of the People’s Republic of China. Many would rather identify themselves as Hongkongers rather than as Chinese. They also have doubts on whether they can adapt to the social fabric of China as a whole, given the two places’ disparate (political) histories. Chan suggests using the concept of “graduated diaspora” to explicate the essential differences between “root” and “route” identity and how people, once on the move, will not easily

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compromise their newly gained experiences with the orthodox framing of root identity. The mainlander communities in Taiwan have undergone myriad changes since the 1950s. Dominic Yang investigates the diaspora communities among older generation migrants from China. He probes into the identity crisis of the prolonged “exile” communities of the mainlanders through their “native place” associations and their profound sense of nostalgia. Despite the fact that most mainlanders still hold a strong attachment to their mainland homeland and home, a sense of loss may emerge after these elderly sojourners make return visits to their birthplaces. The reality in the homeland may not match their memories of home. Memories, imagination of connections, and nostalgic yearning for home had intertwined to create a mixture of split loyalties and new form of sensibility for social changes. Yang argues for a diachronic approach to the study of mainlander identity formation as well as transformation that pays attention to historical development and generational differences.

Notes 1. Full sets of yearly records of entries and exits are not available. The figure is an estimation calculated by Yuk Wah Chan by subtracting the natural increase (difference between births and deaths) of the population from the yearly increase of the number of people in Hong Kong; all these figures are provided by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department. Other sources of reference such as Hambro (1955), Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo (1989), and Lam and Liu (1998) have also been taken into account. 2. There have been different estimates on the size of the civil war migrants following Chiang Kai-shek’s regime to Taiwan ranging from one million to three million. According to an early study conducted by a demographer in Taiwan, the lower end of the estimates is closer to the real number (see Li 1969).

References Chan, Wai Kwan. 1991. The Making of Hong Kong Society, Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Faure, David. 2005. “The Common People in Hong Kong History: Their Livelihood and Aspirations until the 1930s.” In Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration, edited by Lee Puitak, pp. 89-38. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Hambro, Edvard. 1955. The Problem of Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong: Report Submitted to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff.

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Lam, Kit Chun, and Pak Wai Liu. 1998. Immigration and the Economy of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Lau, Siu-kai, and Kuan Hsin-chi. 1988. The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Li, Dongming ( 㛶 㢇 㖶 ). 1969. “Guangfu hou Taiwan renkou shehui zengjia zhi tantao” ⃱⽑⼴冢䀋Ṣ⎋䣦㚫⡆≈ᷳ㍊妶 [A study of Taiwan’s population increase after the retrocession]. Taipei wenxian ⎘ ⊿㔯䌣 [Taipei archives] 9/10: 215-249. Madokoro, Laura. 2012. “Borders Transformed: Sovereign Concerns, Population Movements and the Making of Territorial Frontiers in Hong Kong, 1949-1967”. Journal of Refugee Studies 25 (3): 407-427. Peterson, Glen. 2012. Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China. New York: Routledge. Sussman, Nan. 2011. Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, A Hong Kong Case. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Wickberg, Edgar.1994. “The Chinese as Overseas Migrants.” In Migration: The Asian Experience, edited by Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot, 12-37. New York: St. Martin’s Press in association with St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Wang, Gungwu. 2004. “Cultural Centres for the Chinese Overseas.” In Chinese and Indian Diasporas: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Wong Siu-lun, 27-50. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, the University of Hong Kong. Wong, Siu-lun. 1988. Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER SEVEN FROM A REFUGEE PORT TO A MIGRATION HUB: HONG KONG’S IMMIGRATION PRACTICES AND HIERARCHY YUK WAH CHAN AND GLORIA KO

Introduction Hong Kong, ceded to the British as a result of the first Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking in 18421, had been a British colony for one and a half centuries. Yet, Hong Kong was largely a Chinese society with most of the population composed of Chinese migrants from mainland China. In the first century under colonial rule, the border between Hong Kong and China was mainly a nominal one, and people commuted between China and Hong Kong frequently and easily. At the end of the internal war between Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) in the late 1940s, an increasing number of Chinese, especially those from the southern part of China, moved to Hong Kong to avoid the CCP regime. In 1950, the Hong Kong colonial government decided to close the border and tighten border control. From then onwards, the land border between Hong Kong and China had undergone a number of paradigmatic changes which worked quite differently from other models of immigration control and entry regulations. It can be said Hong Kong immigration is a multifarious system; an important part of which has to do with its multiple relations with China. This chapter will firstly provide a historical overview of migration relations and border control between Hong Kong and China. It then analyses Hong Kong’s shifting immigration landscape and its migration relations with China as well as other parts of Asia after 1980. It will discuss border control practices and entry regulations in different periods and how such practices and regulations reflect a hierarchical treatment of the mainland Chinese and other Asian migrants.

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Hong Kong-China migration relations China has always been the most important source of migrants for Hong Kong. Before 1949, Hong Kong and China were in a more equal “migration relation” as Chinese moved to Hong Kong to do trading and make a living, and at the same time many in Hong Kong migrated back to China when they encountered troubles in the city or had decided to return to their families in China. The official figures show that from around 230,000 people in 1901, the population in Hong Kong grew to around 900,000 in 1931 (see table 7-1). Populations in Hong Kong were very dynamic, and flows across border were frequent; a majority of the population in the mid-1930s had only lived in the city for less than ten years (Faure 2005, 28). This shows the fluidity of cross-border flows and the effects of the open border between China and Hong Kong. By 1941, Hong Kong’s population had reached 1.6 million. The onslaught of the Japanese invasion in 1941 had a significant impact on population; over one million people left for China to avoid the war. There is no detailed record of entries and exits from 1942-44; however, the number of people in Hong Kong in 1945, the year when the Japanese surrendered, was under 600,000. One year later, the population bounced back to 1.5 million. Probably, many who had left during the Japanese occupation returned to Hong Kong. On the eve of the establishment of China’s communist regime, Hong Kong had 1.8 million people. After the CCP took over China, migration relations between the colony of Hong Kong and China slanted towards a one-sided flow from mainland China to Hong Kong. Thus Hong Kong became a sanctuary for voluntary and involuntary mainland Chinese migrants. Hong Kong received at least 350,000 entries from China from 1949-1950 (Lam and Liu 1998, 8), and in the 1950s, there was a yearly population increase of more than 100,000 people (see Table 7-1), which included migrants and births. In 1970, the population was already over four million. In the following years, despite the fact that the Hong Kong government had implemented stricter border control, there were continuous influxes of migrants and refugees before 1980.

From a compassionate and inclusive border to a differentiating border Ku (2004) has examined the immigration policies and practices of the Hong Kong colonial government between the 1950s and 1980 and she argues that before 1950, there was not yet “a practical policy of exclusion

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aimed against the Chinese immigrants” (2004, 333) and the official discourse describing Hong Kong as a proud, safe, and well-ordered sanctuary for Chinese seeking asylum was clearly stated in the official documents. Despite the tabling of the 1949 Immigration Control Bill which aimed at imposing tighter control over illegal immigrants, the overall sentiment in the immediate aftermath of 1949 was to include and settle all immigrants (Ku 2004). Table 7-1: Population in Hong Kong (1841-2011) Year

Number of Year Number of people people 119,300 2,677,000 1861 1956 124,200 3,195,300 1871 1961 160,400 3,679,400 1881 1966 221,400 4,095,500 1891 1971 233,263 4,551,000 1901 1976 456,700 4,667,500 1911 1978 650,000 4,870,500 1921 1979 900,000 5,145,100 1931 1980 1,639,400 5,445,400 1941 1985 Under 600,000 5,522,281 1945 1991 1,500,0006,217,556 1946 1996 1,600,000 1,860,000 6,708,389 1949 2001 2,060,000 6,864,346 1950 2006 2,070,000 7,071,576 1951 2011 Sources: Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, supplemented by Chan (1991, 63) and Lam and Liu (1998, 10).

In the 1950s, there was a series of struggles and negotiations between Hong Kong and the Chinese authorities over the control of the number of migrants from China. It was also since that period that Hong Kong has witnessed dramatic changes in its border relations with China. The Hong Kong government had tried to impose a quota system in 1950 (Siu 2008); however, China vehemently protested against such a system. Negotiations were carried out between the two governments and both sides came to a compromise, allowing the Chinese authorities to vet applications and decide who could enter Hong Kong (Lam and Liu 1998, 9). But it was believed that the most effective measure to reduce the number of illegal immigrants rested on China. When the Chinese authorities were cooperative and used more force to check the exit of people, there were fewer illegal immigrants. In February 1956, the two sides even agreed to

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lift border restrictions to allow families of the two sides to visit each other. The Hong Kong government however might have regretted such a measure as 80 percent of those who entered Hong Kong refused to return to China (Madokoro 2012). Indeed, while the Beijing authorities had considered free entry and exit between China and Hong Kong as traditional rights of the people, the colonial government in Hong Kong dismissed such Chinese discourse as it was primarily concerned with the increase in population and the subsequent pressures on social services. From the mid-1950s to 1960s, the Hong Kong police had become more aggressive in returning bordercrossing Chinese to the mainland. However, such repatriation was often done secretly, “taking place at night by land and sea” (Madokoro 2012, 416). The government also worried that the forced return of migrants would attract international criticism as the United Nations (UN) had already agreed the international community should protect refugees in 1951, recognising the rights of political asylum seekers. The Hong Kong government was not willing to be affected by outside influences on the issue of border control. It argued that Chinese migrants from China should not be considered refugees and that the Chinese authorities should cooperate to control the exit of people. Towards the end of the 1950s, China was troubled by the adverse effects of the Great Leap Forward campaign; many people in China suffered from immense famine and starvation. This catastrophic event directly led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people. From 1959 to 1962, another big wave of out-migration occurred; over 140,000 people entered Hong Kong, which was the second climax of entry of mainlanders (Ku 2004). It was believed that severe draught and anticipation of tighter controls on food rationing in China had led to the mass exodus (Madokoro 2012, 418). In 1966 and 1967, there were serious disputes between China and Hong Kong about border control. In China, the Cultural Revolution had led to great political and social upheavals. Hong Kong also felt its impacts. There were youth demonstrations and riots in the streets, and bombs were planted in different urban areas. At the border, pro-Mao elements continued to protest against the British control of Hong Kong and the imposition of border controls. In June and July 1967, there were daily clashes between Chinese and Hong Kong police. Some Chinese even attempted to blow up the border fence. Finally the British army took over the control of the border posts and imposed a curfew. As Madokoro (2012, 421) argued, the Hong Kong land border by then was heavily militarised and the movement between the two sides was highly obstructed.

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Ambiguity over “illegal Chinese immigrants” Since 1951, the United Nations had already promulgated the convention relating to the Status of Refugees which recognises the rights of political asylum seekers. However, the overall sentiment of the Hong Kong and British government was that Chinese immigrants should not be considered as refugees. Due to the sensitive relationship between Hong Kong and China, the Hong Kong government could not act bluntly towards China’s response concerning border control. Although the government had begun a quota system after 1950 to regulate legal immigration, Hong Kong faced large numbers of illegal Chinese immigrants at different times. During the two decades from the mid-1950 to 1970s, the Hong Kong government exercised much discretion to allow an enormous number of illegal immigrants to stay (Lam and Liu 1998, 13), and there was much ambiguity in the government’s attitude toward Chinese migrants. In 1974, it implemented yet another policy to curb (at the same time encourage) illegal immigration. This was the well-known “touch base” policy. Under this policy, illegal arrivals who could evade capture to reach urban areas in Kowloon would be allowed to stay while those arrested at the border would be repatriated. The policy, though aimed at providing some criteria for repatriation, was seen as sitting half-way between tracking down all illegal immigrants and allowing flexibility in border control (Ku 2004). The opening and reform of China in 1978 led to another massive exodus from China. An estimated 362,292 illegal immigrants arrived from 1978 to 1980; 180,270 of whom were arrested upon entry and 180,022 were evaders (Lam and Liu 1998: 12). The pressure from such an influx led the government to abandon the touch-base policy in October 1980. This firmly shut the door to any “illegal” immigration. From this period onwards, all adult Hong Kong residents had to carry identity cards at all times. Police officers were permitted by law to stop and check anyone’s proof of identity. Indeed, throughout the years between 1949 and 1980, the negotiations between China and Hong Kong over the issue of border-crossing by Chinese nationals had pushed Hong Kong to define and redefine the boundary between Hong Kong and China, and the rationales for including or excluding people from mainland China. In the amendment of the Bill of Immigration in 1971, the issue of legal defines of “illegal immigration” was raised and debated again. There appeared for the first time in official document the concept of “a Hong Kong belonger” (Chan 2008). The emergence of such term—Hong Kong belonger—as a legal / official concept reinforced the consciousness of a local identity. As argued by Ku

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(2004), the changes in immigration policies (against Chinese entrants) in Hong Kong, among other factors, had helped shape the construction of the Hong Kong identity, and at the same time “problematise” illegal immigration. The first half of the 1970s had witnessed heated social debates on whether or not illegal immigrants from China should be detained and repatriated. As mentioned above, the touch-base policy in 1974 was a middle-range policy to solve the dilemma between stopping irregular flows of people and exercising discretionary power to show compassion towards Chinese migrants. After 1980, such leniency was discontinued and land border control became more institutionalised.

Hongkongers versus mainlanders The abolition of the touch-base policy symbolises the end of the “ambiguous border” between Hong Kong and China, and the complete institutionalization of Hong Kong’s immigration control over the land border. From then onwards, all illegal immigrants from China would be repatriated. Hong Kong was no longer a welcoming sanctuary for Chinese escapees. The land border became an “exclusive” one. It was also the end of compassion and sympathy towards irregular mainlander migrants. As pointed out by Ku (2004) and others (Law and Lee 2006; also see Siu 2008), there appeared a bigger rift between Hongkongers and mainlanders. A popular television soap opera (1979) had coined the negative image of mainlanders into the character with the name of “ah chaan”—which described them as lazy, unwanted country bumpkin migrants. Since 1980, all Chinese mainlanders who would like to migrate to Hong Kong for family reunion had to apply for a one-way permit. Unlike previous decades, the government began to fully implement the quota system. The daily quota was set at 150 from 1980 to 1983, but was reduced to 75 from 1983 to 1993. From 1993 to 1995, it was raised to 105 and from 1995 the quota has been at 150 per day (Lam and Liu 1998). The one-way permit is different from a two-way permit; the former is for immigrants who will settle permanently in Hong Kong, while the latter is for those who enter for a short-term visit only. From the 1980s to the present time, mainlanders who would like to migrate to Hong Kong for the purposes of family reunion (particularly for the mainland wives of Hong Kong men), have often waited for seven-to-ten years before they are able to obtain a one-way permit. Before that, they commute frequently to Hong Kong to stay with their husbands by using the two-way permit, which allows them to stay in Hong Kong for three months at a time.

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As previously mentioned, in order to keep a tight control on illegal immigrants, Hong Kong residents were made to carry identity cards at all times in public areas. Those without identity cards or proper documents were often at the risk of being detained by the Hong Kong police. It reinforced the rift between those with a legal identity and illegal entrants. It was also since then that Hong Kong people became accustomed seeing people stopped on the street to have their identity checked. Hong Kong people generally believe that illegal immigrants should be controlled and regulated. Since the 1980s, there had been a clear “differentiation discourse” among Hongkongers highlighting their distinctiveness against the mainlanders (Ku 2004). The self-consciousness of a Hong Kong identity was largely built by a differentiation against new mainland migrants (those migrated after 1980) as well as illegal entrants. In the 1980s, the term “II” (short for “illegal immigrant”) was a popular defamatory term specifically pointing to illegal mainlanders. The Hong Kong identity is thus a social construction through a socio-legal process of differentiation from mainland Chinese.

Chinese immigration after 1997 Marriage migration and family reunion Since 1980, under the quota system for the mainlanders, Hong Kong has enjoyed a steady and continuous supply of immigrants from China. If the yearly quota has been fully utilised, the Chinese immigrant population from 1981 to 2010 should stand at around 1.375 million. The basic purpose for this quota system is to facilitate family reunion, including the unification of marriage migrants from China with their spouses in Hong Kong. From 1980 to the 2000s, after the opening of China, many Chinese men in Hong Kong married Chinese women in the mainland. Hong KongChina cross-border marriage increased from 16,451 in 1986 to a peak of 34,628 in 2006; most of which are Hong Kong men marrying mainland women (see Table 7-2). However, a noticeable trend is the increasing number of Hong Kong women marrying mainlanders in more recent times, showing a yearly figure of over 4000. From the 1990s to 2000s, typical one-way permit holders from China were women who came to be reunited with their husbands. A survey conducted by the Central Policy Unit (2013) shows that around 80 percent of the adult new arrivals were male. However, while marriage is one of the popular ways for mainland Chinese to migrate to Hong Kong, due to the quota system, marrying a Hong Kong person does not “automatically”

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allow the mainland spouse to enter Hong Kong and stay with their husband or wife. They often need to “queue” for a period (from a few years to over ten years, depending on their place of origin) to get included in the quota. Compared to marriage migrants of other nationalities, mainland Chinese spouses are particularly “discriminated” against by the entry policies, i.e. the quota system that deals with mainland migrants. Yet, on the other hand, their Hong Kong spouses are not subject to any obligatory income survey. The prominently feminine phenomenon of mainland immigration coincides with Hong Kong’s labour importation of Southeast Asians. “Domestic helper” has been its biggest category of overseas labour recruitment; and since almost all of them are female, it has led to another prominent phenomenon of the feminisation of immigration in Hong Kong (see related sections below). Table 7-2: Hong Kong-China cross-border marriages (1986-2011) Year

1986

HK-China marriages (with mainland brides) 15,776

HK-China marriages (with mainland bridegrooms) 675

Total cross-border (HK-China) marriages 16,451

Total marriage registration 43,280

1991

21,220

1,390

22,610

42,568

1996

24,564

1,821

26,385

37,045

2001

18,380

2,359

20,739

32,825

2006

28,145

6,483

34,628

50,328

2009

18,145

4,194

22,339

51,175

2010

19,295

4,853

24,148

52,558

2011

20,167

5,865

26,032

58,369

Source: Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department

Elite Chinese immigration since the 2000s In general, mainland immigrants from China in the 1980s and 1990s were often considered to belong to lower social class categories. As Chiu, Choi and Ting (2005) point out, Chinese immigrants were often penalised in their initial class placement in Hong Kong. Their socio-economic attainments are generally lower than the local population, and class mobility among these migrants has been limited.

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Since the early 2000s, the situation of entry of mainlanders has gradually changed. Besides the path for marriage migration and family reunion, Hong Kong has implemented a number of schemes which provide various channels of Chinese migration. The Admission Scheme for Mainland Talents and Professionals (ASMTP) began in July 2003. This scheme works in line with the General Employment Policy (GEP), but is specifically tailored for the mainland Chinese. By the end of 2012, a total of 57,126 mainland talents and professionals were recruited. Another way for mainlanders to immigrate to Hong Kong is through the Quality Migrant Admission Scheme implemented on 28 June 2006. It is a quotabased scheme and operates under a points system. It aims to attract highly skilled persons and those admitted do not need to show that they have secured an offer of local employment when they settle in Hong Kong. There were 2,392 successful applicants at the end of 2012 (HKID 2013). The government implemented yet another labour migration scheme that is tailored for mainlanders and other overseas elites who study in Hong Kong in June 2006. Eligible applicants are those who have obtained a degree or higher qualification in a full-time and locally accredited programme in Hong Kong under the “Immigration Arrangements for Nonlocal Graduates” (IANG). A total of 22,115 non-local graduates were approved to work in Hong Kong by end of 2012 under this policy. The above schemes have enhanced education migration. Another migration scheme that aims at recruiting rich migrants is the Capital Investment Entrant Scheme implemented on 27 October 2003. People who are able to make an investment of up to 10 million in Hong Kong are eligible for this scheme (before 14 October 2010, the requirement was $6.5 million) (HKID 2013). Although the scheme is not limited to mainlanders, the common impression is that it is chiefly targeting rich mainlanders. Under this new scheme, the spouses and children under 18 of successful applicants can move to Hong Kong together with the applicants. There were 18,639 approved cases by the end of 2012 (HKID 2013). This is quite different treatment of mainland migrants when compared with those queuing under the one-way permit quota system.

Return Hong Kong migrants From the early 1980s to 1997, there were continuous emigration waves from Hong Kong to the West. Some have called these emigrants from Hong Kong “reluctant exiles” (Skeldon 1994). However, the majority of these emigrants have returned to Hong Kong for work or for family reunion. It is estimated that between 500,000 and 700,000 Hong Kong

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emigrants had returned to Hong Kong before 1997 (Ma 2011; Ley and Kobayashi 2005). Even by using the conservative estimate of 500,000, the number of re-migrants stands at 83 percent of all those who emigrated before 1997, which amounts to seven percent of the total population (Sussman 2011). There has been increasing attention to this returned group (Waters 2002, 2006; Kobayashi and Preston 2007; Salaff, Wong, and Greve 2010). In the 1990s, the emigrants attempted to strategize and strike a balance between the purposes of making money and making a better living for the next generation (including better education, lifestyle, and political “insurance”). Consequentially, a pattern of “transmigrant living” began to emerge, with the husband returning to Hong Kong for better-paid jobs (and flying frequently between homes), and the wives and children staying in the destination countries. In the late 2000s, a second layer of this phenomenon of transmigration / return migration has emerged. Many of the second generation of the previous emigrants, born or grew up abroad, have also returned to Hong Kong for jobs.

A migration hub for other Asian migrants Besides receiving migrants from China, Hong Kong has also been a port receiving migrants from many other parts of Asia. During the change of political regime in Vietnam in the mid-1970s, Hong Kong was the first port of asylum for the Vietnamese who fled their country. In the two decades of 1970s and 1980s, Hong Kong was one of the Asian ports receiving the largest amount of Vietnamese refugees, and most were resettled to a third country in the West (Chan 2011). The other most notable groups who entered Hong Kong since the 1980s were foreign domestic helpers from Southeast Asia who came as contracted migrant workers. According to immigration statistics, there are now more than 300,000 domestic worker migrants and the majority are Filipinos and Indonesians. Their stay in Hong Kong is supported by their employment contracts, but they will not be eligible for Hong Kong residency regardless of the length of time they worked in Hong Kong. The other group of entry is professionals from all parts of the world. Similar to foreign domestic workers, their stay is supported by their employment contracts. But unlike domestic workers, they can earn Hong Kong permanent resident status after they stay in Hong Kong for seven consecutive years; but their numbers remain low.

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Variegated streams of migration from Southeast and South Asia Vietnamese migrants Hong Kong was the Port of First Asylum in Asia for Vietnamese who fled their country in the 1970s and 1980s. They would then be processed for the refugee status to resettle to other countries (mainly Western countries). However, when the admissions schemes of the West eased off in the mid-1980s, Hong Kong encountered many difficulties in resettling the Vietnamese, and as a result, many of them were kept in closed refugee camps for years. In 1988, Hong Kong introduced a vetting system and those who were not screened as refugees were arranged for repatriation to Vietnam. From April 1975 until the end of 2003 Hong Kong had received more than 200,000 Vietnamese people, of which 143,000 were resettled to third countries and 72,000 were returned to Vietnam. Before the closure of the last refugee camp (Pillar Point Vietnamese Refugees Centre) in May 2000, the “Widened Local Resettlement for Vietnamese Refugees and Eligible Vietnamese Migrants Scheme”2 was introduced in February 2000 to allow around 1,400 Vietnamese to apply for settlement in the city. By the end of 2003, there were 960 Vietnamese refugees and 437 Vietnamese migrants who were accepted for settlement under this scheme (HKISD 2003). Government records show that from 1975 to 2003, an estimate of 17,400 Vietnamese had successfully settled in Hong Kong (HKISD 2001, 2003). Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais, and others Hong Kong has also received a large number of temporary labour migrants from other parts of Asia and the majority is from the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Most of them are domestic workers. In the late 1970s, the government introduced the foreign domestic worker scheme in response to the need for domestic workers and child carers for the families of working parents. The scheme is covered by comprehensive labour laws with a minimum wage which is subject to revision by the Economic Development and Labour Bureau. The workers are offered a two-year fixed-term contract with the possibility of extension. When the scheme was first introduced, the majority of helpers were from the Philippines. A notable characteristic of the Philippine workers was their good English skill which was welcomed by employers in Hong Kong. The 1990s witnessed the incoming of Indonesian nationals as domestic worker migrants. They were notable for their Cantonese language training before they came to Hong Kong. In 1990, there were

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only about one thousand Indonesians in Hong Kong, the number increased to 146,980 by the end of 2011 (see Table 7-3). The number of Indonesians exceeded that of Filipinos for the first time in 2009. From the mid-1990s to the present, the job market of domestic workers has been dominated by Filipinos and Indonesians. On top of that, Hong Kong has also taken in domestic workers from Thailand, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (beginning in 2013) and Myanmar (beginning in 2014). Table 7-3 demonstrates that the number of foreign domestic helpers has kept rising. Hong Kong has become one of the most favourable cities for Asian workers in the past three decades. The application procedure for labour migrants is comparatively transparent and free from corruption. However, all foreign domestic workers are not eligible for Hong Kong permanent residence even if they have worked in Hong Kong for seven consecutive years. This is a big contrast with professional migrants to be examined in the following section. Table 7-3: The nationalities of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong (1990-2011) Year

Philippines

Indonesia

Thailand

1990 63,600 1,000 4,300 2000 151,490 55,200 6,450 2008 125,943 123,341 3,820 2009 129,875 130,448 3,858 2010 137,313 140,941 3,695 2011 144,553 148,153 3,323 2013 164,628 149,034 2,710 Source: Hong Kong Immigration Department

Other nationalities 1,400 3,650 3,493 3,597 3,732 3,932 4,616

Total 70,300 216,790 256,597 267,778 285,681 299,961 320,988

Indians, Pakistanis, and Nepalese Hong Kong is home to a number of South Asians. Traditional South Asian groups include the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the Nepalese. As of 2011, there were around 63,000 South Asians (28,616 Indians, 18,042 Pakistanis and 16,518 Nepalese) in Hong Kong (HKCSD 2012a). New entries from such groups continue through family reunions. The integration of these migrants and their local-born offspring has long been a point of concern for minority policies. The experiences of deprivation and social marginalisation have made many calling for an increase in social and governmental support.

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Admission of professionals and others The Hong Kong government introduced the General Employment Policy (GEP) to attract professionals with special skills to fill job vacancies that cannot be filled in Hong Kong. Such applications have to be supported by the educational background of the applicants and employment contracts. Their permits of stay will start with a two-year contract followed by an extension of another two years. The third extension would be a three-year term or any duration specified in the employment contract. After the completion of seven consecutive years of employment and stay in Hong Kong, the applicant can apply for Hong Kong permanent resident status. Under the “dependent policy”, professional migrants are allowed to bring in their spouse and any children under 18, who are also eligible for application for Hong Kong permanent residence. The policy admitted 28,625 overseas professionals (see Table 74 below) from more than 100 countries in 2012 (HKISD 2012) and 6,023 were from Asia (2,584 from Japan, 2,334 from India, and 1,105 from the Philippines). On the other hand, Hong Kong continuously admits small numbers of lower-skilled workers through its “Supplementary Labour Scheme”. Table 7-4: Number of visas issued for professional entry in 2011 and 2012 Year

Number of visas

2011

30,557

2012

28,625

Source: Hong Kong Year Book 2012, Hong Kong Immigration Department

Economic benefits The largest group of temporary foreign migrants in Hong Kong is foreign domestic helpers and their contribution is obvious. With their support in taking care of domestic work and caring for children and the elderly, middle-class couples are able to work, which directly enhances the financial capacity of the families, and contributes to the economic development of the society in a wider sense. As Hong Kong is facing an increasingly ageing population (the median age in 2001 was 36.8 while that in 2011 was 41.7) (HKCSD 2012b), more and more foreign domestic helpers were hired to take care of the elderly at home. Foreign domestic

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helpers also boost the local economy. With some 300,000-strong Southeast Asians in Hong Kong, many related businesses targeting at these groups have sprouted and flourished; these include airline businesses, eateries, phone card companies, and employment agencies. The basic reason for foreign domestic workers to decide to temporarily separate from their family and to work overseas is to earn a better and more secure income, which allows the family at home to prosper, and which also often provides a better education for their children. According to World Bank, the amount of personal remittances to Indonesia and the Philippines has been on the rise and has contributed to the development of their home countries (see Table 7-5). Table 7-5: Personal remittances in million USD (2008-2012) 2008 6,794.2 Indonesia 18,628 Philippines Source: The World Bank (2013)

2009 6,793 19,726

2010 6,916 21,369

2011 6,924 22,973

2012 7,212 24,641

Conclusion In addition to the 740 million internal migrants in all countries around the world, there were around 214 million international migrants in 2010. In other words, about one billion, or one in seven people in the world, are in some form of migration (cited in IOM and UNDESA 2012). All governments indeed need to prepare to meet new challenges brought about by such demographic changes and migration shifts. After 1997, Hong Kong became part of China in terms of its geopolitical status. However, with the “one country two systems” as promised in the mini-constitutional framework of the Basic Law, Hong Kong has kept the system it established before its return to China—including the rule of law, the civil service and other socio-legal systems. The Hong Kong-China land border is part of this system. Ever since 1980, Hong Kong has been keeping a restrictive border towards mainland migrants. After 1997, Hong Kong’s immigration policy towards mainlanders was further informed by the availability of talent and the rise of the “new rich” in mainland China. Compared to the “traditional” quota system, the new schemes favour the elite groups from mainland China. While Hong Kong is in general one of the freest ports in the world, it is particularly restrictive towards mainland marriage migrants and lowskilled migration. Hong Kong’s immigration policies are underlined with

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restrictive measures cross-cutting ethnic and class boundaries. With its differentiated treatment within different migration schemes towards migrants from China and other Asian places, Hong Kong’s immigration practices and policies have manifested a hierarchical system which finds its roots back in the 1970s and 1980s as well as in the more recent changing political-economic situations in China and around the region. As illustrated in the chapter, Hong Kong implemented different immigration measures to address different border control and manpower needs at different periods of time. However these piecemeal policies cannot address the imminent issue of a fast-ageing population. According to the “Hong Kong Population Projections 2012-2041” (HKCSD 2012b), the median age of the population will change from 41.7 in 2011 to 49.9 in 2041. The proportion of people aged 65 or above will increase from 13 percent in 2011 to 30 percent in 2041. Well-planned policies bringing in migrants in a managed manner will benefit both the migrants and the receiving societies. Considering Hong Kong’s ageing population and sensitive Hong Kong-China border relationship, immigration and border management together with population planning should be a major policy concern for Hong Kong in the coming decades.

Notes 1. The whole territory of the British colony was ceded and lent from the Qing dynasty of China to the British by three different agreements. The Island of Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Nanking signed in 1842. A part of Kowloon was also ceded by the Anglo-Chinese Treaty signed in 1860. The Treaty of Peking of 1898 further leased the New Territories and part of Kowloon to the British for 99 years as from 1 July 1898. 2. The scheme was launched under the stress to accommodate those Vietnamese who exhausted all the venues for resettlement and repatriation.

References Central Policy Unit. 2013. A Study of New Arrivals from Mainland China. Hong Kong: The Government of the HKSAR. Chan, J. M. M. 2008. “Immigration Policies and Human Resources Planning.” In Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, edited by H. F. Siu and A. S. Ku, 149-200. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chan, W. K. 1991. The Making of Hong Kong Society, Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Chan, Y. W., ed. 2011. The Chinese / Vietnamese Diaspora – Revisiting the Boat People. New York: Routledge. Chiu, W. K., S. Y. P. Choi, and K. F. Ting. 2005. “Getting Ahead in the Capitalist Paradise: Migration from China and Socioeconomic Attainment in Colonial Hong Kong.” International Migration Review 39 (1): 203-227. Faure, D. 2005. “The Common People in Hong Kong History: Their Livelihood and Aspirations until the 1930s.” In Colonial Hong Kong and Modern China: Interaction and Reintegration, edited by P. T. Lee, 89-38. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. HKCSD (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department). 2012a. “Hong Kong Population by Place of Birth, Ethnicity and Nationality (Table A120).” Hong Kong: Census and Statistics Department. —. 2012b. Hong Kong Population Projections 2012-2041. Hong Kong: Census and Statistics Department, SAR. HKISD (Hong Kong Information Services Department). 2001. Hong Kong Year Book 2001. Hong Kong: Information Services Department. —. 2003. Hong Kong Year Book 2003. Hong Kong: Information Services Department. —. 2012. Hong Kong Year Book 2012. Hong Kong: Information Services Department. HKID (Hong Kong Immigration Department). 2013. “Hong Kong: The Facts–Immigration.” Hong Kong: Immigration Department. IOM (International Organization for Migration) and UNDESA (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs).2012. “Migration and Human Mobility: Thematic Think Piece,” May 2012. Http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Think%20Pieces/13_migratio n.pdf Kobayashi, A., and V. Preston. 2007. “Transnationalism through the Life Course: Hong Kong Immigrants in Canada.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 48 (2): 151-167. Ku, A. S. 2004. “Immigration Policies, Discourses, and the Politics of Local Belonging in Hong Kong (1950-80).” Modern China 30 (3): 326-360. Lam, K. C., and P. W. Liu. 1998. Immigration and the Economy of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Law, K. Y., and K. M. Lee. 2006. ‘Citizenship, Economy and Social Exclusion of Mainland Chinese Immigrants in Hong Kong’. Journal of Contemporary Asia 36 (2) : 217-242. Ley, D., and A. Kobayashi. 2005. “Back to Hong Kong: Return Migration or Transnational Sojourn?” Global Networks 5 (2): 111–127.

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Ma, Z. 2011. “Immigration Transition and Return Migration in Hong Kong.” Social Transformation in Chinese Societies, 7 (1): 7-36. Madokoro, L. 2012. “Borders Transformed: Sovereign Concerns, Population Movements and the Making of Territorial Frontiers in Hong Kong, 1949-1967.” Journal of Refugee Studies 25 (3): 407-427. Salaff, J., S. L. Wong, and A. Greve. 2010. Hong Kong Movers and Stayers: Narratives of Family Migration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Skeldon, R. 1994. Reluctant Exiles? Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese. New York: M.E. Sharpe. Siu, H. F. 2008. “Positioning ‘Hong Kongers’ and ‘New Immigrants’.” In Hong Kong Mobile: Making a Global Population, edited by H. F. Siu and A. S. Ku,117-148. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Sussman, N. M. 2011. Return Migration and Identity: A Global Phenomenon, A Hong Kong Case. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press The World Bank. 2013. “Personal Remittances Received.” Http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT. Waters, J. L. 2002. “Flexible Families? ‘Astronaut’ Households and the Experiences of Lone Mothers in Vancouver, British Columbia.” Social & Cultural Geography 3 (2): 117-134. —. 2006. “Geographies of Cultural Capital: Education, International Migration and Family Strategies between Hong Kong and Canada.” Journal Compilation of Royal Geographical Society, 179-192.

CHAPTER EIGHT FORCED MIGRATION AND IMAGINED HOMELAND: NOSTALGIA AND RETURN OF THE CHINESE MAINLANDERS IN TAIWAN DOMINIC MENG-HSUAN YANG

Nostalgia is a gulf of shallow strait. I am here, the mainland is over there. —Yu Guangzhong, “Nostalgia”, circa 1970. 悱ォ㗗ᶨ䀋㶢㶢䘬㴟ⲥˤㆹ⛐忁柕炻⣏映⛐恋柕ˤȹἁ⃱ᷕ˪悱ォ˫ġ ᶨḅᶫ暞⸜ˤġ China is really just a dream. It’s a dream that we can never return to. ġ—Lu Yilu, Home and Country during the Past Forty Years: Writings about the Return, 1988. ᷕ⚳炻䛇䘬⎒㗗⣊ᶨ⟜炻侴⣊㗗⚆ᶵ⍣Ḯˤȹ渧ㅞ渧˪⚃⋩⸜Ἦ⭞⚳Ļġġ 彼悱㍊奒㔋㔯˫ġ ᶨḅℓℓ⸜ġˤ

Introduction On 1 October 1949, when Chairman Mao stood victorious on top of Tiananmen and proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the world witnessed a massive wave of forced migration out of mainland China. Most of this human exodus landed in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Approximately one million mainland Chinese—military personnel, government employees, and war refugees combined—followed Chiang Kai-shek’s defeated regime (Republic of China, ROC) across the sea to an island recently re-acquired from Japan after fifty years of colonial rule (Li 1969; Lin 2009, 336). Contrary to popular belief, the exiled population in Taiwan was not a monolith formed by Nationalist military elites and diehard supporters, but a mosaic of political, social, and provincial

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diversities (Zhao 2001; Corcuff 2004; Yang and Chang 2010; Fan 2011; Meyer 2012). The civil war migrants and their descendants in Taiwan are commonly referred to as “mainlanders” or waishengren (⢾䚩Ṣ), though, it is important to recognise that a collective mainlander identity and the scholarly debate surrounding this identity did not emerge until the 1990s, when the island state democratised and underwent the process of bentuhua (㛔⛇⊾) or indigenisation/Taiwanisation (Corcuff 2002; Li 2002; Wang 2003, 149; Simon 2006). This chapter first examines nostalgic writings and local history projects produced by the civil war migrants (first generation waishengren) in Taiwan from the early 1960s to the 1980s through the journal magazines published by the mainlander native place associations. Then, it shows how the belated return in the late 1980s and the early 1990s shattered these idealistic portrayals and abstract notions about one’s native place in China. In a cruel twist of fate, after dreaming and reminiscing about home for decades, the exiled mainlanders discovered at the very moment of return that the “home” that they had longed for lived only in their memories. Instead of ending a lifetime of nostalgia, the returnees experienced a severe case of reverse culture shock when they witnessed the cataclysmic transformation of their native villages and hometowns under the PRC. Consequently, only a very small number of people have moved back to the mainland. Most of the returnees chose to remain in Taiwan. They also began to see the island as their permanent home for the first time in four decades. While some would never go back again, others travel back and forward between the two opposite ends of the Taiwan Strait, much like a diaspora. They feel connected to both China and Taiwan, but could never feel completely at home in both places. By bringing forth this hitherto little-known story and historical transformation, I argue for the need to reorient scholarly discussion of Chines diaspora to address involuntary migration. I also illustrate the need to conduct historical research to examine diachronic transformation of displaced communities through time. The main issues at stake are not only the ontological essence of Chineseness, but also the epistemological question on what constitutes diasporic subjectivity and identity. How did war, forced relocation, and postponed return influence the civil war exiles’ perception of home and belonging? What does this historical experience inform us about the debate on the nature of Chinese identity? Could political exiles and war refugees who were displaced inside the borders of their nation-state be considered a form of diaspora? The following is an attempt to answer these questions.

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The chapter will first offer a brief overview of how the concept of diaspora was applied to research on Chinese migration and the study of waishengren. Then, it will introduce nostalgic cultural projects put forward by the mainlander native place associations from the early 1960s to the 1980s. The chapter ends with a discussion of waishengren’s reverse culture shock when they revisited mainland China four decades after the initial displacement.

Diaspora theory in Chinese migration and waishengren studies The late Edward Said suggested that the twentieth century “with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers” was indeed “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (Said 1994, 137-138). Common folk in China experienced no less political upheavals and social chaos; suffered no less human casualties and natural calamities than people living in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of Asia. Yet, intellectual dialogue on Chinese political exiles and refugees has been exiguous compared to displaced populations elsewhere. In reference to diaspora, the field has not only privileged overseas/transnational movements, but has also been dominated by a paradigm that is fixed upon diversifying Chineseness (Chun 1996; Ang 1998; Chow 1998) in order to debunk essentialist notions, such as the “living tree” (Tu 1991) or “Greater China” (Shambaugh 1995). The same diasporic discourse then incorporated the language of transnationalism and globalisation in the 2000s (McKeown 1999; Ong 2000; Chan 2006; Künnemann and Mayer 2009). Nowadays, “diaspora” has become synonymous with “diversity”, and interchangeable with terms like “overseas communities” or “transnationalism”. The word is losing its original meaning and conceptual significance. Moreover, this particular theoretical paradigm has prevented scholars from exploring another form of migration experienced by tens of millions of Chinese in the mode era, namely, involuntary displacement. In a recent book chronicling the migrant experiences of low-ranking Nationalist soldiers in Taiwan entitled China’s Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s-1990s, historian Joshua Fan suggests the possibility of considering the underprivileged and impoverished Nationalist veterans in Taiwan as a form of political diaspora (Fan 2011). Fan’s argument resonates with earlier calls made by Taiwan-based anthropologist Zhao Yanning (Antonia Chao), sociologist Zhang Maogui, as well as Canadian anthropologist Scott Simon (Zhao

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2001; Zhang 2005; Simon 2006). These scholars invariably point to one defining characteristic of the civil war exiles called liuli (㳩暊) or lisan (暊㔋), which has a “diasporic” undertone. These terms literally mean “flowing away” or “dispersal”. Liuli or lisan speaks to an eternal condition of rootlessness and a never-ending search for belonging as a result of the traumatic exodus in 1949 and the political and social transformation in Taiwan in recent decades, hence Fan’s idea of a “homeless generation” constantly searching for home. After democratisation, waishengren felt distinctively the loss of political and cultural privileges to the native Taiwanese—the island’s majority population whose political aspirations, languages, and cultural heritage the mainlanders had suppressed when they came over from China. Since the mid-1990s, there have been intense feelings of disorientation, alienation, humiliation, and even anger on the part of the mainlanders when the rest of the Taiwanese society began to view them collectively as accomplices to Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian regime and perpetual outsiders to the island’s new imagined community. Mahlon Meyer’s Remembering China from Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions after the Chinese Civil War, is filled with personal testimonies expressing these vitriolic sentiments (Meyer 2012). While the subjective experience of the civil war exiles, and their descendants born in Taiwan to some degree, can be considered “diasporic”, they do not fit neatly into existing diaspora theories and communities proposed by landmark studies in the field (Sheffer 1986; Safran 1991; Gilroy 1993; Clifford 1997; Cohen 2008). This is not simply because their involuntary migration occurred within the borders of their own nationstate. Tibetans and Uighurs do not have to leave China to experience dislocation and dispossession. Moreover, as Joshua Fan rightly points out, because the island had just been through fifty years of Japanese colonialism, moving from China to Taiwan immediately following World War II was like moving to a foreign country (Fan 2011, 7). The most important reason waishengren do not fit is that they migrated with an authoritarian regime dominated by mainlander military elites. Consequently, the semi-Japanised Hoklo, Hakka, and the aboriginal communities in Taiwan were “displaced” politically, socially, and economically by the mainlander migration. It was the indigenous society that needed to adjust to the linguistic and cultural hegemony brought by the migrants and not the other way around. The local populations only managed to turn the tables after democratisation. Robin Cohen’s concept of “imperial diasporas” (Cohen 2008, 68) might offer the closest example. Nonetheless, the analytical comparison between the China’s “homeless

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generation” and the British colonialists (the example Cohen provided) seems both awkward and anachronistic. The disjuncture between history and theory does not necessarily mean we should abandon the term “diaspora” as a useful analytical tool in understanding the subjectivity and identity of a displaced population like the first generation waishengren. As a matter of fact, none of the recognised diasporic communities in world history fit seamlessly into established theories and categories. In Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (2003), Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur argues: Theorizations of diaspora need not, and should not, be divorced from historical and cultural specificity. Diasporic traversals question the rigidities of identity itself—religious, ethnic, gendered, national; yet this diasporic movement marks not a postmodern turn from history but a nomadic turn in which the very parameters of specific historical moments are embodied and—as diaspora itself suggests—are scattered and regrouped into new points of becoming (Braziel and Mannur 2003, 3).

For Braziel and Mannur, the “new points of becoming” in theorising diaspora rest upon the study of specific historical moments and cases across different cultures and times. In the meantime, Sudesh Mishra also observes that the diaspora scholarship is moving towards what he calls “the scene of archival specificity”—laying emphasis on historically-based study of different migrant communities in world history in order to build a more diverse and solid foundation for the project of theorising diaspora (Mishra 2006, 100-101). Adding to Braziel, Mannur, and Mishra’s point, I would submit that we neither go back to considering diaspora as defined by fixed categories based on the Jewish ideal type, nor as an abstract notion representing diversity, hybridity, in-between-ness, and non-belonging, which arguably has contributed to the proliferation and misuse of the term on a broad range of migrant phenomena. We not only need to reorient scholarly discussion on the Chinese diaspora to address involuntary migration, but also need to conduct historical research to examine diachronic transformation in time, probing into significant moments of change, rupture, and shifting power relations. For example, most of the existing works on waishengren are based on social surveys and personal narratives produced since the early 1990s. Hence, the interpretation and theorisation of mainlander identity has relied heavily upon what waishengren are thinking and writing about in recent times. What were the mainlanders thinking and writing about before the 1990? Did their imagination of home

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and belonging change over time? What does this transformation say about Chinese identity and Chinese diaspora? Literary scholars like Edward Said writing about exile often portray it as an eternal condition of loss (Robinson 1994). Yet forced migrants are not timeless and unchangeable entities of sorrow and loss set in stone, but living historical agents. Their compulsive need to return and search for belonging manifested in different forms according to the progression of time and changing circumstances. The following sections explore a critical historical transformation that is important to understanding mainlander subjectivity and identity at the present time.

The mainlander native place associations and nostalgic cultural production The mainlander native place associations or waisheng tongxianghui ( ⢾䚩⎴悱᭳) are voluntary and communal assistance groups formed based on native place ties. Tongxianghui is a product of migration. Similar organisations can be found in other Chinese migrant communities both inside and outside of China and throughout history (Dou 1943; Ho 1966; Goodman 1995; Hsu 2000; Belsky 2005). In Taiwan, the mainlander native place associations were first established by exiled provincial leaders during the late 1940s and the early 1950s to serve the immediate and everyday needs of their fellow natives arriving in Taiwan—searching for lost relatives, securing jobs, finding accommodations, and so on. Social survey data provided by the Taipei Municipal Government Bureau of Social Affairs indicate that 62 waisheng tongxianghui registered with the municipal authorities between 1948 and 1955. In contrast, before the Nationalist defeat in the civil war, there had only been five mainlander associations in 1947. By 1960, there were 92 associations according to the official records. The total number reached about 300 in the 1990s (Zhong 1999, 70-71). Some of the waisheng tongxianghui are still active today, while others ceased to function and became mere empty shells when the first generation mainlanders died out. Notwithstanding the exiled generation’s effort to get their offspring born and raised in Taiwan involved, the participation of the second and the third generation mainlanders has been miniscule. All the associations are privately funded. Despite some strict government regulations during the 1950s, most of the waisheng tongxianghui have been afforded with considerable autonomy since the 1970s. They rely largely upon charitable donations from their fellow provincials. Consequently, the

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associations vary greatly in membership size and financial strength, as well as in longevity. In China studies, intellectual debate on tongxianghui has revolved around the question whether these associations represented some kind of early modern “civil society” or “alternative modernity” in Chinese cities (Ho 1966; Rowe 1984; Rowe 1989; Goodman 1995; Belsky 2005). Consequently, little was written on the development of tongxianghui during the late Republican period and under the PRC. In regard to waisheng tongxianghui in Taiwan, there have only been three studies. All three were graduate theses, and only one of which was ever published (Li 1979; Zhong 1999; Xu 2005). While these works offered extensive information about the associations, especially Zhong Yanyu’s published monograph, they paid little attention to the historical significance of the cultural activities put forward by waisheng tongxianghui. Waisheng tongxianghui produced two types of magazines—the “bulletin magazine” and the “reference” magazine. The first type usually fell under names like tongxun (忂妲), huixun (㚫妲), xiangxun (悱イ), jianxun ( 䯉 妲 ), and tongxiang ( ⎴ 悱 ). These could be translated as “communiqué”, “association news”, “native place news”, “newsletter,” and “native place”, respectively, hence the word “bulletin”. The second type, which constituted the mainstay of waisheng tongxianghui’s publications, was called wenxian (㔯䌣). The literal translation of wenxian is “documents” or “documentary sources”. However, instead of using these, I prefer the word “reference”. The reason for the word selection is to underscore tongxianghui publishers’ intention when they printed and circulated these journals. Like compiling an encyclopaedia, the main purpose of wenxian publications were to create a repository of knowledge about their respective native places that could be cited, referred to, and studied by the future generations (Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui 1985, 3). In compiling this knowledge, a majority of mainlander writers and contributors to their native place journals drew heavily upon individual memories. The first wenxian or “reference” magazine produced by waisheng tongxianghui in Taiwan was Sichuan wenxian (⚃ⶅ㔯䌣), which debuted in September 1962. The introduction of Sichuan wenxian ushered in a new era of tongxianghui activities. The magazine was started by a group of provincial and community leaders affiliated with the Sichuan native place association in Taipei. The group was formed by retired provincial representatives, government officials, university professors, and businessmen (Sichuan wenxian 1966, vol. 45, 1). They did this with their

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own money and on their own free time. The magazine came about after approximately two years of planning and preparation. The impact of the magazine was immediate. After only two issues, the publishers received over 600 letters of support from enthusiastic readers wanting to become regular subscribers, to join the Sichuan native place association, or to submit their own writings and historical sources for publication. Around 80 percent of the letters came directly from Sichuan natives. The other 20 percent were people from other provinces who felt connected to Sichuan because they had lived and worked for an extensive period of time there, usually during the Anti-Japanese War (Sichuan wenxian 1962, vol. 3, 1). The success of Sichuan wenxian set an example which others were quick to emulate. In January 1963, Taipei Rehe native place association introduced Rehe tongxun (䅙㱛忂妲). Another magazine put forward by the Jiangsu native called Jiangsu wenxian ( 㰇 喯 㔯 䌣 ) also appeared around the same time. Taipei Ningbo native place association, one of the most influential waisheng tongxianghui on the island, promptly followed suit with their own monthly journal Ningbo tongxiang (⮏㲊⎴悱) in August the same year. By the end of the decade, a considerable number of magazines were in circulation. The notable ones included Dapu huixun (⣏ ❼㚫妲), Guizhou wenxian (屜ⶆ㔯䌣), Guangxi wenxian (⺋大㔯䌣), Jiangxi wenxian (㰇大㔯䌣), Hubei wenxian (㷾⊿㔯䌣), Fujian wenxian (䤷⺢㔯䌣), Zhejiang yuekan (㴁㰇㚰↲), Hunan wenxian (㷾⋿㔯䌣), Zhongyuan wenxian ( ᷕ ⍇ 㔯 䌣 ), and Nanjing tongxun ( ⋿ Ṕ 忂 妲 ) (Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui 1985, 8). The momentum showed no signs of slowing down in the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, as magazines sponsored by waisheng tongxianghui grew like “bamboo shoots in the spring after a rain”, to phrase it in a wellknown Chinese idiom. Titles that started publishing during this period included Shaanxi wenxian (昅大㔯䌣), Dongbei wenxian (㜙⊿㔯䌣), Guangdong wenxian (⺋㜙㔯䌣), Hebei pingjin wenxian (㱛⊿⸛㳍㔯䌣), Danyang wenxian ( ᷡ 春 㔯 䌣 ), Yunnan wenxian ( 暚 ⋿ 㔯 䌣 ), Shanxi wenxian (Ⱉ大㔯䌣), Gansu wenxian (䓀倭㔯䌣), Shandong wenxian (Ⱉ 㜙㔯䌣), Fengxiang wenxian (寸䷋㔯䌣), Suiyuan wenxian (䴷怈㔯䌣), Guangxi wenxian (⺋大㔯䌣), Jianli wenxian (䚋⇑㔯䌣), and Huaxian wenxian (厗䷋㔯䌣). By 1985, the total number of magazines reached 48. Tongxianghui magazines contained an incredibly rich collection of provincial histories, cultures, and geographies. By actively producing these texts, the exiled mainlanders reminisced about the homes and families they were forced to leave behind. If they could not physically go

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home, they could at least return mentally. Though documentary sources such as local chronicles (㕡⽿), county chronicles (䷋⽿), and official maps were presented and utilised from time to time, a majority of contributors drew heavily upon personal recollections. The civil war migrants immersed deeply in memories of the past. They conjured up utopian and idyllic images of their hometowns unchanged through time. They wrote biographies, memoirs, poetries, and anecdotes. They provided hundreds upon hundreds of miscellaneous accounts on social customs, regional cuisines, operas, ballads, folklores, dialects, proverbs, and practically anything about their respective native places and provinces in China. The production and distribution of wenxian magazines was by no means a money-making enterprise. On the contrary, it was expensive, time-consuming, and could put individuals as well as the associations in financial ruin. Tongxianghui publishers without a sizable endowment or frequent donations from their members were mired in difficulties. Some journals ran out of money and ceased to exist quickly, while others had to publish intermittently. The trials and tribulations of Hunan wenxian were a good example. In February 1969, a retired college professor from Hunan founded the magazine as a bimonthly journal and financed it with his own pension. After eight issues, the professor had exhausted his life savings. The Hunan tongxianghui in Taipei then took over the bankrupt magazine and published it as a quarterly but only to run into considerable debt again a few years later. It was not until early 1975 when enough funds were gathered from other Hunan natives that the magazine was able to continue again (Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui 1985, 98-99). Hunan wenxian was not the only tongxianghui journal that had experienced financial difficulties and had to shut down for an extended period of time. Jiangsu wenxian, Guizhou wenxian, and Hebei pingjin wenxian went through similar ordeals (Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui 1971, 41-42, 60-61). The extent to which the first generation waishengren went beyond their means to produce knowledge about their native places illustrated a compulsive need—a need to assuage the agony of involuntary migration and forced separation from home and family. Yet it is amazing how these cultural activities that once meant so much to the exiles of 1949 quickly dissipated when they were finally allowed to go home in late 1987. The act of producing knowledge about a distant homeland actually contributed to reverse culture shock, as the returnees came to a painful realisation—the “home” they had reminisced and idolised about for decades lived only in their memories. The return experience dislodged native places on the mainland as the only loci of origin and sites for nostalgic imaginations. To

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phrase it in the lexicon of Cultural Studies, the belated return fundamentally changed the modality of “in-between-ness” and “lived tension” for a displaced population.

A broken dream: belated return and reverse culture shock Though many of the civil war migrants thought they would probably never go home and could find solace only in their fading memories, political and social transformations on both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the late 1970s and the 1980s were paving the way for their return. The first major transformation was Deng Xiaoping’s re-ascent to power in the PRC. The return of Deng not only signalled the end of Maoism, a final end to decades of radical revolutionary campaigns and disastrous socialist experiments, but also the reopening of China to overseas visitors and investors. On 1 January 1979, Beijing announced that it would stop shelling the Nationalist defensive positions in Quemoy ( 慹 攨 ), the offshore island outside of Xiamen (⹰攨) in southern Fujian still held by Taiwan’s forces. At the same time, the Chinese authorities issued “a proclamation to compatriots in Taiwan” ( ⏲ ⎘ 䀋 ⎴ 傆 㚠 ). The proclamation adopted a reconciliatory policy towards Taipei, calling for “three links and four flows” (ᶱ忂⚃㳩). “Three links and four flows” promoted trade, travel, postal service, as well as a series of economic and cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait (Qu 1989, 113-114; Fan 2011, 110). Suspicious of China’s intentions, Nationalist authorities in Taipei had initially responded with the so-called “Three Noes Policy” (ᶱᶵ㓧䫾 )—no contact, no negotiation, and no compromise (ᶵ㍍妠ˣᶵ婯⇌ˣᶵ ⥍⋼). However, the ROC government in Taiwan could hardly stem the tide of people entering China clandestinely through foreign locations when a majority of its former allies established formal diplomatic relations with the PRC during the 1970s and the 1980s. It was estimated that during the first half of the 1980s approximately 10,000 to 50,000 waishengren in Taiwan had gone back to the mainland to see their relatives every year via locations such as Hong Kong, the United States, Japan, Thailand, Philippines, and Singapore (Yin 1987, 16; Qu 1989, 12). By the second half of the 1980s, the Nationalist authorities came under heavy pressure to initiate reforms. In August 1986, hundreds of retired Nationalist soldiers protested against the government’s unjust pension system, which excluded a considerable number of early retirees and subjected many to abject poverty. The number of disgruntled veterans grew into tens of thousands in

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just a few months. The event raised widespread public concern about the well-being of the aging veterans, many of whom were young boys abducted by the retreating Nationalist divisions in the closing days of the civil war (Hu 1990). Then in the spring of 1987, a small number of disgruntled veterans joined forces with the newly formed opposition party in Taiwan, the Democratic Progressive Party (㮹ᷣ忚㬍源, DPP). They formed an organisation called “the mainlander homebound movement association” (⢾䚩Ṣ彼悱᥈ぶಁ㐍᭳) and held open demonstrations on the street. The episode was later dubbed “the veterans’ homebound movement” (侩ℝ彼悱㐠ື). Despite criticism coming from within their own ranks, the protestors won overwhelming sympathy and support of the general public in Taiwan (Jiang 2008, 216-218). Even the local populations who disliked the mainlanders and looked down upon the lowranking veterans thought the aging soldiers should be allowed to go home and reunite with their families. Therefore, when Chiang Ching-kuo made the historic decision to lift martial law in July 1987, public opinion on this particular matter could no longer be ignored by a formerly authoritarian party trying to retain popular support in the highly volatile process of democratic transition. In October 1987, in the midst of the island’s steady march towards further reforms, the authorities in Taiwan finally decided to grant their citizens the right to visit relatives in China. The new policy was announced after Chiang Ching-kuo, who was gravely ill and approaching the end of his life, gave his final blessing. As soon as the travel restriction was lifted, the surviving exiles of 1949 flocked to mainland China en masse. Travel agencies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China ran on 24-hour shifts in order to accommodate this massive flow of human beings. Airline tickets to Hong Kong, travel brochures, and guidebooks on how to purchase home appliances and electronics for relatives in China from overseas locations became the hottest commodities. According to official statistics, the number of Taiwan residents who visited China surpassed 200,000 in one single year (Qu 1989, 41). The size of the returnees grew steadily in the next few years as the government eased many of the remaining restrictions. Before long, many of the returnees arrived back in Taiwan and began to publish a large number of travelogues and personal accounts about their homecoming experience. Rather than expressing joy, relief, and gratification in fulfilling a lifelong dream, these writings articulated intense feelings of disappointment, disillusionment, disorientation, and sadness. The stark contrast between idealistic mental images of their native places and the harsh realities of their hometowns and villages in

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China gave rise to a state of cognitive dissonance, a reverse culture shock that weighed heavily on the psyche of the aging returnees. Describing his return experience, Zhang Tuowu (⻝㉻唒, 1928- ), an acclaimed mainlander writer known for his acerbic and realistic portrayal of the harsh life of rank-and-file soldiers in the Nationalist military, wrote: Since returning from last year’s (should be the year prior to last year) return trip in May, I felt half of me has died. I couldn’t bring myself to write. I became lazy and dispirited…Long before I embarked on the trip, I had this plan to write a book called Going Home. I even drew up a table of contents in my mind. Yet contrary to all my hopes and expectations, everything about the return experience was not exactly one would expect. Not only that, I arrived back in Taipei feeling miserable, broken-hearted, disappointed, and pointless (Zhang 2010: 182).

Elaborating on what happened, Zhang stated: I sat in the car and stared at the scenes throughout my way home. The landscape of my native soil in Jiangnan, the landscape I had constantly reminisced in my dreams, became utterly unfamiliar…I asked myself: Am I lost? Did I just enter another country? After that, I reached my brothers’ home, which I stayed for three days. During those three days, I asked them the same questions five or six times: Where is my home? Where is the home I spent my childhood years, my native place? Where is the Houshan Village in Jiangnan? They responded with silence and I became utterly dejected (Zhang 2010: 186).

Another mainlander writer in his 60s who visited his family’s estate in Haozhou ( 㮓 ⶆ ) in northern Anhui Province, authored the following passages. He did so after witnessing the physical destruction of his home village under PRC rule, and he did so, after learning the devastating news. His entire extended family, except for one cousin, had starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. Talking about his home village, he wrote: If I haven’t asked, there’s no way for me to tell that this was the old homestead I had been thinking about for the last four decades! Then it suddenly dawned on me. I was no longer a returnee, but a stranger passing by (Feng 1989, 106).

And speaking of his only surviving relative, the cousin, he remarked with great sadness:

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My second oldest cousin is the only one among five cousins of my maternal family who has survived. Back in the days, within ten or so kilometres of our surrounding area, he was the first one to receive a Western education. When he graduated from secondary school, people dubbed him “scholar of Western learning” (㲳䥨ㇵ). They went out to greet him on the streets when he returned from the county town…He was gentled, scholarly, cultured, and suave with delicate skin and fair complexion…I have never heard him speak one word in foul language. Yet the person who walked out of a run-down straw hut to greet me was this wizened, yellow and skinny old man, clothes dishevelled, and with a pair of rough hands like broken gunny sacks. I stared at him blankly for some time. There was this unspeakable sadness in my heart. A question came to my mind and kept repeating itself: “How could he have become like this?” “How could he have become like this (Feng 1989, 107-108)?”

Another returnee offered an even more upsetting account. This person was a native of Laiyang (厲春) County in Shandong Province. He left his native village during the Anti-Japanese War to join the military when he was still a teenager. Like many of his peers, he was patriotic. He wanted to fight the Japanese. In March 1990, with mixed emotions and great anxiety, he embarked on the homebound journey. Fifty long years has passed since he first left the village. The person wrote: The moment I was about to ask where mom and dad were, my sixth youngest sister dragged me into another room. We hugged each other and cried. She wept and told me: “Father died in a [land reform] struggle session. His body was thrown into the wilderness. Mother missed you so much that she cried until her eyes went blind. She died during the Cultural Revolution. No one was there to take care of the funeral because our older brother and his wife also got sick and died. Our old house was completely demolished....” Before she could finish, my heart ached like being cut by a knife. My head hurt like it was about to explode. At that instance, I wanted to go back to Taiwan right away and put an end to this dreadful trip (Xue 2008: 112-113).

These are only three examples among hundreds of published travel accounts written by returning mainlanders during the late 1980s and the early 1990s. They all tell a similar heartrending experience. A clear indication of how this reverse culture shock influenced the diasporic identity of first generation waishengren can be observed in the low number of retired veterans who applied for residency in mainland China. In the early 1990s, the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, despite their continued difference in politics, made the resettlement

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arrangements possible. Surveys conducted by the Taiwanese authorities show that, throughout the 1990s, only about 7,400 former soldiers applied for the resettlement program in China with the ROC government’s assistance and pension plan. This was less than six percent of the 130,000 eligible mainlander retirees from the military. By 2004, the number has increased only moderately to about 8,700 (Jian 2004, 172-173). Realising that they longer feel at home in China, a majority of the civil war exiles, upon returning to Taiwan from the mainland, came to appreciate their lived experiences and memories on the island. Many began to consider the island their permanent home in the early 1990s. Unfortunately for the ageing first generation waishengren, it was also during this time that the island started to embark on the course of indigenisation/Taiwanisation, a corollary of the democratisation process that empowered the long-suppressed local majority populations. As mentioned, this has led to a growing sense of alienation from the mainstream Taiwanese society on the part of waishengren. Even some of the second and the third generation mainlanders, their own children and grandchildren, have denounced their mainlander heritage and gone over to the indigenisation camp. A shared complaint by the senescent former exiles is the feeling of being excluded by both sides. When they visit China, their own relatives and fellow natives consider them outsiders and call them “compatriots from Taiwan” taibao (⎘傆). Yet when they are in Taiwan, they are also treated like outcasts, as an unpleasant reminder of the Nationalist authoritarian rule on the island. Their age and heavy accent have become a mark of shame. When emotions ran high during major election campaigns on the island, there would be the occasional “go back to China!” remarks hurled at them. The surviving civil war exiles, now in their 70s and 80s, knew they could never return to the China they had longed for. In the meantime, their historical legacy and their rightful place on the island, something they had long taken for granted before the homebound journey, have also been questioned and challenged especially by radical proponents of Taiwanese nationalism. While most have no desire to reside in the mainland, some continue to hope that a renunciation between the PRC and the ROC in the distant future could finally bring them home nominally and symbolically. Other became staunch defenders of the Nationalist Party and the history of the ROC on the island against both the PRC and Taiwan independence. This is not because they agree with Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial rule, as many waishengren were also victims of the same authoritarian apparatus before the island’s democratisation. The main reason is that the history of

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the Nationalist regime in Taiwan came to represent the history of their lived experiences and communities on the island.

Concluding remarks It is likely that the surviving exiles of the Chinese civil war will continue to search for home and belonging until the day they pass away. An old waishengren from Gansu Province told his son that he now considers Taiwan his home and his native village in Gansu his root (㟡). Though the distance between these two places is far, as long as he lives, he will continue to travel between his home and his root (Xue 2008, 49). The story of the first generation mainlanders underscores the complexity, fluidity, and contingency of Chinese diasporic identity wrought by changing historical conditions. The very idea of home shifted and so did the modality of “in-between-ness”. The mainlander story also illustrates the importance of looking into historical experiences and sentiments of non-belonging produced by involuntary displacement in theorising Chinese diaspora. As mentioned, forced relocation was a form of migration experienced by tens of millions of Chinese during the modern era. Famous historical figures, such as Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and Sun Yat-sen had all been political exiles. Hong Kong, Macao, and countries in Southeast Asia have been safe havens for Chinese political dissidents and refugees since the Republican era. The people who helped build China Studies in North America and shaped American policy toward the PRC after World War Two were part of the émigré population in 1949. The exiles of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and Falun Gong have considerable influence on the overseas Chinese communities nowadays. Yet these subjects and their subjectivities have received little attention in the research and debate on Chinese diaspora because the current scholarship is shaped by a paradigm that overlooks political migrants. This is a fertile field waiting to be ploughed.

Note 1. A Note on the Romanisation of Chinese Characters: This study makes use of the Hanyu Pinyin system in general. The exceptions are place names in Taiwan or well-known historical figures and organisations, such as Chiang Kai-shek (instead of Jiang Jieshi) and KMT/Kuomintang (instead of GMD/Guomindang).

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Goodman, Bryna. 1995. Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ho, Ping-ti ỽ䁛晠. 1966. Zhongguo huiguan shilun ᷕ⚳㚫棐⎚婾 [A historical treatise on huiguan in China], Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju. Hsu, Madeline, Y. 2000. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943. Stanford California: Stanford University Press. Hu, Taili 傉⎘渿. 1990. “Cong shachang dao jietou: laobing zijiu yundong gaishu” ⽆㱁⟜⇘埿柕: 侩ℝ冒㓹忳≽㤪徘 [From battlefield to the streets: an account of the self-help movement of the Nationalist veterans]. In Taiwan xinxing shehui yundong 冢䀋㕘冰䣦㚫忳≽ [New social movements in Taiwan], edited by Xu Zhengguang ⼸㬋⃱ and Song Wenli ⬳㔯慴, 157-173. Taipei: Juliu tushu. Jian, Chunan 䯉㗍⬱. 2004. Rongmin dalu anyang zhi xinli ji shehui shiying 㥖㮹⣏映⬱梲ᷳ⽫䎮⍲䣦㚫怑ㅱ [The psychological and social adjustments for retired veterans living in mainland China], 171180. Proceedings for Zuqun yu wenhua fazhan xueshu yantaohui 㕷佌 冯 㔯 ⊾ 䘤 ⯽ ⬠ 埻 䞼 妶 㚫 [The Academic Conference on the Development of Ethnic Groups and Cultures], Taipei. Jiang, Sizhang ⦄⿅䪈. 2008. Xiangchou—yige ˬ waishengren ˭de liuli wu youshang 悱ォ—ᶨᾳˬ⢾䚩Ṣ˭䘬㳩暊冯ㄪ  [Nostalgia— displacement and grief of a “mainlander”]. Taipei: Wenjintang. Künnemann, Vanessa and Ruth Mayer, eds. 2009. Trans-Pacific Interactions: the United States and China, 1880-1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Li, Dongming 㛶㢇㖶. 1969. “Guangfu hou Taiwan renkou shehui zengjia zhi tantao” ⃱⽑⼴冢䀋Ṣ⎋䣦㚫⡆≈ᷳ㍊妶 [A study of Taiwan’s population increase after the retrocession]. Taipei wenxian ⎘⊿㔯䌣 [Taipei archives] 9/10: 215-249. Li, Kuang-chun. 2002. “Mirror and Masks: An Interpretative Study of Mainlanders’ Identity Dilemma.” In Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, edited by Stéphane Corcuff, 102-122. Armonk, New York: M E Sharpe. Li, Xiaoling 㛶㓰䍚. 1979. “Minjian shetuan zhi yanjiu: yi Taipei diqu tongxiang zuzhi weili” 㮹攻䣦⛀ᷳ䞼䨞: ẍ⎘⊿⛘⋨⎴悱⤌⧊Ⅽ౛ [A study of civil organisations: the native place associations in Taipei], master’s thesis. Taipei: National Taiwan University, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology.

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Lin, Tongfa 㜿㠞㱽. 2009. Yijiusijiu da chetui ᶨḅ⚃ḅ⣏㑌徨 [1949, the great retreat]. Taipei: Lianjing. McKeown, Adam. 1999. “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842~ 1949.” The Journal of Asian Studies 58 (2): 306-337. Meyer, Mahlon. 2012. Remembering China from Taiwan: Divided Families and Bittersweet Reunions after the Chinese Civil War. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Mishra, Sudesh. 2006. Diaspora Criticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2000. Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Qu, Haiyuan 䝧㴟㸸 et al. 1989. Dalu tanqin ji fangwen de yingxiang ⣏ 映㍊奒⍲姒⓷䘬⼙枧 [The effects of visiting relatives in mainland China]. Taipei: Caituan faren Zhang Rongfa jijinhui guojia zhengce yanjiu ziliao zhongxin. Robinson, Marc, ed. 1994. Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. San Diego/New York/London: A Harvest Book. Rowe, William T. 1984. Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889. Stanford California: Stanford University Press. —. 1989 Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895. Stanford California: Stanford University Press. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1 (1): 83-99. Said, Edward. 1994. “Reflections on Exile.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson, 137-149. San Diego/New York/London: A Harvest Book. Shambaugh, David, ed. 1995. Greater China: The Next Superpower? Oxford UK: Oxford University Press. Sheffer, Gabriel, ed. 1986. Modern Diasporas in International Politics. London/Sidney: Croom Helm. Sichuan wenxian (⚃ⶅ㔯䌣). 1962-1967. Volumes 1-55. Simon, Scott. 2006. “Taiwan’s Mainlanders: A Diasporic Identity in Construction.” Revue européenne des migrations internationals 22 (1): 87-106. Tu, Wei-ming. 1991. “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center.” Daedalus 120 (2): 1-32. Wang, Fuchang 䌳 䓓 㖴 . 2003. Dangdai Taiwan shehui de zuqun xiangxiang 䔞 ẋ ⎘ 䀋 䣦 㚫 䘬 㕷 佌 ゛ ⁷ [Ethnic imagination in contemporary Taiwan]. Taipei: Qunxue.

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Xu, Lijuan ⼸渿⧇. 2005. “Taipei shi Jiangxi tongxianghui zhi tantao” ⎘ ⊿ⶪ㰇大⎴悱᭳அ᥈ウ [An investigation of the Jiangxi Native Place Association in Taipei], master’s thesis. Taipei: National Taiwan Normal University, Department of History. Xue, Jiguang 啃 两 ⃱ et al. 2008. Xiangguan chuchu—waishengren fanxiang tanqin zhaopian gushishu 悱㜝⹦⹦—⢾䚩Ṣ彼悱᥈ぶ↷∦ ᨾ஦᭩ [Home everywhere: a pictorial story book of the return visits for the mainlanders]. Taipei County, Zhonghe City: INK Publishing. Yang, Dominic Meng-Hsuan and Mau-kuei Chang. 2010. “Understanding the Nuances of Waishengren: History and Agency.” China Perspectives 3: 108-122. Yin, Ping ⯡厵. 1987. “Guixiang jie” 㬠悱⤖ [Return home complex]. Yuanjian zazhi 怈夳暄娴 [Global views monthly] 12: 14-19. Zhang, Maogui. 2005. “Waishengren: Exploring Diaspora Chinese Nationalism in Taiwan.” Paper presented at the inauguration address for the Series on Identities in East Asia, Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University. Zhang, Tuowu ⻝㉻唒. 2010. Wojia youge hunxiaozi ㆹ⭞㚱ᾳ㷦⮷⫸ [I have a bastard kid at home], second edition, Taipei: Jiuge chuban youxian gongsi. Zhao, Yanning (Antonia Chao) 嵁⼍ᑀ. 2001. “Daizhe caomao daochu luxing—shilun zhongguo liuwang ˣ nuxing zhuti ˣ yu jiyi jian de jiangou guanxi” ㇜叿勱ⷥ⇘嗽㕭埴—娎婾ᷕ⚳㳩ṉˣ⤛⿏ᷣ橼ˣ冯 姀 ㅞ 攻 䘬 ⺢ 㥳 斄 Ὢ [A forever banished uterus: Chinese diaspora, fertility, and the politics of suffering]. Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan ⎘䀋䣦 㚫䞼䨞⬋↲ [Taiwan: a radical quarterly in social studies] 41: 53-97. Zhong, Yanyou 挦导㓠. 1999. Zhengzhi xing yimin de huzhu zuzhi—Taipei shi zhi waisheng tongxianghui (1946-1955) 㓧㱣⿏䦣㮹䘬Ḻ≑䳬䷼ — ⎘ ⊿ ⶪ ᷳ ⢾ 䚩 ⎴ 悱 ᭳ (1946-1995) [Associations for mutual assistance among political migrants—the mainlander native place associations in Taipei, 1946-1995]. Taipei County, Banqiao: Daoxiang chubanshe. Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui ᷕ ⚳ ⛘ 㕡 㔯 䌣 ⬠ 㚫 , ed. 1985. Zhongguo difang wenxian shetuan huiyao ᷕ⚳⛘㕡㔯䌣䣦⛀唰天 [A summary report of the Chinese local reference organisations]. Taipei: Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui. Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui ᷕ ⚳ ⛘ 㕡 㔯 䌣 ⬠ 㚫 , ed. 1971. Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui niankan ᷕ⚳⛘㕡㔯䌣⬠㚫⸜↲ [Yearbook of the SSCLR], vol. 1, Taipei: Zhongguo difang wenxian xuehui.

CHAPTER NINE FROM A “BORROWED PLACE” TO A “GRADUATED DIASPORA”: THE RETURN HONG KONG DIASPORA AND HONG KONG-CHINA RELATIONS YUK WAH CHAN

Introduction An interesting aspect about Hong Kong-China migration relations is the fact that such relations have kept changing and shifting both before and after 1997. Before 1997, Hong Kong was considered a diaspora Chinese society, separated from China since 1842 and formed largely by Chinese migrants from mainland China. Since the handover of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China in 1997, this diaspora community has theoretically “returned” to the motherland. This has not been done by the physical movements of people, but by the return of the city’s sovereignty to China and its changed legal-political status. Yet, Hong Kong-China relationship continues to evolve with much political negotiation and contestation. Not unlike returnees elsewhere, the “Hong Kong return diaspora” finds itself not quite fitting in the homeland / mainland body. A Hong Kong identity is often stressed vis-á-vis the Chinese one. Though having returned, Hong Kong remains as an “incongruous” part of China. Hong Kong’s political survival now relies on the novel concept of “One Country, Two Systems”, which demands much political imagination as Hong Kong has retained its basic economic, social, and legal infrastructure, and a land border continues to bar people from exit and entry without legitimate permits. This chapter relates Hong Kong’s return to China to migration studies of “return migration” and political studies of sovereignty and differentiated territories. It discusses the different institutional and social borders that continue to separate Hong

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Kong from China. Instead of “de-diasporising” Hong Kong, the political return has continued to demonstrate its distinctiveness. This chapter employs a new conceptual template—“graduated territory, graduated diaspora”—to examine Hong Kong’s situation. This research received its inspiration from Aihwa Ong’s (2000) “graduated sovereignty”. Ong argues that some sovereign states in Southeast Asia, in response to neoliberal capitalism and globalisation processes, have implemented differential treatment of its people within the state’s boundaries. This chapter expands the discussion and incorporates Ong’s arguments into the specific situation of Hong Kong. Separated from China, Hong Kong experienced different political paths and governance before 1997. After 1997, as a Special Administrative Region, it has continued to undertake unique political trajectories that differentiate it from the rest of China. At the same time, as a diaspora largely formed by Chinese migrants and their descendants, Hong Kong has in past decades constructed a different sense of belonging and cultural identity, which has effected the fabrication of a social border between the return diaspora of Hong Kong and the China mainland. While Ong argues for the gradated practices of sovereign power and the state’s “voluntary” differential treatment of its people, this chapter attempts to further delineate how the statecraft of a “One Country, Two Systems” and a “Special Administrative Region” has facilitated the institutionalisation of a differentiated territory within the state boundary. In addition, it will illustrate how the migration experiences of an entire population has effectively “departed” the people from their “roots” and built the experientially different base of a “return diaspora”. It explicates on the shifting social borders that maintain the sense of difference that Hongkongers hold towards the mainland and mainlanders since the 1980s.

From graduated sovereignty to graduated diaspora Graduated sovereignty Ong has analysed the plight of some Southeast Asian states within the globalisation processes whence they encountered neo-liberalist capitalism. The intervention of global markets and regulatory institutions (such as the World Trade Organisation and other United Nations organisations) have been exerting much influence on developing states, and governments in Asia have created new economic possibilities, social spaces and political constellations, which in turn conditioned their further actions. Ong argues that there are a constellation of “differential treatments of populations—

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through schemes of biopolitical disciplining and pastoral care—that differently insert them into the processes of global capitalism” (2000, 62). While Ong focuses on the effects that globalisation and neo-liberalist capitalism has on Asian states and the practices of governance, I am more concerned how those who are “treated” differently by the state respond and react to such distinctive treatment. In the case of Hong Kong, it is— how people in the “return diaspora” perceive their relations with the “homeland”. Ong examines the modality that shows an assemblage of governmental practices that differentiate its treatment of its subjects so that it falls in line with the needs of the global market. After exploring various forms of state power and its manipulation of global relations with neoliberal capital and regulatory agencies, she argues that Asian governments are reacting differently to such global forces with a mix of governing practices (including internal military repression) and making institutional adjustments to meet the challenges of the global forces. Graduated sovereignty…refers to the differential treatment of populations —through schemes of biopolitical disciplining and pastoral care—that differently insert them into the processes of global capitalism. These gradations of governing may be in a continuum, but they overlap with preformed racial, religious and gender hierarchies, and further fragment citizenship for people who are all, normally speaking, citizens of the same country. (2000, 62)

In a more recent paper, Ong (2012) takes the analysis further to reinforce the idea of how neoliberal calculations have dictated the development policies of many states. Rather than rendering the state less important, global neoliberal flows of capital have actually helped to consolidate authoritarianism. In Ong’s words—the states have developed the milieu of a combination or articulation of neoliberal logic, authoritarian rules and global capitals that generates a scheme of internal governance that stratifies treatments of national subjects and cut national bodies into differentiated terrains. A significant contribution of Ong is that despite the fact that modern states tend to believe in a “full-bodied” sovereignty within the boundary of their own territories, political realities often show the opposite. The state, under myriad circumstances, has responded to different internal and external forces that necessitate continued negotiations of power, status, and identity within and beyond state boundaries. As a special administrative zone of the Chinese state, Hong Kong is certainly a distinctively different “territory” from the rest of China. While China has large pockets of autonomous regions, Hong Kong (and Macau)

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is yet another type of system within China’s governance. As authoritarian as China is, it also has to respond to different internal and external political realities that necessitate negotiations of power, “ownerships” (of territories), governance, and identity (of places) under its rule. In theory, China has never admitted any thinning of its sovereignty over Hong Kong. Even before 1997, China had never explicitly recognised Hong Kong as a “separated” territory; the Chinese populations in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, in the eyes of the Chinese state, are gangaotai tongbao (compatriots in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), rather than haiwai tongbao (overseas compatriots). The political reality of the return of Hong Kong, as a developed British colony at the end of the twentieth century and in the prime time of China’s awakening transitional economy, has necessitated China to craft a new system within its political spectrum to accommodate the “returning” of the territory and the diaspora. In face of internal and global politics, China has in a sense implemented a type of “graduated sovereignty” to its treatment of Hong Kong. The colonial time-space of Hong Kong has thus been transited to a post-colonial time-space for the development of a “special administration” for fifty years. The following sections will provide two new concepts for the analysis of Hong Kong’s post-colonial development.

Graduated territory “Graduated territory” refers to the transformed status and the specially arranged institutional infrastructure of Hong Kong after 1997, which has been a result of many rounds of international communications and diplomatic negotiations between Hong Kong, China, and the United Kingdom, in response to the need of a transitional period for preparing Hong Kong for completely integrating into China. As a Special Administrative Region (SAR), Hong Kong has been authorised to retain its social, politico-economic, and legal systems developed before 1997. In the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the people of Hong Kong are also guaranteed special rights to elect its chief administrator in 2017. The land border between China and Hong Kong, as elaborated in Chapter seven, has clearly shown this differentiating boundary that continues to separate Hong Kong from the rest of China. Hong Kong still maintains its entry and exit control and its own legal system. The more recent debates on whether Hong Kong should reduce or stop the entry of mainland Chinese immigrants clearly show how the land border also marks the frame of reference that Hong Kong people use to demarcate their own “territory” and “social border”. Being one of the world’s top capitalist

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cities and global financial centres, Hong Kong may still be economically beneficial to China; yet, politically, Hong Kong remains an uneasy piece of flesh within the state body of China. Since the handover of its “sovereignty” back to China, Hong Kong has continued to make adjustments to the various institutional changes. Ong (2000) investigates how variegated treatment of the people has been imposed by the state in accordance to the need of adapting to pressures and measures of the global neoliberal capitalist forces. Rather than being a response on the part of the state to global capitalism, the situation of Hong Kong has resulted from international politics and diplomacy of handling a “borrowed” colony before 1997 and a chain of concerted efforts in response to post-colonial adaptation after 1997. Such adaptation has made Hong Kong a unique “graduated territory” within the state body of China.

Graduated diaspora I also use the concept, “graduated diaspora”, to examine Hong Kong people’s self-perceived difference from Chinese mainlanders and the existing social borders. As a return diaspora on the whole, Hong Kong people have kept differentiating themselves from mainlanders. Albeit the fact that a majority of the present population are constituted by people born in China and their descendants, many have shown excessive aversion towards Chinese mainlanders, especially mainland tourists, during our survey interviews. Indeed, the institutional maintenance of the Hong Kong-China border, the social consciousness of a local identity, and the self-acclaimed sense of difference has all continued to strengthen the social borders that keep widening the rift between mainlanders and Hongkongers. Not unlike other return migrants who find estrangement and distance between their own community and the root society, Hongkongers find it hard to identify with the Chinese in the mainland; a resistant sentiment has been developed towards any further cultural integration between Hong Kong and China. Since the late 2000s, there has been an increasing number of reported cases showing aggravated tensions between Hong Kong residents and mainland visitors, and such tension has been labelled as “China-Hong Kong conflict” (zhonggang maodun) (China Daily 2012; CNN 2012). We conducted a research in the summer of 2013 to explore more updated sentiments regarding the Hong Kong-China rift among Hong Kong people, and to analyse its implications on the migration and border relations between the two places. “Graduated diaspora” provides a new conceptual platform for the analysis of variegated migration experiences and their consequences. It

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highlights the gradation of relations that diasporic communities have held towards their “homeland”, which evolve through life experiences different from those in the root societies. These differences are particularly lucidly enshrined through a “return”. Academic discussions of diaspora are still crowned under ethnic labels. As I have argued elsewhere (Chan 2013), due to such a limitation in “naming” and interpreting a diaspora, we are yet to broaden our conceptual framing of effects of migration and mobility have on the migrants. Once en route, migrants are accumulating “experiences” that make them different from “root”. Many returnees would have encountered “cultural distance”, if not shock, when they return “home”. In diaspora studies, the “ethnicised” labelling of diasporas explicitly implies root connections. While a diaspora population living away from home may manifest all sorts of nostalgia for home, migrants may find various nexuses of disconnections after a return. “Graduated diaspora” is used in such an attempt as to capture this estranged state of a return diaspora. In my study of the returned Chinese Vietnamese in Vietnam, I used the term “hybrid diaspora” to frame “the on-going movement and shifting identityscape of a diaspora whose identity and sense of belonging have continued to evolve along with its experiences of on-going movement” (Chan 2013, 3). In this chapter, I provide yet another conceptual template that helps transcend the “ethnic” dimension and limitation of “diaspora” and accommodate the gradated destinies of the “once” separated parts of a people. Before I explicate on the historical formation of the Hong Kong identity differentials and the social borders between Hong Kong and China, I will turn to the literature on return migration that will help locate Hong Kong’s situation within the existing studies of return migration. I will also extend the use of John Urry’s mobility typology to intertwine political status, diaspora identity, and movement.

Migration relations and return mobilities Return migration has re-captured scholarly attention since the 2000s (Gmelch 1980; King 2000; Tsuda 2003; Long 2004; Ley and Kobayashi 2005; Christou 2006; Seol and Skrentny 2009; King and Christou 2011; Chan and Tran 2011). In the early discussions of return migration, Ghosh (2000, 9-10) put forward an early typology of return migration: x

repatriation of migrants from less developed countries to highly developed countries;

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return migration of labour migrants from developed industrial countries to less developed home countries; return movements between countries of broadly equal economic status.

These hardly exhaust the different patterns of return migration. More recently, King and Christou (2011) have stipulated different types of return mobilities. While there is a kind of “return for good”, that means to settle (back home) permanently, there are various kinds of short-term returns. In the age of globalisation and the rapidly increasing movement of people and shifting of boundaries, migration has been swiftly recycled (Chan and Tran 2011; Christou 2006). Migration often involves physical motilities of individual migrants; yet, the return of Hong Kong to the motherland as a whole is a peculiar type of return. It was not constituted by the actual physical movement of people, but rendered by the change in Hong Kong’s political status. Urry (2007, 47) put forward five types of mobilities—corporeal, material, imaginative, virtual, and communicative. To Urry, imaginative mobilities include those changes effected through the changed images of places and peoples moving across multiple print and visual media, which also reconstruct vision of place. I attempt to extend this concept of mobility to include Hong Kong’s return to China. It links to the imaginative belonging of Hong Kong as part of China’s territory but at the same time a “separation” from China due to the political guarantee of a high level of autonomy as well as the continuation of its own institutional infrastructure and ways of life—a graduated territory. It also requires the symbolic and imaginative “travel” of both the Chinese authorities and the Hong Kong return diaspora in political discourses to adapt to each other’s new position and to draw new visions of their relationships—a graduated diaspora. Such process of “mobility” may provoke contestations of identity, rights, power, and obligations. Amidst the various discussions in return migration literature, many have pointed out the discordance returnees have felt towards the homeland environment and culture. Returnees may return out of different reasons, such as economic, cultural, and political reasons; and may have returned voluntarily or involuntarily. However, one common problem found among returnees is the issue of adaptation and reintegration. Some may feel completely lost in an unfamiliar “home” environment. Returnees encounter multiple spaces of difference between them and their homeland compatriots and experience cultural distancing and discrimination (Christou 2006; Potter 2005; Seol and Skrentny 2009). Some even consciously construct a resistant identity against the predominant homeland culture (Tsuda 2003).

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Not unlike the return migrants elsewhere, the Hong Kong return diaspora finds itself not fitting in the homeland / mainland body. The research results and analysis below will elaborate on the updated differentiated discourses and imaginative mobility of the Hong Kong populace. This mobility continues to “move” to adapt to the new political realm of a graduated territory and respond to the new cultural space of a graduated diaspora.

China-HK relations and formation of social borders Social borders before the 2000s Ever since the establishment of the communist regime in China, Hong Kong had acted as a sanctuary for many Chinese who were thwarted by the political campaigns and economic hardship in China. Hong Kong received over two million migrants and refugees from China from the 1940s to 1980s (Chan 1991). The more unstable China was, the more actively Hong Kong would play the role of a political and economic sanctuary for Chinese mainlanders. Thus, Hong Kong has been described as a migrant society, formed mostly by migrants and refugees from China. Its people are said to carry the ethos of a “refugee mentality” (Lau and Kuan 1988). As explained in Chapter seven, it was not until late 1980 that the Hong Kong government implemented complete control over illegal immigration and imposed a strict quota system for “institutionalising” immigrations from China. The stark contrast between the level of economic development between China and Hong Kong in the 1970s had assisted in building up the bad impressions that Hong Kong people have towards the Chinese regime. The opening of China in the early 1980s not only opened new opportunities for Hong Kong capitalists to invest in a land with abundant supply of cheap labour, it also lifted the mysterious curtain on the socialist governance which had led to sheer poverty and underdevelopment in China. The detrimental political reality in China had all but impressed Hong Kong people further about the defects of the authoritarian communist regime. The socio-economic situation in China presented a big contrast to the rapid progress and fast-paced economic development of the capitalist system in Hong Kong. Well implanted within the collective “local identity” consciousness of the Hong Kong people is a self-acclaimed difference from and superiority over the mainlanders. Albeit being a colonial society, the collective identity of Hongkongers has never been confused by colonial rules or the

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ethno-political hierarchy in Hong Kong. Instead, the Hong Kong identity was often contrasted with the mainland. Unlike other colonised societies, where identity politics is generated through a process of political resistance against colonial rule and discursive deconstruction of colonial cultural hegemony, Hong Kong’s local identity has been shaped and consolidated in conscious contrast with the mainland. Lau, analysing the emergence of the Hong Kong local identity, has explicated on the economic, social and cultural factors leading to the formation of such identity (Lau 1982). As the first person in Hong Kong who conducted social surveys on Hong Kong people’s awareness of a local identity, Lau is a well-quoted sociologist and the former head of the Central Policy Unit of the SAR government. Between 1985 and 1995, those who expressed a strong or very strong sense of belonging to Hong Kong ranged from 55.1 to 79.5 percent (Lau 2000, 257). According to Lau, factors contributing to the formation of the “Hongkongese” identity were multifold. First, the setting up of a socialist regime in China in 1949 had virtually stopped the movement of people between Hong Kong and China. Second, Hong Kong’s development path had also been different from that in China. The gargantuan divergence in developmental experiences between the two societies since 1949—with Hong Kong pursuing laissez-faire capitalism and China experiencing socialism—had been critical to the rise of the Hongkongese identity and the sense of difference. Moreover, during the three decades from 1950 to the early 1980s, China remained a closed country; on the contrary, Hong Kong had experienced tremendous economic growth and was labelled the “goldlaying flying geese”. Lau further pointed out: ...a substantial portion of Hong Kong Chinese came to Hong Kong either to flee political persecution and turmoil or to seek economic opportunities. This meant that there was in Hong Kong a strong sentiment against the socialist regime in China, which naturally became a core element of the Hongkongese identity. (2000: 257)

According to Lau, the wide disparity in the level of development between Hong Kong and mainland China had led to a sense of superiority among Hong Kong people. Popular culture—popular songs sung in Cantonese and TV movies and films produced in the local dialect—has all helped mould Hong Kong’s peculiar local identity.

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Social borders in the 2000s If it was mainly the disparity in economic development and rich-poor dichotomy that had led Hong Kong society in the 1980s and 1990s to hold China in contempt, the turn of the century should have led Hong Kong people to hold China in high regard. With a decade of continuous growth rate at over 10 percent in the 2000s, China has gained tremendous economic power. The rise of China and its economy has together produced a huge band of leisured Chinese who have become big spenders. A large number of rich Chinese have been travelling the world and especially across the border to Hong Kong for conspicuous spending. However, not only has the rift between Hongkongers and mainlanders not been reduced, it has grown wider since the late 2010s. The term zhonggang maodun (China-Hong Kong conflict) has become the new catchword in local newspapers. From 2009 to 2013, there were a series of issues which greatly bothered Hong Kong people. Firstly, ever since the melamine-tainted milk scandal occurred in late 2008, mainlander parents have been crossing the Hong Kong-China border to grab safer milk powder products which led to a serious baby formula shortage in Hong Kong. This resulted in a new law being passed in early 2013 to restrict travellers from taking more than two cans of milk powder out of Hong Kong. Although the law is meant to cover all travellers, it is obviously made in ad-hoc manner to curb the Chinese “milk grab” (Ko 2013; Lau 2013; China Daily 2011). At around the same time, another controversy arose due to the influx of pregnant mainland women, which led to a shortage of hospital bed space (So 2012; Carney 2013). The most recent conflict was about mainland children entering the SAR for schooling, which led to a new panic about whether Hong Kong can provide sufficient kindergarten places for local children (VOA 2013). All these incidents can be framed under the term—“intrusive mainlanders”— who were blamed by Hong Kong people for taking away local resources and thus Hong Kong people’s priority for using such resources, including milk powder, hospital beds, and kindergarten places.

The Hongkongese-Chinese identity-scape The Public Opinion Programme of the University of Hong Kong has since 1997 kept track of Hong Kong people’s changing attitudes towards their cultural identity. The survey provides four “identity” choices— “Hong Kong Citizen”, “Chinese Hong Kong Citizen”, “Chinese Citizen”, and “Hong Kong Chinese Citizen”. The median of the combined rate of

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the first two vis-a-vis that of the latter two was around 54.7 to 39 percent from 1997 to 2003. In 2004 the ratio was 49 to 47.8 percent. In 2006, those who identified as a “Chinese Citizen” even surpassed that of “Hong Kong Citizen” at 51.9 to 46.8 percent. From 2007 to 2011, preference for the identity of “Chinese” dropped significantly. At the end of 2011, only 16.6 percent identified themselves as a “Chinese citizen” and 17.8 percent as a “Chinese citizen in Hong Kong” (HKUPOP 2012). When the media (BBC 2012; Sing Tao Global Net 2012) reported that more and more Hongkongers were unwilling to identify themselves as Chinese, a mainland official in Hong Kong (Hao Tiechuan, a CCP propaganda officer at the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government of China in the HKSAR) responded to the report with some emotional comments. He said that the survey was not scientific, and it should not have asked Hong Kong people whether they are Chinese or not as it is obviously unquestionable that Hong Kong people are Chinese. Instead, a survey as such should ask Hong Kong people whether they think they are Chinese or British (Ming Pao 2011). Such a comment shows a lack of understanding on the part of Chinese officials of the social and cultural development in Hong Kong. The following sections will discuss how Hong Kong people continue to construct the social borders that distinguish them from mainlanders and sum up post-1997 identity politics in Hong Kong.

From zounan (崘暋) to huigui (⚆㬠) Hong Kong was described as a “refugee” society as many had escaped from the political and economic disasters (zounan) in China before the 1980s. It was then returned to China in the 1990s (huigui). As illustrated above, Hong Kong people have taken all sorts of precautions to make the distinction (between China and Hong Kong) clear. However, it is untrue that they have always rejected their Chinese identity. It is clear that there is a solid Hong Kong identity, yet, people still hold multiple layers of identity that slides along a spectrum of Hongkongese—Chinese identity. As shown from the Hong Kong University survey, from 2003 to 2006, there had been an increase in people’s willingness to pick up the “Chinese” part of their identity. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) that broke out in Asia in 2003 had brought along an economic downturn in many parts of the region. Hong Kong was hard hit by both SARS and the economic slide. In August 2003, the Hong Kong government implemented the “Individual Traveller Scheme” that for the first time freed mainland tourists from the bondage of travel agencies’ package tours. The Scheme

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created a travel boom and brought some prosperity to Hong Kong. This was believed to have positive effects on Hong Kong’s reaction towards China. However, after 2006, Hongkongers’ willingness to identify with the “Chinese” label shrank rapidly. To examine what kind of social borders Hongkongers have crafted towards mainlanders, my research team conducted a study on Hong Kong people’s1 perception of mainlanders and attitudes towards changing crossborder relations. Through a long list of questions, we wanted to explore what kind of views they held towards Chinese tourists and immigrants, and what are the major factors leading to the big gap between people in Hong Kong and from China. A total of 64 individuals were selected through snowball sampling and interviewed with the same set of questionnaire. Among them, there are parent-child pairs. The informants fall into the following age groups: Age groups 15-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 71-80 Subtotal Total

Born in Hong Kong 2 17 17 1 6 4 / 47

Born in China / 2 3 2 4 5 1 17 64

Most of the younger generation respondents (below 41) were born in Hong Kong, while more than half of the informants above 51 were migrants from China. One of our pre-research assumptions was that the older generation would make less differentiation between mainlanders and Hongkongers. However, both younger and older respondents made such differentiations. One third of respondents believed that the massive entry of Chinese tourists in recent years has aggravated Hong Kong people’s negative impressions of the mainlander migrants. The majority (69%) attributed the reasons for the sharpening China-Hong Kong conflicts to the “rough and rude behaviour of the Chinese tourists”, and one-third (34%) believed that Hong Kong people’s increasing tension with Chinese mainlanders was related to their worry about Hong Kong’s political relationship with China. Around 60 percent (38 respondents) believe that it is not easy for new Chinese migrants to adapt to the life of Hong Kong, with a few added that rich migrants would find it easier to adapt.

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As for what criteria would make Chinese migrants becoming Hongkongers, the most common answers are “after living here for seven years” (36%) and “after they internalize Hong Kong values” (33%). Only a few (14%) set “Cantonese” as the requirement. When asked what those “Hong Kong values” are, not every respondent was able to provide answers. Some specified the following: civic sense of responsibility, public morals, rule of law, sense of justice, public hygiene, queuing up, and the sense of discipline. A few said that they did not think Chinese migrants would ever become Hongkongers as “they are from a very different cultural background”. Regardless of the respondents’ ages and birthplaces, an overwhelming majority (86%) opposed speeding up the migration process for mainlanders (i.e., to increase the 150 daily quota for Chinese immigrants). When asked why married couples should be separated by the “quota system”, some provided the following answers: “they can reunite in China” (meaning both the husband and wife can live in mainland China rather than in Hong Kong); “other immigrants do not tend to rely on social welfare”; “seldom will you see a white couple apply for welfare”. When asked if they agreed that Hongkongers are unfair to mainland migrants, more of the younger generation (below age 50) agreed that there are some unfairness and stereotypes. On the other hand, among those aged 51 and above, a general sentiment of non-acceptance can be exemplified with the following comment: New arrivals are different from the Chinese migrants of our generation. Many of us ran away from the disasters (zounan). In those days we came here and worked with our own hands to make a living. Our life was pitiful; we made contribution to the society. Today’s migrants come and can easily get help from the government and organisations in Hong Kong.

This kind of stereotyping—lazy and depending on social welfare— towards mainland immigrants is common amongst Hongkongers. On the other hand, most respondents (62) inclined to maintain the land border between Hong Kong and China and a total of 37 respondents (58%) showed strong opposition to removal of the border. While some opined that whether the integration of the two sides was possible depended on the changes in the social systems and environment of both Hong Kong and China, quite a few said they would not want to see any integration during their life time. Based on this research, we aim to develop a full-scale research to examine further and deeper into the shifting social borders that have kept differentiating Hongkongers and mainlanders, and in what ways such borders can be deconstructed.

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From “borrowed place, borrowed time” to “graduated territory, graduated diaspora” Migration is a life choice, and such movement often brings an altered life trajectory to migrants and their first-born in the new location. Once migrants move, there begins the point of departure for looking into the differentiated trajectory of migrants’ lived experiences. Such newly earned experiences generate and shape a sense of being and belonging among the diasporas that make them different from those in the homeland. The gradated differential or “maturation” of a diaspora is particularly overt when it is contrasted with people of the homeland. Migration almost immediately denotes separation and connection. Classical migration studies have centred on “separation” (from the country of origin) and “assimilation” (into the hosting society), while transnationalism studies stress (transnational) connections. Rather than totally cut off from the origin, migrants develop new senses of belonging in the transnational social space, the building of which has been enhanced by the continuous moves of migrants in-between their roots and guest home. Hong Kong was a society largely formed and developed by migrants from China and their local-born offspring. From 1842 to 1997, Hong Kong was a colony of the British. Due to the unique nature of the 99-year lease of a large part of its territory from the Chinese to the British, Hong Kong was destined to be incorporated back to China. Thus, Hong Kong was often labelled as a city of “borrowed place and borrowed time”. As residents of a “borrowed” colony, Hong Kong people had however developed a strong local identity before 1997, which continued to evolve through and beyond 1997. Both before and after 1997, such an identity have been constructed by contrasting their situations with those of the mainlanders. From the 1970s to 1990s, it was an identity built on a sense of difference between a fast-developing capitalist city in Hong Kong and the political economy of “a poor and backward communist China”. In the 2000s, China rapidly emerged as a global power and a strong state. However, the Hong Kong identity differentials (from China) were further reinforced by the new discourses of “rude and rough” mainland Chinese tourists and other intrusive new-rich mainlanders from the “strong China state”. Such a distance was also underlined by many Hong Kong people’s aversion towards China’s authoritarian pressure on Hong Kong’s political development, and various problematic social problems in China, such as counterfeit products, unsafe food and corruption.

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Return migration often indicates a renewed connection. Regardless of whether it is a voluntary or involuntary return, the experience of estrangement on the part of returnees is not uncommon. While the concept of “transnationalism”, as mentioned above, has contributed much to our understanding of migrants’ transnational living space, there requires a new concept for summing up the more complex sense of being and belonging among return migrant diasporas. Supposedly, upon return, the “once” migrants are to be integrated back to “home”. Yet, their route experiences and identities have often problematized and complicated such process. The term “graduated diaspora” points to the gradation and layers of diasporic communities. It is especially used to highlight the process in which return migrants (those once migrated and who then returned) have to find a new relation with “home”, and have to evoke new adaptation. The Hong Kong graduated diaspora is surely constituted by a Hong Kong identity matriced with different levels of Chinese identification. To problematise the identity issue further, the term “Chinese” is never a static concept. As claimed by some respondents in our survey, there is a huge “cultural difference” between Hongkongers and mainlanders, and there seems a loss of the “Chinese” quality among the mainlanders. For sure, Hong Kong is no longer a city of “borrowed place, borrowed time”; it has become an integral part of China, administered and governed through a different system. The colonial time-space has now been transited to a postcolonial time-space of “special administration” and development. Both Hong Kong people and the Chinese state have to respond to the further evolvement of this graduated territory with its graduated diaspora in Hong Kong.

Conclusion To conclude, this chapter examined the double routes of the Hong Kong Chinese community since the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China through the lens of migration. While Hong Kong has returned to become an integrated part of China since 1997, it is “separated” from China by maintaining its institutional as well as cultural differences. Inspired by Aihwa Ong’s concept of “graduated sovereignty”, the author has ventured into two concepts—“graduated territory” and “graduated diaspora”—to journey the diverged trajectories of the Hong Kong return diaspora. The institutionalisation of the “graduated territory” in Hong Kong was rendered by a statecraft of “One Country, Two Systems”, while the “graduated diaspora” was a result of migration experiences. As Ong’s analysis focuses on state actions, this chapter examines the self-acclaimed

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and self-perceived differential development and formation of the identity of a diasporic population. It has interweaved political studies of sovereignty with migration studies of diasporic identities, and wishes to provoke more interest in studying migrant societies and return diasporas, and their diversely evolving relationships with the society of origin.

Note 1. Hongkonger” or “Hong Kong people” is a contestable term. In this research, “Hong Kong people” is a self-defined perception. We interviewed those who recognised oneself as a Hong Kong person. Not all the interviewees were Hong Kong born.

References BBC. 2012. “English Media: Hong Kong People’s Identity Issue Annoys Beijing.” 13 January. Http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/trad/chinese_ news/2012/01/120113_ukpress_hk.shtml. Carney, J. 2013. “Airport Becomes Last Line of Defence in Fight to Keep Chinese Mainlanders Out of Maternity.” South China Morning Post, 2 June. Http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1251676/airportbecomes-last-line-defence-fight-keep-chinese-mainlanders-out. Chan, Y. W. 2013. “Hybrid Diaspora and Identity-Laundering: A Study of the Return Overseas Chinese Vietnamese in Vietnam.” Asian Ethnicity 14 (4): 525-41. Chan, Y. W., and T. L. T. Tran. 2011. “Recycling Migration and Changing Nationalisms: Vietnamese Return Diaspora and Reconstruction of the Vietnamese Nationhood.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (7): 1101-117. Chan, W. K. 1991. The Making of Hong Kong Society, Three Studies of Class Formation in Early Hong Kong. Oxford: Clarendon Press. China Daily. 2012. “Please Do Not Use ‘Locust’ and ‘Dog’ to Blame Each Other”, 6 February. Http://news.sina.com. —. 2011. “Mainland Buyers Snap Up Baby Milk Powder”, 14 February. Http://www.china.org.cn/business/2011-02/14/content_21913309.htm. March 2012. Christou, A. 2006. “Deciphering Diaspora—Translating Transnationalism: Family Dynamics, Identity Constructions and the Legacy of ‘Home’ in Second-generation Greek-American Return Migration.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29: 1040-56.

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CNN. 2012. “Hong Kong Newspaper Ad Rails Against Chinese ‘Invasion’”, 8 February. Http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/01/world/asia/locust-mainlander-ad/. Gmelch, G. 1980. “Return Migration.” Annual Review of Anthropology 9: 135-59. Ghosh, B., ed. 2000. Return Migration: Journey of Hope or Despair? Geneva: International Organization for Migration. HKUPOP (The University of Hong Kong, Public Opinion Programme). 2012. Http://hkupop.hku.hk/english/release/release884.html. King, R. 2000. “Generalizations from the History of Return Migration.” In Return Migration: Journey of Hope or Despair?, edited by B. Ghosh, 7-55. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. King, R., and A. Christou. 2011. “Of Counter-diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland.” Motilities 6 (4): 451-466. Ko, V. 2013. “Mainland Chinese Traders Milking Hong Kong for All It’s Worth.” World Time, 4 February. Http://world.time.com/2013/02/04/mainland-chinese-traders-milkinghong-kong-for-all-its-worth/. Lau, S. K. 1982. Society and Politics in Hong Kong: Continuity and Change. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. —. 2000. “Hongkongness or Chinese? The Problem of Political Identity on the Eve of Resumption of Chinese Sovereignty over Hong Kong.” In Social Development and Political Change in Hong Kong, edited by Lau Siu-kai, 255-284. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Lau, S. K., and H. C. Kuan. 1988. The Ethos of the Hong Kong Chinese. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press. Ley, D., and A. Kobayashi (2005) “Back to Hong Kong: return migration or transnational sojourn?” Global Networks 5(2): 111-127. Lau, S. 2013. “Move to Make Hong Kong Milk Formula Stocks by Making It ‘Reserved Commodity’”, South China Morning Post, 30 January. Http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1138880/move-protecthong-kong-milk-formula-stocks-making-it-reserved. Long, L. 2004. “Viet Kieu on a Fast Track Back?” In Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants and Those Who Stayed Behind, edited by L. Long and E. Oxfeld, 65-89. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ming Pao. 2011. “Hao Tiechuan Queries HKU Survey Not Scientific”, 29 December. [In Chinese] Http://inews.mingpao.com/htm/INews/20111229/gb42118c.htm.

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Ong, A. 2000. “Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia.” Theory, Culture and Society 17 (4): 55-75. —. (2012) “Powers of Sovereignty: State, People, Wealth, Life”. Focaal —Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 62: 24-35. Potter, R. 2005. “Young, Gifted and Back: Second-generation Transnational Return Migrants to the Caribbean”, Progress in Development Studies 5 (3): 213-36. Seol. D., and J. Skrentny. 2009. “Ethnic Return Migration and Hierarchical National: Korean Chinese Foreign Workers in South Korea.” Ethnicities 9 (2): 147-74. Sing Tao Global Net. 2012. “Liaison Office Criticizes HK Identity survey”, 14 January. Http://ny.stgloballink.com/hk/201201/t20120114_1692236.html. So, A. 2012. “Double Trouble.” The Standard, 6 January. Http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=30&art_id=1 18585&con_type=3. Urry, J. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tsuda, T. 2003. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press. VOA (Voice of America News). 2013. “Seat Panic: Hong Kong Parents Fight Influx of Mainland Children”, 24 October. Http://www.voanews.com/content/race-against-time-to-interviewchina-nanjing-survivors/1814892.html, accessed.

PART III: VIETNAMESE MIGRATION AND DIASPORA

CHAPTER TEN INTRODUCTION: THE FORMATION OF THE GLOBAL VIETNAMESE DIASPORA LONG S. LE

From fairy tales to a global diaspora According to Vietnamese legend, Vietnamese people are associated with the Hung kings who ruled the kingdom of Van Lang. The Hung kings claimed descent from Lac Long Quan (“Lord of the Sea”) a hero of the dragon race who came to the Hong River plain in what is now northern Vietnam. Lac Long Quan assisted the people of the Hong River plain by subduing all evil demons in the land and civilising the people, teaching them to cultivate rice and to wear clothes. Before returning to his home in the sea, he instructed the people to call on him if they were ever in distress. Eventually, the people of the plain called on Long Quan when a northern monarch from southern China entered the land, and finding it without a king, claimed it for himself. To force this foreign ruler out of the plain, Long Quan outwitted the northern monarch by capturing the king’s wife, Au Co (“Queen of the Mountain”), and taking her to the top of Mount Tan Vien. Not able to retrieve his wife, the northern king departed in despair. Long Quan lived with Au Co, where a year later, the latter gave birth to one hundred sons (Taylor 1983). However, not long after this, Long Quan returned to the sea. Au Co and her children also wanted to return to the northern kingdom but were not allowed to by the northern emperor and they were left abandoned in the wilderness. Long Quan came quickly after hearing Au Co and the children had been left stranded. Yet their differences could not be solved, since Long Quan was a water creature and Au Co was an immortal sprung from the earth. Thus, they separated and Long Quan ordered fifty of his sons to follow him back to the sea, while the other half would follow their mother back to the mountain; the bravest of the fifty sons who followed

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Au Co became the first Hung king. Before departing, Long Quan told all his sons that: “Whether you go up to the mountains or down to the sea, you shall let one another know if you are in difficulties, and you shall by no means desert one another” (Durand and Nguyen 1985). The hundred sons agreed. I begin this introductory chapter on the global Vietnamese diaspora with an ancient Vietnamese legend and see this as an appropriate metaphor for migration-related themes on departure, community split, separation, and the underlying theme of “disunity” within the “unity” of being Vietnamese. In the following sections, I will provide some background to the formation of the different groups of the “stateless” and “state-linked” Vietnamese diasporas. While overseas Vietnamese communities formed by Vietnamese refugees have been well-studied, Vietnamese who were sent abroad, mainly to the former Soviet Bloc countries in Eastern Europe have been less attended to. With the emergence of new waves of Vietnamese migration to different parts of Asia, especially in the form of marriage and labour migrants, Vietnamese diasporas worldwide have become ever more complex and take ever more diverse forms. In the following, I will connect readers back to the historical backgrounds of the formation of the Vietnamese refugee diaspora and delineate the following two periods that saw the rise of new types of Vietnamese migration—(1) from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War, and (2) from the early 1990s to the present time.

Vietnamese migration amidst Cold War politics At the Geneva Conference of 1954, international agreements were signed to provisionally divide Vietnam into a communist north and a noncommunist South. Such a division led to around a million Vietnamese to orderly leave the communist north into the south (Bui 1959), and many of these people joined the refugee movement in the subsequent years. Although during the two decades of political turmoil between the 1950s and the 1970s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese were studying and residing in Europe, it was not until after the North Vietnamese communist victory over South Vietnam in 1975 and the post-war exoduses that a Vietnamese diaspora began to emerge. After the fall of Saigon in April 1975, over 130,000 Vietnamese who had served the South Vietnamese government and the rich elite in the south, “evacuated” to the West with the uncertainty that they would be able to return home. This was followed by continuous waves of exodus—millions of Vietnamese escaped Vietnam

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by boat in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Two main reasons accounted for this refugee movement: (1) New policies under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to establish socialism in southern Vietnam; many were involuntarily relocated to labour camps for “re-education” or resettled in “new economic zones” (Nguyen and Kendall 1981). (2) The bitter political and diplomatic struggle between Vietnam and China in the late 1970s (including a border war in 1979) had led to fear amongst the Chinese population in Vietnam; it was also reported that Chinese were actively assisted by the Vietnamese government to leave the country. Hundreds of thousands of these boat refugees ended up in camps in East and Southeast Asia, and for those who survived that ordeal later resettled in Western democratic countries, such as United States, Canada, Germany, France, England, and Australia. These Vietnamese refugee communities, in the 1970s and 1980s, were largely escapees from the Vietnamese communist regime. Many have tried to re-establish their Vietnamese heritage through family traditions and the establishment of “Little Saigons” in the West. Some politically active members continued to challenge the legitimacy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The early core members first supported a more militant approach towards Vietnam, but gradually adopted peaceful advocacy for the enhancement of human rights and a multi-party system for a democratic Vietnam. Such activities have recently gained the support of both government and liberal organisations of the hosting countries (Le 2009). Among the Vietnamese refugees, there was a significant number of ethnic Chinese. Not much has been written about this portion of boat people settlers in the West (Amers 2011); whether they mingled with Vietnamese communities, merged with other overseas Chinese, or formed their own diasporic Chinese Vietnamese clusters. Similarly, not much is known about whether there has been a return of these ethnic Chinese boat people to Vietnam (see Chan 2013).

Stateless versus state-linked Vietnamese diaspora The well-studied Vietnamese migrant groups are the refugee Vietnamese who fled Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War and who attempted to escape from the communist regime in the subsequent years. They are now mostly settled in the “democratic West”, and often

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considered “opposition” groups to the regime back home. Yet, there is also a significant number of overseas Vietnamese communities formed by Vietnamese export workers and students sent through government-run programs to the former Soviet Bloc in the 1980s. From the late 1970s to 1989, Vietnam became economically and militarily dependent on the former Soviet Union as a result of its occupation of Cambodia and conflicts with China. To offset its debts, Vietnam’s “value transfer” to USSR included exported labour, and by the end of the Cold War there were over 200,000 Vietnamese workers in the Soviet Bloc countries. However, there has been a lack of research on the migration experiences of these groups of Vietnamese. This Vietnamese migrant community offers a main contrast to the one constituted by Vietnamese refugees, as many of these migrants were linked to government officials and enjoyed good connections with cadres in the socialist government in Vientam. With the cultural capital they gained in Eastern Europe, and the social capital (connections to officials and cadres) in Vietnam, many have attempted to make a “return” back home and make use of these two capitals to build up new businesses and attain a good career. Gabriel Sheffer (2003) has classified two types of diasporas—“statelinked” and “stateless” —to distinguish those migrant groups connected or not connected to sovereign states. For the stateless diasporas, some have never had a sovereign state in the territory they consider homeland, some have lost it, and some have no clearly defined homeland boundaries (2003, 148). I attempt here to extend the use of this pair of concepts to the overseas Vietnamese. Despite the historical specificity of the formation of the different migration waves and their causes, within the global Vietnamese diaspora, there are those who clearly entertain better relationships with the present ruling regime than the others. Chan and Tran (2011), for example, have also identified two types of Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese)—refugee Viet kieu and government Viet kieu—to relate the Vietnamese diasporas to two different periods of movements and different political contexts. Suffice it to say, the Vietnamese migrant communities established in the former Soviet bloc are more government dependent and are thus “state-linked”, while the former group, the refugees who left Vietnam because of political purges, can be considered “stateless”. Thus, it also makes sense to see the congregation sites of refugee overseas Vietnamese in the West are often named “little Saigon” while those in Eastern Europe are called “little Hanoi”.

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New migrations shaped by Vietnam’s integration with the global economy Since the early 1990s, the Vietnamese government has increasingly viewed international migration as an integral part of national development. These new waves of migration largely appear in the form of education, work, and marriage migration. In terms of labour migration, about 500,000 Vietnamese nationals have worked in more than 40 countries and territories around the world (MFAV 2012). The number of labour migrants have been increasing, from about 70,000 a year in the mid- 2000s to over 85,000 in 2010. In the 2000s, the major destinations for Vietnamese labour migrants are in Asia, representing over 75 percent of the total number of contract-based overseas workers between 2000 and 2010: Taiwan (237,643), Malaysia (184,614), South Korea (90,744), and Japan (42,299) (Department of Overseas Labour, cited in MFAV 2012). Besides this “Asian” trend of labour migration, there are also a growing number of workers being sent to the Middle East. Labour migration to Eastern Europe is picking up again since the collapse of the former Soviet Union (MFAV 2012). In terms of the characteristics of these Vietnamese migrant workers, the majority of contract-based workers abroad are men, though the proportion of women has significantly increased from 10 percent in 1992 to 30 percent in 2010 (MOLISA 2010 cited in MFAV 2012). Adding to the new trend in labour migration is that of marriage migration. Many Vietnamese nationals, especially young women, settled abroad through marriage. More than 130,000 Vietnamese brides either married or registered for marriage with foreigners between 2005 and 2010. Marrying for economic reasons still remains a choice of many women and their parents in rural areas; in recent years a large number of Vietnamese women had married South Korean and Taiwanese men. Lastly, there is a growing number of Vietnamese students studying abroad; countries hosting the most Vietnamese students at the end of 2010 include Australia (25,000), China (13,500), United States (12,800), Singapore (7,000), the United Kingdom (6,000), France (5,500), Russia (5,000), and Japan (3,500) (MFAV 2012).

The global Vietnamese diaspora—trends and updates Overall, combining the Cold War migrations and the new waves of international migration since the 1990s, there are 4.0 million overseas Vietnamese. This saw the making of a global Vietnamese diaspora in

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which 2.2 million are immigrants (World Bank 2011). Vietnam ranks 23rd in the world in terms of the number of emigrants, and about 70 percent of overseas Vietnamese reside in the West and about 80 percent reside in the more developed countries around the world. With such a significant population of overseas Vietnamese, Vietnam receives large sums of remittances from abroad. In 2013, it received 11 billion dollars, ranking 9th in the world’s top 10 remittance-receiving countries. There is also significant imbalance in terms of remittances distribution, 50 percent of the overseas Vietnamese remittances are sent to Ho Chi Minh City (Tuoi Tre News 2014). Indeed, current migration categories—such as labour, study, and marriage, have been getting more complex and increasingly diversified. In large part, this is due to the global demand for labour and services coupled with Vietnam’s disparity in living standards and incomes that have driven Vietnamese nationals to emigrate in recent years. As a result, there is not only a pattern shift in Vietnamese migration, different from the previous waves of Vietnamese refugees and their migrant relatives, but also a change in the choice of destination that moves beyond the South-to-North or East-to-West migration paths. The “archetypal” Vietnamese diaspora, categorised as a “permanent” diaspora in the West, consists of 1.5 million Vietnamese Americans (see Table 10-1). In addition, overseas Vietnamese in the United States make up the overwhelming majority of the estimated 300,000 to 400,000 Vietnamese living abroad who have university and post-graduate education degrees; they also represent the largest portion of the 2,400 Vietnamese migrant physicians (World Bank 2011). Compared to the emerging Vietnamese diasporas in Asia (they are in the initial stages of forming organised community networks), such as the overseas Vietnamese in Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore, or the statelinked Vietnamese diasporas in Eastern Europe, overseas Vietnamese Americans are characterised by their tightly linked networks and their own policy agenda with issues and concerns that are independent of the Vietnamese government. Here, I would like to retrieve the ancient legend I put at the beginning of this chapter. Long Quan and Au Co bred a hundred sons who separated and moved towards different directions for survival and different ideals. Yet, they, as Long Quan ordered, would not desert one another and should see “all in one”. This legend has always reminded me of the recurrent theme of the dialectics of “disunity” and “unity” in Vietnamese history.

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The chapters In the above, I have given an overview of the background to the formation of different Vietnamese diasporas over time, and provide current statistics of international migration from Vietnam. Three chapters are included in this part. This first one is a short chapter on the diasporic experiences of my own extended family and how these experiences tell a non-typical story of international migration that challenges fixed concepts of the Vietnamese diaspora, and how the state-linked and the stateless may actually intertwine and embed each other in “one family, multiple journeys.” Table 10-1: Top 20 largest overseas Vietnamese communities Top 20 largest overseas Vietnamese communities 1. United States 2. Cambodia 3. France 4. China 5. Canada 6. Australia 7. Taiwan 8. Germany 9. Thailand 10. South Korea 11. Russia 12. Malaysia 13. United Kingdom 14. Laos 15. Czech Republic 16. Japan 17. Poland 18. Netherlands 19. Norway 20. Singapore

Estimation of population 1,737,433 762,277 300,000 280,000 220,425 210,000 210,800 137,000 119,000 90,931 100,000 70,000 65,000 66,952 60,301 41,136 25,000 19,510 19,000 12,000

Year of estimation and notes on sources 20111 20132 20123 20074 20115 20126 20107 20108 20109 2009410 201111 201012 201013 201314 201115 200816 2011417 201118 201019 201120

From GraĪyna SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz’s chapter on the transnational networking of Vietnamese in Eastern Europe, readers will get a glimpse of the continuous movement of the state-linked diaspora through its return to Vietnam and cross-border movement of the Vietnamese between European countries, especially after the relaxation of intra-European border controls. The author provides insights into how Vietnamese maintain their bonds

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with their homeland as well as with fellow Vietnamese residing in former Soviet Bloc countries. Fung and Wang document the new trend of marriage migration involving young rural Vietnamese women moving to Taiwan. The authors examine the various factors leading to the rapid changes of their public image in the Taiwanese media within a relatively short period of time.

Notes 1. According to the 2010 Census, there are 1,737,433 people who identify themselves as Vietnamese either alone or in combination with another ethnicity. Http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/pdf/cb13ff-09_asian.pdf. 2. This number is based on the estimate that the Vietnamese population makes up five percent of Cambodia’s population. Https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cb.html. 3. This number is based on reports by the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies. Http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?reg_id=0&ref_id=ip1429. 4. According to the UNHCR, there are some 260,000 ethnic Chinese refugees from Vietnam, while the rest are ethnic Vietnamese. Http://www.unhcr.org/464302994.html. 5. According to Canada’s 2011 National Household Survey, there were a total of 220,425 respondents who reported a Vietnamese origin as a single origin or in addition to one or more other ethnic origins. Http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/dp-pd/dt-td/Rpeng.cfm?LANG=E&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0 &GID=0&GK=0&GRP=0&PID=105396&PRID=0&PTYPE=105277&S=0&SHO WALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2013&THEME=95&VID=0&VNAMEE=&VNA MEF=. 6. This number is estimated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics based on the country of birth. Http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~M ain%20Features~Country%20of%20birth~54. 7. This number is based on over 80,000 Vietnamese workers and around 110,000 Vietnamese spouses in Taiwan. Http://viet-studies.info/kinhte/Transnational_marriage.pdf. 8. This number is estimated by Germany’s Bureau of statistics. Https://www.destatis.de/DE/ZahlenFakten/GesellschaftStaat/Bevoelkerung/Bevoel kerung.htmlaspx. 9. This number is based on the Joshua Project, which is aligned with previous official numbers. Http://www.joshuaproject.net/people-profile.php?rog3=TH&rop3=105018. 10. This number is based on reports by South Korea’s Immigration Department. Http://www.immigration.go.kr/HP/COM/bbs_003/ListShowData.do?strNbodCd=n

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oti0096&strWrtNo=120&strAnsNo=A&strOrgGbnCd=104000&strRtnURL=IMM _6050&strAllOrgYn=N&strThisPage=1&strFilePath=imm/. 11. The number of 78,000 is made up of legal residents (26,000) and labour migrants. In the 1990s, the number of Vietnamese people living in Russia has been estimated at about 100,000. Http://paa2012.princeton.edu/papers/122450. Http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/ittmigdev2005/P11_Rybakovsky%26 Ryazantsev.pdf . Http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/more.php?id=1531_0_4_0. 12. This number is based on the number of workers in Malaysia, according to Vietnam’s Overseas Labour Department. Http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/vietnam/documents/eu_vietnam/vn_migration_a broad_en.pdf . 13. This number includes both legal and illegal Vietnamese in Great Britain according to a report from the BBC. Http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10422480. 14. This number is based on the estimate that the Vietnamese population makes up 1% of Laos’ population. Https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/la.html. 15. This number is based on a research report by Jiri Dobrylovsky and Petr Adamek. Http://msed.vse.cz/files/2011/Dobrylovsky.pdf . 16. This number is based by a case study by AAG Center for Global Geography Education. Http://cgge.aag.org/Migration1e/CaseStudy4_Singapore_Aug10/Case Study4_Singapore_Aug105.html. 17. This number has been reported by the mainstream media and by reports by the Centro Studi Politic Internazionale’s Center for International Relations. Http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/02/vietnamese-struggle-for-a-place-in-poland/ Http://www.cespi.it/WPMIG/Country%2520mig-POLAND.pdf . 18. This number is based on Netherlands’ Central Bureau. Http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?DM=SLNL&PA=37325&D1=0&D2=0 &D3=0&D4=0&D5=a&D6=%2528l-2%2529-l&VW=T. 19. This number is based on Norway’s Embassy in Vietnam. Http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?DM=SLNL&PA=37325&D1=0&D2=0 &D3=0&D4=0&D5=a&D6=%2528l-2%2529-l&VW=T. 20. The number has been cited by Vietnamese government officials. http://www.vietnamembassy-singapore.org/en/.

References Amer, R. 2011. “The Boat People Crisis of 1978-79 and the Hong Kong Experience Examined Through the Ethnic Chinese Dimension.” In The Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora – Revisiting the Boat People, edited by Yuk Wah Chan, 36-51. New York: Routledge.

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Bui, V. 1959. “The Role of Friendly Nations.” In Viet-Nam: The First Five Years: An International Symposium, edited by R. W. Lindholm, 48-53. Michigan: Michigan State University Press. Chan, Y. W. 2013. “Hybrid Diaspora and Identity-Laundering: A Study of the Return Overseas Chinese Vietnamese in Vietnam.” Asian Ethnicity 14 (4): 525-41. Chan, Y. W., and T. L. T. Tran. 2011. “Recycling Migration and Changing Nationalisms: Vietnamese Return Diaspora and Reconstruction of the Vietnamese Nationhood.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (7): 1101-1117. Durand, M., and H. T. Nguyen. 1985. An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Le, C. N. 2009. “Better Dead than Red: Anti-communist Politics Among Vietnamese Americans.” In Anti-communist Minorities in the US: The Political Activism of Ethnic Refugees, edited by I. Zake, 289-210. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan Publishing. MFAV (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Vietnam). 2012. Review of Vietnamese Migration Abroad. Hanoi: Consular Department of Foreign Affairs of Viet Nam. Nguyen, L., and H. Kendall. 1981. After Saigon Fell: Daily Life Under the Vietnamese Communists. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies. Portes, A. 1997. “Globalization from Below: The Rise of Transnational Communities.” In Latin America in the World Economy, edited by W. P. Smith and R. P. Korcezenwicz, 151-168. Westport, Greenwood Press. Sheffer, G. 2003. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Keith. 1983. The Birth of Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tuoi Tre News. 2014. “Vietnam Remittances Top $11 Bln, Half Go To HCMC,” 22 January. Http://tuoitrenews.vn/business/17082/vietnam-remittances-top-11-blnhalf-go-to-hcmc World Bank. 2011. Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011. Http/www.econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXT DECPROSPECTS/0,,contentMDK:21352016~pagePK:64165401~piP K:64165026~theSitePK:476883,00.html.

CHAPTER ELEVEN ONE FAMILY, MULTIPLE DIASPORAS: EXPLORING UNITY AND DIVERSITY IN VIETNAMESE MIGRATION LONG S. LE

Being a member of the Vietnamese diasporic community in the United States, I grew up in a Vietnamese family with all the similar experiences that other Vietnamese refugee families might have encountered. I have also been immersed in a diasporic culture which somehow sees itself as the victim of wars, and political and ideological struggles. I am also familiar with the public discourses that stress the Vietnamese abroad as a force of opposition to the present socialist regime in Vietnam. Being an academic myself, I am aware of those studies that relate Vietnamese migration experiences in the 1970s and 1980s with terms like “refugees” and “boat people”. Yet, as a member of a family which contains individuals who had served as high-ranking officials for the French colonial government, and who worked for political forces on both the communist and non-communist sides, I often have to look for “signs” that could capture a broader narrative of the lived experiences of the Vietnamese—being “victims”, “localisers”, “collaborators”, “resisters”, “losers”, and “winners” of colonisations, Vietnamese nationalism, and international socialism. While the term “diaspora” is now encompassingly used for any social groups or communities of migrants who stay abroad and continue to identify with and show some relationship to the root country, the term “Vietnamese diaspora” has been used in most literature to refer to the “runaways” that fled Vietnam as a result of the Vietnam War and Cold War politics. However, as will be shown in other chapters in Part III, the Vietnamese in Eastern Europe are yet another “type” of Vietnamese diaspora which was formed by the sending-out (or debt-repaying) policies of the Vietnamese government.

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In this chapter, I would like to complicate the idea of the Vietnamese diaspora further by focusing on the experiences of my own family—which shows how within one family, the causes of leaving and moving were affected by very different historical contexts—consisting of both risks and opportunities, and as a result, fell into different typologies of the Vietnamese diasporas that have been beyond the scholarly spotlight till now.

Vietnamese “rites of passage”—journeying through time and space A collaborative study by the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and the American Museum of Natural History describes Vietnam as “one country, many journeys”. This study regards the journeys of the Vietnamese as “rites of passage”—a broad metaphor used to configure travel of different kinds in Vietnamese historical contexts, both on the ground and in the imagination (Nguyen and Kendall 2003). This is important because the international image of Vietnam is still coloured by a few specific “journeys”: “the journey of American soldiers to Vietnam to fight against perceived Communist threats to freedom emanating from China and the Soviet Union, the hasty departure of these American soldiers, and the exodus of the refugees known as boat people” (Salemink 2003, 51). Although such dominant images are shaped by important international events, the study notes that these contemporary events are but a tiny mark on Vietnam’s journeys through time. Broadening travels into “journeys of the body, mind, and spirit” through Vietnam’s long history, the theme of “journeying” has helped enshrine the myriad Vietnamese movements in both space and time: •

•

•

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from a millennium of Chinese rule that left a deep imprint on Vietnamese civilisation to an independent state that stresses the roots of the Vietnamese nation to have preceded before any cultural influences from China; from recognising China’s suzerainty over Vietnam to its own territorial expansion to the south that gradually absorbed the lands and the people of the Champa and Khmer kingdoms; from a “reunified” Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty that began to expand westward to one that was colonised by the French who began to undermine the country’s village autonomy; from a colonised nation whose movement and migration were tightly inhibited to an overseas Vietnamese nationalist movement

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led by Ho Chi Minh who became a legendary hero by defeating French and American imperialism; and from implementing radical centralising reforms under the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam that brought about high poverty and employment to opening up the country to the global economy that renovated traditions, rituals, and relations with the West (Nguyen and Kendall 2003; Salemink 2003).

The collaborative study shows that, in general, Vietnam has gone beyond its troubled wartime history and there is a new understanding of how Vietnamese live, work, and celebrate critical passages of life and time (Nguyen and Kendall 2003). By recounting the above sampling of journeys in Vietnam almost immediately implies one will find many more “journeys of the body, mind, and soul” left to be imagined and undertaken. The official narratives of Vietnamese history tend to emphasise unity and the common struggle against foreign enemies, while downplaying conflicts and division within the country or beyond the country’s borders (Tran and Reid 2006). It seems that the above study may have downplayed themes or journeys related to disunity or disunity within unity in Vietnamese history. There was also a lack of discussion of the backgrounds of the authors themselves and to which part of history— winner or loser, unity or disunity—that they are related.

One family, multiple journeys In this section, I first take advantage of my own family background to understand migration associated with colonialism and nationalism that are embedded in Vietnamese history and culture. In connecting the Vietnamese experiences on the “ground”, I utilise the experiences of my extended family to gain further insights on volunteer migration and forced migration, which could be a result of foreign colonial rule, civil war, or international war. Given that my extended family has members who were core members and leaders of both the communist and non-communist Vietnamese movements, there has been tension between (and instances of) disunity and unity in our extended family relations. In addition, some of my extended family members are currently key members of various Vietnamese communities in North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia, which presents an intriguing picture for those who study diasporas. Specifically, the experiences and encounters of my family have contained different “journeys” that can speak to the idea that Vietnam is “one country, many journeys” in which disunity and unity seem to

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accompany each other. Perhaps one may say this looks like a situation of “one family, multiple journeys”.

Colonial diaspora and movements to the South Before my immediate family’s escape from communist rule in 1981, I already knew my father’s family had rather deep ties to the West. For example, my paternal grandfather, Le Tai Truong, came to the study of Western thought and science at a relatively early age, attending middle and high school at the Lycee du Protectorat from 1914 to 1926. This was possible because his father, Le Kiem Thien, was a veteran translator for the French Superior Resident in Hanoi; for the French colonisers, the Franco-Vietnamese educational institutions were to serve different Vietnamese social strata that they depended on in order to extend their colonial hegemony. However, the French also restricted such opportunities because they feared that Vietnamese elites might become either revolutionaries or malcontents (Kelley 1982). To be sure, “collaborating” with French colonisers did not mean being docile; my great-grandfather was “exiled” by his French employer to a harsh province for demotion and he died there in 1930. My grandfather was suspended for three months and could not return to the Lycee in 1926 for his participation in the student strike organised after the death of Phan Chau Trinh. Phan Chau Trinh was a nationalist who promoted “new learning” within the French colonial system and for a democracy to replace the monarchy as well as more popular rights for Vietnam’s future. When the French Vichy Government came to power (1941-1945), it empowered the more liberal-minded Vietnamese elites, including my grandfather who was promoted as the Chief of the Press Bureau in Hanoi. Such a policy was to ward off both the Vietnamese anti-French and “Asia for Asians” movements in order to retain Vietnamese “loyalty” and “unity” for French Indochina. Nevertheless, many Vietnamese who benefited from the Vichy Government’s expansion of social rights created both communist and noncommunist organisations. By September 1945 when Ho Chi Minh, who had received training in Marxism in the Soviet Union, declared Vietnamese independence from French colonial rule, my grandfather along with his colleagues first migrated to Saigon because of their affiliation with the French. A year later, my grandfather emigrated to Hong Kong where he later joined forces with Bao Dai. Both my grandfather and Bao Dai had disassociated themselves from Ho Chi Minh’s government and began to mobilise a Vietnamese “resistance” against Ho’s attempt in establishing a communist Vietnam. Bao Dai was

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the thirteenth emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, who had studied government affairs in France and was also influenced by Phan Chau Trinh’s nationalism. After he discovered the French had no desire for a Vietnamese democratic monarchy, Bao Dai had no problem with “collaborating” with the Japanese occupiers during World War II. Such collaboration gave Bao Dai the opportunity in April 1945 to create the first nationalist government that “de-colonised” the country by changing the national name back to Viet Nam from French Indochina (Vu 1986). When France returned to Vietnam after World War II attempting to oust Ho Chi Minh’s government, Bao Dai then renegotiated with the French to create the State of Vietnam (1949-1954); Bao Dai later independently appointed Ngo Dinh Diem to govern the Republic of South Vietnam (1954-1975) (Fall 1967). My grandfather served as chief of staff for Bao Dai’s government, who in 1949 relocated his family from Hanoi to the South to set up Bao Dai’s administrative capital in Da Lat. A number of the northern elite families also moved south, which had an impact on “Vietnamizing” Da Lat (Jennings 2011). This southward movement actually preceded the mass internal migration of refugees who were “evacuated” from the North to the South under the 1954 Geneva Accord. In his writings, my grandfather (T. Le 1930 and 1941) saw French colonialism as of the “spirit”, which could offer the opportunity for Vietnamese to become “intellectual hybrids” with “two homelands”. He emigrated to France in 1955 when the Ngo Dinh Diem’s government implemented its “third-way” strategy—embracing democratic ideals but rejecting communism and French colonialism. He did return to Vietnam in 1964 after the fall of the Diem regime, but was “escorted” to France in 1976 with the help of the French Embassy. This was a year after the first mass wave of Vietnamese refugees who were “evacuated” to Western countries when Vietnam was “reunified” under communist rule.

State-linked diaspora and movements to Eastern Europe The siblings of my paternal grandmother had served and became high officials under Viet Minh’s revolution movement (1941-1954), the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1945-1975), and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1975-present). Under the tutelage of these governments, these siblings studied and worked in Eastern communist countries, majoring in engineering and economics. Their “road to communism” was, in part, based on practicality, since neither French colonialism nor Bao Dai’s nationalism offered any real opportunity for mobility or “revolutionary

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hope” for the masses. In contrast, the children of some of these siblings in the last decade have studied and worked in the United States as Vietnamese nationals, and some have become U.S. citizens through marriages to Vietnamese Americans. This was reflective of the changed U.S.-Vietnam relations after the mid-1990s. While these children are still loyal to the current Vietnamese government, it is not enough for them to return home, at least for the moment. Moreover, such a decision to “stay”, in large part, involves their parents’ evaluation of current socio-economic problems in Vietnam. Interestingly, despite the relative success of these relatives in Vietnam, some are seriously considering retiring in the United States, through their children who have become U.S. citizens. On the contrary, some of my grandfather’s children, who have been relatively successful in France, are seriously thinking about retiring in Vietnam.

Refugee diaspora and movements to the West My father, Le Thuc Can, too came to Western learning at a young age. He was a “study abroad” student in France from 1951-1960 and had received professional training in the United States in 1961, 1969, 1972, and 1974, which later became a point of reference for him in deciding where to locate the family after escaping Vietnam. By 1962, the Diem regime had implicitly “approved” government agencies’ recruitment of Vietnamese talents in France, and this led my father to return to Vietnam as a civil servant for South Vietnam. After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, he was put into “re-education camps”. Indeed, he had deliberately chosen not to “evacuate”, hoping to contribute to a “reunified” Vietnam; this was something that the communist regime had promoted among South Vietnam’s non-military personnel (Le 2013). After his release in 1977, my father, and like many of his peers, attempted several escapes and was finally successful in 1981 when the whole family escaped to the Philippines by boat. Because a family member of my paternal grandmother became a member of the party’s politburo and was assigned to a high position in Saigon after 1975, there was “intervention” on behalf of my father in leaving early from his various prison terms along with “granting” permission for my grandfather to leave for France in 1976 due to old age and poor health. Unlike my father’s side of the family who are all residing in Western countries, some of my mother’s siblings, who were military officers for the South Vietnamese government, were in “re-education camps” for ten years, and whose lives and the lives of their children in today’s Vietnam resemble that of “second class” citizens. Some of these

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siblings had worked as taxi drivers, or as English and French tutors. With remittances from relatives overseas, the children of these siblings attended private Vietnamese universities and are working for office jobs at foreign companies like Nike and Tiger Beer. A government decree prohibits the children of officers associated with South Vietnam from attending state universities and working for state institutions for three generations (Le 2013).

Back to the future In the above, my family experiences are analysed across time; such experiences and my family history are anchored to Vietnam’s history through “militant” movements and “collaborative” relations associated with foreign rule and internal civil war. The direct ancestor of my family is Le Lai, a general who sacrificed himself to assist the eventual emperor Le Loi to overthrow the Chinese colonial occupation of Vietnam (1406-1428). His act had also “discredited” the preceding Ho dynasty (1400-1428) which failed to govern through the morality of the day. Le Lai and Le Loi came from marginal places rather than from the Vietnamese heartland (e.g. Le Lai’s ethnicity was Muong), but both became national heroes by protecting the “fatherland” from foreign invaders. However in 1527, the Mac lords, who established their own dynasty until 1592, deposed the eighth emperor of the Le dynasty for his ruthlessness. Interestingly, the family of my paternal grandmother traced its direct ancestor to the last king of the Mac dynasty. On the one hand, the family of my paternal grandfather was able to maintain their socio-political status through time by aligning with elite groups such as the Trinh lords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and later with the Nguyen dynasty, the State of Vietnam, and the Republic of South Vietnam. After the end of the Vietnam War, the family had to take refuge in France and in the United States, and whose return to Vietnam depends, at least originally, on whether there is a space for a noncommunist identity to take root. Yet with the passage of time, younger members of the family have “assimilated” to the host country in which the commitment to sustain the family’s memory and vision of a noncommunist Vietnam is no longer a priority. On the other hand, the family of my paternal grandmother was able to survive through time by taking refuge in marginal places and changing their identity from Mac to Pham; and later aligned with the Viet Minh, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Social of Republic Vietnam, which afforded them to retain the family’s socio-political status. Today,

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the younger family members of my paternal grandmother have started to “settle” in Western countries to sustain their family’s socio-political mobility, although their “vision” remains “unfinished” as to whether to return or to “sponsor” more family members to live abroad. It should be noted that the generational pattern of recalling, retelling, and redeeming family traditions is not given and is often fragile. For example, among the eight sons of my grandfather, only my father returned to Vietnam to explicitly continue the family edict of “choosing public servants among those who have leadership and competence”, which is based on five middle names: Si, Tuyen, Kiem, Tai, and Thuc. These five terms are to honour the family’s direct ancestor, Le Lai, and of which are supposed to be passed down successively to the family’s male descendants. Among my father’ four sons, I am the only one who is attempting to continue the family edict. As such, there is a strong possibility that within another generation that the family traditions may come to an “end”.

Conclusion My own academic backgrounds as well as my “refugee” background have helped or pushed me to become engaged in exploring into the multiple layers of meanings within “a” diaspora. While scholars like Sheffer (2003) has attempted to distinguish “state-linked” and “stateless” diaspora to delineate two types of diaspora from one root (because of their different relationships with the “root” state), I would like to explore further the multiplicity of a diaspora with the above historical specificity and temporal nodes that my family had lived through. The different streams and generations of my family have anchored themselves on different ruling regimes and survived through such variegated forms of diasporas formed by colonial policies, internal wars, and political alliances. The terminology of the various diasporic categories I provided above represent some of the most typical migration paths that other contemporary Vietnamese had also moved through. Being a member of the overseas Vietnamese community in the United States, I have also been unavoidably involved in the debates of what attitudes we now should command towards the changing policies that the Vietnamese government employed for overseas Vietnamese in general, as well as the debates about the shifting trajectories of loyalty and nationalism. While I can understand how the diasporic backgrounds of different groups may directly affect people’s attitude and stands, I would also argue that variegated forms of diaspora as such within one—the Vietnamese—diaspora often overlap and are inter-related to each other.

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For example, some of my cousins who were sent to Eastern Europe by the communist government finally ended up settling in the United States through the wider inter-linked global Vietnamese diaspora. The story of my family also manifests how the diaspora of a family entertains different migration paths which lead members of the same family onto different directions—to the East and to the West. Just as what has been illustrated in the ancient Vietnamese legend of Au Co and Long Quan (see previous chapter)—half of the one hundred sons went up the mountain while the other half went down the sea; yet by no means they should desert one another. Perhaps, the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora resonates with part of the prophesy embedded in the legend of ancient times. But we still have to wait and see whether and when the dispersed sons will be united again.

References Fall, B. 1967. The Two Viet-Nams: A Political and Military Analysis. New York: Praeger Publishers. Jennings, E. 2011. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina. Berkeley: University of California Press Kelly, G. 1982. “Schooling and National Integration: The Case of Interwar Vietnam.” Comparative Education 18 (2): 175-195. Le, L. 2013. “My Folkloristic History of the Viet Nam War: A Noncommunist Experience.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement 8 (1): 1-22. Le, T. T. 1930. “Propose de letters.” Nam Phuong (French Supplement), 155 (October). —. 1941. “Force de la France, conscience de l’Empire.” Indochine, 28 July. Nguyen, H., and L. Kendall, ed. 2003. Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit. Berkeley: California University Press. Salemink, O. 2003. “One Country, Many Journeys.” In Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit, edited by H. Nguyen and L. Kendall, 20-51. Berkeley: California University Press. Sheffer, G. 2003. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ”ƒǡǤǡƒ†Ǥ‡‹†ǡ‡†ǤʹͲͲ͸ǤViet Nam: Borderless HistoriesǤƒ†‹•‘ǣ ‹˜‡”•‹–›‘ˆ‹•…‘•‹”‡••Ǥ Vu, N. 1986. “The Other Side of the 1945 Vietnamese Revolution: The Empire of Viet-Nam.” The Journal of Asian Studies 45 (2): 293-328.

CHAPTER TWELVE VIETNAMESE FROM EASTERN EUROPE AS A TRANSNATIONAL MIGRANT COMMUNITY GRAĩYNA SZYMAēSKA-MATUSIEWICZ

Introduction The Vietnamese diaspora is one of the most significant of the Asian diasporas estimated at 3.6 million (Trinh 2007). Of these, around 300,000 reside in various East European countries (Sidel 2007). Contrary to the large Vietnamese migrant community in the United States which has been richly described in the literature, such communities residing in former Soviet Bloc countries has not gained sufficient attention from researchers. Most of the literature on the subject is composed of works originating from particular Eastern European countries and written mainly in national languages (Halik and Nowicka 2002; Halik 2006; Górny et al. 2007; Grzymaáa-Kazáowska 2008; Mazyrin 2004; Kocourek 2005; Blafkova 2009). Moreover, most studies concerning Vietnamese residing in Poland, the Czech Republic or Russia focus on their adaptation and integration into the host country (Halik and Nowicka 2002, Piáat and WysieĔska 2012; Martinkova 2011), or the identity of the second generation (Grabowska 2005; SzymaĔska 2006). There has been a lack of research that draws a broader picture of the inter-connections between Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe. One important feature of the Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe is understudied—the fact that they maintain various relations across national borders and therefore form a transnational migrant community (Faist 2004; Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen 2004). The transnational connections supported by the members of this group include various bonds maintained with the country of origin along with other countries populated by the Vietnamese within the former Soviet Bloc countries. In her study of Vietnamese and the Pentecostal church in Germany, Huewelmeier (2011) proposes to use the term “socialist

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cosmopolitanism” to analyse the various kinds of bonds and relations maintained by the diaspora inside former socialist countries. Another appropriate term, employed by Bayly (2009, 125) and adduced by Huewelmeier (2013) is “international socialist ecumene”, defined as a “worldwide fraternal community forged by both states and individuals on the basis of enduring revolutionary solidarities and socialist ‘friendships’” (Bayly 2009, 126; Huewelmeier 2013). However, with the exception of the above work, studies indicating the existence of some kind of unity between particular Vietnamese communities in the former Soviet Bloc countries have not been found. One important factor, which must be taken into consideration in analysing the Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe, is that some former Soviet Bloc countries, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former East Germany, and Hungary, have joined the “Schengen Area” which guarantees freedom of travel across countries in the area. The Schengen Area has created a new geographical framework, both replacing the old division between Western and Eastern Europe and strengthening mobility between such countries as the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany. In this chapter, the Vietnamese in Eastern Europe are examined as a transnational community, functioning in transnational social space. The nature of this transnational space is influenced by its former socialist character, which has a significant impact on the nature of the social and cultural capital gained and used by these particular Vietnamese. Current political conditions, such as the existence of the Schengen Area, have also helped shape this transnational space. This chapter examines the various dimensions of transnationality observed in this group, including such aspects as economic strategies, transnational family life, and cultural practices. These are the multiple ways in which these Vietnamese maintain relations with their country of origin and country (or countries) of settlement, forming a multi-layered transnational community of the East European Vietnamese.

Genesis of the Eastern European Vietnamese diaspora Pre-1989 Vietnamese migration to Eastern Europe The presence of the Vietnamese community in Eastern Europe is due to the fact that countries such as the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, from World War II to the year 1989, used to form a political entity called “the Soviet Bloc”. The Democratic Republic

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of Vietnam (later, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), ruled by a communist government, became an ally of the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, which became particularly visible in the 1960s (after the cooling of relations between the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s). It contributed to the development of mutual cooperation between Vietnam and Eastern European countries in many areas. The most important dimension of this cooperation, regarding migration, was the development of scholarships and worker exchange programs (Halik and Nowicka 2002). As a part of government agreements, the Vietnamese arrived in Eastern Europe to study (Russia, Poland, and the German Democratic Republic) or to work as contract workers (Czechoslovakia, Russia, and the German Democratic Republic). Their numbers vary in different countries. It is estimated that around 35,000 Vietnamese went to Czechoslovakia between 1979 and 1985 as a result of bilateral agreements (Kocourek 2005). The number of contract workers increased significantly in the second half of the 1980s. The year 1989 was the peak year, which saw the highest number (167,505) of temporary employees arrived in Eastern Europe (DMPMI 2007). For Poland, the numbers were much smaller, from the 1970s to the mid-1980s only around 200 Vietnamese arrived in that country each year (Halik 2006). Most returned to Vietnam after completing their education, in accordance with state policy. However, the students and workers who stayed in Eastern Europe played an important role in the formation of the local migrant community, serving as core members of the expanded Vietnamese community in the coming decades. Their presence induced a chain of migration in the 1990s, and they acted as hosts for the second wave of migrants.

Post-1989 Vietnamese migration to Eastern Europe After the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989/1991, Vietnamese migration to this area did not cease, but changed its nature significantly. In the new political situation, regulations concerning migration to the former Soviet Bloc countries became more relaxed and Vietnamese were allowed to arrive in these countries more freely.1 This resulted in a second wave of migration, which was of a much larger amount.2 This wave of migration was mainly for family reunion; in the communist period, students and workers were not allowed to bring their families with them (Piáat and WysieĔska 2012). Many of the second wave of migrants were involved in such economic activities as trading goods from Asia and running food services. In the 1990s and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the networks developed by first-wave migrants,

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who arrived during the communist period, were broadly used. The newcomers were often connected with students and workers through family and social ties. The influx of Vietnamese in the 1990s and 2000s led to the formation of migrant communities currently present in such countries as Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Germany.

Various Vietnamese communities in Eastern Europe At present, the largest Vietnamese community in Eastern Europe resides in Russia. Although, according to the official census (2002), there are only 26,205 Vietnamese in the Russian Federation, unofficial estimations point out that their number can be anywhere between 100,000-150,000 individuals (Mazyrin 2004). The second important centre of Vietnamese in Eastern Europe is the Czech Republic. The results of the 2011 census indicate that around 53,000 Vietnamese reside in this country permanently (CSO 2011); unofficial estimates put the total at 90,000 (Blafkova 2009). It is a relatively large number taking into account the overall population of the Czech Republic is 10.5 million. As for Poland, the number of the Vietnamese community, including irregular migrants, is usually estimated at around 25,000-35,000 (Halik and Nowicka 2002; Piáat and WysieĔska 2012). As of 2012, 11,696 Vietnamese were in possession of valid cards of residence in Poland. The approximate numbers of Vietnamese in various countries are presented in Table 12-1: Table 12-1: Vietnamese migrant communities in former Soviet Bloc countries Official data

Russia Germany Czech Republic Poland

26,205 (2002 census) 83,446 (2005 census) 53,110 (2011 census)

Unofficial estimations (including irregular migrants” 100,000-150,0004 130,000-140,0005 ~90,0006

11,696 (cards of residence, 25,000-35,0007 Office for Foreigners, 2012) / ~7,500-8,0008 Slovakia 1,020 (2001 census) 4,000-5,0009 Hungary Sources: The Polish official figure was taken from the Office for Foreigners, and the official figures of the rest were taken from the censuses of the respective countries.

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Estimations of the size of the Vietnamese community in Eastern Europe are difficult not only because of the presence of irregular migrants, but also due to the fact that the above countries (excluding Russia) belong to the Schengen Area. The Schengen Area composed, as of 2013, of 26 European countries, and citizens of the countries belonging to the area are allowed to move freely, and are not subject to passport control. Therefore, it is not possible to adequately track the movement of the Vietnamese between these particular countries once they cross the borders of Poland, the Czech Republic, or Slovakia; many move between these countries depending on the economic opportunities. Although third-party nationals (i.e. citizens of non-European Union countries, such as Vietnamese) holding a residence permit for one of the E.U. countries are not automatically given such status in the other country of the E.U., the lack of border control actually allows people to move freely between these countries. As a result, people may reside in Poland even if they only have a Czech residence permit—this is the sort of “grey zone” created by the free movement allowed under the Schengen Area Agreement. According to reports prepared by E.U. institutions, the recorded inflow of third-party nationals (people from outside the E.U.) from various E.U. countries to Poland is limited (Intra-E.U. Mobility 2013). However, even such incomplete data indicates the existence of particular mobility patterns, such as the migration of Vietnamese from the Czech Republic to Poland. In 2009, 69 out of 71 Vietnamese arriving in Poland from other E.U. countries were former residents of the Czech Republic (Intra-E.U.Mobility 2013, 21). Vietnamese arriving in Poland from the Czech Republic formed the largest group of third-party citizens applying for job permits in Poland (Intra-E.U. Mobility 2013, 41). Martinkova (2011) also noted that many Vietnamese who had official Czech residence permits were not physically present in the Czech Republic, but resided in Poland. These people decided to go through the administrative procedures for residency in the Czech Republic because its migration policy was more relaxed. During my fieldwork in Vietnam in 2007 and 2008, I found that many Vietnamese migrants shifted their place of residence frequently during their lifetime, circulating between Vietnam, and certain countries in Eastern (and sometimes also Western) Europe.10 Such a phenomenon was also studied by Piáat and WysieĔska (2012). Some groups who had valid resident permits allowing them to stay in Eastern European countries actually resided in Vietnam or other countries most of the time. This reinforces the irrelevance of holding onto the immigration-emigration dichotomy and confirms that migration is a non-finite process that never

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really “ends”. Vietnamese from former Soviet Bloc countries, due to multiple connections, form a kind of entity described by Huewelmeier (2011, 2013) as “socialist cosmopolitanism”. Huewelmeier, based on her ethnographic research, presents cases of Vietnamese who, after 1989, changed their place of residence between various Soviet Bloc countries as a result of economic opportunities or matrimonial decisions. During my research, I collected many life histories of second-generation Polish Vietnamese who themselves, or whose family members had resided at different times of their lifespan in such countries as Vietnam, the Czech Republic, Russia, or East Germany. Therefore, the East European Vietnamese should be perceived not as members of “fixed” migrant communities, but rather as members of a transnational community of “East European Vietnamese”, which includes people who are in multiple ways connected with at least two countries—Vietnam and one or more former country of the Soviet Bloc.

The “transnational turn” in migration studies and East European Vietnamese The 1990s saw a “transnational turn” in migration studies. It was becoming apparent that current theories, based on the dichotomy between country of origin and country of settlement, did not properly capture many phenomena connected with the spatial mobility of people (Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen 2004). Originally, the concept of “transnationalism” was formed as a response to developments in transportation and communication, which resulted in a more mobile population and various forms of contact between migrants and their homeland. It is important to stress that transnational mobility is inevitably connected with the conditions of late capitalism which encourages the free movement of both capital and labour across national borders. However, as Basch, Glick-Schiller and SzantonBlanc (1994) argue, the phenomenon of transnationalism has broader consequences. In their book, they present many cases of migrants’ involvement in the economic and political life of both their homeland and the host country. Similarly, the Vietnamese use resources gained from their country of origin as well as those gained in the country of settlement to build and develop social networks and institutions in both places (GlickSchiller, et al. 1992, 1995). Faist (2000:3) considers “transnational social spaces” as spaces “relatively stable, lasting and dense sets of ties reaching beyond and across the borders of sovereign states” (see also Faist 2004, 2006). However, rarely do we find such analytical concept is applied to the studies of East European Vietnamese.11

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Next, I will discuss the multiple ways in which these Vietnamese maintain relations with their country of origin and country (or countries) of settlement. I will base my analysis on my studies conducted among the Vietnamese community in Poland (SzymaĔska 2006) and educated Vietnamese from Hanoi (SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz 2013). These studies focus mainly on the younger generation of Polish-Vietnamese. I carried out a series of in-depth interviews with people who were either born in Poland or arrived there as children. I also participated in various social events taking place in the community. My Hanoi fieldwork focused on changes in family life among urban, educated Vietnamese who have connections to Eastern Europe. I also had the opportunity to create a network of contacts with the community of return migrants from Eastern Europe (mainly Poland). Having talked to various members of this community—people in their 50s and 60s, who had studied in Poland in the past and young people brought up in Europe, often of mixed EuropeanVietnamese identity—I noticed that even after their return to Vietnam, they still maintained bonds with their previous country of residence, keeping contact with relatives and friends who lived in Europe and making use of the social and cultural capital thus gained during their residence there. Moreover, many of these “return migrants” in fact move between two or more countries, switching their place of residence continuously.

Dimensions of transnationality and transnational networking Remittances and economic strategies One of the most important dimensions of transnationalism in migration issues is the economic aspect. In case of the East European Vietnamese community, two important issues must be highlighted: remittances sent by migrants to their home country, and the use of financial resources and social capital by the Vietnamese returning from Eastern Europe to Vietnam. The major economic activity of the Vietnamese in the former Soviet Bloc countries is trading of goods imported from Asia, mainly clothes, shoes, and small electronic devices (Halik and Nowicka 2002; GrzymaáaKazáowska 2004; Martinkova 2011; Mazyrin 2004; Williams and Balazs 2005). Such activities concentrate in large markets (bazaars)—the Stadion DziesiĊciolecia in Warsaw and Wólka Kosowska trade centres (Poland); the Sapa market in Prague and the border market in Cheb (Czech Republic). As Klorek and Szulecka (2012) indicate in their detailed study of the Wólka Kosowska trade centres, many researchers have stressed how

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these markets have become focal points for the Vietnamese migrant community and helped them in maintaining social interactions and developing ethnic institutions (Mroczek et al. 2008; Bieniecki et al. 2008). Places where Vietnamese congregated are often called “little Hanoi”, suggesting that they have formed a kind of “substitution” for the homeland. However, the “real” homeland has never ceased to be important for most migrants, as their economic activities are strongly directed towards Vietnam. An important form of transnationalism for East European Vietnamese is their remittances back to Vietnam. As Levitt and Nyberg-Sørensen (2004) indicate, the financial support to developing countries provided by migrants living abroad has captured increasing attention in global economic analyses (such as studies carried out by the World Bank or International Monetary Fund).12 This phenomenon is particularly important in the case of Vietnam. Money sent by Vietnamese migrants to Vietnam reached U.S. $10 billion in 2012, and made up 6.9 percent of Vietnam’s GDP (World Bank 2011). The most important sources of remittances are transfers from Vietnamese residing in the United States (57 percent of remittances overall). The remittances sent by Vietnamese contract workers from developed Asian countries, such as Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea, are also of growing importance (Nguyen 2008). Money transfers from East European Vietnamese form only a small part of the overall remittances (see Table 12-2 below). Table 12-2: Remittances to Vietnam from Eastern European countries (2011, million U.S.$) Countries

Remittances

Germany*

520

Czech Republic

49

Poland

8

Hungary

6

Slovak Republic

5

Russia

Lack of data

Source: World Bank, Bilateral Remittance Matrix (2011) *Germany includes the former West Germany and East Germany.

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Apart from remittances, the economic activities undertaken by the Vietnamese after their return to Vietnam, whether permanently or temporarily, are equally important since they make use not only of financial resources, but also the cultural and social capital they had gained during their stay in Europe. The impact of this combination of capital could be accurately described as “social remittances” (Levitt and NybergSørensen 2004; Faist 2008). According to Tino Dinh (2010), the overall impact of cultural capital, including skills gained by return migrants during their stay abroad such as proficiency in foreign languages, education, and business skills, becomes more important for Vietnam’s modernisation than money remittances alone. This statement is supported by the fact that return migrants, who gained a higher education during their stay in Eastern Europe, often hold high positions after their return to Vietnam. Data concerning return migrants who studied in Poland during the communist era, provided by the Polish-Vietnamese Friendship Society in Hanoi (Hoi Huu Nghi Viet Nam— Ba Lan), list persons occupying such positions as president of Hanoi, a government minister, directors of state-owned enterprises, a member of parliament, and a rector of a university.13 The importance of personal networks owned by East European Vietnamese must be taken into account when analysing their impacts on changes taking place in Vietnam. Unlike return Vietnamese migrants from the United States, East European Vietnamese do not have to cope with the issues connected to being on the “wrong side” of the conflict during the Vietnam War. Moreover, they can make use of their favourable connections with government officials. When asked where he intended to live after completing his university studies, 20-year-old Vu, one of my Poland-based interviewees, said: “It’s easier there (in Vietnam). My grandparents occupy important positions there, and we have many connections, that’s it.” During my 2007/2008 fieldwork in Hanoi, I collected data from Vietnamese (including the second generation who were born in Poland) who had returned from Poland in previous years. Many found that after their return to the home country, they were able to get good jobs and forge satisfactory careers because of their good command of Western languages (such as English and German). Their economic activities in Vietnam often reflect their connections with Poland. A good example is the Polonez Hotel, named after a traditional Polish dance and run by a return migrant from Poland. A more recent case is a Polish restaurant in Hanoi called V&B that opened in December 2012. It is operated by a Vietnamese who also runs the well-known Van Binh Vietnamese restaurant in Warsaw. These are particularly good examples of an activity transgressing national borders.

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I also noticed that younger return migrants often maintain bonds with Poland, like being employed in Polish companies operating in Vietnam. One example is the Pol-Viet Travel Agency, which declares that it hires only Vietnamese from Poland and Poles residing in Vietnam.14 The use of specific social and cultural capital in economic activities is not only limited to Vietnamese returning from Poland, but can also be noted among other Vietnamese communities residing in other Eastern European countries. During my research among young Vietnamese brought up in Poland, I noticed that most of them take up jobs in the “ethnic economy sector” after graduation, finding employment in businesses run by their parents or family members (Piáat and WysieĔska 2012). It is legitimate to assume that they make use of two kinds of “resources”—the social network, provided by the Vietnamese community, and cultural resources (including education and fluency in Polish and English), provided by their Polish social background. Another good opportunity for second-generation migrants to use both Polish and Vietnamese “resources” was the establishment in 2011 of a direct air connection between Warsaw and Hanoi, operated by LOT Polish Airlines. Many young Vietnamese women living in Poland found employment as flight attendants, since they could speak Polish, Vietnamese, and English. They also expressed their enthusiasm about the possibility of gaining such a job, as it enabled them to pay frequent visits to their home country and maintain contact with family members. Despite the fact that there is no longer a Warsaw-Hanoi direct air connection—as it proved to be unprofitable in comparison to the offers of other air carriers, the multiple use of the cultural resources available for second-generation generation migrants still remains an interesting topic to study

Transnational cultural capitals and flows The Vietnamese from Soviet Bloc countries, consisting of immigrants, return migrants, and circular migrants, involve multiple cultural flows from Vietnam to Eastern Europe and vice versa, additionally influenced by globalised, “Western” culture. Due to the coexistence of numerous elements from various cultures, the East European Vietnamese can be perceived as one of the many examples of the creolization process, taking place in the contemporary world (Hannerz 1987). While observing Vietnamese return migrants from Poland, I noticed numerous manifestations of “East European” cultural influences in their activities. People who used to live in the former Soviet Bloc maintained social contacts with each other, and frequently organised meetings and

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parties. I had the opportunity to visit a Christmas party in a wine store, owned by a return migrant from Poland, where children were offered gifts connected with the country of previous residence, e.g., chocolates produced by Wedel (a Polish confectionery company). During such parties, European food products such as cheese and wine were commonly served, and gifts people presented to each other were typically from Eastern Europe, including Russian or Polish vodka. These are products rarely consumed by the Vietnamese without migration experience, but are highly appreciated by Vietnamese returnees from Eastern Europe. Polish and Russian songs were sung during karaoke, a typical leisure activity of the Vietnamese. I observed similar phenomena during Vietnamese weddings in Poland, when Vietnamese customs, such as singing karaoke, were mixed with Polish wedding traditions such as the blessing of the bread and salt. Younger returned Vietnamese from Poland also maintain contact with each other through direct interactions and social networking, such as Facebook, revealing the common need among migrants to actively deal with such issues as identity and sense of belonging (Marcheva 2011; Leurs and Ponzanesi 2011). The Vietnamese often stress their commitment to Poland and Polish culture, and are active in such sites as “The Vietnamese in Warsaw”, a Facebook website strictly transnational in character. It gathers information about Vietnamese living in Poland, return migrants to Vietnam as well as some Poles involved in the Vietnamese migrant community.15 In their social networks, the Polish Vietnamese commonly use three languages: Polish, Vietnamese, and English, mixing them freely and adding multiple “universal” symbols such as emoticons. While residing in Poland, they share information concerning the newest trends in Vietnamese popular culture; after their return to Vietnam, they get updates and news about the country of their previous residence. Appadurai (1996), who stresses the role of electronic media in forming transnational communities, is particularly relevant here. A detailed study, including multi-sited fieldwork and analysis of Internet content (including social media), will allow a fascinating picture to be drawn of this community, and contribute to the further development of theoretical analyses of global cultural flows.

Establishing transnational families Another important dimension of transnational connections of the East European Vietnamese is the presence of transnational migrant families. This can be defined as families that live separately from each other for some time but maintain a kind of unity and mutual support (Bryceson and

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Vuorela 2002). In the communist era, Vietnamese migration to Soviet Bloc countries referred only to the movement of selected students and workers; families of these people seldom moved with them. After the political transformation and relaxation of migration policies in Vietnam, an increasingly number of migrants’ family members joined them in Europe. However, many families still remain divided, with some residing— permanently or temporarily—in Vietnam. The phenomenon of maintaining trans-border familial relationships entails multiple dimensions, such as the impact of remittances transferred by migrants to their relatives in Vietnam, familial commitment and emotional bonds maintained despite physical distance. The issue of remittances sent by the overseas Vietnamese (mainly “boat people” residing in the United States) to their families has been examined by Phong (2000), who stresses how remittances enhanced the economic wellbeing of Vietnam in the difficult times after the unification of the country in 1975. As mentioned before, although money transfers sent by East European Vietnamese to their families residing in Vietnam were not high in comparison with the migrant populations in other countries, many PolishVietnamese complained to me about the financial commitments they had made towards their relatives in Vietnam. For example, a young informant, 18-year-old Quan, told me about the conflicts between his parents (in Poland) and their siblings (in Vietnam), who expect his parents to support them financially, even though the parents were not well off. Another informant, a 24-year-old woman brought up in Poland, told me that to her surprise, whenever she visited Vietnam, she was given some money as a gift offered by a distant relative who resided in the United States. I believe that the range of financial support granted by the East European Vietnamese to their family members in Vietnam should be quite important and has influenced family relations, both across and inside borders. However, this issue has not yet been studied systematically. A number of studies have been conducted on the changing relationships and emotional ties between migrants and their relatives left behind in the homeland (Hoang and Yeoh 2011, 2012; Tran 2013). Among the second wave migrants in Eastern Europe, many left their spouse and/or small children behind in Vietnam, leading to new cases of family separation. On the other hand, many of the first-wave migrants were welleducated and integrated well with the host society. During their long stay abroad they managed to bring their families to their new home. However, these families may experience a different kind of separation, as some have become return migrants while others stay in Eastern Europe.

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Whether in Hanoi or in Warsaw, I noticed many situations in which selected members of the family—usually parents with grown-up children who were brought up in Poland—returned to Vietnam after a long stay in Poland. Often the decision was caused by the need to take care of an elderly parent. Less frequently, the family member was a grown-up child brought up in Poland. This was the case of Hanh, a 26-year-old woman (in 2008), who had lived in Poland since she was eight. She met her partner in Vietnam through an Internet dating service. Although her entire immediate family, parents, and younger sister Mai, resided in Poland, she decided to go back to Vietnam and got married there. In Hanoi, I had observed the numerous difficulties she experienced while adapting to her life in Vietnam, which she described as “cultural differences”. At the beginning, she had many problems, as her knowledge of Polish was better than her knowledge of Vietnamese. Hanh complained about various differences with her relatives from Vietnam, including the level of control imposed on family members and the attitude towards a non-democratic government. Nevertheless, her previous stay in Poland equipped her with cultural capital, including a good education and knowledge of Western languages, which enabled her to get a good job and develop a professional career in Vietnam. Hanh now lives in Hanoi with her husband who has no migration experience, while her sister is married to a Pole and resides in Warsaw. Hanh maintains contacts with other return migrants from Poland, who live in Hanoi, but her knowledge of Polish is gradually weakening. While Hanh’s children will not gain any knowledge of Polish, Mai’s children will see Polish as their primary language. The two sisters maintain frequent contact, including sending food products from Poland to Vietnam and vice versa. There are many cases of such “transnational” families, stretching between two or more countries, strongly attached to and supportive of each other. However, this phenomenon has not gained sufficient attention. Transnational families are still perceived as a temporary phenomenon, difficult to conceptualise and therefore neglected in academic research (Mazzucato and Schans 2011). The problem of family commitments and family bonds among East European Vietnamese requires in-depth investigation, preferably based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (Glick-Schiller 2003; Fitzgerald 2006; Punch 2012).

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Cross-border networking in Europe Vietnamese residing in Eastern Europe are commonly perceived by scholars as representing migrants officially sent out by the Vietnamese authorities and residing in particular countries of the former Soviet Bloc. We can conceptualise this community as one linked to the former socialist countries (Huewelmeier 2013). Though belonging to one “political unity” in the past, these Vietnamese inevitably maintain multiple transnational connections following the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Some of these connections are still important along with the change of the geopolitical landscape in Europe. At present, the range of trans-border movement among particular countries of the former Soviet Bloc is shaped by new geopolitical divisions and border controls. For example, the flow of Vietnamese between Poland and Russia seems to be quite limited due to a strict visa policy (Iglicka 2008). The trans-border movement of Vietnamese between Russia (and other former Soviet Bloc countries) and European Union countries is currently to a large extent the domain of irregular migration and human trafficking (Small 2012). However the migration of the Vietnamese between Poland and the Czech Republic, now both situated in the Schengen Area, shows an increasing trend. The family histories of some of my informants confirm the existence of particular migration patterns, including moving from the Czech Republic to southern Poland (Silesia or Kraków) and then further on to Warsaw, the capital of Poland, where the majority of Polish-Vietnamese migrants live. Currently, many Vietnamese living in Poland have Czech residence permits, as it was easier to get residency in the Czech Republic in the 2000s. For example, I met a young couple in their 20s, running a small restaurant in Warsaw. Hoa is a Vietnamese brought up in Poland from early childhood, while her husband, Phuc, arrived in the Czech Republic to join members of his family living there. Initially, they met through the Internet and later Phuc decided to visit Hoa in Poland. After getting married, they decided to settle in Warsaw and open a small restaurant located at one of the commuter train stations in the suburbs of the city. When I asked Hoa, a university-educated person, what were the reasons for running a restaurant, she told me that it was solely her husband’s idea, as his family had run a few restaurants in the Czech Republic. After Poland and Czech Republic joined the Schengen Area, the transnational connections maintained by the East European Vietnamese began to change. Transnational connections began to shift across the East European and West European boundaries. One Vietnamese newspaper available in Poland, Ph˱˯ng Ĉông, is published by a journalist who

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completed his PhD at the Polish Academy of Sciences and who now resides in Great Britain. As indicated on its front page, Ph˱˯ng Ĉông is aimed at Vietnamese residing in the European Union and can be purchased in such European cities as Warsaw, London, and Berlin. Particular business activities by Vietnamese in these places can also be observed. For example, Vietnamese women in the United States have specialised in operating nail businesses since the early 1990s, creating a kind of “ethnic niche” (Eckstein and Nguyen 2011; Federman et al. 2006). In the 2000s, this activity became more popular among the Vietnamese in Western Europe, especially in the United Kingdom (Eckstein and Nguyen 2011). Only recently has this kind of business begun to capture the attention of some Polish-Vietnamese. In September 2013, one of my informants—a young Vietnamese woman—told me that she recently travelled to Germany to be trained as a nail technician. She was learning the necessary skills from the Vietnamese operating nail salons in Germany. Although currently there is no Vietnamese nail salon in Poland, a couple of articles describing the Vietnamese nail businesses in Germany and the United Kingdom were published in Ph˱˯ng Ĉông in October 2013 and Vietnamese in Poland were encouraged to become involved in this economic activity. At the end of November 2013, a training course led by a Vietnamese nail entrepreneur from Berlin was held at the Wólka Kosowska trade centre near Warsaw. Nail salons may therefore illustrate the spread of a business activity among members of the Vietnamese communities residing in various states inside the new geo-cultural frame, involving both former Soviet countries and the countries of Western Europe.

Suggestions for further research: a “transnationalisation” paradigm The East European Vietnamese are a community relatively poorly covered by research. This community certainly deserves more attention, as it reflects important issues of migration studies, such as the nature of social and cultural capital gained after migration, and the application of this capital as a living strategy after a return to home country. Such circular migration also involves the impact of return migrants on the process of modernisation in Vietnam, which has so far not been studied (Chan and Tran 2011). Another important issue is the cross-border connections maintained by the Vietnamese inside Europe. As I have indicated in the chapter, by joining the European Union and Schengen Area, East European countries have provided a new geographical

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framework that helps facilitate various forms of transnational connections and activities among the Vietnamese residents of the former Soviet Bloc countries, involving more intense physical movement of people, economic activities, and flows of cultural capital. One must also take into account the complex entanglements that many of the East European Vietnamese—especially those in the first wave of migration—have with the communist authorities in Vietnam. Most are not willing to oppose the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and therefore they are commonly perceived as the most loyal and “unproblematic” part of the Vietnamese diaspora. Another issue worth studying is the multiple ties, including networks of assistance and support, as well as flows of commodities and cultural influences between members of transnational families. There is also multidimensional transnational networking across different countries in Europe and between Vietnam and Europe. Regardless of the particular topic, indepth studies of East European Vietnamese require a much more complex “transnationalisation” paradigm to conceive this group as a transnational community, transgressing multiple national borders.

Notes 1. Before 1989, the inflow of foreigners to Poland was very small, as migration was fully controlled by the state. In fact, it was limited to students, contract workers, and specific categories of refugees, such as Greeks associated with the Communist Party, escaping from Greece after the civil war. 2. Between 1994 and 2001, from 3,000 to 7,000 Vietnamese entered Poland each year (data of Border Guard, cited in Halik 2006). 3. Data of Office for Foreigners, Poland. Http://www.udsc.gov.pl/Zestawienia,roczne,233.html, accessed at 30 July 2013. 4. Data cited in Mazyrin 2004. 5. The case of Vietnamese community in Germany is complicated comparing to other countries of the region. Due to the partition of this country after World War II, Germany experienced an influx of Vietnamese of various backgrounds and migration histories—boat people and refugees escaping from the communist regime arrived in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), while students and workers loyal to the communist authorities went to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) (see Bernd Wolf 2007and Huewelmeier 2011). The Vietnamese community in Germany is still divided along these lines today. 6. Data cited in Blafkova 2009. 7. Data cited in WysieĔska and Piáat 2012. 8. Data cited in Williams and Balaž 2005.

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9. Http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10422480, citing Zoltan Baross, representative of Hungarian National Bureau of Investigation (NNI). 10. According to a report of the Department of Migration Policy of the Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration (2007), even before joining the Schengen Area, most Vietnamese who arrived in Poland did not come directly from Vietnam, but from such countries as the Czech Republic or Russia. 11. An important exception is the current project led by Huewelmeier (2013), who conducted fieldwork in the places—bazaars, where Vietnamese congregate and conduct trade. 12. See reports present at website of the World Bank. Http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDECPROSPEC TS/0,,contentMDK:21121930~menuPK:3145470~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64165 026~theSitePK:476883,00.html and the International Monetary Fund: http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/bop/remitt.htm. 13. Http://static.khoia0.com/Hoi_Viet_Ba/Wietnamscy_absowenci.html, accessed on 27 July 2013. 14. Http://polviettravel.com/our-company, accessed on 27 July 2013. 15. Https://www.facebook.com/groups/vietnampoland/?fref=ts, accessed on 7 Aug 2013.

References Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Basch, Linda, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. Langhorne, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach. Bayly, Susan. 2009. “Vietnamese Narratives of Tradition, Exchange and Friendship in the Worlds of the Global Socialist Ecumenein.” In Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation, edited by Harry G. West and Parvathi Raman, 125-147. New York: Berghahn Books. Bieniecki, Mirosáaw, Agnieszka Cybulska, and Beata Roguska. 2008. Integracja ekonomiczna i kulturowa obcokrajowców w gminie Lesznowola. Warszawa: Instytut Spraw Publicznych. Blafkova, Martina. 2009. Specifika života vietnamske komunity v ýR, Epolis, 22 January. Http://www.e-polis.cz/nezarazene-clanky/343-specifi ka-zivota-vietnamske-komunity-v-cr.html. Bryceson, Deborah F., and Ulla Vuorela. 2002. The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks. Oxford/New York: Berg.

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Federman, Maya N., David E. Harrington, and Kathy J. Krynski. 2006. “Vietnamese Manicurists: Are Immigrants Displacing Natives or Finding New Nails to Polish?” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 59 (2): 302-318. Fitzgerald, David. 2006. “Towards a Theoretical Ethnography of Migration.” Qualitative Sociology, DOI: 10.1007/s11133-005-9005-6. Glick-Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc. 1992. “Transnationalism: A New Analytical Framework for Understanding Migration.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences: Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered 645: 1-24. Glick-Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc. 1995. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration.” Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1): 48-63. Glick-Schiller, Nina. 2003. “The Centrality of Ethnography in the Study of Transnational Migration: Seeing the Wetland Instead of the Swamp

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America Arrivals.” In American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration, edited by N. Foner, 99-128. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Górny, Agata, Aleksandra Grzymaáa-Kazáowska, Ewa KĊpiĔska, Agnieszka Fihel, and Anna Piekut. 2007. Od zbiorowoĞci do spoáecznoĞci: rola migrantów osiedleĔczych w tworzeniu siĊ spoáecznoĞci imigranckich w Polsce. Warszawa: CMR Working Papers, no. 27/85. Grabowska, Ewa. 2005. Ksztaátowanie siĊ powinnoĞci i zachowaĔ w rodzinach wietnamskich w warunkach pobytu we wáasnym kraju i na emigracji. Master’s thesis, Szkoáa WyĪsza Psychologii Spoáecznej. Grzymaáa-Kazáowska, Aleksandra, ed. 2008. MiĊdzy jednoĞcią a wieloĞcią, Integracja odmiennych grup i kategorii imigrantów w Polsce. Warszawa: MPiPS. Halik, Teresa. 2006. Migrancka spoáecznoĞü Wietnamczyków w Polsce w Ğwietle polityki paĔstwa i ocen spoáecznych. PoznaĔ: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu im. A. Mickiewicza. Halik, Teresa and Nowicka, Ewa (2002). Wietnamczycy w Polsce. Integracja czy izolacja? Warszawa: Instytut Orientalistyczny Hannerz, Ulf. 1987. “The World in Creolization.” Africa, 57 (4): 546-559. Hoang, Lan Anh, and Brenda, S. A. Yeoh. 2011. “Breadwinning Wives and ‘Left-Behind’ Husbands: Men and Masculinities in the Vietnamese Transnational Family.” Gender & Society 25 (6): 717-739. Hoang, Lan Anh, and Brenda, S.A. Yeoh. 2012. “Sustaining Families across Transnational Spaces: Vietnamese Migrant Parents and their Left-Behind Children.” Asian Studies Review 36 (3): 307-325. Huewelmeier, Gertrud. 2011. “Socialist Cosmopolitanism Meets Global Pentecostalism: Charismatic Christianity among Vietnamese Migrants in Germany.” Special issue, “Cosmopolitan Sociability: Locating Transnational Religious and Diasporic Networks.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (3): 436-453. —. 2013. “Postsocialist Bazaars: Diversity, Solidarity and Conflict in the Marketplace.” Laboratorium 5 (1): pp. 42-66. Iglicka, Krystyna. 2008. Schengen’s New Eastern Border and Irregular Immigration In and Out of Poland, in: Analyses of Real Instituto Elcano. Http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/wps/wcm/connect/9ecdbe004f018b 8fb971fd3170baead1/ARI492008_Iglicka_Immigration_Poland_Schengen.pdf?MOD=AJPERES& CACHEID=9ecdbe004f018b8fb971fd3170baead1

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Intra-EU Mobility of Third-Country Nationals. 2013, Report produced by the National Contact Point to the European Migration Network in Poland. Http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/european_ migration_network/reports/docs/emn-studies/intra-eu-mobility/20a. poland_intra-mobility_final_october2013_en.pdf Klorek, Natalia, and Monika Szulecka. 2012. “Migrant Economic Institutions and their Environmental Influence: a Case Study of Trade Centres Located in Wólka Kosowska.” Stowarzyszenie Interwencji Prawnej, Analyses, Reports, Expertises, March, Warszawa. Kocourek, Jiri. 2005. Vietnamci v ýR. Http://www.socioweb.cz/index.php?disp=temata&shw=199&lst=108. Levitt, Peggy, and Ninna Nyberg-Sørensen. 2004. “The Transnational Turn in Migration Studies.” Global Migration Perspectives 6. Leurs, Koen and Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2011. “Mediated Crossroads: Youthful Digital Diasporas.” M/C Journal 14 (2). Http://journal.mediaculture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/324. Marcheva, Marta. 2011. The Networked Diaspora: Bulgarian Migrants on Facebook, in: M/C Journal 14 (2). Http://journal.media-culture.org.au/ index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/323. Martínková, Sarka. 2011. “The Vietnamese Ethnic Group, Its Sociability and Social Networks in the Prague Milieu. in: Migration, Diversity and Their Management.” Prague Occasional Papers in Ethnology (8). Institute of Ethnology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 133-200. Http://www.socant.su.se/polopoly_fs/1.30562.1320939988!/Monografi _brezen_2011.pdf#page=133. Mazyrin, Vladimir. 2004. “Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Ways of Living, Problems, and Perspectives.” In Indochina: Trends in Development, edited by N. Bectimirova and V. Dolnikova, 159-179. Moscow: Moscow State University, Institute of Asian and African Studies. Mazzucato, Valentina, and Schans, Djamila. 2011. “Transnational Families and the Well-Being of Children: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges.” Journal of Marriage and Family 73 (4): 704-712. Mroczek Iga, Monika Szulecka, and ElĪbieta TuliĔska. 2008. “Wólka Kosowska jako miejsce skupiające aktywnoĞü ekonomiczną Wietnamczyków.” In MiĊdzy jednoĞcią a wieloĞcią. Integracja odmiennych grup i kategorii migrantów w Polsce, edited by A. Grzymaáa–Kazáowska, 165-196. Warszawa: OBM WNE UW.

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Nguyen, Minh Thao. 2008. Migration, remittances, and economic development: Case of Vietnam. Http://s3.amazonaws.com/zanran_storage/www.trf.or.th/ContentPages/ 16731190.pdf Phong, Dang. 2000. “La Diaspora Vietnamienne: Retour et Intégration au Vietnam. In: Revue Européenne de Migrations Internationales.” Dynamiques migratoires en Asie orientale 16 (1): 183-205. Piáat, Anna, and Kinga WysieĔska. 2012. “SpoáecznoĞci wschodnioazjatyckie w Polsce oraz w wybranych krajach regionu i Ğwiata.” In Sprzedawaü, gotowaü, budowaü? Plany i strategie ChiĔczyków i Wietnamczyków w Polsce, edited by K. WysieĔska. Warszawa: Instytut Spraw Publicznych. Punch, Samantha. 2012. “Studying Transnational Children: A Multi-Sited, Longitudinal, Ethnographic Approach.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38 (6): 1007-023. Small, Ivan. 2012. “Embodied Economies: Vietnamese Transnational Migration and Return Regimes.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 27 (2): 234-259. Sidel, Mark. 2007. Vietnamese-American Diaspora Philanthropy to Vietnam. Report Prepared for The Philanthropic Initiative, Inc. and The Global Equity Initiative of Harvard University. Http://www.tpi.org/sites/files/pdf/vietnam_diaspora_philanthropy_final .pdf SzymaĔska, GraĪyna. 2006. “ToĪsamoĞü etniczna studentów wychowanych w Polsce.” In Kulturowe wymiary imigracji do Polski. Studia Socjologiczne, edited by S. àodziĔski and E. Nowicka. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Prolog. SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz, GraĪyna. 2013. Co siĊ dzieje z tradycyjną rodziną wietnamską? Antropologiczne studium Wietnamczyków z Hanoi i z Warszawy. ToruĔ: Wydawnictwo Adam Marszaáek (in print; publication based on a doctoral thesis defended in 2011). Tran, Phi Phuong. 2013. “The Reproductive Dynamism of Family: ‘Transnational Families’ Model in Vietnamese Market Economy.” Paper presented at the 7th EuroSEAS conference, Lisbon, 2-5 July, 2013. Trinh, Tamara. 2007. Understanding Vietnam: A Look Beyond Facts and Figures, w: Deutsche Bank Research, July 26. Williams, Allan M., and Vladimir Balaž. 2005. “Vietnamese Community in Slovakia.” Sociologia—Slovak Sociological Review 37 (3).

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Wolf, Bernd. 2007. The Vietnamese Diaspora in Germany: Structure and Potentials for Cooperation with a Focus on Berlin and Hesse. Eschborn: GTZ GmbH. World Bank, Bilateral Remittance Matrix. 2011. Http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDEC PROSPECTS/0,,contentMDK:22759429~pagePK:64165401~piPK:64 165026~theSitePK:476883,00.html.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN VIETNAMESE MARRIAGE MIGRANTS AND THE CHANGING PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN TAIWAN HEIDI FUNG AND TSAI-PING WANG

Introduction Due to increasing human mobility in a globalised world, inter- and intra-regional cross-border marriages have become a common phenomenon and have drawn much scholarly attention in recent years (Yang and Lu 2010; Lu 2005; Constable 2005; Williams 2010; Wang and Hsiao 2009; Palriwala and Uberoi 2008). Joining the global trend, Taiwan, an immigrant-sending country in the past, has been receiving an inflow of marriage migrants from neighbouring countries since the mid-1990s (estimated at nearly 500,000). The vast majority of these new immigrants are women (about 93 percent), known as foreign brides (waiji xinniang), and nearly 70 percent came from China, while the rest were from Southeast Asian countries (with Vietnam contributing about 60 percent or over 100,000 of these Southeast Asian marriage migrants). Since almost all immigrants from China and most immigrants from other Southeast Asian countries (i.e., Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar) are of Han-Chinese ancestry, Vietnamese comprise the largest non-Han Chinese immigrant group in Taiwan (see Table 13-1 below), and have hence aroused the highest anxiety in society. These young Vietnamese women mostly come from poor families in villages in the Mekong Delta region and migrated with a purpose—to better their natal family’s lives, while their Taiwanese husbands tend to be much older, with low marriageability and socio-economic status. As these marriages were usually brought about by for-profit brokers with little or no prior courtship, they have often been considered as a form of “commodification of intimacy” (Hochschild 2003; Constable 2009). A full

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service package usually costs the groom U.S. $5,000 to $10,000, which includes one or two tours to Ho Chi Minh City, the legal processing fee, the wedding ceremony, and betrothal gifts and money to the bride’s family (Wang and Chang 2002). Unlike overseas Vietnamese (Vi͏t ki͉u) elsewhere, these marriage migrants bear the burden of speedy adjustment alone, with little support network. In contrast to their compatriots who arrive as overseas contract workers, they strive for upward social mobility and aspire towards permanent settlement in their adopted country (see Table 13-2), while remaining dutiful daughters from afar (Bélanger and Tran 2011; Bélanger, Tran, and Le 2011). Nevertheless, they often suffer from pervasive negative stereotypes and are shunned by people in both the sending and receiving countries. Table 13-1: Residence visas issued to spouses from Southeast Asian countries (1994-2012) Vietnam Indonesia

Thailand & Myanmar

The Philippines

Cambodia

1994 530 2,247 870 1,183 1995 1,969 2,409 1,301 1,757 1996 4,113 2,950 1,973 2,085 1997 9,060 2,464 2,211 2,128 1998 4,630 2,331 1,184 542 1999 6,790 3,643 1,230 603 656 2000 12,327 4,381 1,259 487 875 2001 12,340 3,230 1,389 377 567 2002 12,828 2,602 1,664 389 632 2003 11,566 2,748 1,997 193 644 2004 11,953 2,683 1,773 260 890 2005 7,062 1,757 1,462 278 366 2006 3,864 1,258 882 217 47 2007 4,435 902 807 239 3 2008 3,846 737 682 469 4 2009 3,247 690 602 473 4 2010 2,630 816 483 397 5 2011 2,261 306 422 459 3 2012 1,900 225 500 420 0 Total 117,351 38,379 22,691 12,956 4,696 Source: Bureau of Consular Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Taiwan

Total

4,830 7,436 11,121 15,863 8,687 12,922 19,329 17,903 18,115 17,148 17,559 10,925 6,268 6,386 5,738 5,016 4,331 3,451 3,054 196,073

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Table 13-2: Naturalization of foreigners in Taiwan (1994-2012) Vietnam

Other SEA Countries

Japan/Korea

Others

1994 1 72 42 22 1995 1 64 32 32 1996 10 248 36 24 1997 56 2,148 20 19 1998 176 3,447 33 28 1999 907 3,645 42 33 2000 2,204 2,944 17 33 2001 1,280 808 18 98 2002 515 922 18 78 2003 408 1,014 12 31 2004 2,351 4,100 16 85 2005 8,206 3,028 13 55 2006 10,173 1,763 10 27 2007 8,226 2,479 7 52 2008 10,711 2,424 14 81 2009 7,556 2,161 13 123 2010 5,887 1,705 15 61 2011 4,525 1,309 26 63 2012 4,288 1,186 33 68 Total 67,484 35,404 417 1,013 Source: Department of Social Affairs, Ministry of Interior, Taiwan

Total

137 129 318 2,243 3,684 4,627 5,198 2,204 1,533 1,465 6,552 11,302 11,973 10,764 13,230 9,853 7,668 5,923 5,575 98,803

As suggested by Constable (2009, 55), “commodification of intimacy is not an analytical end in itself, but instead offers a valuable starting point for analyses of gendered social relations, cultural meanings, social inequalities, and capitalist transformations”. Studies on migrant women should also go beyond any overly simplistic dichotomous models of victim or agent, love or money, material or emotional, local or global, and public or private. Researchers also often overlook the continuities between wife and worker, madam and maid, or the paid and unpaid forms of reproductive labour (Glenn 1992; Piper and Roces 2003; Lan 2008a). As stressed by Piper and Roces (2003, 7): To us, migration is by and large a continuing process where women negotiate several roles or swap the priority of roles (albeit set within different degrees of constraints). While the process does begin when the woman decides to explore migration…, it is more difficult to assign a moment when the process ends. Thus, “mail-order brides” become wives, mothers, workers, and citizens.

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Echoing their claims, I believe not only should we move beyond the reified binary dichotomies, but also recognise the full range of roles and responsibilities that marriage migrants actively engage in their on-going daily life. In this chapter, we would like to find out whether and how the public discourse about marriage migrants in Taiwan in general and Vietnamese women in particular has changed qualitatively as well as quantitatively over the past two decades (1994-2012) since their arrival. The results reflect an increasing acknowledgment of the full range of roles and responsibilities that Vietnamese marriage migrants have actively assumed and the economic, social, and familial contributions they have made to both Taiwan and Vietnam.

Public discourses on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Vietnam and Taiwan In Vietnam, women who marry foreign husbands (i.e., Taiwanese and later Korean men) are singled out as phͭ nͷ ḽy ch͛ng n˱ͣc ngoài, a different category of women from those who marry overseas Vietnamese men (Vi͏t ki͉u) and migrate to North America, Europe, or Australia. The women in these two types of international marriages are by no means homogeneous. According to Thai’s (2008) study on Vi͏t ki͉u grooms and their brides, the Vi͏t ki͉u grooms’ backgrounds seem remarkably similar to those of the Taiwanese grooms. Both groups tend to be on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in their respective societies and want to marry “a traditional woman” in order to defend masculinity in their own way (Thai 2008; Tien and Wang 2006; Wang and Tien 2009), yet, they end up marrying women from different socioeconomic backgrounds in Vietnam. Unlike Taiwanese grooms who tend to marry young women from rural areas with little education, the Vi͏t ki͉u men married older, financially secure, and well-educated urban professionals (see Table 13-3). An informant in Thai’s study, Thanh, a college-educated professional woman in Saigon who was waiting for immigration documents to join her newlywed Vi͏t ki͉u husband in the United States, candidly commented and compared women like her to those who marry foreigners: I think there is something different when you talk about Vi͏t ki͉u men coming back here to marry. The women here who marry for money, many of them will marry other foreign men, like Taiwanese and Korean men, but they have sacrificed their lives for their families because they think they can go off to another country and later send money back home. Those [foreign] men seldom check the family backgrounds of the women they marry, because they don’t care. They, the women and the men, know it’s

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something like prostitution, like selling oneself, even though they have weddings and everything. But it’s not really a marriage. If the brides are lucky, their foreign husbands will love them and take care of them. But when it has to do with Vietnamese men [Vi͏t ki͉u], they are more selective. They look for a real marriage. And a marriage that will last forever… (Thai 2008, 112-113)

Although Thanh sympathetically acknowledged her country fellows’ filial deed—“sacrificing their lives for their families”, she described them and their marriages in a derogatory tone. Despite that the two groups of brides actually shared some similarities—they all intended to “move up” through marriage and migration and had little knowledge about their future husbands and in-laws, in Thanh’s eyes, only marriages like hers, but not theirs, were deemed a union on the basis of true love and equal social standing. To a large extent, Thanh’s words reflect the public discourse in Vietnam on women who marry foreign men. Based on the content analysis of 300 reports involving transnational marriages in the online media (between 1999 and 2007), Bélanger, Khuat, and Wang (2007) found that representations of phͭ nͷ ḽy ch͛ng n˱ͣc ngoài generally fell into two types: victim or opportunist. As victims, these women were depicted as poor, uneducated, ignorant, and passive. Due to the lack of proper knowledge and guidance, they could easily become victims to human trafficking, sexually transmitted diseases (due to sexual contact with infected foreign men), and abusive relationships. None of these misfortunes would have happened if they had stayed in Vietnam and married Vietnamese men. In contrast, as opportunists, these women were depicted as lazy, selfish, irresponsible, materialistic, and greedy. Some of them saw marrying foreign men as a fashionable thing to chase after and cared little about whom they actually married and what consequences it might cause, while others took advantage of the opportunity to escape poverty and pursue a comfortable and easy life in a rich country selfishly for themselves. Their entering cross-border marriages was viewed “as a threat to Vietnamese nationalism, patriarchy and masculinity” (Bélanger, Khuat, & Wang 2007).

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Table 13-3: Comparison between U.S.-Vietnam and Taiwan-Vietnam cross-border marriages US-Vietnam (Thai 2008; N=69 pairs) Marriage & Migration Ethnicity & Vietnamese women marry language overseas Vietnamese men (Vi͏t ki͉u) (same language, same ethnicity) How they meet 90% arranged by matchmakers (as a return of gratitude by Vi͏t ki͉u to relatives in Vietnam)

How they move

Brides Place of Residence Education Foreign Language (prior to migration) Occupation/ Income (local standard)

Socioeconomic Status (SES) (prior to marriage) Marriageability in the local marriage market Marital history

Marital Age

Motivation

After marriage, brides migrate to the US to unite with the grooms (brides marry into overseas Vietnamese communities)

70% from Ho Chi Minh City Higher (70% college or advanced 烊26% high school) Mostly had command of English Mostly were professionals with high salaries (e.g., teacher, translator, foreign company clerk, lawyer…)

Taiwan-Vietnam

Vietnamese women marry Taiwanese men (different languages, different ethnicities) Mostly arranged through commercialized marriage brokers (expenses paid by the groom) After marriage, brides migrate to Taiwan to unite with the grooms (brides are scattered loners in the new land) Mostly from villages in the Mekong Delta region Lower (about 6.3 yrs.*) Mostly had no command of any foreign language Mostly had low-skilled jobs with low pay (e.g., farmer, factory worker, apprentice in a tailor’s shop…)

Higher (75% had domestic helpers at home)

Lower

Lower (due to their age and education)

Higher (in villages)

14% have married before; 9% have children from previous marriage 30.5 yrs. (20-63) (29.8 yrs., if excluding 2 >50 yr. olds) Marry a “non-traditional husband” in order to pursue an egalitarian marital life in a more egalitarian society

1st marriage (request of virginity by the groom) Younger, about 23.9 yrs.*

For the betterment of the natal family’s life

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan Grooms Birth Place

Residence/ Migration history

Education Occupation/ Income (local standard) SES Marriageability in the local marriage market Marital history

Marital age

Age difference between B & G Motivation

Vietnam, i.e., 1 or 1.5 generation immigrants (only one was born overseas) 75% have migrated over 10 yrs. ago; 28% have migrated for 20 yrs. ago (40% have not gotten citizenship yet) Lower (23% college; 17% high school; 60% middle school) Mostly have low skilled jobs with low salary

Taiwan

Lower in the host country Lower

Lower in the home country Lower

13% have married before; 9% have children from previous marriage 36 yrs. (20-69) (33.5 yrs., if excluding 8 >50 yr. olds) Smaller (5.5 or 3.7)

36.1 yrs*

Marrying a “traditional woman” to defend own masculinity

217

Taiwan, mostly with no overseas experience

Lower (about 8.5 yrs.*) Mostly have low-skilled jobs with low salary

Larger (about 12.2*) Marrying a “traditional woman” to defend own masculinity**

Source: Fung 2009 * See Wang and Chang 2002 ** See Tien and Wang 2006; Wang and Tien 2009

In Taiwan, marriage migrants from neighbouring countries are also seen as an “imaged and imagined threat to the nation” (Hsia 2001, 2007). In her analysis of 33 episodes of Taiwanese media coverage of “foreign brides” (waiji xinniang) between 1988 and 1996 (mostly about “Indonesian brides” who arrived earlier than “Vietnamese brides”), Hsia (2001, 2007) came up with similar findings as Bélanger, Khuat, and Wang (2007)—these women were portrayed as either “passive victims” or “materialist gold-diggers”. They were prone to committing crimes and creating social problems, contributed to broken families (due to their running away from their conjugal homes) and deteriorating quality of the future population (due to their incompetence in raising and educating their children) in their settlement country. According to Hsia (2007, 63), these pervasive negative stereotypes irresponsibly propagated by the mass media

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“perpetuate the xenophobic stock of knowledge of the Taiwanese”. Likewise, Lim and Chang (2003) analysed 55 articles in the archive of the Central News Agency (between 1996 and 2003) identified by the search keyword, “foreign brides” (waiji xinniang). They found that these women were often depicted as “contaminators”, who might spread diseases like dengue fever, bacillary dysentery or HIV/AIDS. Moreover, there were many discussions on quality control measures for new immigrants and worries about deteriorating quality of the future generation in Taiwan. Lin (in press) analysed the news archive between 1994 and 2009 and found that the media often conflated “foreign brides” (or “foreign spouses”) with the elderly pre-war generation (who are Hoklo/Taiwanese or Japanese speakers with minimal formal education). Such discourse of conflation first appeared in 2000, increased steadily for a number of years, but has dropped since 2007 (N=254 articles). These two very different groups were juxtaposed in two ways: they both were seen as shixue minzhong (citizens who were deprived of education) and unfit caregivers. Due to their non-Mandarin speaking status, these elders and immigrant women were treated like “social children” (a term coined by Lin [2011] to mean those who cannot catch up with social changes and need to be reeducated and transformed). This conflating discourse reflected “the nation’s anxiety of its international status in the era of increasingly competitive regional and global economy” (Lin 2011). These findings resonate with Lan’s (2008b, 842) keen observation that, although the Taiwanese government showed great concern over the low fertility rate and had shifted from controlling births in the 1960s to promoting fertility and parenthood since the 1990s, it openly discouraged the reproductive activities of “foreign brides”, because they were considered “fertile brides yet unfit mothers” due to their “low quality”. In sum, both the terms “women who marry foreigners” (phͭ nͷ ḽy ch͛ng n˱ͣc ngoài) in Vietnam and “foreign brides” (waiji xinniang) in Taiwan are loaded with negative connotations in the public discourse. The former refers specifically and narrowly to women who marry Taiwanese and Korean men (but not those who marry overseas Vi͏t ki͉u), whereas the latter refers specifically and narrowly to women who are from Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia and Vietnam in particular, but never North American or European countries). Both terms reflect a tendency to treat these women as a homogeneous and faceless mass and freeze them at the newlywed and newly arrival stage. In this work, we extend Hsia’s, Lim’s, and Lin’s analyses with updated data from the news archive and with an expanded set of keywords that have emerged more recently in referencing marriage migrants. With a particular focus on Vietnamese marriage

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migrants, the largest non-Han Chinese immigrant group, our study examines the historical trend of the public discourse in Taiwan over the past two decades.

The study Source of data The mass media have been considered as a thermometer to measure the “cultural temperature” of a society (Hennis 1998; Hansen et al. 1998). The mass media in Taiwan mainly consists of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet. According to the Media Agency Association’s Media Book (2012), in terms of popularity, television, newspapers, and the Internet have ranked the highest throughout the last decade, with increasing prominence of the Internet since 2007. In order to undertake a comprehensive and systematic text analysis, we rely on historical archives of newspapers. According to the Media Book (2012), newspapers with the widest circulation in Taiwan are the Apple Daily (first published in 2003), Liberty Times (first published in 1980), United Daily (first published in 1951), and the China Times (first published in 1950). Due to its comprehensiveness, user friendliness and easy accessibility, we decided to use the online news archive offered by the China Times media group, which comprises news articles, columns, and commentaries published on China Times, China Times Express, and Commercial Times (all owned by the group).

Data analyses We analyse news reports on marriage migrants in general (Step One) and Vietnamese women in particular (Steps Two and Three) in the following manner. Step one The objective is to grasp the quantitative trend of news articles reporting on marriage migrants in Taiwan over past years. We searched for the following keywords in the news archive covering the period from 1 January 1994 (the year when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to keep official demographic records) to 31 December 2012: foreign brides (waiji xinniang and its abbreviation, wainiang), foreign spouses (waiji peiou and its abbreviation, waipei), new immigrants (xin yimin), new residents (xin

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zhumin), and new Taiwanese children (referring to children born to foreign-born mothers, xin taiwan zhizi). In other words, any news article within the sampling period that contains any one of the above keywords would be included—it follows the type-count rule. In addition to analysing the overall historical trend, we also analysed the changing frequency over time of each keyword. Since they are token counts in the second analysis, their sum would be larger than the total number in the first analysis. Step two The objective here is to grasp the qualitative trend of how Vietnamese marriage migrants were represented in the news coverage over the past two decades. In order to make the analysis more manageable and better defined, we refined the dataset identified in Step One by: a) including “Vietnam” as an additional keyword, and b) going through each searched news article and deleting reports which are not directly related to Vietnamese marriage migrants and their families. After getting a “clean” set of data, we then assigned codes to each article (including topic/subject, writer/reporter, main protagonist/character, date, place, tone/connotation, and word counts). Of particular interest to us were the tones/connotations in these articles, which were coded in accordance with Lin (1999) and Shiu (2001) as either: x x x x

Positive Negative Neutral Mixed with both positive and negative tones

Definitions and examples, along with the historical trend of these variables, will be reported and discussed in the next section. Step three In this last step, we take a closer look at the actual content of the positive and negative news reports on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan. Content categories were generated from a close reading of each news article along the dimensions of who (the main protagonist in the report: Vietnamese marriage migrants, their family and family life, or their children) and what (the nature of the reported event). An attempt was then

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

221

made to identify any shift in the focus and content of these news reports over the past two decades. The results will be reported in the next section.

Findings Step one A total number of 11,053 articles were identified when applying all the search keywords to the news archive within the defining period, the distribution of which over time is shown in Figure 13-1 below. Regarding the overall trend, the first noticeable thing was that the volume of news reports increased sharply after the period (1988-2003) analysed by Hsia (2001, 2007), and Lim and Chang (2003). It peaked between 2004 and 2007, and then declined abruptly. The volume in 2007 was eight times more than a decade ago, while in 2009, it dropped to the level as low as a decade ago. The possible explanations for the overall quantitative trend will be discussed later. Another noticeable trend is that after its peak in 2004, “foreign brides”, the earliest term that has been used since 1988 (Hsia 2001, 2007), dropped significantly and has been gradually replaced by other terms—first “foreign spouses”, then “new immigrants”, and most recently “new residents”. These keywords are explained below and their frequency distributions are shown in Figure 13-2. x

Foreign brides (waiji xinniang; sometimes abbreviated as wainiang).

In this dataset, the term “foreign brides” appeared as early as 1994. Back in those years, most of these reports focused on marriage migrants from Indonesia, who arrived in Taiwan earlier than the Vietnamese, and outnumbered the latter in obtaining entry visa until 1995 (see Table 13-1) and in obtaining citizenship until 2004 (see Table 13-2). The frequency of “foreign brides” increased sharply after 2001, peaked in 2003 and 2004, and gradually declined afterwards. Since 2009, it has been almost completely abandoned.

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Fig. 13-1: News reports identified by the searching keywords

Source of new articles: China Times News Archive, 1994/1/1-2012/12/31 Fig. 13-2: Distribution of each searching keyword

Source of news articles: China Times News Archive, 1994/1/1-2012/12/31.

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

x

223

Foreign spouses (waiji peiou; sometimes abbreviated as waipei)

Between 1994 and 2001, this term mainly referred to migrant brides or foreign husbands of Taiwanese women. Back then, a small group of “foreign sons-in-law” (yang nyuxu) led by an American man, Richard W. Hartzell, were fighting for work permits and permanent residence in Taiwan (in 2000, the government finally issued its first permit to a Western son-in-law). Beginning in 1998, this term was increasingly used to describe female marriage migrants, but mainly women from China. Not until 2002 did it become commonplace to use it to refer to marriage migrants from Southeast Asia. Since 2004, its frequency began to outnumber that of “foreign brides”, and peaked in 2007, when it appeared twice as frequently as “foreign brides”. Similar to the overall trend, its use has declined sharply since then. Nevertheless, to date, it is still the single most commonly used term (along with “new immigrants” and “new residents”) referring to foreign-born female marriage migrants in Taiwan. x

New immigrants (xin yimin)

This term was found to appear as early as 1994 with a relatively higher frequency between 1994 and 1997. Nevertheless, it referred solely to Taiwanese who had emigrated (or intended to emigrate) to other countries, particularly Canada, the United States, and Australia. Taiwan was primarily an immigrant sending country then, it was not until 2002 did this term begin to also refer to new immigrants, i.e., marriage migrants in Taiwan (2 percent), but by 2003, the proportion of this reference had increased 15 fold (to over 30 percent). From 2006 onward, nearly all uses of this term referred solely to new immigrants in Taiwan (80-90 percent between 2006 and 2012) rather than to Taiwanese emigrants. The frequency of “new immigrants” peaked in 2007, and declined afterwards. Moreover, in 2007, its frequency outnumbered “foreign brides” for the first time, and since then, it has become one of the most frequently adopted terms (along with “foreign spouses” and “new residents”) referring to marriage migrants in Taiwan. x

New residents (xin zhumin)

Although this term first appeared in 1994, in the first decade (19942004), it mainly referred to the previous wave of immigrants who arrived nearly half a century ago—Mainlander Chinese who retreated to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, when his troops were defeated by the

Chapter Thirteen

224

Communist Party. Compared to another term, “people from outside-of-theprovince” (waisheng ren), this term is meant to be more politically correct, which implies that the only difference between Mainlanders and Islanders (bensheng ren) is their time of arrival (the latter’s ancestors migrated to Taiwan from the Fukien Province during the Qing dynasty). In 2004, it appeared to also refer to marriage migrants for the first time (39 percent). Starting from 2007, it predominantly referred to the latest wave of marriage migrants (over 90 percent), with less than three percent referring to Mainlanders. Since 2009, it has become the most frequently used term (along with “foreign spouses” and “new immigrants”) referring to marriage migrants. x

New Taiwanese children (xin taiwan zhizi)

We added “children” to the above set of keywords, and found that their children were seldom brought up in earlier reports (between 1994 and 2002) on “foreign brides” and “foreign spouses”. Starting from 2003 for “foreign brides” and “foreign spouse” and 2005 for “new immigrants” and “new residents”, their children began to be a concern (mentioned in over 15 percent of the articles). In addition, since 2003, there has been a widely used term when referring to their children—“new Taiwanese children”. This term specifically and narrowly refers to mixed blood children born to foreign-born immigrant women from Southeast Asia and China (but not from other East Asian or North American countries) and their Taiwanese husbands. It first appeared in the news archive in 2003, and could have been derived from the cover story “New Taiwanese Children” (Xin TaiWan ZhiZi) in Common Wealth Magazine in March 2003 (later published as a book with the same title, see Yang and Yang [2004]). This term was perhaps inspired by the memoir of the former President Chen Shui-bian (2000), entitled Taiwan Zhizi (A Taiwanese Child) (Tsai 2007). The above historical changes on how these immigrants were referred to may well indicate that the general public was gradually adopting a more sensitive and respectful attitude, perhaps as a result of efforts by various parties, including the government and NGOs. For instance, in 2003, the Ministry of Interior Affairs advised all governmental departments to use the less loaded term, “foreign spouses”, in all official documents. In the same year, the Awakening Foundation, a women’s empowerment NGO, hosted an awareness campaign against the term “foreign brides”, which included an essay contest among marriage migrants on the topic of “Don’t call me foreign bride”, and a vote for their preferred new term. “New immigrants” was the term that they advocated as a result of this campaign.

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

225

In the same year, new immigrant women along with local activists formed an NGO of their own—Trans Asia Sisters Association in Taiwan (TASAT). In 2005, TASAT released a volume of collected essays, paintings and pictures by marriage migrants, entitled “Don’t Call Me Foreign Bride” (Hsia 2005). In December 2004, at the opening ceremony of Taipei’s New Immigrants’ Hall, the former mayor, Ma Ying-jeou, requested that from then on, all their official meetings and documents must use the term “new immigrants”. Later, in 2007, a serial drama on marriage migrants in Taiwan was broadcasted by the Public Television Station. It was played by six Vietnamese women along with local actors and actresses, and was also entitled, “Don’t Call Me a Foreign Bride”. In March 2012, the “Nationwide Torch Plan for New Residents” was launched by the Immigration Agency and the Ministry of Education. Their children rather than the women themselves are the main beneficiaries of this on-going campaign which include programs training new immigrants to be their native language instructors, compiling teaching materials on native languages, offering such things as native language classes to children, encouraging parent-child reading activities and hometown singing or cooking contests. All these might have contributed to the gradual abandonment of the term “foreign brides” and the emerging adoption of “foreign spouses”, “new immigrants”, and “new residents” since 2004. As to the cause of the fluctuations in the overall quantitative trend, one possibility is the entry volume of new immigrants, particularly Vietnamese who account for the largest group (see Table 13-1). Nevertheless, this fails to explain why the sharp increase in the number of new immigrants in 1996-1997 did not raise much public concern. Nor can it fully explain an apparent time lag between the two variables—the number of new immigrants peaked in 2000-2004, while news coverage peaked in 20062007. Similarly, the number of immigrants had dropped significantly since 2005-2006,1 but the news coverage did not decline sharply until 20082009. Another possible explanation was the sharp decline of Taiwan’s economic conditions (see Figure 13-3) in 2008-2009 due to the global financial crisis. Many businesses and government agencies had to terminate or downsize their sponsorship of events and programs for new immigrants and their children at this time. As shown in the next step of our analysis, media coverage of events and programs of this sort would be coded as “neutral” in tone and they account for the highest proportion of news reports each year. This may explain the sharp decline in news

226

Chapter Thirteen T

volume in 22008-2009, and its slow risee in 2010-201 2 as Taiwan recovered r gradually froom the recession. Fig. 13-3: Taiiwan economicc conditions, 1991-2012

Sources: Direectorate Generaal of Budget, Accounting A andd Statistics (DG GBAS) of Executive Yuuan, Taiwan & CIA C World Facctbook

One morre possible exxplanation has to do with thhe noticeable growth g in school enroolments of thhe children. As shown iin Figure 13-4, since 2002/2003, for the first tiime in history y, schools andd teachers in th he formal educational system begaan to encounter a large nuumber of chilldren and parents withh whom they felt unfamiliaar or uneasy. In other worrds, when their childrren began to t enter into o primary sschools (as well as kindergartenns) in large numbers, n theirr new immigrrant mothers suddenly became mucch more visibble than previiously. As a rresult, public concerns over their m mothering com mpetence and d the quality oof the next generation g rose sharplyy, prompting a significant increase i in neews reports frrom 2003 onwards. Thhis is also thee time when the t term “new w Taiwanese children” began to apppear in the puublic discourse. Interestinglly, although th he school admission raate of “new Taaiwanese child dren” kept inccreasing whilee the total student poppulation declined due to the decreassed fertility rate (the percentage oof these childdren in 2012 was 12.4 tim mes higher thaan that of 2002 in elem mentary schools and 20 tim mes higher inn junior high schools), both the oveerall volume of news report about them m and the freq quency of the term, “neew Taiwanesee children”, qu uickly declineed since 2007.

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

227

Fig. 13-4: School admissions of children born to foreign spouses (Elementary Specific & Junior High Specific) in comparison to overall enrolment, 2002-2012

Source: Department of Statistics, Ministry of Education, Taiwan

Step two In addition to quantitative changes, we also examined qualitative changes in the public discourse over the past two decades. For this analysis, 2,234 articles were identified as directly and explicitly related to Vietnamese marriage migrants and their families2 (see Figure 13-5). First of all, we found that news regarding Vietnamese marriage migrants did not appear before 1995. Further, similar to the overall pattern, the frequency of these articles also peaked between 2004 and 2007, and declined sharply since then. Each piece of news articles in this “clean” dataset (1995-2012) was coded for its tone and connotation—whether positive, neutral, or negative. As shown in Figure 13-6, neutrally toned reports constitute the largest category (N=1,309; 59 percent), followed by the negative reports (N=501, 22 percent), and the positive ones (N=424; 19 percent). Since the number of the mixed toned new reports was rather small (19 articles), we combined them with the negative ones. As shown in Table 134 below, neutral reports mainly refer to straightforward or standardised descriptions of government organised or subsidised literacy and life adaptation courses (43 percent) and activities or festivals (31 percent); demographic statistics on new immigrants and their children (7 percent); announcements of government policies, regulations and programs (3

228

Chapter Thirteen

percent); gaining the right to vote and experiencing the first taste of democracy after having obtained citizenship (2 percent); Vietnamese language courses for Taiwanese people, particularly children born to new immigrants (1 percent), and miscellaneous (11 percent). The subcategory of “literacy and life adaptation classes” was particularly high in proportion between 1998 and 2005 and accounted for the large number of neutral news, particularly between 2003 and 2006. The first literacy class was initiated by Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, a sociologist and social activist, in 1995, which aimed at empowering marriage migrants mainly from Indonesia residing in a Hakka village in southern Taiwan (Hsia 2006). Not until 2000 did the central government begin to promote and subsidise literacy and life adaptation classes nation-wide for marriage migrants from Southeast Asian countries. In 2004, the Ministry of Education launched a 371 million New Taiwan Dollar project promoting “a lifelong learning scheme for foreign spouses”. In 2005, the Ministry of the Interior also claimed to have allocated three billion NTD for a similar purpose. These classes were often offered by primary schools and taught by schoolteachers with teaching materials designed for primary school children. In other words, these adult women were treated as first, but not second, language learners (Komiya 2008). Since 2000, government officials or school principals have often stressed in the opening or closing ceremonies of these programs that these classes were conducted for the sake of the migrant women’s children. A recurrent theme of these speeches was that, unlike migrant domestic workers, foreign spouses not only would stay in Taiwan for good, but also would bear the heavy responsibility of educating their children and transmitting (Taiwanese/Chinese) cultural values to them, which could not be accomplished without proficiency in the (Chinese) language and cultural knowledge. If they failed in discharging this responsibility, their children would be the victims and suffer from poor performance in school. All these reports were closely related to the noticeable growing trend in school enrolments of their children (shown in Figure 13-4). Indeed, the first report on the demographics of these children in the news archive appeared in 2002 (it offered the estimation that school enrolment of children born to Southeast Asian foreign brides was about to peak). As reported earlier, after the first appearance of the term “new Taiwanese children” in 2003, reports on literacy classes have also often referred to new immigrants as “mothers of new Taiwanese children”.

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

229

Fig. 13-5: News reports identified by the searching words + Vietnam

N=2,234

Fig. 13-6: Numbers of positive, negative and neutral reports (N=2,234)

Neutral

0% 24% 30% 26% 17% 47% 75% 74% 66% 60% 65% 58% 60% 57% 57% 57% 47% 54% 49%

Positive 0% 13% 0%

11% 5%

6%

7%

2%

12% 12% 16% 17% 20% 23% 23% 20% 33% 33% 37%

Negative 0% 63% 70% 63% 78% 47% 18% 24% 22% 28% 19% 25% 20% 20% 20% 23% 20% 13% 14%

Chapter Thirteen

Total = 1,309

Misc.

Voting experiences

ġ

2(1)

ġ

Heritage language teaching

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ 1(.01)

1(.01) ġ 6(.03)

ġ

6(.13) 6(.11) 9(.13) 6(.06) 8(.04)

ġ

2(.03) ġ

25(.57 )

16(.09) 36(.16) 32(.16) 10(.10) 5(.25) 3(.11) 3(.05) 3(.07)

1(.03) 6(.10) 1(.02)

3(.01) 1(.01) 3(.03) 1(.05) ġ

3(.02) 1(.01) 4(.02) 2(.02)

ġ

3(.07) 11(.21) 12(.17) 9(.08) 44(.24) 45(.27) 69(.33) 84(.42) 54(.56) 6(.30) 14(.48) 36(.60)

6(1) 5(1) 3(1) 7(1) 45(1) 52(1) 71(1) 106(1) 188(1) 165(1) 211(1) 198(1) 97(1) 20(1) 29(1) 60(1) 44(1)

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

Activities & festivals

2(.03) 6(.14)

1(.02)

2(.40) 2(.66) 3(.43) 31(.69) 32(.62) 41(.58) 74(.70) 101(.53) 92(.56) 89(.42) 62(.31) 17(.18) 4(.20) 9(.31) 3(.05) 6(.14)

ġ

1(.01) 1(.01) 2(.01) 2(.02) 1(.05) 1(.03) ġ

1(.01) 2(.02) 11(.06) 3(.02) 3(.01) 4(.02) 1(.01) ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

1(.14) ġ

Literacy & adaptation classes

ġ

ġ

ġ

Policies/regulations

ġ

3(.50) 1(.20) 1(.33) 2(.29) 2(.04) 1(.02) 3(.04) 1(.01) 2(.01)

2(1)

Marriage market/brokers

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

1(.14) 3(.07) 2(.04) 3(.04) 14(.13) 16(.09) 5(.03) 10(.05) 9(.05) 8(.08) 3(.15) 1(.03) 8(.13) 2(.04)

3(.50) 2(.40) ġ

Demographic statistics

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004

Table 13-4: Neutral news reports on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan (1995-2012)

230

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

231

In contrast to the discourse of “literacy and life adaptation classes” imposed on Vietnamese women, there are two notable subsequent developments. First, the subcategory of “activities and festivals”, which include coverage of fairs and exhibitions, food festivals, cooking, singing or essay contests, concerts, opening ceremonies (e.g., for an immigration hall), and holiday celebrations organised by or for new immigrants and their families, had become increasingly more important than the subcategory of “literacy classes” after 2007. Secondly, news in another subcategory, “heritage language teaching”, started to appear recently. This refers to Vietnamese courses offered to Taiwanese people, particularly children born to Vietnamese women. In2012, the Nationwide Torch Project for New Immigrants Action Plan was launched to “boost diversified cultural comprehension, and promote healthy and happy families”, which stressed the need to maintain cultural and linguistic heritage for their children, through training new immigrants to be language teachers and offering heritage language classes in school. The objective, as noted by some politicians and school principals, is to broaden the children’s multicultural horizons so that they can be ready for Taiwan’s business expansion in the ASEAN region. As shown in Figure 13-6, in the early years between 1995 and 1999, news coverage of Vietnamese marriage migrants was scant; if there was any, it was overwhelmingly negative (as high as 80 percent). However, since 2006, and particularly between 2010 and 2012, positive news reports have outnumbered the negative ones, and the number of negative reports continued to decline. Keeping this trend in mind, we now turn to a more detailed analysis of the actual content of the negative and the positive news reports over the years. Step three A content analysis was done on all negative and positive news on Vietnamese marriage migrants from 1995 to 2012. The generated codes and categories are shown in Tables 13-5 and 13-6. In the third stage of our research, we found some noticeable changing trends, which will be elaborated in the following. (1) Compared to negative news, positive news came much later, and did not become diversified in content until 2003/2004. For both negative and positive reports, typical stories were reported only in the early years, while others did not appear until later years. For instance, HIV/AIDSrelated reports which treated Vietnamese new immigrants in general as

Chapter Thirteen

! About Their Children Lagged learners Disadvantaged children! Threats to social order Puzzled identity About Them Committing crimes Gambling Prostitution Fraud marriages Running away Wrong motivations Low quality Household registration problems HIV/AIDS About Their Family Life Abusive wives Unfaithful wives Divorces Unfit mothers Being abused Disadvantaged husbands Disadvantaged wives Other Brokers Misc. Total = 501

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.20) ġ ġ 4(.80) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 5(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 2(.14) 4(.29) ġ 1(.07) 4(.29) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.07) ġ ġ 2(.14) 14(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.08) 1(.08) ġ ġ 3(.26) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.08) 3(.26) 2(.16) ġ 1(.08) ġ 12(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 2(.15) ġ ġ 1(.07) ġ 3 ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 5(.35) 2(.15) ġ ġ 1(.07) ġ 14(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.14) ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.14) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.14) 3(.43) 1(.14) ġ ġ ġ 7(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.09) ġ ġ ġ ġ 3(.27) ġ 1(.09) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.09) 2(.18) ġ 3(.27) ġ ġ ġ 11(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.06) 2(.12) 2(.12) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 2(.12) 7(.40) 1(.06) 2(.12) ġ ġ ġ 17(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.04) ġ 1(.04) ġ 1(.04) 2(.09) ġ ġ 2(.09) ġ 1(.04) 2(.09) ġ 1(.04) 5(.22) 2(.09) 4(.17) ġ ġ 1(.04) 23(1)

ġ 1(.02) 2(.04) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.02) ġ 6(.12) ġ 2(.04) 1(.02) ġ ġ ġ ġ 4(.08) 13(.27) 10(.21) 1(.02) 7(.14) ġ ġ 1(.02) 49(1)

ġ 6(.11) 4(.07) 1(.02) 1(.02) ġ 2(.04) ġ 2(.04) 3(.05) 2(.04) 1(.02) 2(.04) 1(.02) ġ ġ 2(.04) ġ 3(.05) 5(.08) 11(.20) 5(.08) 5(.08) ġ ġ ġ 56(1)

ġ 1(.01) 6(.09) 1(.01) 2(.03) ġ 2(.03) 2(.03) 5(.07) 4(.06) 4(.06) 6(.09) 2(.03) ġ 1(.01) ġ 2(.03) 3(.04) ġ 1(.01) 6(.09) 4(.06) 15(.21) ġ ġ 3(.04) 70(1)

ġ 2(.03) 4(.05) 1(.01) ġ ġ 3(.04) 4(.05) 6(.09) 2(.03) 4(.05) 4(.05) 2(.03) 1(.01) ġ ġ 7(.10) 5(.07) ġ 3(.04) 11(.15) 2(.03) 12(.16) ġ ġ ġ 73(1)

ġ 1(.01) 4(.06) 1(.01) ġ ġ 8(.12) 2(.03) 15(.22) 3(.04) 2(.03) 5(.08) ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.01) 4(.06) 1(.01) ġ 9(.14) 1(.01) 10(.15) ġ 1(.01) ġ 68(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 7(.20) 2(.06) 1(.03) 3(.09) 3(.09) 1(.03) 1(.03) ġ ġ ġ 1(.03) ġ ġ ġ 3(.09) 3(.09) 8(.23) ġ 1(.03) ġ 34(1)

ġ 1(.13) ġ ġ 1(.13) ġ 1(.13) ġ 1(.13) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.13) ġ 1(.13) ġ 2(.22) ġ ġ ġ 8(1)

ġ 1(.08) ġ ġ ġ ġ 4(.34) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 3(.25) ġ 1(.08) 3(.25) ġ ġ ġ 12(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.07) 4(.26) 1(.07) 1(.07) 1(.07) 2(.13) ġ ġ ġ ġ 2(.13) 2(.13) ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.07) ġ ġ ġ 15(1)

ġ ġ 1(.08) ġ ġ ġ 1(.08) 2(.15) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.08) 1(.08) 2(.15) ġ ġ 5(.38) ġ ġ ġ 13(1)

1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

Table 13-5: Negative news reports on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan (1995-2012)

232

ġ ġ ! ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ

! ġ

ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

Becoming Taiwanese ! Being financially ġ independent Being breadwinners ġ Obtaining graduate ġ degrees in Taiwan ġ About Them--Assets Being interpreters/translators Speaking out ġ Teaching Vietnamese ġ culture/language

1997

ġ ġ ġ ġ

1996

ġ ġ ġ ġ

1995

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

About Their Children Normal learners Healthy development Outstanding performances Positive identity About Them-Adaptation Learning diligently

!

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ

! ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ

! ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

1998 1999

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

2001

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

2003

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ 1(.02) ġ ġ

2004

ġ

2(.04) ġ ġ ġ

2005

ġ

3(.04) 3(.04) ġ ġ

2006

ġ

2(.02) 1(.01) 5(.06) 1(.01)

2007

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ

ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ 1(.02) ġ

ġ

2(.02) 3(.04)

ġ 1(.02) 3(.06) 3(.04) 5(.06) 1(.05) 3(.07) 3(.06) 4(.06) 3(.04) 1(.05) ġ ġ 1(.01) 1(.01)

ġ

ġ ġ

3(.07) 2(.04) 1(.01) 2(.02) 2(.04) 3(.06) 4(.06) 4(.05)

2(.16) 1(.05) 1(.02) 2(.04) 10(.15) 6(.08)

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

2002

1(1) ! ! ġ 1(.08) ġ

1(.25) ġ ġ ġ

! ġ

2(.50) ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ

2000

2009

ġ

ġ ġ 2(.28) ġ ġ

ġ ġ 2(.05) 1(.03)

2011

ġ

ġ ġ 6(.18) ġ

2012

2(.10) 3(.08) 2(.06)

ġ

1(.05) ġ 2(.10) 2(.10)

2010

233

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

1(.05) 2(.05) 1(.03) ġ ġ 1(.03)

6(.14) ġ 1(.05) 1(.03) 1(.03) ġ 1(.14) ġ 8(.21) 4(.12) ġ ġ ġ 3(.08) 2(.06)

ġ

9(.22) ġ ġ ġ

! ! 1(.05) 1(.03) ! 4(.10) 1(.14) 1(.05) 2(.05) 2(.06)

2(.05) ġ

ġ

1(.03) ġ 3(.08) ġ

2008

Table 13-6: Positive news reports on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan (1995-2012)

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

Chapter Thirteen

ġ

ġ

ġ

ġ

1(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

1995

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(1) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

About Their Family Life Happy marital/family life Model mothers Model daughters-in-law Having traditional virtues Social criticisms Taiwanese as protectors Protests (by NGOs) Anti-discrimination Urge to accept immigrants Protecting human rights Urge to help their children Cultural/linguistic assets Other Brokers Total = 424

0

1996

ġ

ġ 2(1)

ġ ġ 1(.50) ġ 1(.50) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(1)

1(1) 1(1)

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(1) ġ ġ ġ

ġ 4(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.25) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ 3(.22) ġ 3(.22) 1(.08) 1(.08) 1(.08) 1(.08) ġ ġ

2003

ġ

ġ

ġ 2(.09) ġ 1(.05) 4(.17) ġ 2(.09) 1(.05) ġ 3(.13) 2(.09) 1(.05) 3(.13)

2004

ġ

ġ

ġ 2(.04) ġ 2(.04) 2(.04) ġ 4(.09) 5(.11) 6(.13) 6(.13) 5(.11) 2(.04) 1(.02)

2005

ġ

ġ

ġ 4(.09) ġ ġ 3(.06) ġ 3(.06) 5(.11) 1(.02) 9(.20) 1(.02) 3(.06) 2(.04)

1(1) 13(1) 22(1) 46(1) 47(1)

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

ġ

ġ 69(1)

ġ 4(.06) 2(.03) 1(.01) 1(.01) ġ 6(.09) 4(.06) 7(.11) 7(.11) 5(.07) 1(.01) 2(.03)

2006

81(1)

2(.02)

ġ

ġ 3(.04) 2(.02) 1(.01) ġ ġ 5(.06) 3(.04) 15(.20) 5(.06) 4(.05) 5(.06) 1(.01)

2007

39(1)

ġ

ġ

ġ 3(.08) ġ 1(.03) ġ ġ 3(.08) 3(.08) 1(.03) 2(.05) ġ ġ 1(.03)

2008

2009

ġ

ġ 7(1)

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 3(.43) ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ

Table 13-6: Positive news reports on Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan (1995-2012)

!

234

2010

2011

ġ

ġ

ġ 1(.03) 1(.03) 2(.05) ġ ġ 2(.05) 2(.05) 3(.08) 1(.03) 1(.03) ġ 1(.03)

2012

ġ

ġ

ġ 1(.03) ġ ġ ġ ġ 6(.18) ġ ġ 3(.09) 2(.06) ġ 2(.06)

20(1) 37(1) 33(1)

ġ

ġ

ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ ġ 1(.05) ġ 6(.30) ġ ġ ġ 2(.10)

Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan

235

contaminators were concentrated in the early years only (1996-1999). Similarly, early concerns about household registration problems for marriage migrants and their children (up to 80 percent in 1995) were seldom an issue in later years. In contrast, stories about them committing crimes, gambling, or selling sex did not appear until later years (see “About Them” in Table 13-5). Also, reports on their children did not appear until 2003 (for negative ones) and 2004 (for positive ones). Among positive reports, issues such as Vietnamese wives becoming financially independent and taking up the role of breadwinners in the affinal family (see Huang, Tsay, and Hsiao 2012 for a discussion of the ethnic economy of Vietnamese spouses in Taiwan), being model families/mothers, as well as their children being praised for outstanding performances and positive identity did not appear until recent years. In addition, starting from 2003/2004, their native language and culture began to be seen as cultural and linguistic assets, while some have become native language teachers in Taiwan (see “About Their Family Life” and “About Their Assets” in Table 13-6). (2) In some categories, the issue or meaning of the reported event may vary over time. For instance, regarding reports on “wrong motivations” (see Table 13-5), in the early years, Vietnamese women were often described as “materialist gold-diggers”, while in later years (2000-2008), they were depicted as shrewd and cunning, because after obtaining Taiwanese identity cards (which takes about four years), their behaviour could abruptly change (e.g., asking for a divorce or running away from home). Likewise, regarding “household registration problems” (see Table 13-5), in the early years, since Southeast Asian women were brought to Taiwan by brokers on tourist visas, they ended up illegally overstaying and fell outside the household registration system because the immigration law at the time did not allow them to change their tourist status. In later years (2000-2006), the few cases falling into this category referred to another issue—although they were married to Taiwanese citizens and migrated to Taiwan on spouse dependent visas, a few did not physically live in their registered households. (3) Before 2004, the protagonists in all news reports were faceless and without a name. In other words, the reports simply referred to Vietnamese women collectively as if they were a homogenous group. Starting from 2009, the news reports always referred to specific protagonists with names. Between 2004 and 2008, both types of reporting co-existed. For instance, between 1996 and 2003, in the scattered positive reports, they were portrayed generically as obedient, submissive, docile, and thrifty

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wives or daughters-in-law, which echoed the marriage brokers’ advertising slogans for feminine qualities that are increasingly hard to find in modernday Taiwanese women (see “About Their Family Life” in Table 13-6). Nevertheless, since 2004, positive reports began to treat them as individuals with faces, names and individual life stories and who had proven themselves to be diligent, adaptable, financially independent, and resourceful members of society (see “About Their Adaption” and “About Their Assets” in Table 13-6). (4) There existed a dynamic and interactive relationship between negative and positive news. When negative news reports appeared, particularly the high-profiled ones—such as the tragic story of Ĉoàn Nhұt Linh in 2003,3 the Deputy Minister of Education’s call for “not giving birth to too many children” in 2004,4 the 3,000 Taiwanese “international orphans” wandering on the banks of the Mekong River in 2005,5 and the remains of agent orange toxin carried by Vietnamese women in 20066—, countervailing arguments would almost always immediately followed. Such arguments were mostly presented by scholars or social activists in columns or commentaries that fell into positive categories in our coding scheme (see “Social Criticisms” in Table 13-6). Similar situations also occurred in the coverage of “new Taiwanese children.” Due to worries about the Vietnamese women being unfit mothers (see Table 13-5), the portrayals of their children were overwhelmingly negative between 2003 and 2006. They were often reported to have birth defects and lower birth weight during infancy, suffer from developmental delays during toddlerhood, present difficulties in reading, writing, and learning in primary schools, and have a high potential for becoming school dropouts, alienated gangsters, or threats to social order when they grow older. However, these reports would also be quickly and severely challenged with counter evidence. In recent years, reports on “new Taiwanese children” have become predominantly positive.

Concluding remarks Driven by a strong sense of filial duty and the lack of an adequate social security system, many young women from underprivileged rural families in southern Vietnam have migrated to Taiwan through marriage since the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, as demonstrated in earlier studies, they have long suffered from biased or one-dimensional representation in the local media and were often shunned by people in both their native and

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adopted countries. Nevertheless, our analysis of public discourse in the past two decades revealed that news coverage on marriage migrants in general, and Vietnamese women in particular, have significantly changed qualitatively as well as quantitatively.7 Quantitatively, due to the large amount of “neutral” news coverage, particularly on literacy classes, the total news volume had increased sharply since 2000. Since 2008, not only has the total volume dropped sharply, but the tone of news reports has also changed markedly. With time, as marriage migrant women gradually assimilate into Taiwanese society, coverage of these migrants have moved away from the stereotypical representation of “foreign brides” (waiji xinniang) or “women who marry foreign husbands” (phͭ nͷ ḽy ch͛ng n˱ͣc ngoài,), to “foreign spouses”, “new immigrants”, and “new residents”. By actively making economic, social, and familial contributions to both Vietnam and Taiwan, a fuller range of their roles and responsibilities have gradually been acknowledged—being not only just wives and daughters-in-law, but also mothers, workers, citizens, daughters from afar, and native language teachers. In addition to their own efforts, efforts by Taiwanese intellectuals and activists who have spoken out for social justice as well as the rise of ASEAN as an economic power in the international arena (in contrast to Taiwan’s economic setbacks) might all have contributed to the significant changes in the public discourse. Most crucially, however, it is because these migrants have proven themselves to be competent mothersȹtheir children have neither suffered from being of Ⱦlow qualityȿnor become troublemakers at school. Instead, they have turned out to be multicultural assets to society. The supposed neutrally toned reports regarding literacy classes they attended may not be truly neutral, because the implicit objective of providing such literacy education was to transform these Ⱦ illiterate” “non-modern” immigrants into culturally and linguistically competent mothers (Lin 2011, in press; Komiya 2008). Hence, it remains a vexing question as to why only this particular group of immigrant women alone has to prove themselves competent and adaptive under public scrutiny before they could earn acceptance.ġ By and large, our findings in the media are corroborated by daily life experiences of Vietnamese marriage migrants. Our informants, who have married and lived in Taiwan for over ten years, also noticed changes in their communities and admitted that they and their families feel more at ease now compared to the prejudice and hostility they had experienced in

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the past. Nevertheless, Taiwan still has a long way to go before it becomes a truly tolerant and pluralistic society, but we hope this documentation of Taiwan’s first encounter with a large inflow of cross-border marriage migrants may serve a useful reference for other societies, as frictions due to the confluence of ethnicities and cultures are inevitable in the age of globalisation and transnational migration.

Notes 1. Before 1999, Vietnamese applicants for dependent spouse visas were individually interviewed at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Ho Chi Minh City (TECO). Starting from 1999, interviews were conducted in groups instead. However, in 2005, the TECO shifted to a much stricter individual interview scheme and a much lengthier waiting period. In addition, authorities of both Vietnam and Taiwan banned commercial brokerage agencies for cross-border marriages in 2003 and 2008 respectively. Since 2006, many young village women married Korean men and migrated to the Republic of Korea instead. Recent news reports (between 2008 and 2013) also admitted that the declining economic conditions, due to the cyclical downturn, have made Taiwan much less attractive to Vietnamese women. 2. After adding “Vietnam” to the above keywords, 2,603 articles were identified. Among them, 386 articles were not related to Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan and hence deleted.

3. Ĉoàn Nhұt Linh’s Taiwanese husband, Liu, divorced his Taiwanese wife for the lack of a son and for a change of fortune to save his career and went to Vietnam to marry her in January 2002. After their marriage, Ĉoàn Nhұt Linh was forced to cohabit with Liu, his ex-wife, and their daughter. Liu’s career not only remained to be in the doldrums, he also suffered from urinary tract disease. He blamed all these on Linh, locked her up and abused her brutally for seven months. During this period, since her family back in Vietnam did not hear anything from her, they asked the broker to contact her on their behalf. Liu refused to let the broker enter their home. The police hence intervened. Due to her deep fear, Linh lied to the police saying that she was fine. In February 2003, the stick-thin, near death Linh was abandoned on a remote mountain. In late 2004, Liu and his ex-wife were sentenced for slavery offences, while Linh, who just turned 20 years old, returned to Vietnam to start a new life. 4. In a meeting of nation-wide Commissioners of Education Departments in July 2004, the Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Education, Chou Tsan-der, openly advocated that, due to the unsatisfactory quality of new immigrants and developmental problems caused by their children, foreign

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spouses should not give birth to too many children. 5. As part of a fund-raising campaign, an NGO, Eden Social Welfare Foundation, and the Business Weekly collaboratively released a special issue on “Taiwanese Children Wandering along the Bank of the Mekong River” in June 2005. According to their report, an estimated 3,000 children born to Vietnamese mothers and Taiwanese fathers were sent back to Vietnam due to their parents’ marital problems or financial distress. These children suffered from all sorts of difficulties and longed for coming back to Taiwan. Large sums of money were quickly raised from the public, but the story was criticised for being opinionated and grossly exaggerated (Trҫn 2005). 6. After returning from an official visit to Vietnam in March 2006, a member of the Legislative Yuan, Liao Pen-yen, said in a press conference, that, so that the next generation would be of a better quality, the government should implement stricter immigration controls on Vietnamese women, because their body’s may still carry agent orange toxin left from the Vietnam War 30 years ago. 7. Our data corpus is far more comprehensive than those in earlier studies. For a robustness check, we also repeated the analyses using another online news archive provided by the Central News Agency, Taiwan’s official news agency. 959 news articles from that archive were identified for the period between 1994 and 2012, and similar overall quantitative and qualitative trends were observed.

References Bélanger, D., H. Khuҩt, and Z. Wang. 2007. “Threatening Nationalism, Patriarchy and Masculinity: Constructions of Transnational Marriages between Vietnamese Women and East Asian Men in Vietnamese Mass Media.” Paper presented at the Conference on International Marriage Migration in Asia, Seoul, 13-14 September. Bélanger, D., and L. Trҫn. 2011. “The Impact of Transnational Migration on Gender and Marriage in Sending Communities of Vietnam.” Current Sociology 59 (1): 59-77. Bélanger, D., L. Trҫn, and D. Lê. 2011. “Marriage Migrants as Emigrants: Remittances of Marriage Migrant Women from Vietnam to their Natal Families.” Asian Population Studies 7 (2): 89-105. Constable, N., ed. 2005. Cross-border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transtional Asia. Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —. 2009. “The Commodificaiton of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38: 49-64.

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Chen, S. B. 2000. The Son of Taiwan: My Upbringing, Management Philosophy, and Ideas of the State. Taipei: Chen Xing Publisher. Fung, H. 2009. “Review of For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy.” Taiwan Journal of Anthropology 7 (2):180-185. Glenn, N. 1992. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Sign 18 (1): 1-43. Hansen, A., S. Cottle, R. Negrine, and C. Newbold. 1998. Mass Communication Research Methods. U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Hennis, W. 1998. “The Media as a Cultural Problem: Max Weber’s Sociology of the Press.” History of the Human Sciences 11: 107-110. Hochschild, A. R. 2003. The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, Berkeley. Hsia, H. C. 2001. “The Media Construction of the ‘Foreign Brides’ Phenomenon.” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 43: 153196. —. 2002. Drifting Shoal: The “Foreign Brides” Phenomenon in Capitalist Globalization. Taipei: Taiwan Social Studies Publishing House. —. ed. 2005. Don’t Call Me Foreign Bride. Taipei: Left Bank Publishing House. —. 2006. “Empowering ‘Foreign Brides’ and Community through Praxisoriented Research.” Societies without Borders 1: 93-111. —. 2007. “Imaged and Imagined Threat to the Nation: The Media Construction of ‘Foreign Brides Phenomenon’ as Social Problems in Taiwan.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8: 55-85. Huang, D. S., C. L. Tsay, and H. H. Hsiao, eds. 2012. Ethnic Economy of Vietnamese Spouses in Taiwan. Taipei: Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, RCHSS, Academia Sinica. Komiya, Y. 2008. Language Resources of Marriage Immigrants in Taiwan: Differences in Class, Gender, and Ethnicity. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University. Lan, P. C. 2008a. “New Global Politics of Rreproductive abor: Gendered Labor and Marriage Migration.” Sociology Compass 2 (6): 1801-1815. —. 2008b. “Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan.” Signs 33 (4): 833-861. Lim, K. T., and Y. T. Chang. 2003. “The phenomenon of “foreign bride” in Taiwan” In Taiwan and Southeast Asia: Go-south Policy and

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Vietnamese Brides, edited by M. Hsiao, pp. 187-214. Taipei: Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies (CAPAS), Academia Sinica. Lin, F. M. 1999. Women and Media: The Perspectives of Feminism and Social Constructionalism. Taipei: Ju Liu Publishing House. Lin, S. 2011. Modernity as Discourse: Symbolic Construction of (Il)literacy in Contemporary Taiwan. Paper presented at the meeting of American Anthropological Association, 14-17 November, 2011, Montreal, Canada. —. In press. “Circulating Discourses of Minority Education: The Linguistic Construction of Modernity in Globalizing Taiwan.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly. Lu, M. C. W. 2005. “Commercially Arranged Marriage Migration: Case Studies of Cross-border Marriages in Taiwan.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 12: 275-303. Media Agency Association (MAA). 2012. Taiwan Media Book. Taipei: Author. Palriwala, R., and P. Uberoi, eds. 2008. Marriage, Migration and Gender. New Delhi: Sage. Piper, N., and M. Roces. 2003. Wife or Worker?: Asian Women and Migration. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Shiu, M. L. 2001. HIV/AIDS and Media. Taipei: Ju Liu Publishing House. Thai, H. C. 2008. For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey. Tien, C., and H. Z. Wang. 2006. “Masculinity and Transnational Marriage: Why Taiwanese Men Seek Vietnamese Women to Marry?.” Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 3 (1): 3-36. Tsai, Y. L. 2007. “Encountering Southeast Asia: ‘New Taiwanese Children’ and the Geography of Population Quality.” Cultural Studies Monthly 73. Http://csat.org.tw/journal/journal_pre.asp?PageSize=15&Page=4& F_ID=&Period=&KeyWords=&Order=&IsSelect=. Trҫn, H. P. 2005. “The Arrogance Behind ‘Taiwanese Children Wandering along the Bank of the Mekong River’.” Apply Daily, 19 July. Http://www.appledaily.com.tw/appledaily/article/headline/200507 19/1919558/. Wang, H. Z., and S. M. Chang. 2002. “The Commodification of International Marriages: Cross-border Marriage Business in Taiwan and Vietnam.” International Migration 40 (6): 93-116.

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Wang, H. Z., and M. Hsiao, eds. 2009. Cross-border Marriages with Asian Characteristics. Taipei: Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica. Wang, H. Z., and C. Y. Tien. 2009. “Who Marries Vietnamese Bride: Masculinities and Cross-border Marriages.” In Cross-border Marriages with Asian characteristics, edited by H. Z. Wang and M. Hsiao, pp.13-37. Taipei: Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies, Academia Sinica. Williams, L. 2010. Global Marriage: Cross-border Marriage Migration in Global Context. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Yang, M. L., and A. L. Yang. 2004. New Taiwanese Children: The Future of Taiwanese Competitive Strength. Taipei: Common Wealth Publishing House. Yang, W. S., and M. Lu, eds. 2010. Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

PART IV: CAMBODIAN, LAO AND HMONG DIASPORA AND SETTLEMENT

CHAPTER FOURTEEN INTRODUCTION: CAMBODIAN, LAO, AND HMONG DIASPORA IN THE UNITED STATES JONATHAN H. X. LEE

It is estimated that over one million Cambodian refugees fled Cambodia as a result of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror. Roughly 100,000 were initially resettled in the United States during the early period, immediately after the Fall of Saigon in 1975 and well into the 1980s. The Cambodian diaspora includes the Khmer Krom who live in Vietnam, and the Thai-Khmer who reside in Thailand. However, the global diaspora refers to those displaced by war and genocide, and who primarily resettled and reside in the United States, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and Germany. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR 2000) 320,000 Cambodian refugees, mostly ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese, fled from the Khmer Rouge and resettled in Vietnam. The global Laotian diaspora consist of roughly half a million refugees from Laos who left as a result of the Laotian Civil War (1953-1975). The majority of the overseas Laotian community reside in these countries: Thailand, the United States, and France. Similar to the Cambodians, they have resettled in Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and even in Argentina. The global Hmong diaspora refers to the Hmong, who are one of many tribal minorities, also known as Miao/Meo, who reside in the border regions of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Many Hmong became refugees and were resettled outside of Indochina after the Vietnam War. The majority found their way to the United States, while others resettled in Australia, France, French Guiana, Canada, and countries in South America. Still others were returned to Laos under the controversial United Nations-sponsored repatriation programs. While this volume covers the global conditions and formations of Asian diasporic communities and

Introduction: Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Diaspora in the United States 245

Table 14-1: Indo-Chinese refugee resettlement, 1975-1997 Country

Vietnamese

Laotians

Cambodians

Total resettled

United States

883,317

251,334

152,748

1,287,399

320,000

320,000

Includes Hmong and other highlanders

Vietnam

China

263,000

Canada Australia France Germany United Kingdom New Zealand Netherlands Japan Norway Malaysia

163,415 157,863 46,348 28,916 24,267

17,274 10,239 34236 1706 346

21489 17,605 38,598 998 381

202,178 185,700 119,182 31,620 24,994

6,099

1,350

5,995

13,344

11,546

33

523

12,102

8,231 10,066

1,273 2

Switzerland Sweden Denmark Belgium Other countries Grand total

Notes

7,304 9,099 7,007 5,158 10,343

1,642,179 Source: Robinson (1998)

263,000

1,223 178 10,000

10,727 10,246 10,000

593 26 12 989 4,694

1,717 214 51 896 8,268

9614 9339 7,070 7,043 25,605

324,107

580,884

2,547,170

Includes 150,000 Cambodians and 170,000 ethnic Chinese and ethnic Vietnamese who fled the Khmer Rouge nearly all ethnic Chinese

Cambodian Muslims

subjects, the chapters in this section provides case studies of Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong American displacement and resettlement issues that are applicable to diasporic communities worldwide. Before the mass migration

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of refugees from Cambodia and Laos, following on the heels of the Vietnamese refugee flow after the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, there were already small numbers of Cambodian and Laotian students studying abroad in the United States. This small community, especially the Cambodians, became a central part of the refugee resettlement process, as these Cambodian “exiles” assisted the new arrivals through translation. The iterations of migration from Cambodia and Laos—as well as from Vietnam discussed in Part III—occurred from the late 1970s to the mid1990s. This chapter introduces readers to the key macro-historical variables that influenced migration from Cambodia and Laos, which are also applicable to the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. In addition, this chapter will provide a general overview of resettlement policies, issues, and concerns from historical and contemporary perspectives.

The political contexts United States foreign policy following World War II, more specifically during the Cold War (1947-1989) is a primary variable that directly resulted in the proxy-“Hot War” in Vietnam, also known as the Second Indochina War that occurred in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos from 1956 to 1975. The ensuing Cold War marked an ideological battle between the Western Bloc (the United States with NATO and their allies), and the Eastern Bloc (the former Soviet Union (USSR) and its allies in Warsaw Pact). The United States’ primary objective during this period was to contain the spread of communism. As such, the U.S. supported the French effort to re-colonialize “French Indochina—Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia” after World War II as an important part of the worldwide effort to fight the expansion of communism. By 1954, U.S. military aid to the French topped $2 billion USD (Chan 2004, 31-33). Cambodia and Laos were dragged into the proxy-war in Vietnam by the military strategy of destroying the Ho Chi Minh trail. The bombings—by land and air—in Cambodia and Laos along the Vietnam boarder proceeded in “secret” under President Richard Nixon. Jeremy Hein (1995) notes that the Cambodia-Vietnam border was bombed without congressional approval, for 13 months in 1969-1970. The American military created the appearance that Cambodians and Laotians played a significant role in the coordination of the bombing raids in the border regions. A U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee concluded that the human result of the bombing “…is the most pervasive reason for refugee movement. Our interviews with refugees…largely confirm the findings of the General Accounting

Introduction: Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Diaspora in the United States 247

Office (GAO) interviewers in 1971. The GAO found that some 60 percent of the refugees interviewed cited bombardment as the principle reason for moving” (cited in Hein 1995).

Cambodia In 1941, 19-year-old Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012) was declared king, under the assumption that Sihanouk would be easy to manipulate and control because of his youth; however this was not the case (Chandler 1983, 137-152). Shortly after the young prince became king, Japan invaded and conquered Indochina, controlling the area from 1941 to 1945, through to the end of World War II. Japan allowed Cambodia to be ruled by its young king, under the supervision of the Vichy French government. When Japan lost the war in 1945, it also lost control and domination of Indochina. But under the principle that Asia should be ruled by Asians, Japan urged Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos to declare independence. France returned to its former rule, attempting to regain control of its territory in Indochina, albeit acting against a worldwide objection to colonialism. It should be noted that even though Sihanouk played a key role in Cambodia’s struggle for independence from France after World War II, the Viet Minh (or Viet Cong) guerrilla forces who challenged France’s colonial claim over Indochina, set the stage for his success. For decades, Viet Minh forces placed both economic and military strain on France’s resources. On 7 May 1954, the Viet Minh won a decisive victory over the French, after a 57-day siege that resulted in the surrender of more than 10,000 starving French troops at Diem Bien Phu. This was a catastrophic defeat for France that shattered the remaining public support for the first French-Viet Minh Indochina war. Growing international pressure coupled with the cost of years of guerrilla warfare, forced France to give up its colonial control of and claim on Indochina. In 1954, at the Geneva Conference, Cambodia was granted full independence—along with Laos and Vietnam. As the Vietnam War escalated, Sihanouk was concerned that hostilities would spill over into Cambodia. So in June 1969, he restored relations with Washington. However, his ability to balance relationships between the right and left, the United States, North Vietnam, and China, soon became precarious. Internally, support for his policies and his tolerance of the Viet Minh occupation of Cambodia’s borders diminished. People from within his own government, the urban elite, and the military, began to voice their opposition. Working under the principal of “search and

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destroy”, the United States’ military secretly began to bomb the Cambodian countryside in March 1969. The clandestine bombing targeted the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Laos and Cambodia. The bombing destroyed villages, created countless refugees, and also pushed Viet Minh forces deeper into Cambodia. General Lon Nol claimed that there were as many as 40,000 Viet Minh soldiers on Cambodian soil. The bombing killed thousands of civilians, and left hundreds of thousands homeless and refugees (Clymer 2004). Because of the turmoil caused by U.S. military intervention, Cambodia’s economy was stagnant by 1970; this, coupled with famine from an unsuccessful harvest, created unrest and discontent among the peasants. However, the majority of Cambodian peasants still considered Sihanouk a modern day god-king. By comparison to the tragic events to come under the Khmer Rouge, many Cambodians today consider Sihanouk’s era to have been the “golden age” (Chandler 1983, 190). Others blame his totalitarian rule as the cause of many of Cambodia’s problems: an immature political system, intolerance of pluralism, and lack of national debate. During Sihanouk’s 18 March 1970 trip to France, General Lon Nol—albeit reluctantly, but with support from the United States—led a bloodless coup d’état that ousted Sihanouk (Becker 1986, 114). In April 1970, Lon Nol abolished the monarchy and established the Khmer Republic. Days later, Sihanouk established a government in exile, the National United Front of Kampuchea, seeking support from his old enemy— the Khmer Rouge. This move surprised many, because for years, Sihanouk had denounced and suppressed their activities, and had even derisively dubbed them “Khmer Rouge” (Red Khmer). Little did he know that he was laying the foundation for the Khmer Rouge victory that would come five years later. In June 1974, the United States withdrew its forces from Cambodia, reducing the Khmer Republic’s control to only larger towns and cities, and only half the countryside. It was inconceivable that the Khmer Republic, backed by the United States, would lose to the Khmer Rouge, as it did the morning of 17 April 1975. Two weeks before the Fall of Saigon, roughly at the beginning of the Cambodian New Year, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh as victors, with wide popular support, and an increase in territorial control. Many of the Khmer Rouge cadres and soldiers were under the age of fifteen. That year would become Year Zero, ushering in a new phase of Cambodian history by eliminating its past culture and traditions. Year Zero was a new start, a new beginning marking a complete revolution of what it meant to be Khmer, revolutionizing Khmer life with the hopes of making Cambodia a self-sufficient nation (Chandler 1983).

Introduction: Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong Diaspora in the United States 249

Khmer Rouge The Khmer Rouge regime, Democratic Kampuchea (DK), lasted from April 1975 until January 1979. It would become one of the most radical and brutal periods in world history (Etcheson 2005, 4). Under the leadership of a Paris-educated schoolteacher, Pol Pot (formerly Saloth Sar) and Chinese-Khmer Khieu Samphan (president of DK from 1976-1979) the Khmer Rouge attempted to transform Cambodian society into a Maoist peasant agrarian cooperative. Since 1903, the Khmer Rouge worked to gain peasant support—unsuccessfully. However, after Lon Nol ousted their prince, Sihanouk joined forces with the Khmer Rouge, eliciting support from the peasantry. Although Sihanouk hoped to use the Khmer Rouge to regain his power and kingdom, he became its pawn, instead giving the Khmer Rouge legitimacy and increasing peasant support. Immediately after the Khmer Rouge swept into power, currency was abolished and postal services were suspended. Convincing people that the Americans were about to bomb the cities, the cities were abandoned, and the borders were closed. Urban dwellers, merchants, ethnic Chinese, and ethnic Vietnamese Cambodians, along with other elites, were executed or sent to labour and re-education camps (Chandler 1999). Survivors report that during this period, people who wore glasses were executed because they represented intellectuals, beautiful Cambodian women were forced to marry malformed Khmer Rouge veterans, and there were no dogs in the countryside because hungry Cambodians ate them due to the shortage of food (Becker 1986, 162). What followed was four years of starvation and slavery. The numbers of Cambodians who died under the Khmer Rouge remains a topic of debate: Vietnamese sources say three million, while others estimate one-two million deaths. Historians have called it the Cambodian Holocaust, a pogrom of ethnic cleansing and societal reform that still haunts many survivors and their descendants (Chandler 1999).

Laos In the 1960s and 1970s, a “Secret War”, raged between the U.S.backed Royal Lao government and the Pathet Lao, a communist, nationalist political movement closely associated with the North Vietnamese Communist movement (Johnson 2004, 134). Known as the American Central Intelligence Agency’s “Secret War” against the Pathet Lao, the war resulted in a massive bombing campaign in Laos (Osornprasop 2012, 186-188). During the early years of the war (the mid1960s) young Hmong males were used for reconnaissance, but as the war

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became protracted Hmong involvement grew to the point where the Hmong were active fighters—fighting against the Pathet Lao communist forces (Fredriksen 2012, 191-192). Between 1962 and 1973, the U.S. dropped as much as five million tons of cluster bombs on Laos in defiance of the 1962 Geneva Accord that recognized Laos as a neutral zone (Porter 2005, 49-53). The North Vietnamese also blatantly violated the 1962 Geneva Accord (Westmoreland 1995, 39-44). The devastating campaign of 580,000 bombing missions was the equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24-hours a day, for nine years. By 1973 an estimated 200,000 people lost their lives in the conflict, in combat or were combatants, killed in bombing, and nearly twice as many were wounded. This figure does not include wounded or killed civilians. By 1975, when the Pathet Lao gained control of the country, after violating the 1973 peace agreement which resulted in the establishment of a coalition government in Laos, Laos was rife with internal ethnic strife and had gained the distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in history. Individuals who served in the Royal Lao Army, served the U.S. military—such as the Hmong, or who were considered a threat to the new Pathet Lao government were subsequently held in the Lao gulag “reeducation” labour camps called “seminars” in rural Laos (McGregor 2008, 84). As a result of the “Secret War,” hundreds of thousands of Laotian refugees, about 10 percent of the population at the time, fled their homeland between 1975 and the early 1990s, many of them migrating to the United States. The majority of Laotian and Hmong refugees who fled Laos spent time in refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before settling in countries such as Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, France, French Guiana, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States.

Refugees from Cambodia and Laos The passage of the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 allowed for Southeast Asians who had been closely associated with the U.S. military in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia passage to the U.S. Later on, the Refugee Act of 1980 sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter admitted more Southeast Asian refugees, in particular, the “boat people” from Vietnam (many were ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese), Khmer Rouge survivors from Cambodia, and multi-ethnic Laotian refugees of Laos.

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By the time invasion from Vietnam in 1979 brought an end to Khmer Rouge rule, the Cambodian Genocide had claimed the lives of between one and a half to three million people—about one-third of the entire population. Over 100,000 Cambodians fled to the Thai border following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Refugee camps were established by the United Nations, and over the next decade, Cambodians were allowed to resettle in other countries, primarily the United States. The first wave of Cambodian immigrants to the United States included the fortunate 4,600 Cambodians who managed to flee the country just prior to the 1975 Khmer Rouge takeover, and consisted mainly of former government leaders and those with close ties to the United States. As such, the composition of the first wave reflected an educated, urbanized, and middle-class refugee population (Mortland 2010, 78). The next waves took place following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. The majority of these refugees were from the rural areas of Cambodia, where there was less access to formal education. Many in this wave were also ethnic Chinese Cambodians who survived the genocide (Haines 2010, 17). By 1990, 147,708 Cambodian refugees had resettled in the United States. The U.S normalized its relations with Cambodia in 1991, but it was following the United Nations-supervised elections in May 1993, that diplomatic relations with the United States was fully reestablished with an embassy (Thayer 2012, 97). Since then, efforts by Cambodian Americans to sponsor relatives left behind in Cambodia have resulted in some new immigrants to the United States. A small number of Cambodian immigrants have also arrived as spouses of Cambodian American and other U.S. citizens, adopted children, and those who arrived on their own on tourist, student, business, or missionary visas. Since 2000, “visa marriages” among Cambodians and Cambodian Americans are also common (Thompson 2013). According to Joseph Cerquone (1986), between 1975 and 1979 approximately 22,000 Laotian refugees arrived in the United States. The majority of these earlier refugees were relatives of Laotians who were employed by the U.S. Information Service, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or the U.S. embassy in Vientiane. Between 1979 and 1981, 105,477 refugees arrived in the United States. Additionally, between 1986 and 1989, 52,864 Laotian refugees also arrived in the United States. Unlike the first waves, they were mainly farmers and villagers who were not as educated or as ready for life in an urban setting. Laotian refugees continued to immigrate to the United States from the 1980s to the early 1990s, albeit in small numbers.

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Because the Hmong had become targets in their own land they began to migrate out of Laos, across the Mekong River into Thailand. For many years, Hmong leaders and their often fragmented families were kept in refugee camps in northern Thailand. Ban Vinai was the largest of the camps that held Hmong refugees. At Ban Vinai, the water was often bad, food was scarce, and the living conditions were crowded (Long 1993). By the early 1980s Hmong families who could demonstrate their participation in the war were obtaining emigration status to the United States. In the years that followed many Hmong refugees made their way to that country.

Adjusting to life in America Most Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong arrived in the United States as impoverished political refugees who had experienced the trauma of war, genocide, and poor living conditions in refugee camps. Refugee resettlement was organized by the federal Refugee Act of 1980, which included a domestic policy of refugee assistance through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). This included housing assistance, English as a second language courses, vocational training, healthcare, and financial support. Unfortunately, the federal resettlement program was unsystematic. By the early 1980s, the decline of the U.S. auto industry and ensuing economic recession resulted in systematic under-funding for refugee resettlement. Cuts in federal spending-cum-funding therefore covered only a fraction of the cost faced by states, counties, cities, and institutions responsible for assisting with refugee resettlement. A number of churches and other charitable organisations were also involved in the sponsorship and support of Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, and Vietnamese refugees. These civil society groups where strongest during the early period, 1975 to mid-1980s, as “compassion fatigue” slowly impacted this aspect of resettlement resources for the refugee populations. The ORR attempted to spread Cambodian, Hmong, and Laotian refugees in cities and towns across the United States so as not to overburden institutions in any single area. Some have argued that this policy of dispersal proved to be ineffective and slowed the pace of integration into American society as resettling them together, in strong communities, would have provided the refugee population cultural, moral, and social support through networks, cultural familiarity, and ability to collectively experience displacement and replacement together. However, secondary migration resulted in Long Beach, California becoming a Cambodian centre (discussed in Chapter 17). Laotians refugees live in geographically diverse communities (Hein 2006; Needham and Quintiliani

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2008; Lee 2010). The largest concentration lives in California, in particular Sacramento, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Other sizable communities live in Texas, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Oregon. The Hmong communities are largest in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (discussed in Chapter 18). Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong refugees faced a wide range of challenges as they adjusted to life in the United States and elsewhere in their diasporic communities worldwide. These challenges included problems of lingering post-war trauma; schools that were ill-equipped to meet the unique cultural, academic, and linguistic needs of Cambodian and Laotian refugee students; lack of needed social services; gang involvement and conflicts with other ethnic minority gangs; early marriage; and welfare dependency. For Cambodian Americans, the issue of forced deportations of non-naturalised citizens is a current critical issue.

The chapters The authors in this section offer case studies on displacement and resettlement issues within Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong diasporic communities in the United States. Readers can extrapolate that the struggles and challenges of displacement and resettlement are shared among similar communities worldwide. Stacy M. Kula and Yeng Yang examine Lao and Hmong diasporic community formations and issues of cultural preservation and socio-economic integration to the host society. On the similar theme of cultural preservation, Jonathan H. X. Lee documents appropriation of new artistic forms, namely rap music, by Cambodian American youth to negotiate the vexing circumstances of their life in the United States and transnational ties between Cambodia and the diasporic communities in the United States. Karen Quintiliani and Susan Needham provide a case study of Cambodian American political formation that crosses problematic and troubling ethnic, linguistic, class, and historical boundaries in Cambodia Town, USA.

References Becker, E. 1986. When the War was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Cerquone, J. 1986. Refugees from Laos: In Harm’s Way. US Committee for Refugees. American Council for Nationalities Service.

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Chan, S. 2004. Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chandler, D. 1983. A History of Cambodia, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. —. 1999. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clymer, K. J. 2004. The United States and Cambodia, 1870-1969: from Curiosity to Confrontation, New York, NY: RoutledgeCurzon. Etcheson, C. 2005. After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide, Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press. Fredriksen, J. C. 2012. Fighting Elites: A History of U.S. Special Forces, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Haines, D. W. 2010. Safe Haven?: A History of Refugees in America, Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press. Hein, J. 1995. From Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia: A Refugee Experience in the United States, New York: Twayne Publishers. —. 2006. Ethnic Origins: The Adaptation of Cambodian and Hmong Refugees in Four American Cities, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Johnson, C. 2004. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Lee, J. H. X., ed. 2010. Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities, Dubuque, IA: Kendall and Hunt Publishing Company. Long, L. 1993. Ban Vinai: The Refugee Camp, New York: Columbia University Press. McGregor, A. 2008. Southeast Asian Development, New York: Routledge. Mortland, C. A. 2010. “Cambodian Resettlement in America.” In Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities, edited by Jonathan H. X. Lee. Dubuque, IA: Kendall and Hunt Publishing Company. Needham, S., and K. Quintiliani. 2008. Cambodians in Long Beach (Images of America). Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing. Osornprasop, S. 2012. “Thailand and the Secret War in Laos, 1960-74.” In Southeast Asia and the Cold War, edited by Albert Lau. New York: Routledge. Porter, G. 2005. Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, C. W. 1998. Terms of Refuge: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, London: Zed Books. UNHCR. 2000. The State of the World’s Refugees: Fifty years of humanitarian action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Thayer, C. A. 2012. “Cambodia-United States Relations.” In Cambodia: Progress and Challenges Since 1991, edited by Pou Sothirak, Geoff Wade, and Mark Hong. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Thompson, N. A. 2013. “Doing Your Duty—Visa Marriage in the Provinces.” The Phnom Penh Post, 13 September. Http://www.phnompenhpost.com/7days/doing-your-duty%E2%80%93-visa-marriage-provinces. Westmoreland, W. C. 1995. “Vietnam in Perspective.” In Vietnam: Four American Perspectives: Lectures by George S. McGovern, William C. Westmoreland, Edward N. Luttwak, and Thomas J. McCormick, edited by Patrick J. Hearden. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Research Foundation.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN SINGING OUR LIVES WITH HIS WORDS: R. J. SIN, CAMBODIAN AMERICAN MUSICIAN STRUMMING HISTORY, PAIN, AND SUBJECTIVITY JONATHAN H. X. LEE

Introduction In the documentary film, Dancing Across Borders (2010) Ravynn Karet-Coxen, founder of the Nginn Karet Foundation, says, “All Cambodians had their soul amputated. They had no more emotions. Their eyes did not smile anymore like they use to smile.” Karet-Coxen’s sentiment echoes refugee relief volunteer and scholar Carol A. Mortland’s contention that, Virtually every popular and scholarly article on Cambodians emphasized their problems, underscoring first the enormity of the horrors they had experienced during the Khmer Rouge years, the changes they endured after resettlement, and the scars they bore from anguish, malnutrition, overwork, terror, and loss (personal communication, December 2009, also see Mortland 2010).

Cambodians who migrated to the United States in the late 1970s to the mid-1980s arrived as “refugees” who were characterised as hopeless, helpless victims of war and genocide. This characterisation, combined with the systematic and multifarious effects of under-funding for resettlement produced a cycle of poverty and dependency on state welfare that impacted two generations of Cambodian Americans who remain invisible within mainstream society as a result of the popular racialised conception of Asian Americans as a “model minority”. Cambodian American community activists, scholars, and artists are actively working

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to deconstruct the “victim narrative” and pave a way forward to end the cycle of poverty within the diverse terrain of the Cambodian American communities (Morris 1996; McKinney 2007; Lee 2010, 2011). The focus of this chapter is Ratha Jim Sin (a.k.a. R. J. Sin), a Cambodian American musician in the San Francisco Bay area who proudly publicises that he was “raised by refugee Americans”. Sin employs history, his life experiences, and a mixture of traditional and modern forms of music to speak for the first generation who are unable or unwilling to speak for themselves. Sin shares his inspiration, his motivation, and his vision for the generation of Cambodian American youth who he represents, and the first generation elders who anchor their lives. More than just a reflection on Sin’s art and life, I seek to create a new paradigm for scholarly and media representation of Cambodian American subjectivity. In addition, I seek to analyse the interplay among creativity, history, and subjectivity among Cambodian Americans as they nourish a “Cambodian and Cambodian American soul” back to life. The soul of a nation, of a community is expressed in its culture, and it is here that Sin, sings the lives of his people, their history, and shared experiences as Cambodian and American.

Constructing victims Among Asian Americans, Cambodian Americans are a fairly recent group in the United States. In the late 1960s, there was a small group of Cambodian foreign exchange students at California State University, Long Beach. Most of these students were unable to return home when the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia, and in 1975, the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, under the leadership of the notorious Pol Pot, overthrew the government and commenced a reign of terror. Overnight, cities were emptied, and the people were forced into rural areas to work as agricultural labourers under slave-like inhumane conditions. All institutions were shut down, including temples, banks, and schools. The Khmer Rouge systematically executed former leaders and other members of the educated classes. In addition, they targeted ethnic minorities such as the Cham and Chinese Cambodians. Many more died of starvation, exhaustion, and disease. By the time invasion from Vietnam in 1979 brought an end to Khmer Rouge rule, the Cambodian genocide had claimed the lives of between 1.8 to 2 million people (other estimate upwards of 3 million)—about one-third of the entire population. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled to the Thai border following the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Refugee camps were established by the United Nations,

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and over the next decade, Cambodians were allowed to resettle in other countries: Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, and Canada, with the majority resettling in the United States. The first wave of Cambodian immigrants to the United States included 4,600 Cambodians who were mainly former government leaders and had close ties to the United States. The next waves took place following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, and most of these refugees were from rural Cambodia (see Chapter 14). During this period, resettlement resources were cut, in part due to an economic recession, and public political pressure to “cut government spending”. Resettlement policy thus dispersed roughly 150,000 Cambodian refugees into all fifty states as a way to lessen the economic burden on struggling cities and townships. This included placing Cambodian refugees in urban ghetto projects and apartment buildings owned by slum-lords in Brooklyn, New York, and the Tenderloin neighbourhood of San Francisco, California as well as underserved projects in Lynn and Lowell, Massachusetts. The impact of poor resettlement policies and under-funding of Cambodian refugee resettlement has resulted in an underserved and underprivileged Cambodian American population, young and old, who are stereotyped as “victims” and who are still traumatised by the Pol Pot era. As such, this community is prone to gang violence, has low rates of high school graduation, and even lower rates of college graduation. Moreover, they are dependent on the government as evident by the high volume of Cambodian Americans who are on the welfare rolls. The overall effects of the negative stereotype of Cambodian American youth impact on their ethnic identity as they identify as “Asian American” instead of “Cambodian American” because of internalised shame. Cambodian American scholars called this phenomena “ethnic disassociation”. Cambodian American youth swim against both the currents of negative stereotypes and a community that is “socially dead” – a culture that feeds and accentuates Cambodian Americans as perpetual victims of war, genocide, and poverty (Lee 2011).

Social death and Cambodian subjectivity The Cambodian auto-genocide, which lasted for three years, eight months, and twenty days, between 1975 and 1979, when the Khmer Rouge held power in Cambodia, has been described as one of the most radical and brutal periods in world history. It was a time of mass starvation, torture, slavery, and killing. Imagine children being separated from their families, and killed if they attempted to return to their parents. Imagine

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children being trained to be soldiers and then ordered to kill, not just strangers, but their own parents. Imagine being guilty for crimes that you have not committed and being forced to admit guilt, then sent to reeducation camps and labour camps as punishment for said criminal activities, or being sentenced to death. The Khmer Rouge, under the leadership of Pol Pot, the nom de guerre of Saloth Sar, attempted to copy Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward in China, and create an agrarian utopia based on rice agriculture. This leap would create the “cleanest, most fair society ever known in our history”, as stated in a propaganda radio broadcast (Hinton 2005, 8). However, what the message failed to mention is that in order to create this “cleanest” and “most fair” society, it requires the destruction of families, social relationships and bonds, traditions, culture, religion, arts, and literature. Invoking the concept of “social death” defined by Claudia Card as, …central to the evil of genocide… [the] loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning in one’s existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents” (Card 2003, 63).

For Cambodian Americans, social death was compounded because war and genocide was followed by a mass migration of refugees seeking safety and life. This movement resulted in radical life changes as refugees faced culture shock, survivor’s guilt, and the challenges of adapting to a completely new, modern society. Fleeing their homeland does not simply represent the leaving of a physical space and security, but also the disconnection that thereby occurs from one’s sense of self, one’s culture, and one’s history. The loss is physical, somatic, cultural, and symbolic. The number of Cambodians who died under the Khmer Rouge remains a topic of debate: Vietnamese sources say three million, while others estimate 1.8-2 million deaths. More than three decades later, Cambodians worldwide are still haunted by this grim chapter in their history— collective and individual. Collective and individual experiences and encounters with trauma among Cambodian Americans are transmitted across multiple generations silently and unconsciously. First generation refugee-survivors remain quiet about their experiences, and transmit social death—the inability to sustain and maintain connections to traditions, community, and history—to their second generation Cambodian-American children. The birth of children to subsequent generations in which the community has been destroyed and ties to past generations have been

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severed through separation and death is termed “natal alienation” (Card 2003, 74). Card states, “Those who are natally alienated are born already socially dead” (2003, 74 original emphasis). Cambodian American children who experience natal alienation grow up with a superficial understanding of their heritage, their families’ histories, parents’ culture, and roots because their access to cultural resources (rituals, symbols, language, and extended family) is limited. While not the case for all, or to the same degree, for some refugee-survivors of the Cambodian genocide who immigrated to the United States, social death and natal alienation are applicable concepts that highlight the link among psychological, social, and cultural traumas. How can Cambodian Americans employ music (Schlund-Vials 2008) and other forms of creative expressions to become “socially undead” and hence to reengage with society, community, and self? I argue that Cambodian American musical expressions provide one path towards becoming “socially alive” which is part and parcel of the complex process of healing and search for justice.

Ratha Jim Sin: no shame Sin is the oldest son of Cambodian refugees who was born in Oakland, California. Sin has two younger brothers and sisters, several aunts and uncles, and grandparents. While growing up, his parents demanded he speak Khmer at home. As such, Sin feels a strong connection to his heritage. When asked about his identity, Sin says, “I see myself as Khmer, even though I was born here”. He is “Khmer with American ways!” Early on, Sin realised his voice through his writing. His music speaks to his life experience growing up in a fractured community that is underserved and underprivileged: a history that many would shy away from and keep secret. Instead of disassociating from his Khmer identity, Sin embraced it, saying, “Over the years, I learned about my culture through my family, and learned to embrace who I am as an individual. It is about being proud of who you are.” Sin admits that his father did not want him and his siblings associating with some Khmer youth because, “My dad believed in stereotypes of Khmer kids being in gangs and did not do well in school. He did not want me to run with the wrong people.” This negative stereotype was affirmed by the community he grew-up in, the community where his parents still reside. When asked about the central issue within the Cambodian American community in the Bay Area, Sin says, “I don’t want to speak for everyone, but from what I can see, we have an issue with trust, which makes it difficult for us to unite and bring unity. We don’t trust each other. People will question my intentions: What

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is this person doing? Is this person really trying to help our community?” Sin’s creativity is inspired by his family’s history. He fondly talks about his grandfather, and says, A lot of the stories my grandfather shared with us is about hard labor during Khmer Rouge times. One of the historic things that I feel proud about it, is that not only did my family survive the genocide, and live to tell about it.... my grandfather led his whole family to safety and moved them, little by little, during war, dogging landmine, to escape the war and genocide. He took my whole family out of Cambodia.

His music, enjoins anyone who listens to “be proud of who you are and having ‘no shame’. Invite people to know your story”, he says. In “Kampot Freestyle” Sin writes: If you don’t know the history don’t re write it, we riots, we tired, she cryin out, cease fire...shots go off, destroyin’ you was no loss, life inside them barbed wires... genocide survivor... people chained to each other, sleeping on the floor, cold cells... dead bodies stacked higher than hotels... the things my grandfather encountered, hard for him to say painfully, khmer rouge, fuck ‘em all anally... i tell it to the next man, the way that it was passed down... never ashamed of my background... cowards put your hands down... you never been about the culture... i’m just getting started, it’s far from being over... tell me who’s colder? so many war stories i can a be soldier... my pen is my gun, loaded no holster... i tell em let me loose on the subject, then it’s a wrap... time for me to put my people on the map... my history runs deep, scar for life it cuts deep, this whole movement is a part of me... 3rd generation khmer born that i bleed....

Sin’s freestyle is unrestricted, uninhibited, and raw. He inserts himself, and his family into historical discourse, and provides an alternative account from the margins. Growing up, Sin listened to all genres of music, but it was Tupac Shakur’s message of “no shame” that influenced him the most. Sin says, “Tupac.... he had no shame, he shared it all.” “(Tupac’s music)…made it known that he was proud to be a black male. I thought this was powerful.” “This is how I feel about the music that my brother and I make. We do not just make an empty song. We want to convey a message.”

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The “no shame” message is clear in his first two albums Thinking Too Much (2011) and RJ | RATHA (2011). Both albums are self-produced and locally consumed. His second album is self-titled RJ | RATHA (see album covers attached to this chapter). In combining RJ, his American nickname, with Ratha, his Khmer name, he spells out his hybrid experience and subjectivity: Raised by refugees Americans True to His Arts and culture

In the first full track, “Do You Know Who You Are” he articulates, directly and forcefully, his message of “no shame”: There’s more than a few... who wasn’t coo...with being khmer i’m talkin’ to all you... I came along and made tight for folks to love who they are… express they pride... made you believe someone on your side... a shame growing up... thoughts of section 8 living had us throwing up... had dreams of being a drug dealer with the whip they was rollin up… I knew the welfare life was nothin’ nice... and i knew pops never approved of it just a sacrifice... cause moms got no education but she educated... but its instill in our women if you have a kid get on welfare you made it... damn… how the fuck that came about... its not the only path there’s another main route... so every time i’m slaving i am reminded… dreams are to get my parents off this government shit... can’t lose sight or get blinded… so the females with no brain i don’t mind it...

In his home, Sin was exposed to Khmer folk music. This, coupled with his grandfather’s stories, fascinated him, as well as inspired him. Sin says, “I fell in love with storytelling because my grandfather can tell his stories for hours-on-end.” His music is thus a form of storytelling, a public confession, and an invocation to others like him that shame, spoken or unspoken, is not the right response to their historical and life circumstances.

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Creativity, subjectivity, and history While attending middle school, Sin started to write poetry. His poems were inspired by his family’s stories. He experimented with free verse poetry. He says, “I was just writing… I didn’t even know how to make it rhyme. I was just writing.” By age 15 or 16, Sin started to write about “deeper things” and as he recalls, “I just started to rhyme, but still not as serious until about 2010 when I was surrounded by Khmer people”. Sin says, “When I first got started, I came across Laura Mam’s stuff, and I messaged her to tell her I like her work and she wrote me back…It inspired me to take my music to the next level. It didn’t feel that I was alone anymore. I got a chance to see that and other Khmer artists doing it, and I was like man, I didn’t feel alone.” Sin’s music is experimental, unstructured yet compelling. He says, “I don’t even think I do hip hop, the way Bee (his younger brother, Ratana Jim Sin) mixes the beat and instruments, it is labelled Hip Hop. Bee mixes Khmer soul, old school Khmer songs with modern beats.” Like, for example “Track 16 is a mixture of Khmer sounds, American kicks, and Khmer songs all in one song.” “There is really no exact category to classify the music we make. We are inspired by certain people from hip hop, R&B, and Khmer folk music” says Sin. Inspired by Tupac, Sin wants listeners to know that he is proud to be a Khmer American. Sin says, “I want people to know about the struggle of a young Khmer male in America. Our struggles. Being raised on welfare and public housing. It is not all good out here, just because we live in America.” Moreover, Sin wants to “build a bridge to close the cultural gap between the older and younger generations.” Sin says, My family was on welfare, that’s how I grew on up... we lived in section 8 housing. We talk about that a lot in our music. One of the themes of our music is No Shame in who we are and what we have been through. It is an outlet for both of us to express ourselves and be creative about it.

For over two years, Sin has not only self-produced and distributed his CDs, but also uploads music videos on YouTube (Sin 2014), allowing him to transcend physical boarders and penetrate wider and deeper within the Cambodian diaspora. Sin’s hip hop engages in issues of poverty, and other social and political struggles. Sin reflects on this: Deportation is a big issue in our community. My uncle got deported… he was in and out of trouble with the law… he got in trouble because of

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Chapter Fifteen weed…(even so) I’m just really proud of being Khmer! Everything I faced growing up… does not mean I can’t amount to something else. If we can chase our dreams (of making music), then, they can as well.

Sin employs hip hop to evoke recognition from his peers, his community, and the outside world. History is crucial to Sin’s creative project. History is personal and immediate for Sin as it affects the atmosphere and tone of his particular subjectivity and his relationship to it: it is at once near him, yet far way, both temporally and spatially. Sin is acutely aware of the historic past and how it conditions the limits of his community’s cohesion. In “Siem Pang Freestyle” Sin raps: This goes out to my people on the struggle... welfare, food stamp hustle... lights bright at the end of the tunnel, i was raised in the projects, home for most refugees, known as the jungle... to all my sisters tired of being a single parent... to all my homies who lives are somewhat transparent... to the old folks, encourage your youngs ones to go vote... to my dudes who wrk 9 to 5 and still go broke... to the ones who can’t afford a coupe and roll four doors... to kids who rock white tees cause they can’t afford a polo... you can all put your hands up! to my nation, this your anthem! my fellas if they you say ugly yea we handsome, to my ladies if you heard me, get more classin... and gamble in life and stop throwing you ass in...

In uttering the phrase “To my people” Sin enjoins and communicates a connection and continuity in his sense of self that is linked to a larger social body. A shared sense of the past, a recognition that he and others like him share similar life experiences. His audience are second-generation Cambodian Americans, ones who are separated from Cambodia and from its traumatic history. They are the post-generation for whom deconstructing and reconstructing identities—cultural, ethnic, religious, sexual, and national—are quotidian concerns cum necessities. As such, the intersection of history and authenticity is foundationally acute as it is a foundational requirement for being. Sin’s lyrics draw people together as it enjoins people to feel that, they, themselves are a member of a group. Sin rejects the victim label by having “no shame” for the conditions of his life, nor his community’s problems. His lyrics tug-at the inner being of his peers and awaken in them a feeling, an emotion, an awareness that they are unable to articulate for themselves, as it is amorphous and abstract. His musical stories provide a counter narrative to the victim narrative that is submerged in a community that is

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socially dead—real or imagined. Just as the victim narrative employs crime rates, gang activities, teenage pregnancies, welfare dependency rates, and unresolved mental illnesses as evidences of “victims”, Sin employs them to accentuate their existence. For Sin, it is about life, living, not perpetual victimhood. Sin’s message of “no shame” speaks to a sense of authenticity that is informed by acceptance not denial. It is simultaneously an individual creation of authenticity and a public declaration of a community’s life. His lyrics thus reveal a vexing anxiety between individual subjectivity and the collective identity. He sings not just his life and his words, but those of his community. He is currently working on his third self-produced album, entitled Family Inheritance. “The material won’t change....I still will focus on the Cambodian community and want to tell its stories,” Sin says.

Resistance, victimhood, and regeneration Sin’s music, his voice and subjectivity, is one among a growing chorus of Cambodian American musicians who are actively reclaiming, not only their agency, but their communities’ vitality. They are tired of being “survivors” and wish to be made whole again: to become a person, once more. The forces of modernisation and globalisation rendered Cambodia and Cambodians fragmented: war and genocide produced refugees. An ocean apart and worlds away, Cambodian Americans connect to Cambodia and Cambodians through the World Wide Web, through self-produced and community consumed YouTube music videos, with a message of hope, liberation, and regeneration. Cambodian American youth are at a threshold of a new beginning. They are leading the way in making their community socially alive. They are debunking the victim narrative and stereotype and standing firm. They publicly confess to their economic, social, and political disenfranchisement through poetry, visual arts, and music as a testament to their vitality, their courage and ability to survive. With a collective voice, they say, “We are Cambodian. We are American. We are proud. We have no shame”.

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RJ | RATHA released June 2011. Lyrics by R. J. Sin with music by Ratana Jim Sin (a.k.a. Bee Sin). (Courtesy of R. J. and Bee Sin)

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References Card, C. 2003. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia 18 (1): 63-79. Hinton, A. L. 2005. Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lee, J. H. X.. 2011. “Peace Profile: Laura Tevary Mam and The Like’s Me.” Peace Review, 552-557. Lee, J. H. X. ed. 2010. Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities. Dubuque: Kendall Hunt. McKinney, K. 2007. “‘Breaking the Conspiracy of Silence’: Testimony, Traumatic Memory, and Psychotherapy with Survivors of Political Violence.” ETHOS 35(3): 265-299. Morris, D. B. 1996. “About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community.” Daedalus (Social Suffering) 125 (1): 25-45. Mortland, C. 2010. “Cambodian Resettlement in America.” In Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities, edited by Jonathan H. X. Lee. Dubuque, IA: Kendall and Hunt Publishing Company. Schlund-Vials, C. J. 2008. “A Transnational Hip Hop Nation: praCh, Cambodia, and Memorialising the Killing Fields.” Life Writing 5 (1): 11-27. Sin, R. J. 2014. Http://www.mujestic.com/rj_sin, viewed 9 January 2014. —. 2014. Http://www.youtube.com/rathajim, viewed 9 January 2014. Sonis, J. 2009. “Probable Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Disability in Cambodia. Associations With Perceived Justice, Desire for Revenge, and Attitudes Toward the Khmer Rouge Trials.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 302 (5). Van Schaack, B. 2011. Cambodia’s Hidden Scars: Trauma Psychology in the Wake of the Khmer Rouge. An Edited Volume on Cambodia’s Mental Health Documentation Center of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THREE DECADES OF CAMBODIAN AMERICAN POLITICAL ACTIVISM IN LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA KAREN QUINTILIANI AND SUSAN NEEDHAM

Introduction Since the 1970s, Cambodians have been scattered around the world mainly as refugees fleeing war and genocide. The dominant image of Cambodian refugees has been of a broken and traumatised people in need of services. Because of their refugee status, most people think of Cambodians as victims of political repression rather than active participants in civic life. In this chapter, we trace the emergence of Cambodian political activism centred in Long Beach, California, home to the largest population of Cambodians in the United States. Using Foucault’s concept of “genealogy”, we map the discontinuous events and discourses that transformed the dominant image of Cambodians as refugee-victim. Through this analysis, we illustrate how time, history, and place converged to create the conditions for Cambodians to gain enough political recognition to have a segment of the city named “Cambodia Town”—the first ethnic designation of this kind in city history and in the world. In the twentieth century, war and conflict has been one of the driving forces for large-scale Asian migration (Amrith 2011). The dominant discourse of refugees as victims contributes to the idea they are threats to the nation-state and a drain on resources (Vertovec 2011; Colson 2007), which can lead to anti-immigrant policies and discriminatory practices. Findings from this on-going ethnographic research project about the Long Beach Cambodian community challenges the pervasive refugee discourse and illustrates how Cambodians deployed their tragic past and cultural resources to transform the meaning of being refugees and gain political

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recognition. Before discussing the relevance of Foucault’s genealogical approach to understanding the emergence of Cambodian political action in Long Beach, we provide a brief description of the Cambodian migration experience. Data for this chapter come from various ethnographic research projects from 1988 to the present including direct observation of social, cultural, and political activities contributing to the creation of Cambodia Town. It draws on informal, semi-structured, and oral history interviews from a cross-section of Cambodian community members as well as nonCambodians; observations at events and institutions; and newspapers and documents. We combined our research materials to create the Cambodian History and Archive Project, a web-based ethnography (http://www.cam chap.org) and on-site archive that includes thousands of English and Khmer newspapers, documents, unpublished manuscripts and reports, and rare photos of the community’s development and the many events that have occurred from the 1950s to the present. These materials are the basis for constructing this genealogy tracing the emergence of Cambodian political activism in Long Beach.

Long Beach connections Cambodians’ earliest connection to Long Beach began after the postcolonial period following Cambodia’s independence from France in 1954. During the 1950s and 1960s, Cambodian students attended universities throughout the world where they studied primarily the technical trades, engineering, and agriculture. During that time, about 140 students came to the United States as part of the Agency on International Development (USAID) educational initiative to advance Cambodia and several of them attended the California State Universities (CSU), including Long Beach, Los Angeles, and San Luis Obispo (Needham and Quintiliani 2007). Students that attended CSU-Long Beach organised Cambodian events to introduce other students, faculty, and local community members to their culture (Needham and Quintiliani 2008). Most students returned home to Cambodia after graduation, eager to teach what they had learned and to develop their country’s natural resources and industrial infrastructure. A few students settled in the Long Beach area and helped future students adjust to their new circumstances. In 1965, then Prime Minister of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, cut off diplomatic relations with the United States due, in part, to the escalating Vietnam War engulfing Cambodia. This halted the student exchange program. After Marshal Lon Nol took control of Cambodia in 1970,

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relations with the United States were restored and the educational exchange program resumed as well as a military personnel training with the U.S. armed forces (Coleman 1987). In April 1975, the radical communist group known as the Khmer Rouge (KR) took control of Cambodia’s government. Determined to return the country to a time before European contact, they cut off all communication with Western countries, dismantled the country’s infrastructure, and forcibly moved people out of the cities into the countryside where they worked in segregated work camps. By the time the Vietnamese military invaded Cambodia and defeated the KR in 1979, nearly two million Cambodians had died from starvation, disease, and murder (Chandler 1991; Kiernan 1996). Cambodians in the United States and around the world suddenly became exiles, stateless refugees. The early student and military connections to the United States proved critical to the Cambodian refugee and resettlement process after the country fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Cambodians were a part of one of the largest Southeast Asian refugee movements that occurred at the end of the Vietnam-American War in 1975 (Rumbaut 2006). The United States was a main receiving country for thousands of Southeast Asian refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam fleeing persecution and warfare. Over 150,000 Cambodian refugees have been admitted to the U.S. since 1975 (Niedzwiecki and Duong 2004). Today, there are approximately 307,000 living in the United States (SEARAC 2011). Over 95,000 Cambodians are in California with onethird of the population residing in Los Angeles County (U.S. Census Bureau 2011). During the 1980s, when the largest influx of Cambodian refugees entered the U.S., one city, Long Beach, California, at the southernmost border of Los Angeles County, became the centre of the Cambodian diaspora and home to the largest Cambodian community outside of Southeast Asia (Needham and Quintiliani 2007; Chan 2004).

Genealogy and emergence As the brief narrative suggests, Long Beach became the centre of the Cambodian diaspora from a confluence of factors, accidents of history that intersected with the political turmoil that exploded in Southeast Asia. Using Foucault’s notion of genealogy, we analyse key political events or circumstances spanning three decades in the Long Beach Cambodian community. In Foucault’s (1994) words, genealogies do not seek to “record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality” that lead to a constructed truth about how the past can explain the present (76).

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Instead, the task of genealogy is to interpret, through multiple and diverse sources, how particular conditions for the production of knowledge and power culminate in time and space. Genealogies are therefore topical and aim to record the everyday interstices of human experience that defy one explanation. Foucault borrows from Nietzsche the idea of “emergence” to describe the objective of genealogical analysis which seeks to excavate events and processes in order to reveal the conditions and subjectivities emerging from domination (Foucault 1994). Central to Foucault’s genealogical analysis is the theory of discourse. Discourses, in Foucault’s framework, illustrate how language and power operate in everyday practices. Accordingly, discourses reveal what can be said and thought, as well as who can speak, when, and with what authority (Hardy 2010). Discourses “embody meaning and social relationships; they constitute both subjectivity and power relations” (Ball 1990, 2). According to Foucault, discourses are not merely embedded in words, but are part of social practices that constitute objects and in doing so conceal their invention (Foucault 1989[1972]). In this chapter, we present diverse sources and particular conditions used by Cambodians in Long Beach to transform the discourse or meaning of being refugee and claim their cultural and political identities.

The early years Cambodians had a unique struggle compared to other Southeast Asians fleeing their homelands in 1975. Shortly after the KR took over, the genocidal scope of their regime became clear, but with little impact on world leaders. Countries like the United States suffered from war fatigue after the end of the Vietnam War and had little interest in intervening in Cambodia. At the time, there were about ten Cambodian families living in the Southern California area. As a loosely connected group they knew of each other and met occasionally, but had no sense of being a “community” as such. Using their network of sympathetic professors and co-workers, they mobilized to help the refugees/evacuees sent to Camp Pendleton; the military base located about 80 miles south of Long Beach, for processing. Many personally sponsored these early refugees and formed the Khmer Solidarity Association of America (which would later become the Cambodian Association of America) with the expressed goal to meet the social, cultural, and economic needs of exiled Cambodians. As the Khmer Solidarity Association of America, they wrote numerous letters to humanitarian groups (e.g., United Nations, American Red Cross) and politicians concerning the plight of the Cambodian people. In a

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Western Union Mailgram, dated 6 May 1975, the Khmer Solidarity Association of America sent then-President of the United States, Gerald Ford, a message asking for immediate help for Cambodian refugees fearing for their lives in Thailand border camps: We, Representatives Khmer Solidarity Association of America, appeal to American people and U.S. government to take humanitarian action toward Cambodian refugees who have fled Cambodia to different countries. These countries, Thailand and others, sympathetic to new Khmer Rouge government, threaten to send refugees back to Cambodia where refugees will face execution by Khmer Rouge, due to distressing situation. We ask for your compassion and help toward unfortunate Cambodians in evacuating them to the U.S. soon as possible. They have lost almost everything but life and hope. Khmer Solidarity Association, Viradet Kreng. (Needham and Quintiliani 2008)

As photographs of violence in Cambodia leaked out to news agencies, Cambodians in the United States began to mobilise. In July 1975, hundreds of Cambodians, most arriving as refugees a couple months prior, organised a protest in front of the United Nations building in downtown Los Angeles, California. Families, including children as young as five years old, held placards with enlarged photos of Khmer Rouge soldiers dressed in the notorious black pyjama uniforms torturing and beating people. The protestors’ signs read: “Save us from genocide” and “UN help Cambodian life.” Many of the signs were in three languages, Khmer, English, and French, illustrating the attempt to appeal to the world using their collective knowledge at a time when they had little else. Many more protests were organized in Long Beach and Los Angeles. By 1977, Long Beach had two ethnic organisations or Mutual Assistance Organisations: Cambodian Association of America and the United Cambodian Community. Both organisations played leadership roles and provided social services to Cambodians from the 1970s to the present. A less well-known role these organisations played focused on re-vitalising and re-imagining Cambodian cultural arts and identity. What motivated these organisations and their leadership and staff to see this as central to their mission and purpose? The anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood (1998) notes that the Khmer diaspora has been shaped by a mythical belief that Cambodia no longer exists as a result of the genocide and the invasion of the Vietnamese that defeated the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Whether it is a real or imagined fear of loss, diasporic Cambodians believe that to embody a core (even essentialised) Khmer cultural identity pivots on representing key symbols, specifically, Angkor Wat, the Apsara dancer (female classical

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dancer), Buddhism, and the Khmer language. The leadership of the Long Beach Cambodian community deployed these symbols as a way to draw Cambodians to their agencies for services and to represent Cambodian culture at events and festivals in the city. Cambodians wanted to be known for more than the “killing fields”; they wanted the outside world (near and far) to know they are an enduring people with a 2000 year-old history.

National political participation Cambodians had been engaged in the American democratic process mainly because of continuing political upheaval in the homeland. As Cambodians throughout the 1980s established businesses and community organisations, they became involved in Republican Party politics. As the political party in power at the time, Cambodians saw an opportunity to gain greater recognition for the situation in Cambodia where a civil war continued to rage between political factions. The Republican Party had a strong existing Asian political network that outreached to Cambodian business groups and community organisations. In 1989, then-president George H.W. Bush appointed Sichan Siv, a Cambodian survivor of the “killing fields”, as the first American of Asian ancestry to serve as deputy assistant to the president. Mr. Siv’s appointment boosted support for the Republican Party and helped to introduce Cambodians to national politics. When President George H.W. Bush visited Southern California in 1992, Long Beach Cambodian community members mobilised over 20,000 people to attend the Republican event at Mile Square Park in nearby Garden Grove. As a way to display the uniqueness of Khmer culture, the Cambodian delegation created a “Living Angkor” with people dressed in traditional clothing and wrapped in cloth to depict the stone towers of the famous Cambodian twelfth century temple. Many other Republican events followed in the 1990s. At each one Cambodians represented their cultural symbols and at the same time advocated for their homeland.

Emergence of the refugee discourse As the Cambodian population increased in Long Beach from 19751979 so did the number of newspaper articles about the community. At first stories in the newspapers were in keeping with the Asian model minority myth, a racialised discourse of success based upon a stereotyped ideal of Asian cultural and family values used politically to explain the deficits of other ethnic minorities (Palumbo-Liu 1999; Cheng and Yang

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1996). Especially memorable were stories of how Cambodians overcame great tragedy to succeed in America. A 1982 article in the Press-Telegram, a local newspaper, featured a fourth grader who won a national essay contest and received a bicycle. The article emphasised that she was Cambodian and a survivor of the “killing fields” of Cambodia, arriving only two years earlier (Hinch 1982). However, as more Cambodian refugees resettled in Long Beach throughout the 1980s, a different image dominated of a poor and traumatised population. Martha Estrada, the coordinator of immigrant assistance program for Long Beach Unified School District, expressed in 1987 the public concern for the growing Cambodian “problem” Because of those giddy early days of success, the public has formed this stereotype of every Asian student being that potential valedictorian. But a great many of them are also experiencing problems with the gangs, the dropouts, the suicides. (Kelley 1987)

As some youth struggled, the dominant discourse that constituted Cambodian refugees as the newest threat to American society overshadowed the diverse experiences and contributions they had made since arriving in Long Beach. Both representations reinforced stereotypes and distortions that masked the social and political struggles of working class Cambodians. Public portrayals of the Cambodian “problem” aligned with how other ethnic minorities in the City of Long Beach were viewed. When Cambodian youth began to form gangs in response to the violence they encountered on the streets of Long Beach, Cambodian leaders responded by concentrating on local political action. Between 1989 and 1995 gang activity was at its highest. This is when Latino and Cambodian gangs clashed and a bloody war was fought on the streets in the form of drive-by shootings and retaliatory killings (Bush and Cowan 1994). At the same time, Cambodian gangs became more profit oriented and engaged in a spree of extortion schemes against Cambodian businesses and home invasion robberies targeting co-ethnics (Pack 1990). The United Cambodian Community (UCC) and Cambodian Business Association (CBA) organised the community’s first demonstration and boycott. Cambodian businesses on Anaheim Street closed for the day and 150 placard carrying Cambodians and supporters from the African American and Latino communities participated. Their signs read: “No police protection, no business, no taxes”, and “From one killing field to another killing field.” Sam Oum of CBA said:

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Ten years ago, we moved to Long Beach escaping the killing fields, but ten years later, after all our hard work, after trying to make Long Beach beautiful again, it turns out to be a crime-infested area. Everyday, there’s a new killing, and killing and killing. How much more do we have to take? (Pack 1991)

Cambodians deployed their tragic past to call attention to the plight of working class and ethnic minorities in Central Long Beach. Although this multi-ethnic coalition raised issues about the lack of institutional and government resources for education, youth services, and healthcare, all issues that they knew contributed to the despair in their neighbourhoods, the one issue adopted by city officials was the community’s need for police protection. Despite the Cambodian leadership’s political success, they could not overcome the image of refugees as threats that needed protection even from their own troubled youth. Six years later, after countless hours of lobbying, the Anaheim Street Community Police Center, directed by a Cambodian community organiser, opened in the heart of what would become Cambodia Town. The physical presence of a police substation in this neighbourhood with Khmer, Spanish, and English languages displayed prominently in the window signalled a new form of cultural recognition at the institutional level.

New leadership emerges In 1993 Cambodia held its first democratic elections. Many of the leaders instrumental to establishing organisations and businesses in Long Beach now wanted to apply their knowledge and experience to rebuilding their homeland. As many as twenty leaders, some of whom had arrived in the United States before or in 1975, left Long Beach for Cambodia. The sudden leadership drain disrupted collaborative institutional networks in Long Beach that had taken years to build and were just beginning to meet community needs. The gap in leadership left many wondering about the future of Cambodians in Long Beach. However, new leadership emerged out of the established Cambodian organisations. Despite the loss of so many leaders who had literally been the face of the community, a new form of public representation of Cambodian’s presence in the city unexpectedly took shape. In 2001, the United Cambodian Community (UCC) received a grant from the City to design and hang banners from the light poles in Central Long Beach along Anaheim Street. Cambodians consider this area the heart of the community and an expression of their successes and struggles to build new lives culturally and economically. The bright pink banners

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proudly proclaimed the area “Little Phnom Penh,” with the message underneath, “Our Kids are Our Future.” The picture on the banner was of an Aspara dancer with hearts inside her outlined image drawn by fiveyear old Mardie Sim, the winner of the art contest for the banner project. The message on the banner resonated with Cambodians. Even for those who lived transnational lives, Long Beach had become their home and the home of their children, many of whom had been born since their families arrived in the United States. The success of the banner project sparked the idea to have a section of Anaheim Street permanently named by the community. In 2001, with the banners still visible, the Cambodian Association of America (CAA) hosted a meeting comprised of a coalition representing segments of the Cambodian community: CAA; UCC; The Venerable Reverend Dr Kong Chhean, Abbott of the largest Cambodian Buddhist temple in Long Beach; and Cambodian media groups as well as other community leaders in education and business. At this meeting, they considered several names that could encompass the diversity of the Cambodian population in Long Beach. Over the years, the area had been identified as “Little Phnom Penh” and “Phnom Penh by the Sea”, but after much debate, the group settled on the name proposed by the coalition’s leaders: “Cambodia Town”. A Cambodia Town Initiative Task Force (CTITF) was formed and officially supported by key Cambodian organisations and businesses to work with the City to develop a cultural designation. Using their experience from political practices at the national level in the Republican Party and locally, Cambodians built grassroots community support for the notion of Cambodia Town among neighbourhood residents. Cambodia Town representatives attended political fundraisers and various political action groups. They volunteered in community activities including the Martin Luther King Day Parade and Cinco de Mayo events to mobilise support for Cambodia Town. Through these grassroots efforts, city officials took notice and began to embrace the idea that having a Cambodia Town could be good for the city economically. Long Beach competes for tourists with the betterknown City of Los Angeles and nearby Anaheim, home to Disneyland. Long Beach, a city reliant on the vagaries of the aerospace industry and the Port, often suffers longer during economic recessions. Also, the selfproclaimed “International City” had few, if any, viable examples of how Long Beach as a tourist destination lived up to this name. Cambodians, in the wake of the successful banner project and the other cultural events they sponsor during Cambodian New Year every April offered a potentially unique cultural experience and identity for the City. For these

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reasons, the City supported the pro-business model of the Cambodia Town leadership and urged them to seek a Business Improvement District (BID) designation. However, a BID meant that Cambodian Town, Inc., the official name of the non-profit organisation formed from the task force, needed business owners on Anaheim Street to sign and approve the designation and agree to an annual fee to fund improvement activities. The Cambodian Town, Inc. Board members began the lengthy process of obtaining a BID, but also continued to pressure the City Council for a cultural designation apart from the BID. While a majority of business owners, even those owned by Latinos and other Asian populations, approved of a “Cambodia Town” designation, it was difficult to secure their signatures for the BID when it meant assessing themselves. Also, public opposition from within the Cambodian community and with some Latino community groups made it difficult for the all-volunteer Cambodian Town Board of Directors and Advisory Council to be on top of shifting public opinion. Opposition groups spread unfounded rumours that Latino gangs would attack Cambodians if the City agreed to the name. At a City Council meeting in which public testimony was invited to comment on the Cambodia Town cultural designation (while the Board of Directors sought approval for the BID), members of the Long Beach police department denied that the cultural designation would cause gang violence. Even though the police publically repudiated the opposition group’s fears, more personal attacks were waged against members of the Cambodia Town Board. They made thinly veiled claims in Khmer newspapers and to English language reporters that the Board leadership were acting on behalf of the unpopular government in Cambodia and thus were communist themselves. These types of accusations were deeply painful and resulted in friction between Cambodian community members over the designation. In a timely and unusual display of support, the Editorial Board of the local newspaper, Press-Telegram, wrote an op-ed piece extolling the benefits of a Cambodia Town cultural and business district: Investment along Anaheim is especially significant because it was done largely with private funds and a do-it-yourself spirit by political refugees seeking protection from a murderous regime. Some say the Cambodia Town title would create an area that sees itself separate from American culture, but the independent businesses operating and employing people along Anaheim are a testament to the entrepreneurship of this country and the possibilities it offers outsiders. (Press-Telegram 2006)

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The Editorial Board countered a main argument against Cambodia Town; that is, Cambodians are not a majority population and therefore a specialised ethnic name would alienate other groups: Cambodians are not the only ethnic group living in that section of Central Long Beach, and, in fact, their overall numbers are smaller than those of blacks, Hispanics and whites citywide. But Cambodians have strung together a group of interesting and unusual businesses the rest of the country needs to hear about (Press Telegram 2006).

The Editorial Board reconstitutes the American Dream discourse, easily understandable to the broader public who, over the years, were familiar with the newspaper’s previous articles portraying Cambodian refugees as a threat. The Editorial Board’s sentiment reflected other changes in City of Long Beach since Cambodians arrived in the 1970s. The City Council, the local government body responsible for voting on and implementing policy changes, had become more ethnically diverse. The Latino and African American City Council members had Cambodians on their staff. There were also councilmembers with ties to the Long Beach Cambodian community through their work in education and health care during the refugee resettlement process. Moreover, as more Cambodians became American citizens, they represented a voting block across three city council districts, which meant local politicians could not ignore Cambodians even if their numbers were relatively small. All of these disparate events and conditions culminated in the City Council voting 8-1 to approve Cambodia Town as the first cultural designation in city history on 3 July 2007. For Cambodia Town, Inc., however, the work was not over. Through continued grassroots organizing and fundraising, the Board sought and garnered the political support to have street signs along Anaheim Street and freeway signs, approved by the State of California, directing people to Cambodia Town. Sithea San, the first Chair of Cambodia Town, Inc. during this period and a refugee herself who came as a teenager with her mother and siblings, reflected on the significance of the community’s journey: It’s very challenging. We went to so many hearings and City Council meetings. The process we went through taught us a lot. We learned how the system in this country works; how laws are drafted; and how a City Council works to draft a resolution that becomes policy. If you are not involved, you will not understand this country’s system. I’m glad that I have this opportunity, as the first chair of the Cambodia Town, to take [on] this task.

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Possible futures Over the last three decades, Cambodians transformed the dominant discourse of refugees as threats through political actions. They deployed their tragic past and cultural symbols to challenge how the broader society viewed their culture and their resettlement challenges. Cambodian political activism emerged out of concerns for the homeland and local refugee needs that were not mutually exclusive, but constructed through and within the politics of representation and recognition. Foucault (1994) suggests that by shifting discourses, and attendant meanings and practices, people can create possible futures not recognized previously (cf. Martin 1988). Today, a younger generation of Cambodians embraces the Cambodia Town designation as their own. The first Cambodia Town Film Festival was held September 14-15, 2012. Organized by praCh Ly, the well-known Cambodian rapper that grew up in Long Beach, the event was a successful display of a new generation reimaging themselves and a city. Instead of younger Cambodians feeling embarrassed about growing up in Long Beach, which has been the case, many claim they live in Cambodia Town. Cambodia Town is no longer seen as a poor, gang area, even though these issues still exist. Cambodians and non-Cambodians are starting to view this part of Long Beach as a site of opportunities and possibilities for a city, a neighbourhood, and for the people that live and work there. However, as Foucault’s analytical framework suggests, our hopes should be tempered by the need for continuing political action to defy domination and appropriation of people and places.

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—. 1991. “Cambodian Community Demands More Protection.” Press Telegram, 19 April, A1 and A6. Palumbo-Liu, D. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Press-Telegram. 2006. “Call it Cambodia Town”. Press-Telegram, 10 October, A8. Rumbaut, R. G. 2006. “Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian Americans.” In Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, second edition, edited by P. G. Min, 315-333. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC). 2011. Statistics on Southeast Asians adapted from the American Community Survey. Washington DC: Southeast Asia Resource Center. United States Census Bureau. 2011. 2011 American Survey 1-year Estimates. Http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. —. 2010. 2006-2010 American Community Survey Selected Population Tables. Http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. Vertovec, S. 2011. “The Cultural Politics of Nation and Migration.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40: 241-256.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LAO AMERICAN MIGRATION AND RESETTLEMENT: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE STACY M. KULA

Introduction Among the post-Vietnam War Indo-Chinese refugees1 who migrated to the United States, Lao Americans are the fewest in numbers. Partially because of their small population size, Lao Americans have received the least attention from scholars and the media. Thus, less is known about this group when compared to other Indo-Chinese groups such as the Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong refugees. Indeed, the Lao Americans have reason to report feeling like “forgotten refugees” (Muir 1988, 8). More public awareness and scholarship should be devoted to understanding this group, their history, and the challenges they face. This chapter will therefore detail what is known about Lao American migration and resettlement, the major issues facing this ethnic community, and prospects for its future. As the second generation of this group has already reached adulthood and the third generation is emerging, more public understanding will help to solicit more social support for the group.

Lao American migration history The full retreat of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia in April 1975 quickly spelled the doom of U.S.-backed governments in the region. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime was able to overtake the capital of Cambodia on 17 April, Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces on 30 April, and Laos was overcome by Pathet Lao forces in December of that same year. Facing retaliation by the new government, as well as economic hardship and forced political “re-education”, many Lao made the difficult decision to

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leave their homeland and fled across the Mekong River to neighbouring Thailand. There, refugee camps were quickly established to act as a holding location until the displaced could be settled or repatriated (Long 1993). The United States acted as one main destination for many Lao refugees (Lee, Chapter 15 of this volume). Those initially admitted were frequently families of soldiers associated with the former Kingdom of Laos who would have had some exposure to modern society and some education, though these characteristics by no means applied to all of the first refugees, and over the years the percentage of Lao immigrants from rural, poor, and uneducated backgrounds increased. Regardless of their backgrounds, however, virtually all Lao refugees to the United States experienced similar occupational and educational struggles, as any educational credentials were unrecognised by the United States and language barriers created an additional hardship. Thus, Lao refugees were relegated to labour-intensive industries primarily in manufacturing and service upon arrival, and even those who had attended college in their home country were forced to start over (Anderson 2005). Time in the Thai camps prior to arrival in the United States had both positive and negative repercussions on Lao refugees. Life in these camps was difficult and the refugees were given few resources except what was absolutely necessary for survival (Floriani 1980; Mollica et al. 2002). This, combined with the constant anticipation of possible resettlement in a new country, added to the psychological sense of displacement, which reached its highest levels in those who languished in the camps for a decade or more (Long 1993). However, the concentration of co-ethnic families also enabled refugees to develop social support systems that buffered the negative impact of displacement, as well as provided opportunities to maintain cultural traditions and language practices (Beiser et al. 1989, 183; Floriani 1980). Like other Indo-Chinese refugee groups, Lao immigrants arrived in the United States starting in 1975, but their largest numbers came during the 1980s and 1990s (see Table 17-1). Because refugees were categorised by country of origin rather than by ethnic group, it is impossible to know exactly how many Lao were admitted each year; the records lump all Laotian groups together, including Lao, Hmong, and other smaller ethnic groups. However, the pattern of immigration—an initial arrival of refugees in 1975, a huge surge from 1979-1980, and steady inflows of refugees from then until the closure of the official Thai refugee camps in the mid1990s—holds true for all groups. With the exception of a rise in refugee immigration by Hmong in 2004-2006 (concurrent with the forced removal in Thailand of Hmong who had sought refuge in the Wat Tham Krabok

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monastery for nearly a decade since camp closures), refugee immigration from Laos almost entirely ceased in the 2000s. Table 17-1: Immigration of refugees originating from Laos by fiscal year2 Fiscal Year

Number of admitted refugees

1975-76

11,000

1977-78

8,400

1979-80

85,700

1981-82

23,393

1983-84

10,125

1985-86

17,508

1987-88

27,991

1989-90

21,275

1991-92

16,517

1993-94

13,155

1995-96

5,885

1997-98

924

1999-2000

83

2001-02

40

2003-04

6,018

2005-06

9,347

2007-08

176

2009-10

50

Source: Niedzwiecki and Duong 2011.

Upon their arrival, Lao refugees, like all Indo-Chinese refugee groups, were dispersed to different communities throughout the United States by government agencies (Lee, Chapter 14, this volume). This practice often broke up extended families and kinship networks, and many refugees engaged in “secondary migration” to reunite with members of their families or communities (Kelly 1986), as well as to join an ethnic enclave

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that would provide social and economic support. This secondary migration changed considerably the settlement patterns of refugees. For example, Kelly (1986, 144-145) notes that although the first wave of Indo-Chinese refugees arriving in the late 1970s were dispersed over all the states of the United States, by 1979 it was estimated that 75 percent of these groups were concentrated in the urban areas of just four states: California, Texas, Washington, and Louisiana. In general, these secondary migrations concentrated people from the eastern and northern regions to southern and western states (with a few notable exceptions), and from rural to urban areas. California predominated as a site of secondary migration for all Indo-Chinese refugee groups.

Lao American settlement in the United States Sociologists Portes and Rumbaut (2001) point out that in order for immigrant groups to develop a strong occupational and educational adaptation to the United States, several elements have to be in place. For all groups, incoming characteristics such as English language knowledge, education, economic wealth, and “intact families”3 are associated with positive socioeconomic outcomes, but so are three specific host country factors: 1) support for immigration by the host government; 2) social reception by the host society; and 3) the strength of the educational, professional and entrepreneurial base of the existing co-ethnic community. When the Lao refugee experience is judged by these criteria, it becomes evident that the cards were stacked against their “successful” initial integration into the United States. In terms of the incoming characteristics, this group suffered great barriers. Even educated Lao immigrants were unlikely to speak English, as French was the only European language commonly taught in Laos, and the language was very difficult to acquire for adult refugees. In fact, many second-generation students reported that their parents still do not speak English well after nearly two decades in the United States (Rumbaut 2008, 214). Also, virtually all Lao refugees (even those who had Laotian degrees and credentials) were considered to be uneducated and granted few occupational opportunities due to that designation. Therefore, both first generation refugees and their children were hampered by low human capital (Portes et al. 2009; Rumbaut 2008). In terms of economic wealth, all refugees suffered loss of what they had owned through the experiences of flight and time in the refugee camps. Lao Americans did have a very low divorce rate and families were generally able to stay intact (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 86), but many of the extended family and kinship

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networks that characterize Lao culture were broken up during the resettlement process, necessitating a second and sometimes even third migration and increasing the acculturative stress on families (Anderson 2005). The host country factors of government support, social reception, and the educational and occupational strength of the existing co-ethnic community were not favourable to Lao refugees’ integration and their chances of success in the United States. While the U.S. government provided unprecedented financial and administrative support to assist refugee resettlement, these efforts did not bring the intended effects. The main strategy used for resettlement involved “sponsorships” by individuals, churches, and other organisations, which were supposed to provide refugees with necessary supports (such as jobs, food, and lodging) to establish themselves in the new country. However, the refugees’ lack of English knowledge and job skills, coupled with the lack of translation and job training services in the assistance program, rendered these tasks very difficult to fulfil (Kelly 1986; Trueba et al. 1990). Additionally, sponsor duties were often cut short because of refugees’ decisions to engage in secondary migration, which connected them to their extended families and provided greater employment opportunities. The resettlement assistance program also suffered from economic recessions that gripped the country in the early 1980s, which resulted in deep funding cuts to the resettlement program (Lee, Chapter 14, this volume). In terms of societal reception, refugees encountered a society that had increasingly become opposed to and affected by the Vietnam War, and who were often highly discriminatory towards Indo-Chinese refugees who came from the region. All of these groups reported discrimination at high levels, but Lao Americans reported the highest levels of personal experience with racism at over 72 percent (Portes and Rumbaut 2001, 41). Even Americans who were initially sympathetic toward Indo-Chinese refugee groups suffered from “compassion fatigue” that presented further challenges to societal integration for these groups (Lee, Chapter 14, this volume). Finally, because of the absence of an existing strong co-ethnic community, Lao refugees did not have the advantages of being able to secure educational and occupational help from their co-ethnic peers. The fact that the government had scattered them throughout the United States actually lowered Lao immigrants’ ability to develop ethnic enclaves, which also impacted the development of ethnic solidarity among the various refugee populations from Laos.

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The Lao American community today The 2010 U.S. Census counted the total number of Lao Americans at 232,133 in that year (Hoeffel et al. 2012), indicating a 17 percent growth over their 2000 census count, which is less than half the rate of growth of the other Southeast Asian groups.4 Lao Americans, according to these Census statistics, thus represent about nine percent of the total IndoChinese population, which includes Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, and Hmong. As noted above, Lao Americans have engaged in second and even third migrations as they have settled in the United States. This pattern of “resettlement” increased the sense of displacement experienced by many Lao Americans and also delayed the establishment of ethnic enclaves; however, today several known Lao communities have developed and are continuing to grow. California was the site of final settlement of almost one-third of all Lao Americans, and Lao enclaves have developed in the cities of Fresno and San Diego. There is also a sizable Laotian American community in Texas, where about seven percent of the Lao American population lives, particularly in Amarillo and Denton. Minnesota and Washington each hosts approximately five percent of the nationwide Laotian American population, principally in Minneapolis and Seattle (Bankston III 2000). Laotian enclaves have also formed in New Iberia, Los Angeles and in Washington, DC (Liu and Geron 2008). This group is by far the most evenly distributed group of all Southeast Asian Americans. Wherever they have settled, most Lao Americans currently reside in urban communities, though some have moved into the suburbs (Liu and Geron 2008). About two-thirds of Lao refugees have become naturalised citizens, while approximately one-third has chosen to retain their citizenship to their homelands (Niedzwiecki and Duong 2011). Like most other Southeast Asian groups, Lao Americans are considered to be generally low-income and working-class, though there are a growing number of entrepreneurs and college-educated members within the community (Niedzwiecki and Duong 2004; 2009). Cambodians and Laotians most often work in production and transportation, though management and business is also a common career choice (Niedzwiecki and Duong 2009). According to the 2010 American Community Survey administered by the Census Bureau, the average age within the Lao American community is estimated at 28.4, much younger than the national average of 37.2. The average Lao American family has 4.2 children, making these families larger than the U.S. average of 3.23 children. This means that a significant portion of the Lao American community is young and issues of education

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are particularly important for the successful development of a strong Lao American ethnic community. However, Lao American children who are now in the second and third generation remain one of the most educationally underserved of all Asian American groups. One report shows that Lao Americans have the lowest educational attainment of all Asian groups (behind Hmong Americans, another group originating from Laos). While the percentage of the Lao American population attaining a high school diploma, a bachelor’s degree, and other advanced degrees has shown an upward trend, the majority of Lao American children are still not receiving an education that will enable upward mobility. This is not due to a lack of emphasis on education by Lao culture. In fact, refugees from Laos experienced in their homeland a society in which education was highly intertwined with other aspects of culture, as Buddhist temples provided education and encouraged learning throughout life as one means of continued self-improvement (Phapphayboun 2003). Therefore, education continues to be highly valued by Lao Americans (Bankston III 2000). What is the reason, then, for the lack of educational advancement among Lao American youth? One reason is that significant barriers to learning have never been addressed or understood by U.S. schools. These barriers include racism, poverty, social isolation, and school tracking (Ngo and Lee 2007; Schram 1993) and negative teacher assessments of parental interests and involvement (Schram 1993). For example, teachers of Lao children were rarely provided translators or even professional development to understand Lao culture; because of this, Lao children’s silence and submissiveness toward teachers, which aligned with cultural notions of respect, has often been misinterpreted as lack of interest or passivity, while their parents’ lack of involvement due to linguistic, educational, and economic barriers has been misunderstood as a lack of concern. Lao children have therefore often been placed in lower-tracked classes regardless of their academic background or ability (Schram 1993). Another concern for Lao American families involves the above noted occupational barriers that have relegated them to low socioeconomic status, which exposes children to unsafe neighbourhoods, inadequate schools, and disruptive social environments. These factors can pull them away from their parents’ culture and values supportive of educational achievement and upward mobility (Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Portes and Zhou 1993). Parents of lower socioeconomic status are also less able to provide resources to their children, gain cultural and institutional support from schools, and be actively involved in their children’s education, despite their desire for their children to excel in school (Portes et al. 2009; Portes and Zhou 1993).

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Researchers Portes and Zhou (1993) point out that instead of experiencing upward mobility across generations, many of the newer immigrant groups are experiencing either flat or downward trends. This happens particularly in cases where immigrant groups settle in areas in which their children’s peer group does not value education and holds values that contradict the parental culture. Children by nature tend to assimilate quickly into their environment, as their development is characterized by rapid change through adolescence (Erikson 1968). If Lao American youth pull away from their heritage and adopt the attitudes of their non-Lao peers, downward assimilation is the natural result, and they do not make gains in occupational or educational attainment across generations. Studies with Southeast Asian youth have shown that to the extent that youth successfully blend their traditional cultures with the attitudes and values necessary for success in the host culture (a process called “selective acculturation”), they experience much better outcomes in every area in comparison with peers who reject the parental culture outright (a result termed “dissonant acculturation”) (Portes and Zhou 1993). This is one reason that movement to ethnic enclaves that provide more co-ethnic peers is particularly important for the advancement of the Lao American community. In such enclaves, peers can co-construct their Lao American identities in ways that provide for adaptation of the parental culture or a melding between Lao and American cultures without outright rejection of Lao traditions and values. This is one characteristic of academically successful Lao American women in Rhode Island as described by Anderson (2005). Ethnic enclaves also enable the transmission of information and resources more easily within the co-ethnic group. As businesses emerge, jobs are created within the community and entrepreneurial skills can be learned, increasing the chances for individuals to advance occupationally. A third major issue of concern for the Lao American community today involves the retention of traditional Lao language and culture across the second and emerging third generations. This culture is primarily characterized by the centrality of the traditional extended family, including grandparents and elders, each with specific roles that are thought to be complementary (Phapphayboun 2003). Filial piety, or respect and care for elder family members, is stressed. Thus, youth are taught to respect and obey their parents without question, and adults are to care for the needs of their elderly family members. Parents tend to be more permissive when children are young and to gradually become stricter as the children age (Moore et al. 1997). Within the family, husbands traditionally are the

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breadwinners and decision-makers of the family unit, while wives take care of the needs of the household (including the household finances) and children, and also are seen as the purveyors of culture and tradition to future generations. Because of this, young girls are often expected to help cook and clean by age ten while boys are not given such tasks, and the sexual purity of young women is carefully controlled (Shah 2007). There is also a strong oral storytelling tradition in Lao culture, which is used to pass down folktales and values (Phapphayboun 2003). In terms of religious practice, another central aspect of traditional Lao culture, Theravada Buddhism has been the predominant religion for over 600 years (Moore et al. 1997; Phapphayboun 2003). This branch of Buddhism emphasizes harmony with nature as well as a cyclical view of life and death that is expressed in the hierarchy and prescribed roles within the family: parents and grandparents take care of children when they are young, and the children are then expected to care for their elders when they are old as part of the cycle (Moore et al. 1997). Grandparents normally name babies upon birth, often with words expressing their hopes for the child; nicknames that develop afterward express a salient trait of the child (Asian American Institute 2005). Educationally, emphasis on living a peaceful, quiet life in harmony with others is expressed through a strong deference to teachers and the educational system rather than active advocacy (Phommsasouvanh 1997). However, as noted above, this should not be interpreted as lack of interest; Lao parents stress education as a means of upward social mobility (Ngo 2006). It is unavoidable that after immigration, aspects of the new host culture will be adopted either in lieu of or in concert with the heritage culture. Within the Lao community, there has been a variety of responses to acculturation, from outright rejection of traditional Loa culture in favour of U.S. peer culture, to a selective blending of the two by both Laos- and US-born Lao Americans as they negotiate their ethnicity and identity. Unfortunately, Lao American youth on average are not doing well in school, and appear to adhere to their peer culture that disengages them from their families and schools all too often (Portes and Rumbaut 2001). Lao communities with enough resources have engaged in efforts to preserve and transmit their culture to new generations, for example by establishing Theravada Buddhist temples and creating cultural associations that reach out to youth, providing such offerings as afterschool programs and language schools (Anderson 2005). Such efforts may give Lao communities a greater chance of supporting positive outcomes and upward mobility for future generations, as the successful blending of traditional

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and new cultures has been associated with positive educational and occupational outcomes for immigrant groups (Portes and Zhou 1993). The issue of gender roles is one area where traditional Lao culture is undergoing a shift as American culture is selectively adopted and assimilated into Lao American life. Many Lao young women have resisted what they see to be inequities in gender roles and child-rearing practices. Anderson (2005, 207) reported that the women in his study desired a sense of equal partnership in their marriages both in terms of decision-making and of handling household tasks; one participant described this as the “I cook, you wash” strategy. In another study, young women planned to marry outside their ethnic group specifically in order to escape the gender roles of their culture (Shah 2007). Gender roles outside the home are shifting as well, as women now have had to be fully involved in providing financially through work. Because traditional roles did include some financial responsibility for women, this transition to greater financial provision has been smooth for some families (Anderson 2005), but other families have reported great difficulty, particularly on the part of husbands, in coming to terms with this rapid cultural change (Moore et al. 1997). On the other hand, some traditional practices have retained their importance to many Lao youth. The responsibility to care for the elderly is one such value, as many Lao who attend college list the promise of a career that will enable them to care for their parents in later life among their motivations to persist in school. Another is the centrality of the extended family and kinship network. This has emerged as a necessary part of Lao life particularly when it comes to childcare for families that must rely on multiple incomes and/or extended schooling in order to make ends meet (Anderson 2005). The pooling of time and financial resources has made it possible for Lao families to survive and even attain some measure of upward mobility over time.

The future of the Lao American community As refugees to the United States, Lao Americans have experienced tremendous challenges. In today’s society, they are virtually unknown due to their small number and dispersion across the country. Like other immigrant groups, they are confronted with language and cultural differences that act as social and economic barriers. While government support provided some assistance initially, without existing ethnic communities to support their assimilation, their acculturation has been further complicated their low human capital, societal discrimination, and their children’s exposure to negative peer groups. Additionally, cultural

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misunderstandings and conflicts remain between Lao families and U.S. schools that are so crucial to this group’s possibility of upward mobility (DeVoe 1996). Academic scholars have consistently have classified the Lao American co-ethnic community as weak. However, it should be noted that most studies on the Lao community in the United States were conducted in the 1990s; very little research has been conducted on the Lao American community in more recent times. An increasing number of Lao Americans have become educated professionals and entrepreneurs, according to Census Bureau data (see Niedzwiecki and Duong 2004, 2009). Anderson (2005) has also found that the Lao American community has been able to establish more temples and cultural organisations that can support the transmission of traditional Lao culture in the United States, which in turn positively impacts the group’s socio-economic integration and educational success. This is especially important because those who are able to retain their parents’ language and cultural values while also adapting to life as Americans show the greatest educational achievement and upward mobility (Zhou and Xiong 2005). It is a point for future investigation to determine the extent to which the emergence of these ethnic social structures may aid positive outcomes for Lao Americans. The upward trend in educational attainment is promising, but the high number of Lao adolescents of low attainment indicates that more work needs to be done to support such efforts. Continued support is definitely required to enable a greater number of Lao youth to experience upward mobility. The future of Lao Americans will depend on several factors, including the adaptation of the third generation that is now emerging, support for educational attainment of Lao adolescents, and the development of a strong entrepreneurial and professional base that can support co-ethnic occupational upward mobility. There is a pressing need for research on Laotian American population and in particular, their adaptation and educational experiences in the United States. More research can deepen our understanding of the needs of the Lao American community as well as its trajectory of assimilation and negotiation of identity across generations.

Notes 1. Major Indo-Chinese refugee groups include Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Lao. It should be noted that several smaller ethnic groups originating from Laos (e.g., Mien) have also immigrated as refugees. The term “Laotians” is used variably in the literature, sometimes referring to all groups originating from Laos (including Hmong, Lao, Mien, etc.), sometimes referring to all groups except Hmong, and on other occasions referring to Lao specifically. According to the

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2010 U.S. Census, there are approximately 2.5 million Indo-Chinese in the United States, representing 14.5 percent of the total Asian American population. Vietnamese number over 1.7 million and represent 69.3 percent of the IndoChinese population. Cambodians, Hmong, and other Laotians (the latter consisting mostly of Lao) number approximately 277,000, 260,000, and 232,000, and represent 11, 10.4, and 9.3 percent of the Indo-Chinese population, respectively (Hoeffel et al. 2012). 2. These numbers include all refugee immigration from Laos, including Hmong and other ethnic groups. The surge of immigrants from 2003-2006 is primarily of Hmong who arrived due to the 2003 closure of the Wat Tham Krabok monastery which served as an unofficial refugee camp after all camps were officially closed in the mid-1990s (Migration Policy Institute 2005). 3. Of all the Indo-Chinese refugees, only the first wave Vietnamese refugees came as “intact families”, while the second and third wave Indo-Chinese refugees mostly came as broken families in segmented migration. 4. When comparing population statistics with those from the 2000 Census, Lao Americans have experienced the least growth in the population. The Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong populations grew by 42, 34.3, and 39.6 percent, respectively, in that decade; the Lao population, by contrast, grew by just 17.1 percent (Hoeffel et al. 2012; Niedzwiecki and Duong 2004).

References Anderson, Wanni W. 2005. “Between necessity and choice: Rhode Island Lao American women.” In Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas., edited by W. W. Anderson and R. G. Lee, 194-226. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press. Asian American Institute 2005. Asian American Community Profiles. Chicago, IL: Asian American Center for Advancing Justice. Bankston III, C. L. 2000. Laotian Americans. Gale Encyclopedia of Multicultural America. Http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3405800099.html. Beiser, Morton, R. Jay Turner, and Soma Ganesan. 1989. “Catastrophic Stress and Factors Affecting its Consequences among Southeast Asian Refugees.” Social Science & Medicine 28 (3): 183-195. DeVoe, Pamela A. 1996. “Lao.” In Refugees in America in the 1990s: A reference handbook, edited by D. W. Haines, 259-278. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Erikson, Erik. 1968. Youth, Identity and Crisis. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Floriani, Carol Milardo. 1980. “Southeast Asian Refugees: Life in a Camp.” The American Journal of Nursing 80 (11): 2028-030.

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Hoeffel, E. M., S. Rastogi, and M. O. Kim, et al. 2012. “The Asian Population: 2010.” 2010 Census Briefs. Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau. Kelly, G. P. 1986. “Coping with America: Refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in the 1970s and 1980s.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 487: 138-149. Liu, M., and K. Geron. 2008. “Changing Neighborhood: Ethnic Enclaves and the Struggle for Social Justice.” Social Justice 35 (2): 18-35. Long, Lynellyn D. 1993. Ban Vinai, the Refugee Camp. New York: Columbia University Press. Migration Policy Institute. 2005. US in Focus: The Foreign-Born Hmong in the United States. Http: www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=281. Mollica, Richard F., Cui Xingjia, Keith McInnes, et al. 2002. “Sciencebased Policy for Psychosocial Interventions in Refugee Camps: A Cambodian Example.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 190 (3): 158-166. Moore, L. J., K.-O. Keopraseuth, and P. K. Leung, et al. 1997. “Laotian American Families.” In Working with Asian Americans: A Guide for Clinicians, edited by E. Lee, 136-152. New York, NY: Guilford Press. Muir, K. L. S. 1988. The Strongest Part of the Family: A Study of Lao Refugee Women in Columbus, Ohio. New York: AMS Press. Ngo, B. 2006. “Learning from the Margins: The Education of Southeast and South Asian Americans in Context.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 9 (1): 51-65. Ngo, B., and S. J. Lee. 2007. “Complicating the Image of Model Minority Success: A Review of Southeast Asian American Education.” Review of Educational Research 77 (4): 415-453. Niedzwiecki, M., and T. C. Duong, 2004. Southeast Asian Aerican Statistical Profile. Washington, DC: Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. Niedzwiecki, M., and T. C. Duong. 2009. Southeast Asian American Statistical Profile. Washington, DC: Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC). Niedzwiecki, M., and T. C. Duong. 2011. Southeast Asian American Statistical Profile. Washington, DC: Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC). Phapphayboun, T. 2003. Laotian Americans. Http://www.asiannation.org/laotian.shtml. Phommsasouvanh, B. 1997. “Social Context of Lao People in the United States.” In Unfamiliar Partners: Asian Parents and U.S. Public

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Schools, edited by B. Te, M. T. Cordova, W. Walker-Moffat, et al., 2428. Boston, MA: National Coalition of Advocates for Students. Portes, A., and M. Zhou, M. 1993. “The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and its Variants.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 530: 74-96. Portes, Alejandro, Patricia Fernández-Kelly, and William Haller. 2009. “The Adaptation of the Immigrant Second Generation in America: A Theoretical Overview and Recent Evidence.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35 (7): 1077-104. Portes, Alejandro and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 2001. Legacies : The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rumbaut, Rubén G. 2008. “The Coming of the Second Generation: Immigration and Ethnic Mobility in Southern California.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 620: 196-236. Schram, Tom. 1993. “Laotian Refugees in a Small-town School: Contexts and Encounters." Journal of Research in Rural Education 9 (3): 125136. Shah, B. 2007. “Being Young, Female and Laotian: Ethnicity as Social Capital at the Intersection of Gender, Generation, ‘Race’ and Age.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (1): 28-50. Trueba, H., L. Jacobs, and E. Kirton. 1990. Cultural Conflict and Adaptation: The Case of Hmong Children in American Society."Albany: State University of New York Press. Zhou, M., and Y. S. Xiong. 2005. “The Multifaceted American Experiences of the Children of Asian Immigrants: Lessons for Segmented Assimilation.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (6): 1119-152. 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN HMONG AMERICANS THREE DECADES LATER: TAKING A LOOK AT THE ON-GOING BARRIERS AND CHALLENGES YENG YANG1

Introduction After more than three decades in the United States, Hmong Americans are found in large concentrated communities (for examples, MinneapolisSaint Paul, Minnesota; Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, Wisconsin; Fresno, California) as well as in smaller communities (for examples, Dallas, Texas; Honolulu, Hawaii; Knoxville, Tennessee). According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there are now over 260,000 Hmong descendants living in the country, indicating a significant increase from the estimated 186,000 ethnic Hmong in 2000 (2000 U.S. Census). While Hmong residents continue to move and relocate across different states, the majority remain heavily concentrated in three states: California (91,000), Minnesota (66,000), and Wisconsin (49,000) (see Table 18-1). More than thirty years later, how have they adapted and acculturated in the United States? How have they negotiated their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness? Are there signs of cultural preservation or cultural loss? What factors have contributed to their socioeconomic status? The chapter begins with a brief discussion on the historical background that displaced many ethnic Hmong who became political refugees in the United States. Next is a discussion of the “model minority myth” which helps to explain how Hmong Americans are situated in multiple disadvantaged positions within the larger minority discourse. It then follows with a summary of their latest socioeconomic status. To further explore their current conditions beyond statistics, the chapter will examine the concerns and challenges facing the Hmong communities through examining some recent studies. At the end, it will suggest ways to improve the situation.

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Table 18-1: Top ten states of Hmong population in the United States Place United States

Hmong Population 260,076

California

91,224

Minnesota

66,181

Wisconsin

49,240

North Carolina

10,864

Michigan

5,924

Colorado

3,859

Georgia

3,623

Alaska

3,534

Oklahoma

3,369

Oregon

2,920

Source: 2010 U.S. Census

Historical background Hmong Americans in the United States are an ethnic group from Laos who came to the United States as political refugees in 1975. Originally from China, Hmong had lived in Laos since the nineteenth century. In searching for the origin of the Hmong Diaspora, Lee (2007, 21) explained that for Hmong and Mien, the results of DNA testing on the distribution of genetic markers affirms a southern China origin. Furthermore, the various references to the Chinese in their folklore, language, stories, traditions, funeral rituals, and religious practices further suggest an origin in China. After their movements to Laos, Hmong clans settled in small villages in the mountainous regions and practiced slash-and-burn agriculture which required frequent searches for fertile land (Vang, 2010). Such practice had resulted outsiders to label Hmong as “nomads”, “mountain dwellers” and “isolationists” who did not mix with other peoples” (Vang 2010, 20). Given the remoteness of the places they resided in, the primary way that Hmong were incorporated into the larger Lao, Vietnamese and Thai societies was through taxation. Vang has stressed that besides being taxed, Hmong existed primarily on the margins of these societies with their own set of rules, practices, and regulations within the boundary of their villages. Taxation under the French period had eventually forged new

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ethnic divisions in the twentieth century (Vang 2010, 21). Vang also points out that, “as a result of the Truman Doctrine committing American support in the fight against communism anywhere in the world, U.S. policy makers pushed for not only a neutral Laos but also one that was proAmericans” (2010, 24). Nevertheless, these efforts were never truly fulfilled in Laos, and as a result, the U.S. intelligence community changed its initial strategies that would involve counterinsurgency by the late 1950s. In particular, an agent with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), James William Lair, was the person that called for recruitment and training of the Hmong and other highland ethnic minorities (Vang 2010). Through this proposal emerged the connection of Lair and Major General Vang Pao, who served as a commander of the Second Military Region (MR II) in the Royal Lao Army (Vang 2010; Yang 2012). Vang (2010, 25) describes Vang Pao as follows: A self-described devout anti-communist, Vang Pao was interested in protecting northeastern Laos, where most people of Hmong ethnicity lived, from Communist domination. Because he had limited capacity as an ethnic minority officer, he also became frustrated with the performance of solders under his command.

Conscious of these limitations, Vang Pao eventually accepted the offers of Lair to arm Hmong and other ethnic minorities by the early 1960s. In return for his support, the United States agreed to give Vang Pao and his recruitments along with their families, military and humanitarian aid. It is important to note that what specifically took place between the negotiation of Lair and Vang Pao in 1961 has been contested to this day. In short, this secretive war in Laos was collaborated by the U.S. embassy in Laos and the CIA. As Vang (2010, 30) explained: The portrayal of American military activities in Laos as a “secret” suggests that no one knew about the situation. In actuality, it was a secret only because open, public discussions were not taking place. Indeed, “[congressional] committees were well aware of what was happening. Appropriations committees provided the funds and were briefed at regular intervals. Senators] were ‘very approving.’ They believed ‘it was a much cheaper and better way to fight a war in Southeast Asian than to commit American troops.’ The war effort was cheap because the vast majority of lives lost in Laos were not American, thus preventing the kind of war outrage that events in Vietnam generated among a segment of the U.S. population.

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At the war’s peak in 1969, it was estimated that at least 40,000 Hmong took part in the fighting (Chan 1994) and over 100,000 died as a result of the war, (many were killed during their flight to the refugee camps in Thailand, in addition to starvation and disease) and today, nearly every Hmong family has a tragic story to tell about the death of someone related to the war (Lee 2007). Nevertheless, an estimated figure of 200,000 Hmong had escaped from Laos and became refugees in Thailand (Lee 2007). In describing the last day at Long Tieng, the headquarters of the CIA in Laos, Fadiman (1997, 139) asserted that when the last transport plane left Long Tieng, “more than 10,000 Hmong were left on the airfield, fully expecting more aircraft to return”. Yet, when no aircraft returned for them, many stuck together with relatives and friends forming a long line carrying their children heading to the refugee camps in Thailand. In Xiong’s (n.d.) account, “for those that stayed behind, the communists came and attacked their villages, burned their houses, destroyed their crops, and killed off their livestock”. For some, the journey was as uncomplicated as a simple walk across the border within a few hours or days. Yet, for the majority, the journey to escape persecution meant many long harsh weeks or months in the jungle—along with challenges of having to stay unseen as to avoid detection and crossing the Mekong River before reaching the refugee camps. Citing Hamilton-Merritt (1993), Xiong (n.d.) provides details of the journey to Thailand: In their jungle paths to Thailand, many families had to abandon their weak and dying family members and relatives who could not walk ... one crying child could alert the enemy and case the deaths of all; therefore, when crossing a road or nearing an enemy village, those who had opium mixed small quantities of it with water and gave it to all children to put them to sleep. Those who had no opium placed their hands over their children’s mouths when they cried, so the enemy could not hear. Many children died in this way because the parents gave the children too much opium or covered their mouths too long. If a child died, parents dug a hole, piled dirt on top of the child, and walked on.

In the camps, the Hmong refugees endured harsh living conditions. In describing his account in the refugee camp, Vu Pao Tcha, a Hmong in Fresno, California recalled his experience: The conditions in Camp Ban Nam Yao ... were terrible, especially when it first opened. There were no toilets. People had no water to wash themselves. There was no clinic for the sick. There were no jobs, no land to grow food, and virtually no way of getting money to buy food. (Duffy, Harmon, Ranard, Thao, and Yang 2004, 20)

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In her memoir, Kao Kalia Yang (2008, 55) also detailed her refugee camp experience when she was a child: Ban Vinai refugee camp was a dirty place. Dust particles flew high in the hot wind. Young women held pieces of cloth over their noses when they walked in the noon sun to pick rations for their families in a patch of designated ground. The cotton prints of their tube skirts swooshed in the air. Young men narrowed their eyes and breathed through their noses, drawing the dirt in, eyeing the groups of women … Little boys and girls ran around as they did in every other part of the world where there is little to do and many people to look after them. The dust went into my throat, got into my nostrils. When I blew my nose on the inside corner of my shirt ... I saw black dirt on the fabric. Somehow the dust turned black inside my nose when in the air it looked orange … I couldn’t ask an adult why and how the dust changed its color inside my nose. Ban Vinai refugee camp was a place where kids kept secrets and adults stayed inside themselves.

In the camps, some families had to wait for years before they were granted permission to resettle in another country. Unlike the 150,000 Vietnamese who were immediately evacuated in April 1975, as “allowed by the United States under the ‘parole’ power of the U.S. Attorney General” (Chan 1994, 49), Hmong refugees did not receive that same privilege. During this period, only 3,000 Hmong refugees were granted asylum under the Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. Nevertheless, the Refugee Act of 1980 eventually opened the door for all refugees. By the mid-1990s, most Hmong refugees had resettled in the West, around 90 percent of them were relocated to the United States, and the rest to France, Canada, Australia, and other countries (Yau 2005; Yang 2013). Then in 2004, 15,000 Hmong refugees from Wat Tham Krabok Temple in Thailand were relocated to the United States. After three decades in the United States, Hmong culture, like any other culture, is multifaceted, fluid, dynamic, and continues to adapt and change. During the 1980s and 1990s, scholars who had written about the Hmong communities tended to do so through a “deficit” lens. It was not uncommon to find literature on Hmong culture describing it as “rural, preliterate, patriarchal, clannish, and traditional” (Lee 2005, 13). In doing so, Hmong culture was viewed as being static and frozen in time. As argued by Lee, the primary problem with this framework is that it does not recognise “Hmong culture has always been responsive to social conditions first in China, then Laos, and now the United States” (Lee 2005, 14). More recently, scholars have moved away from the “deficit oriented framework” to looking more at the social, economic, racial, and other structural barriers and challenges facing Hmong Americans. After three decades,

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what are the on-going concerns of the Hmong communities in the U.S.? What are their socioeconomic statuses when compared to other Asian ethnic groups and the U.S. population in general? Before turning to the socioeconomic status data, a discussion of the “model minority myth” and its impacts on Hmong Americans will be useful.

Model minority myth For Hmong Americans, the perpetuation of the “model minority myth” continues to silence their authentic voices, stories, and struggles. More often than not, Hmong Americans’ voices and struggles are hidden and concealed within the larger discourse of the model minority myth (Lee 2009). The “model minority” has often been characterized as, “a set of stereotypes that are composed of several positive qualities purportedly unique to all Asian Americans…generally characterizes this group as intelligent, academically conscientious, educational achieving, skilled in math and science, respectful, obedient, well-behaved, well-assimilated, self-disciplined, serious, hardworking…” (Wang and Shen 2008, 3).Since the 1960s, this concept has been exploited in a number of ways to exemplify the astounding accomplishments achieved by Chinese and Japanese Americans despite having to endure epic struggles, hardships, racism, and discrimination at the personal, legal, and institutional levels. Scholars have argued that the model minority myth has become a concept consumed by the U.S. society to sustain a racial hierarchy ideology by positioning Asian Americans above blacks, Latinos, and other non-whites. As such, when these minority groups could not achieve the American dream, blame is placed on their own lack of a hard work ethic, and personal or cultural values, and not the fault of America’s social and political structure that fails them (Osajima 1987; Lee 2009; Tu 2011). Lee and Ngo (2007) affirmed that the perpetuation of the model minority stereotype has been supported by much of the academic research on Asian American students—specifically those that have looked at the achievement and attainments between racial groups through aggregated data. While the aggregated data suggest that Asian Americans—as a group—are faring well in America, this is far from the reality. In fact, these statistics are misleading and offer an inaccurate representation of all the various ethnic groups that make up Asian Americans. While it may be true that some East Asian Americans succeed academically and appear to hold onto the stereotype, this does not mean that all East Asian Americans are performing well in all subjects, let alone, all Asian Americans (Zhao and Qiu 2009). As articulated by Samhita (2012), the use of aggregated

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data further marginalizes and silences genuine stories about the diverse lives of Asians in the United States. One of the primary concerns with this stereotype, which many scholars and advocates have pointed out, is that it lumps together the diverse ethnic groups that make up the term “Asian Americans”. And in doing so, this assertion ignores the vast differences of Asian Americans with regard to their ethnic identity, geographic locations, language, cultural and religious experiences. Furthermore, Asian Americans also differ in terms of socioeconomic background, generational status, and age and time of arrival to the United States. For example, some came as refugees while others as students, employees, or immigrants; some came with occupational and educational skills while others came with no deliberate plans; some are second or third generation U.S. born (Zhao and Qiu 2009), while others are first generation with parents who lack language, educational, and occupation skills. Disregarding these vast differences of Asian Americans is to further overlook and silence the harsh and compelling conditions experienced by the various Asian ethnic groups that are situated at the lowest layer of the U.S. socioeconomic hierarchy— such as those of some Southeast Asian Americans.

Hmong Americans’ positionality and the model minority myth Although Hmong Americans have been in the United States for more than three decades, many Americans are still unaware of who they are and why they are here. As said by Lee (2005, 13), “... I have been struck by how little many of the undergraduate students from Wisconsin know about why the Hmong are in the United States, although this state has the thirdlargest population of people of Hmong descent.” One of the underlying factors that contributes to this ignorance is that the stories, voices, and struggles of the Hmong and their history are virtually absent from U.S. mainstream society, education, or history textbooks, although to some extent, they are briefly covered in Asian American studies. Furthermore, their invisibility is in part because of the fact that their involvement during the Vietnam War was not revealed to the American public and media. Hence, most Americans knew what was going in Vietnam, but not in Laos—now known as the ‘secret war’ in Laos. The model minority myths further convey implicit and explicit messages within a political, structural, and cultural context (Osajima 1987; Lee 2009). Because of this, the essentialisation of the model minority stereotype has often been a sizzling topic for the political platform in the United States (Lee 2009, 11). Whether for good or for bad, the model

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minority stereotypes of Asian Americans are used to serve the interest of the dominant group (Lee 2009, 6). In Lee’s view, as Asian Americans are becoming Americanized, they for the most part, are never truly seen as “authentic Americans” in part because of the perpetual foreigner image— which tends to lead to the question, where are you really from? In addition to this particular image within the public discourse, Hmong Americans’ status as a stateless nation and as refugees further reinforces the idea that they are foreigners. On the one hand, Hmong Americans inhabit a unique position in which their needs and concerns are often hidden and concealed within the overall achievements of Asian Americans. On the other hand, they are often portrayed as low-life school dropouts, gangsters, and welfare dependents (Lee and Ngo 2007). However, the realities of their academic performance are far more complex than these two images (Lee and Ngo 2007, 416). Their realities often entail having to cope with a wide range of the social, economic, racial, and structural barriers and challenges within the home, community, and school contexts. In a more profound analysis of Hmong communities, Vang (2010, 2) states that: Hmong community formation in the United States has been a multifaceted process utilizing both existing Hmong social-organization strategies and new resources available to them in the host country. Consequently, multiple layers of community building exist. These layers range from familial to extended kinship groups to formal institutions such as nonprofits and churches. The layers are complex because newly formed communities facilitate the invention of new identities while simultaneously generating intra-ethnic group tensions on multiple scales.

As argued by the above scholars, these barriers and challenges are interconnected in complex, multi-layered, and multifaceted ways. Below is a summary of their socioeconomic status.

Socioeconomic status at a glance According to a compiled report by the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice (2011), aggregated data of Asian Americans’ academic achievement shows that they hold the highest proportion of college graduates with bachelor’s degrees. However, a breakdown among ethnic groups indicates that only a very small amount (14 percent) of Hmong Americans received such degrees, as compared to Taiwanese (the highest, at 73 percent), Indians (second highest, at 68 percent), Malaysians (at 57 percent), Indonesians and Bangladeshis (at 47 percent) (see Table 18-2).

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Table 18-2: Educational attainment of Asian group, United States (2007-2009) Groups

Bachelor’s degree

High school

Taiwanese 73% 95% Indian 68% 91% Malaysian 57% 93% Sri Lankan 56% 93% Pakistani 55% 87% Korean 52% 91% Chinese (excluding Taiwanese) 50% 82% Bangladeshi 47% 81% Indonesian 47% 94% Japanese 46% 94% Filipino 46% 92% Thai 42% 84% Vietnamese 27% 72% Hmong 14% 61% Cambodian 14% 62% Laotian 12% 66% All Americans 42% 84% Source: U.S. Census Bureau , 2007-2009 American Community Survey, 3-Year Estimates.  Annual income per-capita for Hmong Americans illustrates that they are situated at the very bottom of the U.S. economic ladder, making about $11,000, whereas Taiwanese and Indians make $38,000 and $36,000 respectively (see Table 18-3).

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Table 18-3: Per capita income of Asian groups, United States (20072009) Groups

Income

Taiwanese $38,312 Indian $36,533 Malaysian $33,480 Sri Lankan $32,480 Japanese $31,831 Chinese (excluding Taiwanese) $30,061 Korean $26,118 Filipino $25,799 Indonesian $25,729 Pakistani $24,663 Thai $21,708 Vietnamese $21,542 Bangladeshi $16,784 Laotian $16,585 Cambodian $15,940 Hmong $10,949 All Americans $27,100 Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007-2009 American Community Survey, 3-Year Estimates. The poverty rate among all Asian Americans was at 11 percent, indicating an overall low poverty rate for Asian Americans. However, disaggregated data shows a 26 percent poverty rate for Hmong Americans—indicating that they have one of the highest poverty rates across all Asian ethnic groups in the United States (see Table 18-4). It is important to note that while poverty is still prevalent within Hmong American communities, the poverty rates for the group have actually decreased from 35 percent since 2000. Finally, the disaggregated data in employment shows that the majority of Hmong Americans are employed in construction, extraction, production, transportation, and sales and clerk occupations, while 64 percent Indians and 49 percent Japanese are in management and professional occupations (see Fig. 18-1). The data above helps provide some general contexts in understanding the realities and conditions of many Hmong Americans in the United States. After three decades in the country, why do the majority of Hmong

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Americans continue to struggle at the very bottom of the U.S. socioeconomic ladder—as indicated by the above data? Turning to recent scholarly studies will help provide a more concrete context to analyse why Hmong Americans have to continue to struggle in the United States. Although there have been a growing amount of scholarly works looking at the educational attainments and challenges of Hmong students, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss all of them. As such, the selected highlights below are done with the intent to elucidate the most fundamental and prevalent on-going concerns and challenges facing Hmong students and their communities. Table 18-4: Poverty rates among Asian groups, United States (20072009) Groups Filipino

Poverty rate 6%

Indian

8%

Japanese

8%

Sri Lankan

9%

Malaysian

10%

Chinese (except Taiwanese)

12%

Indonesian

12%

Taiwanese

12%

Korean

13%

Laotian

13%

Thai

14%

Vietnamese

14%

Pakistani

15%

Cambodian

18%

Bangladeshi

20%

Hmong

26%

All Americans

14%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007-2009 American Community Survey, 3-Year Estimates.

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Figure 18-1: Occupations of Asian groups, United States (2007-2009) 70% 60% 50%

Labor Intensive

40%

Management & Profesional

30%

Sales & Office

20%

Service

10% 0% Indian JapaneseFilipino Hmong Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2007-2009 American Community Survey, 3Year Estimates.

On-going concerns and challenges As recent research has shown, Hmong communities continue to face a wide range of social, economic, racial, and structural barriers and challenges in their homes, communities, and schools (Vang, 2005; T. Yang 2008; Wright and Boun 2011), despite some progress has been achieved in the last three decades (Xiong 2010; Vang 2010; Pabst 2013;Yang 2013). A major concern expressed by recent studies is that the majority of school teachers of Hmong American and other Southeast Asian American students have limited or no knowledge of Southeast Asian history and culture (Wright and Boun 2011). For many of these students, dealing with issues of disengagement, resentment, and resistance in schooling has been a constant daily battle. Hmong students often come from underserved K12 schools and from homes where their parents lack English proficiency or have low levels of formal education. In addition to attending underserved K-12, Hmong children further encountered a number of barriers and challenges within their schools and communities, including racial

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profiling, racial discrimination, and “alcohol, tobacco and drug abuse, gang violence, teen pregnancy, dropouts, and welfare dependency” (Wright and Boun 2011, 72). As the second and third generation Hmong American children are rapidly losing the Hmong language (T. Yang 2008), Hmong parents have expressed the desire to maintain the language because they want their children to be able to speak the language with the elders, and to pass the language onto the next generation. Outside the home environment, Hmong parents see educators and school administrators as not supportive enough, as the education system has not been encouraging the use of home languages. In T. Yang’s (2008, 14) observation: There is a need for the younger Hmong generation to learn the Hmong language for the purpose of academic success and connecting with the elder generation who cannot converse with them in English. Philosophical issues of this nature must be addressed in mainstream society; it must be made widely known that children’s maintenance of their Hmong language can be useful in facilitating family communication, improving job opportunities, and assuring a bright future.

In addition to these educational, cultural, racial, and structural barriers and challenges, Hmong students are often found to be responsible for “translating” the needs for their family (Lee 2001; Moua 2007). As previously mentioned, since the parents of these students often lack proficiency in English, the students often have to take responsibility for “interpreting for their parents, driving their parents to appointments, performing various household chores, and even working to help support the family” (Moua 2007, 512). Generally, girls are the ones that have to deal with various responsibilities, such as cooking, cleaning, and taking care of younger siblings. These obligations and responsibilities will potentially interfere with the students’ education. Furthermore, there is always family pressure to do well in school, “to take care of and be a role model for younger siblings, assist with the financial support of family members, stay close to home…” (Moua 2007, 228). Hmong students and parents often felt disempowered due to the exclusion of their culture and language in school, pedagogical assumptions in the classroom, and inappropriate instructions that do not address the needs of Hmong students (Moua, 2007). In a research that examines the high poverty rate of Hmong Americans, Xiong (2013) notes that while kinship and ethnic networks are important for social and economic support for Hmong American families, many families actually lack the sufficient entrepreneurial or professional skills to participate and compete in the

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mainstream labour market—due to their lack-of-know-how and agrarian background. He also notes that the absence of well-developed ethnic enclaves further contributes to their poverty; as there is no formal or informal entrepreneurial enclave economy to turn to for employment. However, this claim is questionable contingent upon one’s definition of what is an ethnic enclave. In short, Xiong views that academic achievement alone does not guarantee success—that is, being academically successful does not guarantee a stable career. What is also significant is the right kind of “social capital”. For Xiong (2013, 96), social capital is defined as, the “actual or potential resources linked to possession of durable networks of social relationships that can serve positive ends, such as providing access to employment and rewards in the marketplace”. Without the appropriate cohesive social networks that facilitate employment, Hmong Americans have often been denied access and opportunities in academic institutions and in the labour market. In Xiong’s (2013, 96) assessment: It is the processes of social closure that operate in the state’s public schools as well as in the primary labour market that create and sustain systems of racial and class stratification in American society. Class, gender, and racial stratification systems in these key institutions reproduce conditions that exacerbate and keep many Hmong American families in poverty.

Despite these hardships found in Hmong American communities, Xiong, like other scholars (Vang 2010; Her 2012; Yang 2012, 2013), concurs that many members of Hmong communities have made great strides—as attested through their ability to own homes and the increasing number of college and graduate students in Hmong American families.

An optimistic prospective for Hmong Americans Altogether, the above account of some of the recent studies provides a clearer context to comprehend Hmong Americans’ socioeconomic status. The literature analyses some of the fundamental barriers and challenges confronting Hmong Americans and their communities in the United States, and explains the complexities and realities in which Hmong Americans have to negotiate and navigate their agency not just within their home, community, and school, but also from the mainstream society. Lee (2005) has argued that having settled in the United States for the past three decades, Hmong Americans are well aware of how they have been portrayed and characterized in the larger society. To provide a similar perspective, Xiong (2013, 92) states, “[L]abeled as hill tribes, denounced

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as welfare recipients, and exoticized by the majority society and mainstream media, Hmong American families and their children have come to be keenly aware of the social and economic consequences of receiving public assistance”. Aside from these stereotypes, barriers, and challenges, a large number of Hmong Americans have become, academically, politically, and economically successful and made tremendous strides in the United States. With an optimistic outlook, Her (2012, 43) views that Hmong Americans will continue to pursue meanings for their lives outside the boundary of their communities. In Her’s observation: In light of these changes, “Hmong” no longer connotes, as it did for much of its history, a people circumscribed by geography or bounded by cultural absolutes. Signifying the name of a group, the power, elusiveness, and appeal of this world lie in its complex layers of history. While the origin of the term “Hmong” remains a source of disagreement, its contemporary American meaning has been broaden with each reinterpretation.

Other scholars have asserted that having been a minority with traits of resiliency, adaptability, and flexibility since their movement from China to Southeast Asia, this “minority” attributes will allow Hmong Americans to respond and adapt to any challenges that lie on the foreseeable horizon (Yang 2013; Lee 2005). In her reflection, Vang (2010, 160-161) concludes genuinely regarding the progress of Hmong Americans after three decades in the United States: If one looks back to where the Hmong were in 1975 when the first refugees arrived in the United States and compares this with the vibrant community that exists today, one finds that notwithstanding continuing poverty and discrimination, the American Hmong community has made great strides…One indisputable fact is that Hmong experiences have contributed to the re-creating and transforming of societies in which they now live…Those who know them prior to their migration to western nations feared that they would not survive in these technologically advanced environments. Some event predicted their extinction. However, if the last quarter of the twentieth century tells anything about the Hmong people’s ability to adapt and create meaningful communities, those fears may now be put to rest.

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Conclusion Above all else, given the wide range of social, economic, racial, and structural challenges described above, what are the practical ways to help minority and marginalized youth such as those of Hmong Americans in the United States? To conclude this chapter, I will provide some recommendations that educators and policy-makers may employ to better assist and support Hmong American students, parents, and communities: (1) Within the Hmong diaspora, the Hmong language has been the primary unit that helps Hmong families function and unite. Given the concerns expressed by Hmong parents and their children regarding the gradual loss of the Hmong language as shown in the literature, it is especially significant to have Hmong language schools and/or other bilingual education programs in the United States to help promote and sustain the language. Promoting to maintain and speak the home language can be something that all schools can do to help minority students feel valued and accepted within the school environment. (2) The above discussion indicates that after three decades in the United States, many teachers and administrators, let alone the general population in the United States, still have very little or no knowledge of the history and culture of Southeast Asian American students. As such, it is vital to provide and update educators and school administrators with professional development and resources with which they can connect to and learn about Southeast Asian Americans’ history and culture, as well as the internal and external factors impacting the students, their families and communities. Incorporating the voices, stories, and struggles of Hmong Americans and other marginalized ethnic groups into U.S. mainstream education and history textbooks can be one way to call for validation and recognition. (3) The above research has indicated the pitfalls of using aggregated data and how misleading these data can be. As such, schools, states, and the federal government should collect and report on disaggregated data for different Asian American ethnic groups to help clarify the differences and disparities among these ethnic groups.

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The author (second from right) with his first-cousins when he was five years old in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp before departing to the United states.

The author (right) with his cousin, Xou, standing in front of a dwelling in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp.

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The author’s father (front-center with thumb up) with his brothers and cousins.

Note 1. The author is a member of the Hmong refugee diaspora in the United States. The photos attached to this chapter provide glimpses of the faces of Hmong refugees during the 1970s-1990s in Ban Vinai refugee camp.

References Asian American Center for Advancing Justice. 2011. “A Community of Contrasts: Asian Americans in the United States: 2011.” Http://www.advancingjustice.org/pdf/Community_of_Contrast.pdf. Chan, S. 1994. Hmong Means Free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Duffy, J., R. Harmon, D. Ranard, B. Thao, and K. Yang. 2004. “The Hmong: An Introduction to their History and Culture.” Center for Applied Linguistics. Fadiman, A. 1997. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Hamilton-Merritt, J. 1993. Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Her, V. K. 2012. “Searching for Sources of Hmong Identity in Multicultural America.” In Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens, edited by V. K. Her and M. L. Buley-Meissner, 31-46. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press. Lee, G. Y. 2007. “Diaspora and the Predicament of Origins: Interrogating Hmong Postcolonial History and Identity.” Hmong Studies Journal 8: 1-25. Lee, S. J. 2001. “More than ‘Model Minorities’ or ‘Delinquents’: A look at Hmong American High School Students.” Harvard Educational Review 71 (3): 505-528. —. 2005. Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. New York: Teachers College Press. —. 2009. Unraveling the Model Minority Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. New York: Teachers College Press. Lee, S. J., and B. Ngo. 2007. “Complicating the Image of Model Minority Success: A Review of Southeast Asian American Education.” Review of Educational Research 77 (4): 415-453. Moua, M. 2007. An Investigation of Factors Impacting Hmong Students’ Completion of a Four-year Postsecondary Degree. Unpublished doctorate dissertation, California State University, Fresno and University of California, Davis. Osajima, K. 1987. “Asian Americans as the Model Minority: An Analysis of the Popular Press Image in the 1960s and 1980s.” In Reflections on Shattered Windows: Promises and Prospects for Asian Americans Studies, edited by G. Y. Okihiro, S. Hune, A. A. Hansen, and J. M. Lie, 166-174. Pullman: Washington State University Press. Pabst, G. 2013. “Report Shows Growth in Hmong Community.” Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel. Http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/report-shows-growth-inhmong-community-a388pb6-185823661.html Samhita, M. 2012. “Five Ways the Myth of the ‘Model Minority’ Hurts All of Us.” Feministing. Http://feministing.com/2012/06/26/five-ways-themyth-of-the-model-minority-hurts-us/. Tu, D. L. 2011. “Model Minority.” In Encyclopedia of Asian American Studies, edited by J. H. X. Lee and K. M. Nadeau, 69-71. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. Vang, C. T. 2005. “Hmong American K–12 Students and the Academic Skills Needed for a College Education: A Review of the Existing

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Literature and Suggestions for Future Research.” Hmong Studies Journal 5: 1-31. Vang, Y. V. 2010. Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Wang, W. Y., and C. F. Shen. 2008. “Model Minority Myth.” In Encyclopedia of Counseling, edited by F. Leong, 1212-215. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications. Wright, W. E., and S. Boun. 2011. “Southeast Asian American Education 35 Years after Initial Resettlement: Research Report and Policy Recommendation.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement 6: 1-91. Xiong, M. No date. “Hmong Journey to Freedom.” Http://www.hmongstudies.org/HmongJourneyforFreedom.html. Xiong, Y. S. 2010. “Hmong Americans’ Educational Attainment: Recent Changes and Remaining Challenges.” Hmong Studies Journal 13: 118. —. 2013. “An Analysis of Poverty in Hmong American Communities.” In Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-first Century, edited by M. E. Pfeifer, M. Chiu, and K. Yang, 66-105. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yang, K. 2012. “Forging New Paths, Confronting New Challenges: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-first Century.” In Hmong and American: From Refugees to Citizens, edited by V. K. Her and M. L. Buley-Meissner, 161-173. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press. —. 2013. “The American Experience of the Hmong: A Historical Review.” In Diversity in Diaspora: Hmong Americans in the Twenty-first Century, edited by M. E. Pfeifer, M. Chiu, and K. Yang, 3-53. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yang, K. K. 2008. The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Yang, T. 2008. “Hmong Parents’ Critical Reflections on their Children’s Heritage Language Maintenance.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement 3: 1-18. Yau, J. 2005. The Foreign-born Hmong in the United States. Migration Policy Institute. Http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=281. Zhao, Y., and W. Qiu. 2009. “How Good are the Asians? Refuting Four Myths about Asian-American Academic Achievement.” Phi Delta Kappan 90: 38-344.

PART V: SINGAPORE: NEW IMMIGRANTS AND RETURN MIGRATION

CHAPTER NINETEEN INTRODUCTION: IMMIGRATION, EMIGRATION, AND RETURN MIGRATION IN SINGAPORE ELAINE LYNN-EE HO

Migration trends in Singapore Singapore is known as a melting pot of immigrant communities and cultures that have converged in the city-state historically under colonial governance. When it gained independence in 1965 (after a brief merger with the Federation of Malaya from 1963-1965), the country inherited a mosaic of plural cultures as well as the vestige of racial tensions that it managed through an ideology of state-sponsored multiculturalism. Enforcing a comprehensive multicultural policy environment has made Singapore an exemplar of multicultural relations in the last forty decades, producing a stable social environment for foreign investors to promote economic growth. Globalisation, however, posed new challenges for Singaporean economic development from the 1990s onwards. Seeing the need for Singapore to reinvent itself, the political elites forwarded a new immigration strategy encouraging highly skilled “foreign talent” (in local parlance) to work and settle in Singapore. At the same time, companies were allowed to bring in lowly skilled foreign workers on temporary immigration visas. This dual-pronged approach has characterised Singaporean immigration and economic development, sharpening not only class divisions but also creating an even more diverse cultural environment now posing distinct challenges to nation-building in Singapore. Population statistics in 2013 show that of the resident Singaporean population (i.e., Singapore citizens and permanent residents) 74.2 percent are Chinese, 13.3 percent are Malays, 9.1 percent are Indians, and 3.3 percent are categorised as “Others” (SingStat 2013). Comparatively, the ethnic composition of the citizen population in Singapore is as follows:

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76.2 percent are Chinese, 15 percent are Malays, 7.4 percent are Indians and 1.4 percent is categorised as “Others”. These statistics only account for ethnic representation amongst citizens and permanent residents, and the resident population data excludes those who have been away from Singapore for a continuous period of six months or longer. Official data on the ethnic representation of the overall new immigrant population, including those on temporary visas, was not available at the time of writing. However, media reports in the national newspaper suggest that new immigration in Singapore is primarily from India and China (The Straits Times 2012). Notwithstanding the significance of immigration trends in Singapore, emigration trends are picking up in the country as well with as many as 200,000 Singaporeans found living overseas in 2011 (National and Population Talent Division, 2012). In absolute numbers that may seem meagre compared to the larger diasporas of countries like China and India, but to a city-state with less than 3.3 million citizens, the outflow of young and educated Singaporeans, and whether they will return to Singapore, have become a matter of concern for the political leadership. Alongside historical immigration and new immigration flows, the contemporary emigration trends described above present further complexities for Singaporean society as it balances globalisation imperatives with nationbuilding priorities.

Stratification of foreign labour in Singapore Immigration in Singapore is characterized by socio-economic divisions, which Yeoh (2006) attributes to the bifurcation of foreign labour policies that streams foreigners into either highly skilled or lowly skilled work. Whilst highly skilled foreign labour is directed at catapulting Singapore into the echelon of global city status, their lowly skilled counterparts are channelled into menial jobs found undesirable by Singaporean workers. The nature of work performed by foreigners determines the type of residency, employment, and social rights they are entitled to in Singapore. Lowly skilled workers on work permits, for example, are contractually tied to the employer sponsoring the worker’s visa and it is mandatory for the employee to stay in accommodation arranged by the employers. Of the lowly skilled workers, a sizeable proportion is female foreign domestic workers employed in Singaporean households. These foreign domestic workers take on the household and caring duties of Singaporean women who work full-time (Yeoh et al. 2000).

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However, the nature of their employment in domestic spaces, isolated from the public eye, meant that their employment rights received limited legal protection or state regulation. Growing incidents of abuse or withheld wages, coupled with the visibility brought by civil society activism, has prompted the Singaporean state to enforce policies for improving their working conditions, including making rest days mandatory.

Multiculturalism and new immigration complexities Apart from the stratification of skills noticeable in Singapore’s foreign labour policy, another (unanticipated) outcome of the state’s proimmigration stance is becoming apparent in the form of new social tensions driven by ethnicity and nationality differences. Multiculturalism (or multiracialism, which is the official term) describes the official state approach towards managing inter-ethnic relationships since Singapore gained independence in 1965. In popular parlance it is referred to as the “CMIO model”, referring to the main ethnic groups of Chinese, Malay, and Indians in Singapore, and another catch-all category known as “Others” (under which the Eurasians of mixed European and Asian descent are classified). Singapore’s CMIO model influences a range of policies such as the bilingual education system and also public housing home ownership and electoral representation schemes. The effectiveness of the CMIO model in ensuring inter-ethnic equality has been widely debated by scholars (e.g., Purushotam 1997; Sin 2002; Tan 2005). However, new immigration from China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere is posing another set of challenges to the CMIO model, which prescribes how relationships between ethnic groups should be regulated but does not account for differences within ethnic groups. Ho’s (2006) qualitative study of attitudes expressed by Singaporeans towards emigration and immigration found that they expressed strong reservations about the “foreign talent” strategy mooted by the Singaporean state then as a means of accelerating economic growth. Her study also found their resentment towards the state’s pro-immigration policy was most directed towards the new immigrants from China and India, rather than the Western expatriate prototype. In spite of shared ethnic backgrounds, a “cultural clash” (Ho 2006, 396) between the new Asian immigrants and Singaporeans was perceptible. Nearly a decade later, such intra-ethnic tensions between Singaporeans and the new Asian immigrants have become exacerbated as new immigration grows in volume and pace in Singapore. The chapter by Jason

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Lim (this volume) examines the social conflicts arising from differentiated Chinese identities asserted by Singaporean Chinese compared to the new immigrants from mainland China. Lim situates his analysis in the nationbuilding history of Singapore and its transnational relationships with China, Taiwan and Hong Kong (Surydinata 1997). His chapter highlights the intertwining of nation-building processes and ethnicity claims in Singapore. As part of constructing a newly independent nation-state in Singapore, Chinese identity has been downplayed in official policy and rhetoric in order to accommodate its diverse ethnic groups and to assert the country’s independence from China. On the other hand, Lim points out that the nation-building project in China has suppressed ethnic difference in order to assert Han Chinese supremacy. These distinctive nationbuilding histories and processes in turn shape the mind-sets of their respective nationals towards other ethnic groups. Lim’s chapter argues that Singaporean Chinese regard the Chinese immigrants from China as “arrogant and rude, [lacking] understanding of local (including Singapore Chinese) norms, [and] competition for jobs and schooling places”. Setting itself apart from other countries with a predominant ethnic group, Singapore adopts the English language as its lingua franca. This presents a challenge for Mandarin speakers from China who thought that Singapore would have a majority population speaking the same language as them. Whereas the Chinese settlers who came to Singapore in its pre-independence days were mainly from southern China, the new immigrants from China originate from a variety of regions thus bringing with them distinctive food cultures and regional dialects. This differentiates them from the Singaporean Chinese who have acquired not only localised but also hybrid Chinese identities as part of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. Intra-ethnic racism, however, cuts both ways as new immigrants from China also assert their cultural superiority to the Singaporean Chinese during social interactions and through social media.

Perceived cultural similarities and dissimilarities While Singaporeans express discriminating attitudes towards the mainland Chinese, co-ethnics from the neighbouring country of Malaysia are regarded as more culturally similar to Singapore’s majority Chinese population. This is suggested in Koh Sin Yee’s chapter (this volume) on second-generation Malaysian Chinese living in Singapore. Such cultural similarity or dissimilarity is marked for example by accent, food preferences, and mannerisms. Singapore has also had longstanding

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preferential entry policies for Malaysians to study and work across the border. Moreover, second-generation Malaysian Chinese grew up in Singapore and are regarded by Singaporeans as sufficiently socialised into Singaporean identity and society. Male second-generation permanent residents are obligated to fulfil conscription duties in Singapore as well, which serves as a rite of passage and also means that in the eyes of the Singaporean public they have earned the right to remain in the country. Koh’s chapter, however, also draws out the ambivalence of belonging as experienced by second-generation migrants who, on the one hand, exhibit a diasporic consciousness towards their country of origin (i.e., Malaysia), and on the other hand, acknowledge a mixed sense of belonging towards the host country (i.e., Singapore). Such ambivalence is not limited to migrants’ personal imaginaries of home and homeland, but manifests materially as the identity of citizen or permanent resident is inscribed on documentation that migrants have to produce at border control or when being assessed for their eligibility to benefit from government programs. Such material documents mark the nuances of national belonging and who is deemed as a rightful claimant for citizenship rights and privileges. Socially, migrants—especially diasporic descendants who have grown up in a second country (Ho 2013a)—are also reminded of how they are perceived as “the stranger from within” by others as well as themselves during their interactions with family members and friends whose identities are situated in only one nation-state. Koh’s chapter further reminds us that retaining citizenship status in the country of origin leaves the door open for return migration. In fact Malaysia is advancing policy initiatives aimed at capturing the human capital embodied by the Malaysian diaspora, reflecting the country’s concern about emigration and brain drain as well as the potential presented by return migration for accelerating Malaysia’s economic development. Such diaspora strategies, targeted at nationals abroad, should be contextualized in a wider race for global talent (Ho 2011a), which is being similarly implemented in Singapore in a bid to enhance its national competitiveness internationally.

New challenges posed by emigration and “return” Singaporean emigration is regarded as a means of propelling Singapore’s globalisation drive (Yeoh and Willis 1999) in parallel with the pro-immigration policy. Young Singaporeans are encouraged to go abroad and reap the global exposure that would benefit Singapore’s economic development. They in turn see it as a means of acquiring the educational

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qualifications, professional experience, and transnational dispositions that would be advantageous in the workplace (Ho 2011b; Lin 2012; Pluss 2013). But the emigration of Singaporeans is also of concern to the Singaporean political leadership because of its implications for Singapore’s future demographic composition, labour force regeneration and political leadership renewal. The Overseas Singaporean Unit (OSU) was established in 2006 under the Prime Minister’s Office and tasked with leading and coordinating the work done by different government agencies to reach out to the Singaporean diaspora. The diaspora strategies enacted by the Singaporean state range from citizenship legislative changes to bureaucratic initiatives and government investment in organising activities for overseas Singaporeans (Ho 2013b). The Singaporean state’s call for its nationals to globalise in order to keep Singapore internationally competitive may prove to be a doubleedged sword. The family unit situated in Singapore is a strong pull factor drawing overseas Singaporeans back to Singapore (Ho 2008). But Ho and Lin (this volume) also argue that such return trajectories should be analysed with a wider geographical framing in view. Their research, conducted with overseas Singaporeans in the United Kindom and the United States, show that return migration decisions entail complex identity and familial negotiations as well as balancing those with career and lifestyle aspirations. After calibrating these factors, the return trajectory may in fact lead migrants to frame their “return” migration decisions in a wider geographical imaginary than to the country of emigration. Recognizing the limited job choices they may have in Singapore, these overseas Singaporeans see themselves returning to work in dynamic Asian economies. This expands their career options while still allowing them to benefit from geographical proximity to family members in Singapore. Such overseas Singaporeans further stress the cultural advantage they have working in Asia compared to Europe or North America. While they see the benefits of an employment stint in Europe or North America, they also recognize the potential barriers to their career progression because they are foreigners of Asian ethnicity (Ho 2011b). However, Ho and Lin’s chapter also suggest that their geographical interpretation of “Asia” is in fact limited to Chinese-speaking countries such as Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in East Asia. Ho and Lin’s chapter further takes into account migrants’ intentions for deferring return or choosing not to return at all, which is revealing of their perceptions towards the country of anticipated return. In the Singaporean case, overseas Singaporeans highlight not only workplace attitudes that are less accommodating towards returnees, especially junior employees, but

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also the competition posed by “foreign” talent as a result of the state’s proimmigration policy in earlier years. The link between foreign immigration trends, and national emigration and return migration is thus made clear. While migration researchers tend to look at these migration trends as standalone processes, the situation in Singapore suggests that perceptions of unequal treatment towards nationals in favour of foreigners can precipitate emigration as a means of accruing the global networks and exposure valued in Singapore. In the longer term, return migration decision-making is also mediated by considerations over the social position of nationals relative to immigrant populations, alongside other concerns such as care for ageing parents and young children, and work opportunities.

Looking forward In sum, Singapore today is not only a society with immigrant histories but is also characterised by new immigrant inflows, emigrant outflows and the possibility of return migration. Their interplay in the migration landscape of Singapore poses new challenges for the nation-building project. Where the CMIO model had previously guided the management of compartmentalized inter-ethnic relationships in Singapore, recent immigration from China and India challenge Singaporeans’ hegemonic ethnic and national identities. This results in new forms of intra-ethnic racism despite shared Chinese or Indian ethnicity alongside inter-ethnic racism that continues to be observable in Singapore. Whether the CMIO model is equipped to address these new social divisions remains to be seen. But the Singaporean political leadership is cognizant of the delicate balance to be maintained in catering to the new settlers while also accommodating the demands of the Singaporean citizenry. For example, a quota for Singaporean permanent resident (SPR) households—in addition to the ethnic quota—is now in place to ensure SPRs are not over-represented in the flat ownership of a public housing estate (Housing and Development Board 2013). In addition, a new regulation introduced in 2013 restricts SPR households from purchasing public housing until three years after they have obtained their permanent residency status (Channel News Asia 2013). These policy changes reflect the political leadership’s swift response towards immigration tensions in Singapore. However, the potential discomforts posed by the return migration of overseas Singaporeans who have been socialised into foreign working cultures, liberal attitudes and cosmopolitan lifestyles, is an issue that could raise new nation-building challenges in the near future.

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As a city-state measuring less than 720 square kilometres, Singapore’s global footprint is arguably far larger than its physical size. Its global influence is in no small way derived from the diverse migration inflows and outflows that lubricate its economic development and unique role as a cultural bridge between Asia and the rest of the world. Singapore’s efficacious policymaking directed at countering the tensions posed by new immigration to nation building, whilst retaining an emphasis on global openness, presents useful lessons for other societies grappling with similar challenges. Nonetheless, even as policies fixes evolve, migration continues apace and generates new complexities; it remains to be seen whether Singaporean policymakers and society can keep up with such change.

References Channel News Asia. 2013. “New Measures to Cool HDB Resale Market”, 27 August. Http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/newmeasures-to-cool-hdb/791988.html. Ho, E. L. E. 2006. “Negotiating Citizenship and Belonging in a Transnational World: Singapore, a Cosmopolis.” Social and Cultural Geography 7 (3): 385-401. —. 2008. “‘Flexible Citizenship’ or Familial Ties That Bind? Singaporean Transmigrants in London.” International Migration 46 (4): 146-175. —. 2011a. “‘Claiming’ the Diaspora: Sending State Strategies, Elite Mobility and the Spatialities of Citizenship.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (6): 757-772. —. 2011b. “Identity Politics and Cultural Asymmetries: Singaporean Transmigrants ‘Fashioning’ Cosmopolitanism’.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (5): 729-746. —. 2013a. “‘Refugee’ or ‘Returnee’? The Ethnic Geopolitics of Diasporic Resettlement in China and Intergenerational Change.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (4): 599-611. —. 2013b. “The Singaporean Diaspora Landscape.” In Changing Landscapes of Singapore: Old Tensions, New Discoveries, edited by E. L. E. Ho, C. Y. Woon, and K. Ramdas, 158-176. Singapore: NUS Press. Housing and Development Board. 2013. “Ethnic Integration Policy & SPR Quota.” Http://www.hdb.gov.sg/fi10/fi10322p.nsf/w/SellFlatEthnic IntegrationPolicy_EIP. Lin, W. 2012. “Beyond Flexible Citizenship: Towards a Study of Many Chinese Transnationalisms.” Geoforum 43 (1): 137-146.

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National Population and Talent Division. 2012. Population in Brief. Http://www.population.sg/population-in-brief/2012/files/population-inbrief-2012.pdf. Pluss, C. 2013. “Chinese Migrants in New York: Explaining Inequalities with Transnational Positions and Capital Conversions in Transnational Spaces.” International Sociology 28 (1): 12-28. Purushotam, N. 1997. Negotiating Language, Constructing Race: Disciplining Difference in Singapore. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co. Singstat. 2013. Population and Population Structures. Http://www.singstat.gov.sg/statistics/latest_data.html#15. Sin, C. H. 2002. “The Quest for a Balanced Ethnic Mix: Singapore’s Ethnic Quota Policy Examined.” Urban Studies 39 (8): 1347-374. Surydinata, L. 1997. Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Tan, E. K. B. 2005. “Multiracialism Engineered: The Limits of Electoral and Spatial Integration in Singapore.” Ethnopolitics 4 (4): 413-428. The Straits Times. 2012. The Chinese Immigration Challenge”, 3 June. Yeoh, B. S. A. 2006. Bifurcated Labour: The Unequal Incorporation of transmigrants in Singapore. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 97: 26-37. Yeoh, B. S. A., and K. Willis. 1999. “‘Heart’ and ‘wing’, Nation and Diaspora: Gendered Discourses in Singapore’s Regionalisation Process.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 6 (4): 355-372. Yeoh, B., S. Huang, and K. Willis. 2000. “Global Cities, Transnational Flows and Gender Dimensions: The View from Singapore.” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 91: 147-158.

CHAPTER TWENTY THE DESIRABILITY OF ASIA? LOGICS AND GEOGRAPHIES OF “RETURN” MIGRATION AMONGST SINGAPOREAN TRANSMIGRANTS IN DIASPORA ELAINE LYNN-EE HO AND LIN WEIQIANG

Introduction Return migration is regarded conventionally as the “movement of emigrants back to their homelands to resettle” (Gmelch 1980, 136, cited in Jeffery and Murison 2011, 131). Recent writings on return migration have, however, underlined the ambivalent nature of “return” and productive insights can be drawn when discourses of return are viewed alongside insights gleaned from transnationalism studies. This chapter considers the case of Singaporean transnational migrants (transmigrants) and their attitudes towards the possibility of “returning” to Singapore. We draw on two qualitative research projects conducted separately in, first, London (2004-2005), and secondly, in New York and San Francisco (2007-2008). We aim to destabilise notions of “return” by highlighting three thematic framings that emerged from our fieldwork. Our chapter draws out the slippery geographical imaginations of “home” as emplaced in Singapore vis-à-vis its location in the broader context of Asia where Singaporean transmigrants foresee better career opportunities. In one sense, these Singaporean transmigrants harbour a cosmopolitan outlook that exceeds their national homeland, but this is tempered by attitudes they simultaneously express about the perceived cultural advantages and disadvantages of geographical location, and the limited geographical imaginary they associate with the region referred to as “Asia”. We also consider the ways in which “return” as an ideal is constantly negotiated and re-negotiated, and in some cases, always in a

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process of deferment. Finally, we focus on migrants’ intentions not to return in a bid to counterbalance the prevailing focus on journeys back home within the framework of return migration, thus unpacking the assumptions that underpin it. Indeed, just as mobility is accompanied by immobility (Sheller and Urry 2006), to fully understand return one must also bring into view the option of not returning.

Ideologies or desires for pathways of return Return migration is often regarded as a natural outcome following emigration once the goals leading to departure from a national homeland have been fulfilled. The “territorial trap”, or “the privileging of a nationalterritorial conception of the state”, that was described by Agnew back in 1994 (92) persists in shaping the ontology of return and guiding our study on return migration. Patterns of transnational migration complicate the linear logic associated with departure and return (Teo 2011); some scholars view the nature of return as only temporary and describe it as cyclical or transnational sojourning instead (Ley and Kobayashi 2005). Recent scholarship on the “diaspora strategies” propagated by migrantsending states such as China, India, New Zealand, and Singapore, further reframes the relationship between “homeland”, return migration and transnationalism (Larner 2007; Ho 2011a). These countries engage with their diaspora through extraterritorial policy initiatives aimed at mobilising emigrants’ financial, human, and social capital for the benefit of the homeland. They recognise that emigrants may have reasons to remain abroad and even if they do not return physically, there are benefits to be reaped from brain circulation (Saxenian 2006) and extending national belonging abroad. The literature on return migration highlights complex issues of identity and belonging in relation to notions of home and homeland. We describe the subjects of our chapter as transmigrants because even though they live abroad, they continue to retain family, emotional, and other personal ties simultaneously with their country of origin (Basch et al. 1994). Emigration and return migration, two intrinsically linked processes, are often underpinned by moralising discourses. For example, Filipina labour migrants see themselves, and are portrayed by the Filipino government and media, as “heroes” and their successful return migration stories are lauded for their contributions to economic development and nation building in the Philippines (Parreñas 2001, 1139). Likewise in the case of Israel, Cohen (2009, 8) argues that economic rationalism underlies the country’s policy of encouraging return migration and “there is a clear

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preference towards the support of highly skilled emigrants”. Migrants themselves often harbour hopes of returning after achieving their migration objectives, which is usually to accumulate enough savings to sustain the family back home (Conway and Potter 2007). However, as the research findings in this paper shows, migrants’ desires for pathways of return may not live up to such stereotypes. In this chapter we critically interrogate claims of return migration by considering, when migrants say they intend to return do they mean returning to the place from which their sojourn originated or elsewhere? What does it mean to desire “return” and where is it anchored geographically? Moreover, migrants’ intentions to return may not materialise in reality as life circumstances and opportunities shape their decisions differently as the years go by. In fact, decisions not to return are revealing of the way migrants relate to the politics and societal codes characteristic of the homeland. Aranda (2006) highlights, for example, the way female Puerto Ricans in America express reservations about returning to their country of origin because of concerns over sustained gendered inequalities for women. As the empirical analyses in this chapter demonstrate, examining reasons for not returning can reveal insights into the society of (assumed) return and how migrants engage with such societal dynamics. This chapter shifts the discussion from physical return to narratives of potential return, so as to draw out the underlying logics and associated geographical imaginaries of return migration that may be elided in actual return migration journeys.

Singapore, where immigration and emigration meet As a young nation established in the aftermath of British colonialism, Singapore is a tiny city-state in Southeast Asia better known as a site of immigration rather than as a site of emigration. Yet, emigration has, in the last twenty years or so, rapidly picked up pace; government estimates claim that some 200,000 Singaporeans (out of a citizenry of only 3.29 million) currently live abroad (Singapore Department of Statistics 2012). Of these, about 40,000 reside in the United Kingdom (U.K.), while 27,000 are located in the United States (U.S.).1 The continual attrition of people amid high rates of immigration potently reflects the social psyche of a nation that has long been exposed to a culture of itinerancy and selfenterprise. As much as immigrants, and especially highly skilled migrants, dubbed “foreign talent”, are valued for their economic contributions to Singapore, emigration is likewise regarded as a means to gain greater cultural capital and new opportunities for oneself.

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This propensity for emigration is not purely a matter of organic evolution, but has also become heavily abetted by the state in recent decades. An overseas exposure among Singaporeans is encouraged by the government to enhance the city-state’s economic competitiveness in the same way that immigration has been employed as a demographic control valve for meeting the city’s manpower needs. Of note, the administration led by former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong articulated in the early 1990s a roadmap for the country that involved expanding Singapore’s economic sphere through a process called “regionalisation”, later recalibrated as “globalisation”. Part of this strategy involved facilitating highly skilled citizens to take up international business assignments and greenfield ventures abroad as part of their career development (Singapore 21 Committee 1999). Promising pre-university youths are also sent to developed English-speaking countries (and increasingly to China too) on government scholarships for tertiary education and learning, with the attached obligation that they must return upon the completion of their studies. Implicit in these twin rationales is the intent that young Singaporeans would acquire new skills, return to Singapore, and help Singapore enlarge its pie in high-value and technologically advanced industries. Emigration is, in short, a critical strategy in Singapore’s globalising intentions. However, accompanying this tactic is a perceived need to rein in the mobilities of Singaporeans. This has been given particular priority in recent years, seeing that emigration rates have spiked sharply in the country. In 2012, it was reported in a parliamentary session that there are around 1,000 cases of citizenship renunciation among its skilled nationals per year between 2000 and 2010 (Channel NewsAsia 2012). Because of these trends, the Overseas Singaporean Unit (OSU) was established under the Prime Minister’s Office in 2005, representing a concerted effort by the government to build direct and friendly bridges with its diaspora and to hopefully convince Singaporeans living overseas to one day come home. To elaborate, the OSU has been tasked with not just the customary role of relaying information on the latest national developments to those overseas, but also with facilitating them in government administration, providing employment search assistance for those contemplating return, and even organizing social events such as “Singapore Day” in cities like London and New York for them to “mingle in”. For a time, the agency had also been running two “official” Singapore Clubs—housed in Singaporeowned luxury hotels in Australia—with the expressed purpose of “helping” overseas Singaporeans “get together, exchange information and expand their social networks” (The Straits Times 2007). By thus making

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cognizant the viability of “Singapore as home” abroad, these programmes invite those overseas to rediscover their immutable bonds with Singapore, in a subtle rehashing of the ontological intertwining of home and return with nation. In the empirical analyses below, we signal how the Singaporean transmigrants we studied deviate from the intentions of the government to entice return; overseas Singaporeans like them may “return”, but not necessarily to Singapore.

Methodology This chapter draws on interviews with Singaporean transmigrants in the United Kingdom (London) and the United States (New York and San Francisco), which are popular destination countries for Singaporeans looking for an educational or work experience abroad. Although the research in these two countries was carried out separately, the methodology adopted and demographic characteristics of their study samples are similar. In both cases, participants were recruited using a mixed snowballing method that relied on the referrals of overseas Singaporean associations, online communities, family contacts in Singapore, and the interviewees themselves. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with Singaporean transmigrants in their 20 and 30s, and virtually all held or were working towards a tertiary degree. For those who were working, a majority held highly skilled or professional jobs in investment banking, finance, and law. Others were in academia, software engineering, information technology, market research, the arts or entrepreneurship. A total of 43 interviews were conducted in London, and 49 interviews in the San Francisco-Bay Area (SFBA) and the New York-New Jersey Area (NYNJA). The interviewees were predominantly of Chinese ethnicity, reflecting the demographic profile of the city-state, but the researchers purposefully contacted a sample of Singaporeans from other ethnic backgrounds too (e.g., Malay, Indian, or Eurasian). The interview sample done in the U.S. contained slightly more men than women while the sample in the U.K. consisted of approximately equal numbers of men and women. In both interview samples, the majority of respondents have Singaporean citizenship and are in the U.K. or U.S. on temporary visas (some have British or American permanent residency status).

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Desiring Singapore, or regional imaginaries of return? When asked if they intend to return to Singapore, the interviewees brought up the advantages of moving back to the city-state compared to life overseas. The most cited reasons are known colloquially in Singapore as the “3Fs—friends, family, and food” and, one may add, place familiarity. This is captured in the interview extract below with Matthew (male, twenties, single, London) for example: I think there are quite a few attractions in Singapore. First, I feel comfortable there, like I know my way around and familiarity is good. Second thing is I think it is a good place to live and bring up children. I don’t have any kids now but eventually if I have kids you don’t really have to worry about schooling and it is convenient basically. Singapore is a very convenient place to live. Certain things are expensive like housing and cars but the rest of it is quite affordable. If you compare with London, right, once you start having kids you really have to start worrying about support. That’s the other thing also, my parents are there; I don’t know what you have heard from other people but when I ask this question, people always say it is the 3Fs, right? “Friends, family and food”... If you transplanted the people and move them somewhere else I think I would have no reason to go back. I don’t really care where I work as long as the opportunities and the career are good. And ideally if Singapore can offer me a good job—I won’t expect Singapore’s salary to be as high as the U.K. or U.S.— but if they offer me something I am comfortable with I guess I would put Singapore as my first priority.

Matthew’s narrative highlights the significance of place familiarity, convenience, affordability, family presence, and a family-friendly living environment that draws overseas Singaporeans like himself to move back (Lin, 2011 for the U.S. case). Significantly, respondents in London and New York were more likely to highlight the upbringing of young children as a likely reason for returning to Singapore. This could be because these expensive and congested financial cities are seen as less desirable places for starting a family compared to the San Francisco-Bay Area. However, Matthew also makes clear that the decision to return to Singapore is contingent on the availability of desirable work opportunities. Cerase’s (1976) typology of return (return of failure, return of conservatism, return of innovation, and return of retirement) argues that migrants take into account the conditions in the country of return to weigh the relative costs and benefits of staying in the host country or returning to the country of origin. This is similarly the case with the Singaporean

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transmigrants discussed in this section who are considering whether return migration to Singapore is worth it for the reasons mentioned above compared to their career aspirations. Their career aspirations are, however, not reducible to immediate salary concerns but also corresponds to job satisfaction and career progress. A delicate balance between career aspirations and family considerations is sought amongst such Singaporean transmigrants. However, the “return” migration depicted by a number of the Singaporean transmigrants interviewed may not be anchored in the territorial boundaries of the city-state at all. In fact a recurring theme in a number of the interviews is how the “return” imaginary is framed in terms of returning to Asia rather than Singapore itself, indicating a more extended geographical claim to belonging/affinity. Alex (male, twenties, married, London) expressed that for his spouse and himself, they anticipate that: I think the most likely scenario is for us to go back to Singapore but depending on the opportunities I may consider working in, say, China at some point. I think part of the attraction in going back to Singapore now is a lot of the excitement in the North Asia region (China) coming up and that seems to be exciting part of the world now. Whereas you can say that Europe is more sedate. So it depends on where the job opportunities are. Also where my current job takes me to… for my wife it also depends on what she wants to do… [Singapore] is not global enough. It is the hub for Southeast Asia but the Western world does not see Singapore as the hub of all activities. In terms of work it would be a downgrade if I went to Singapore...

Although Singapore is one of their potential return destinations, Singaporean transmigrants like Alex are considering options to work elsewhere in Asia, such as China. For these globally minded Singaporeans, as Alex puts it: “Singapore is not global enough” as a regional hub. Already, Asian destinations such as mainland China or Hong Kong seem more enticing. Hong Kong and Singapore are considered regional competitors for premier financial hub status but the former has the advantage of having mainland China as its hinterland. The economic growth and remaining untapped potential of the mainland Chinese market draws career-driven Singaporean transmigrants. In particular, ChineseSingaporeans see themselves as having a competitive edge given their ethnicity and bilingual backgrounds in English and Mandarin. Geographical proximity to Singapore is another reason for relocating to Asian countries so that they can visit easily and be closer to family and friends. However, the emerging economies in Asian countries are like

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unexplored frontiers for these Singaporean transmigrants. This is illustrated in Mike’s (male, twenties, single, New York) interview in which he said that: I want to go back to Asia… and hopefully I will make my way back to Singapore. But if you know for some reason or another, Singapore [doesn’t offer] a lot of opportunities and whatever right, then at least a place like Hong Kong [for example] that will be close enough, much better, much better than staying here lah. [It’s closer to] family and friends, and also the fact that it’s much easier to [visit Singapore]. You [also] don’t have some kind of like disadvantage. And I do believe that you know the next fifty years will be like the emerging markets’ world, the world of Asia... [Moreover] the people who run [businesses in the US] are still Caucasian people [mostly], and you are not one of them.

As indicated in the narratives above, Asia is regarded as a site of return for the Singaporean transmigrants studied. Although returning to Singapore is one option for them, they foresee that there are better opportunities for career development in countries in Asia where economic growth has yet to reach maturity compared to North American or European economies. Additionally they feel that they have a cultural advantage in Asia. On the face of it, Singaporean transmigrants like them can be construed as cosmopolitans adept at navigating both Western and Eastern cultures; this is in fact a strategic identity that several interviewees fashioned for themselves. Yet as Ho (2011b) argues elsewhere, the cosmopolitanism they proffer is inflected by essentialised racial and nationality framings. They also have a limited view of the region they refer to as “Asia”. Despite the heterogeneity of languages and cultures in Asia, they associate “Asia” with the Chinese-speaking sphere of mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan only. This perception is influenced in part by their experiences of living in the U.S. and U.K. where they feel disadvantaged as outsiders compared to Caucasians that are born and bred in these countries. Being based in “Asia”, or more specifically parts of East Asia, also means they can combine their career ambitions with family proximity to loved ones living in Singapore. The narratives in this section illustrate a need to consider “return” trajectories that may not be situated in the nation-state from which migrants originate. Rather, it may be more productive to extend our analyses of “return” to other geographical imaginaries in which migrants claim an affiliation that extends beyond the national container.

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Desiring more, deferring return For other Singaporean transmigrants, “return” is a possibility that becomes deferred as other life options take precedence. The desire for international and exposure was often raised during the interviews; Johnny’s (male, twenties, single, London) narrative below offers us an example: I don’t think I am going to move back very soon. But I will be in Asia for sure. You will see me in Hong Kong in two to three years. Having said that it doesn’t matter if we choose to move back or not… When you think of the world map you have all the Singaporeans around the world. It is effectively a network. It is just a matter of how to connect them. I think a lot of people will intend to return to Singapore but not until they have satisfied their own need for international experience and exposure.

For Johnny, the decision whether to “return” or not is mediated by several considerations. Two key themes are worth exploring further from this example. First, as with the Singaporean transmigrants discussed in the previous section he does not see “return” as necessarily geographically situated in Singapore. Rather, he believes he can be based in Asia and still remain connected to Singapore and a network of overseas Singaporeans. Second, he acknowledges that most Singaporean transmigrants will opt to return to Singapore but in his view the return trajectory will take place only after one has accrued sufficient international experience and exposure. Individual needs for international exposure and experience are usually tied to personal development for fulfilling career aspirations. One interpretation of this research finding could be to surmise that Singaporeans who venture abroad become more individualistic, or “Westernised” over time. But these sentiments should be analysed in relation to broader societal context and social pressures in Singapore. The interview with Zach (male, thirties, single, New York) illustrates some of these societal tensions that Singaporean transmigrants take into consideration: I think I do have somewhat some plans to return, but mostly because as my parents get older I eventually want to go back and look after them in their later years. Right now they are still up and about doing things, so I guess that urgency for me to go back right now isn’t there. But I think at some point, if not Singapore, at least around the region… I mean what’s keeping me here is just, it’s the working culture, for one; the other thing is at least in my observation is that I do intend to build up my resume [abroad, till] I get a bit more senior. I think, at least in my opinion, is [sic] that when you

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Chapter Twenty are actually starting out work, it’s better to start out in a different country… Singapore doesn’t seem to be very kind to people who just graduated and just starting up their careers… By the time I go back to Singapore I would at least be catapulted to a slightly more senior level, rather than start building my career there and then.

The narrative by Zach shows that desires for individual selfimprovement through an overseas stint is mitigated by concerns over care for ageing parents. As his parents are still healthy and independent, Zach feels that there isn’t an urgent need for him to return to Singapore. But the deferment of return is also influenced by a belief that Singaporean employers are unreceptive towards advancing the careers of junior-level employees; rather the prospects for career advancement are better for those who return to work in Singapore at senior-management level. The rationale underpinning the societal perceptions expressed by Zach is brought into sharp relief by an explanation given in another interview. Don (male, thirties, married, New York) said that: I feel that in Asia, that’s where my growth strengths are… But the unfortunate thing is I don’t see myself going back to Singapore at this point, for another ten years at least. Basically because, you know, the good jobs are still very rare, and if you are, I’m in finance, so if you are in finance, or even industries, like Hong Kong, China, or whatever, they are so much bigger than Singapore…. I do want to go back to Singapore eventually but not for ten years, not for fifteen years. Because [Singapore] has this bad habit of thinking everything foreign is good, that is the problem with people’s mind set, and the government as well. So I can’t change it, I can’t force it, why fight it? Go out and be a foreign talent and come back as a foreign talent, right?

As with the other Singaporean transmigrants mentioned in this chapter, Don expresses concern over his career prospects if he returned to Singapore, which he perceives to be a less ideal career destination compared to Hong Kong or mainland China. But he also underlines a simmering tension in Singaporean society in which a foreign-local divide is perceptible (Koh 2003; Ho 2009). However, the predilection toward privileging “foreignness” he highlights is not merely directed at nationality status but also the notion that in order to succeed in Singaporean society, Singaporeans need to prove that they can become successful abroad first. The phrase, “I can’t change it, I can’t force it, why fight it” (Don), suggests a degree of resignation mixed with resentment towards the privileging of foreign credentials and professional work experience.

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The above narratives show that decisions to defer return are underpinned by the belief that they would gain greater career mileage from working abroad before returning to Singapore. Even as these Singaporean transmigrants feel compelled to play by such rules of the game to advance their careers in the Singaporean workplace, they also benefit from the competitive edge they obtain from an overseas stint and are culpable of reinforcing a status quo that sidelines locally gained qualifications and professional work experience.

Desiring not to return: another lens into societal relations Inasmuch as some Singaporean transmigrants interviewed articulate a desire to return to Singapore or the wider Asian region, there are others who express a lack of desire to relocate again. Earlier in the chapter, we had suggested that the career-oriented Singaporean transmigrants emphasise the importance of individual development but the individualism at stake here needs to be viewed in the context of societal pressure to obtain international experience and exposure in order to succeed professionally in Singapore. Likewise, the “sense of individualism” important to the interviewee, Patrick (male, twenties, London), mentioned below has to be contextualised in wider-held perceptions amongst young and well-educated Singaporeans that Singaporean society is one in which conformity towards societal norms is expected as a result of government policies (e.g., in educational and career pathways) and also societal attitudes (e.g., measures of success). As Patrick (male, single, twenties, London) puts it: The one thing is [the Singaporean government and society should] loosen up a bit. Recognise that each person is an individual instead of thinking, oh, to micro-manage each person. To a certain extent they have to realise that so what if you force a person to become what he doesn’t want to be? At the most the person will just be competent. Allow them to be what they really want to be… To make us go back you basically have to reverse a few of the things. I am just not happy that if I go back I lose my own sense of individualism.

In other cases, it is the formation of family units and homes outside of Singapore that deters return migration decisions. Sylvia (female, forties, married, New York) highlights this reason for “not look[ing] back” towards Singapore:

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Byron (1999, 299 cited in Duval 2004, 56), writing in the context of Caribbean migration, observes that “many migrants simply do not see a permanent return” for themselves. In the case of overseas Singaporeans like Sylvia, transnational family formations result in notions of home that are simultaneously situated in two countries. While Singapore retains place memories and extended family relations for many such Singaporean transmigrants, returning to Singapore may take a backseat in view of marriage and job commitments in another place. Such Singaporeans have a more flexible attitude towards “home” as Samuel (male, thirties, married, Bay Area) puts it: [Home] is not a concept that’s tied to geography…. We’ve created a home in the Bay Area, and a lifestyle... [But in another sense,] I equate home with childhood, riding my bicycle, playing chapteh2 you know that kind of thing, playing marbles, that’s home right? Home is where there [are] familiar things…. certain things, familiar faces, food, culture, things like that you know. Obviously the longer you are away, you become familiar with other things, right, so that becomes home… I feel a certain disconnect [to Singapore]… Maybe over the years the disconnect might get bigger or it might get smaller. I don’t know…

As time away from Singapore becomes more prolonged, Singaporean transmigrants such as Samuel feel a growing disconnect to the city-state. Singaporean transmigrants that return to the city-state oftentimes experience re-adaptation struggles. The Singaporean national newspaper ran a feature back in 2008 on the issues faced by returnees. One was quoted as saying, “you have to learn how to deal with people all over again. It’s very easy to rub people the wrong way”. Another returnee interviewed by the newspaper brought up a growing internal divide within Singaporean society between Singaporean migrants and non-migrants: “[I was] confronted with hostility… people felt threatened by my overseas experience” (The Straits Times, 14 June 2008).3 As a result of these challenges, Singaporean transmigrants that return may choose to re-migrate again. Simultaneously, they develop place attachments to the other country in which they spend a growing amount of

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time (Teo 2011). With the interplay of these spatial and temporal dynamics, return migration, at least in its “traditional” homeland-bound sense, grows to become a more distant possibility with the passage of time.

Conclusion This chapter has engaged critically with discourses of return migration by examining the attitudes Singaporean transmigrants in diaspora have towards return. Rather than assuming return will be a natural outcome of emigration, we considered the logics and desires underpinning how return comes to be deferred in individual migration pathways and also situations where Singaporean transmigrants see themselves not returning to Singapore. Their decision-making processes are mediated by factors such as transnational family formations located in another country apart from Singapore, growing emotional distance from Singapore as a result of prolonged time periods away, and in some cases, dissatisfaction with aspects of Singaporean society. We also highlighted how “return” intentions may not be situated in the country of origin (i.e., Singapore) but rather extend geographically to a broader regional imaginary (e.g., “Asia”). This argument prompts us to delink the ontology of return from the territorial trap (Agnew 1994). On the face of it, these Singaporean transmigrants may be construed as cosmopolitans as they frame home and belonging in a manner that transcends the national homeland. On the other hand, the reasons prompting their return to Asia also prompts us to consider the ways in which the regional framings to which the migrants claim affiliation (or desire) are in fact essentialised in particular ways by them (e.g., ethnicity and language similarities). These themes prod us towards studying return as a process underpinned by flexible geographical imaginaries, rather than an end-point in itself, as migrants negotiate and re-negotiate their return intentions and outcomes.

Notes 1. Only Australia—a popular education or retirement destination for Singaporeans— has a greater population of overseas Singaporeans than the U.K. and United States. An estimated 50,000 Singaporeans live in Australia (The Straits Times 2012). 2. This is a traditional game in which players aim to keep a heavily weighted shuttlecock in the air only by using their feet. The reference to this game by the respondent is meant to highlight his nostalgic memories of his childhood spent in Singapore.

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3. Such sentiments towards re-adaption difficulties as expressed in the newspaper report are corroborated by some of the interviews with Singaporean transmigrants in the United Kingdom and the United States who had initially returned to Singapore but re-migrated again.

References Agnew, J. 1994. “Timeless Space and State-centrism: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory.” In The Global Economy of Political Space, edited by S. J. Rosow, N. Inayatullah, and M. Rupert, 88-89. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Aranda, E. 2006. Emotional Bridges to Puerto Rico. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Byron, M. 1999. “The Caribbean-born Population in 1990s Britain: Who Will Return?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 25: 285-301. Basch, L., N. Glick Schiller, and C. Szanton Blanc. 1994. Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialised Nation-states. Langhorne, Switzerland: Gordon and Breach. Conway, D., and R. B. Potter. 2007 “Caribbean Transnational Migrants as Agents of Change.” Geography Compass 1: 24-45. Cerase, F. P. 1974. “Expectations and Reality: A Case Study of Return Migration from the United States to Southern Italy.” International Migration Review 8: 245-262. Channel NewsAsia. 2012. “DPM Teo on S’poreans Emigrating.” Channel NewsAsia, 10 January. Http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/11 75732/1/.htm. Cohen, N. 2009. “Come Home, Be Professional: Ethno-nationalism and Economic Rationalism in Israel’s Return Migration Strategy.” Immigrants and Minorities 27 (1): 1-28. Duval, D. T. 2004. “Linking Return Visits and Return Migration among Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean Migrants in Toronto.” Global Networks 4: 51-67. Gmelch, G. 1980. “Return migration.” Annual Review of Anthropology 9: 135-159. Ho, E. L. E. 2009. “Constituting Citizenship through the Emotions: Singaporean Transmigrants in London.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (4): 788-804. —. 2011a. “‘Claiming’ the Diaspora: Sending State Strategies, Elite Mobility and the Spatialities of Citizenship.” Progress in Human Geography 35 (6): 757-772.

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—. 2011b. “Identity Politics and Cultural Asymmetries: Singaporean Transmigrants “fashioning” Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (5): 729-746. Jeffery, L., and J. Murison. 2011. The Temporal, Social, Spatial and Legal Dimensions of Return and Onward Migration.” Population, Space and Place 17: 131-139. Koh, A. 2003. “Global Flows of Foreign Talent: Identity Anxieties in Singapore’s Ethnoscape.” SOJOURN 18 (2): 230-256. Larner, W. 2007. “Expatriate Experts and Globalizing Governmentalities: The New Zealand Diaspora Strategy.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32: 331-345. Ley, D., and A. Kobayashi. 2005. “Back to Hong Kong: Return Migration or Transnational Sojourn?” Global Networks 5 (2): 111-127. Lin, W. 2011. “Beyond Flexible Citizenship: Towards many Chinese Transnationalisms.” Geoforum 43: 137-146. Parreñas, R. 2001. “Transgressing the Nation-state: The Partial Citizenship and ‘Imagined (Global) Community’ of Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers.” Globalization and Gender 26 (4): 1129-154. Saxenian, A. 2006. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sherry, M., and J. Urry. 2006. “The New Mobilities Paradigm.” Environment and Planning A 38: 207-226. Singapore 21 Committee. 1999. Singapore 21: Together We Can Make the Difference. Singapore: Singapore 21 Committee. Singapore Department of Statistics. 2012. Population in Brief 2012. Singapore: Singapore Department of Statistics. Http://www.singstat.gov.sg/statistics/browse_by_theme/population/stat istical_tables/popinbrief2012.pdf. Teo, S. Y. 2011. “‘The Moon Back Home is Brighter’? Return Migration and the Cultural Politics of Belonging.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37 (5): 805-820. The Straits Times. 2007. “Home Away from Home for Singaporeans Overseas.” 30 September. Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings. —. 2008. 14 June. Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings. —. 2012. “200,000 S’poreans Living Abroad: 27% Rise in Number of Citizens Overseas Since 2003, with Australia the Top Draw.” 14 October. Singapore: Singapore Press Holdings.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE A QUESTION OF IDENTITY: ETHNIC CHINESE FROM THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA AND THE REPUBLIC OF SINGAPORE JASON LIM

Introduction In June 2011, Wang Pengfei, a student from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at the EASB East Asia Institute of Management in Singapore, posted a video of himself on YouTube wearing a pair of thick glasses and putting on black lipstick. In the 2½-minute clip, he mocked the different racial groups in Singapore, resulting in an uproar from netizens in Singapore. He was eventually hauled up for questioning before the school authorities, expelled from the EASB and then sent back home to the PRC as his student visa had been cancelled. What irked some Singapore Chinese about the video clip was a reference to how they were descended from southern Chinese “peasant stock”. It implied that the Singapore Chinese were inferior to those now arriving in large numbers to Singapore from northern China, especially from places such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing, and Liaoning. The incident happened one month after general elections which confirmed the rise of popular nationalism in Singapore, with calls for a “Singaporeans First” policy from the political opposition (Lim 2013). Some Singapore Chinese have shown high levels of discomfort with the sudden influx of these “new migrants” from the PRC who spoke with a very different accent and who appeared to be rude, inconsiderate, pushy, and self-righteous. An example is an entry in the SGForum blog on 30 April 2008:

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I know I should not create a hate between us and the PRC Chinese. But, really I can’t stop thinking that our own country are [sic] full of them here. … So many of them roaming around in Singapore now [sic]. I thought I am in China instead of Singapore. (Cheowyonglee 2008)

The Singapore Chinese identity can be seen as part of a broader argument of how diasporic Chinese identity is intertwined with regional postcolonial nation-building processes in Southeast Asia. Assimilation of the Chinese in Southeast Asia became increasingly difficult from the middle of the nineteenth century as more Chinese migrated into the region. In 1955, China called on the overseas Chinese to adopt local citizenship. By the early twenty-first century, it was the more recent Chinese migrants who maintained a stronger political link with China (Suryadinata 2004, 8). However, the Chinese continued to be discriminated by Southeast Asian governments in post-colonial Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Malaysia in an attempt to ensure a “Southeast Asianization” of the Chinese community (Carstens 2005; Suryadinata 2004). It is here that both Singapore and its Chinese community represent an anomaly in Southeast Asian politics and society since the Singapore Chinese have their own “incipient local character” (Suryadinata 2004, 16) that is not contrary with being Singaporean. This is the result of a nation-building process that was introduced by the People’s Action Party (PAP) government in 1959, stressing multiracialism and a Southeast Asian environment. Along with the geopolitical milieu, a Chinese identity in Singapore has evolved over the last five decades. The result is that the Chinese in Singapore (particularly those born after independence in 1965) believe that while they are “ethnically” the same as the Chinese in the PRC, they are nonetheless “culturally” different. The Singapore Chinese can be regarded as part of what Shih Shu-mei has called a “Sinophone” network (Shih 2007, 4) of places outside mainland China where ethnic Chinese had congregated, but where Chinese culture had been localized. The issue of a Singapore Chinese identity gets complicated with the arrival of new migrants from China since the 1990s. The Singapore Chinese have transnational links with China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Between 1949 when the PRC was proclaimed to the “reform and opening up” of the PRC in 1982, the political links between the Chinese in the PRC and Singapore were broken due to ideological conflicts during the Cold War. Economic ties were boosted from the late 1980s as trade between the PRC and Singapore increased. Since the 1950s, however, the Singapore Chinese had maintained cultural and social ties with the Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Films and music from these two territories were hugely

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popular in Singapore, and remain so to this day. The huge presence of new migrants from China has evoked a sense of nationalism that is linked with Singapore, and a belief that Singapore Chinese identity is linked socially and culturally with that of Hong Kong and Taiwan. The immigration of large numbers of Chinese from the PRC has led to new questions raised in Singapore about nationalism and ethnicity. The blatant attempt to jump on the Chinese bandwagon by the PAP government has raised a storm in Singapore (especially in cyberspace) which reflects the rise of nationalism in Singapore as more migrants pour into the city-state. Out of that sense of the need to link “Chinese-ness” with Singapore, comes a question of the difference in ethnicity (if at all) between the PRC Chinese and the Singapore Chinese. This chapter traces the background of an emerging Singapore Chinese identity in a multi-racial context, questions of ethnic identity and “overseas Chinese-ness” and the effects of events in Singapore from 2011 that have raised questions about nationalism and ethnicity among the Singapore Chinese.

Background In 1978, the PAP government of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew introduced the “Speak Mandarin Campaign” and the Singapore Chinese community was encouraged to discard the use of dialects. Statistics released in the national press in the next few years showed a decline in the number of dialect speakers as the number of Mandarin speakers increased. It was an attempt to get the Singapore Chinese community to think of themselves as culturally similar with the Chinese in the PRC that was similar to the Taiwanese government’s discouragement of the use of Taiwanese and Hakka in favour of the “national language” (Mandarin). The Taiwanese were expected “to forget your mother tongue and remember your national language” (Shih 2007, 119). The PAP government attempted to reduce fears from the non-Chinese that the campaign was not a chauvinistic move against other languages, but to prevent the ethnic Chinese from becoming “deculturated” (The Straits Times 1980, 9). In the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen Square Incident in June 1989, the Singapore government began making preparations for the arrival of 25,000 skilled workers and their families from Hong Kong. In his National Day Rally speech, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew reassured Singaporeans that it would not be at the expense of national unity but he noted the unhappiness of the non-Chinese communities in Singapore over the new policy (The Straits Times 1989, 17). Immigration was relaxed further after Singapore and the PRC established diplomatic relations in

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1991. The aim was to increase the talent pool in Singapore, including the granting of permanent residency status to highly educated professionals from the PRC. By the late 1990s, although never made explicit by the Singapore government, the relaxed restriction on mainland Chinese migrating to Singapore became a solution to arrest the declining birth-rate of the Singapore Chinese and the potential for social problems in the distant future. While the government promotes the message of the need for racial tolerance in the country (and citizens are constantly reminded about the violence and destruction from the racial riots of 1950 and 1964), it ironically continues to play the race card by constantly pointing out that the Chinese must reproduce at a rate that ensures the community remains at a level that is 75 percent of the population. The clash in outlook between the PRC Chinese and the Singapore Chinese surfaced in the last decade. Lee Kuan Yew, in his memoirs published in 2000, noted: We are so much like the Chinese in the southern provinces in physical appearance. We have the same cultural values, in attitudes toward relationships between the sexes, relations within the family, deference due to our elders, and other social norms regarding family and friends. But we are so different in our outlook and view of the world and of our place in this world. Theirs is so huge a country that they feel absolutely confident there will be a seat from them at the top of the table once they have put themselves right, and it was only a matter of time. … We, the migrants who have cut our roots and transplanted ourselves on a different soil, in a very different climate, lack this self-confidence. (Lee 2000, 593-594, emphasis added)

Lee’s memoirs, in effect, assume that the Singapore Chinese community lacks the drive that the Chinese in the PRC possess. The number of residents in Singapore from the PRC, Hong Kong and Macao increased steadily from 2000 to reach 175,155 in 2010 (Department of Statistics, Singapore 2010). Chinese citizens were not only working and/or studying in Singapore but also settling down with their families. The arrival of mass numbers of mainland Chinese have proven to be unsettling for some in the Chinese community. Typical among complaints by the Singapore Chinese of the Chinese from the PRC were the latter’s arrogant and rude behaviour, lack of understanding of local (including Singapore Chinese) norms, competition for jobs and schooling places, and the perception that the current Singapore government was bending backwards in order to please PRC citizens as much as possible. Prejudices against the Chinese from the PRC surfaced—a Singaporean entrepreneur with a Chinese wife and living in Beijing told The Straits Times that “if you read

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Singapore newspapers, Chinese women seem to fall into three categories— prostitutes, husband-snatchers and peidu mamas (“study mothers”). I’m reluctant to have my wife face such stereotypes” (Peh 2006). The arrival of Chinese from the PRC in a country where English is the predominant language is problematic too. One example is the recollection of a Eurasian journalist of an incident when she placed an order for chicken wings: “Four. Pack please,” and with that, I thought my order of chicken wings would be taken care of. Until the woman looked at me uncomprehendingly. I switched to Mandarin and was roundly abused for not using the language despite knowing it. Mandarin, she declared, was the most beautiful language in the world. … I told her she had better pick up some English if she was staying here because there are more than just Chinese-speaking people in Singapore. (Hanson 2007)

Since Chinese from the PRC are free to live and work anywhere in the world, and with the possibility of returning home to a future economic superpower, they see no need for assimilation in their new territories of residence. A local newspaper report noted that “that is why Singaporeans now often find themselves in the midst of a people who speak Putonghua (Mandarin) with unabashed vigour” and that “they consume some unique sort of Chinese cuisine with gusto, dismissing the local Chinese fare” (Teo 2007). Some Chinese from the PRC have also gone online and criticized the Singapore Chinese for not being “Chinese enough”. The main insults tend to be centred on the educational background, language, and ancestry of the Singapore Chinese. It stems from the popular image of the overseas Chinese back in the mid-twentieth century as uncouth, uncultured, and even “unChinese” (Ong 2013). Chinese nationalists who had arrived in Southeast Asia to drum up support for their cause found it difficult to do so because the Chinese in Southeast Asia had a different concept of “Chinese-ness” (Duara 1997, 1,043). The Singapore Chinese coined the category Nanyang (South Seas) for themselves, a mark of separation from the Chinese in China (Shih 2007, 26). The Chinese from the PRC also believe that theirs was a culture “not adulterated by colonisation” even if they are politically apathetic due to almost seven decades of communist rule (Teo 2007). This is itself problematic because, as Prasenjit Duara has shown, Chinese historiography today is concerned about maintaining the continuity of the history of the Chinese people (Duara 2009, 29). It is difficult to argue that colonialism had never had an impact on the Chinese in the PRC. The label of a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” China, as promoted

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by the PRC describing China from 1840 to 1949, actually reveals that China failed to resist the colonizers.

Ethnic identity and “overseas Chinese-ness” This chapter suggests that the reason for the clash between the Chinese from the PRC—current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calls them “Chinese Chinese” (Loh 2006)—and the Singapore Chinese goes beyond nationalistic pride and into the definition of “Chinese-ness” as an ethnic identity. The Chinese concept of national identity is linked not only to the state but also to race. Southern China was integrated into the entity we know today as “China” during the Sui and Tang dynasties from AD 581 to 907 (Holcombe 2004). In terms of language and physique, northern and southern Chinese look different but they are conveniently lumped together by the state as a “Han (Chinese) people”. Modern nationalism in China arose from the humiliation faced by the Qing Empire at the hands of Western powers and determination of Han Chinese revolutionaries to rid the country of the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (Dikötter 1992; Harrison 2001). China is not merely a state; it is a civilisation that has remained unbroken for 5,000 years. It is no wonder then that the early nationalists including Dr Sun Yat-sen promoted nationalism to “forestall racial destruction” (Dikötter 1992, 124). The government of Chiang Kaishek of the Republic of China (ROC) on the mainland between 1928 and 1949 has been described as “Confucian fascism” (Wakeman 1997). Some statements by the PRC leadership tend to emphasize the racial character of the state. In August 2012, then Vice-President Xi Jinping commented about the “great renaissance of the Chinese race” (Nikkei Report, 2012, emphasis added), although seven months later, Xi, now President, vowed to “pursue a renaissance of the Chinese nation” (Cai and Yu 2013, emphasis added). There are still prejudiced views of Tibetans and Uyghurs in official circles. The emphasis on race is in contrast with the promotion in Singapore of nation building that is “regardless of race, language and religion” as epitomised in the national pledge. Chinese identity in Singapore can be seen as a convergence of nationalism defined by the PAP and the reaction of the Chinese community in differentiating itself from the PRC and the ROC (Taiwan). Anthony Smith argues that as an elusive concept, the state must define national identity by drawing on past experiences and claiming them as part of a national past that every citizen should accept. Modern states use national identity to mark itself and its people as different from every other state. Smith asserts that “nationalism, in short, is a product of

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modernity, nothing less” (Smith 2001, 46, emphasis in original). With selfgovernment granted by the British in June 1959, the Singapore Chinese were expected to cut their political and cultural ties with “China” (whether PRC or ROC) and declare their loyalty to the new state. There was the introduction of a new constitution, national anthem, national coat-of-arms, national flag, and national pledge. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew even played down his Chinese ethnicity on the American current affairs programme Meet the Press in 1967. When New York Times reporter Seymour Topping commented that Lee was “speaking as a Chinese who understands China”, Lee answered that “I can’t speak as a Chinese because I am a Singaporean. I am of Chinese ethnic stock.” (NAA, A1838, 3024/11/161 Part 2 1967) By the time Singapore celebrated 25 years of nation building in 1984, the themes of the city-state’s modern history were revisited: the shared experience of British colonialism, the Japanese occupation, racial tensions and violence, communist conspiracies, postcolonial economic development and social cohesion, survival of a small state, and progress towards a (bright) future. These themes were revisited when National Education was introduced in 1996 (Goh and Gopinathan 2005). Taiwan has had multiple colonial experiences that shape its culture (Shih 2007, 138). In that aspect, Singapore’s experience is similar to that of Taiwan. The message of nation building makes Singapore “an imagined political community” that is confined to finite boundaries (Anderson 1991, 6-7). The “cultural roots” of nationalism is emphasised so that people will think of themselves in distinct and unique terms compared to others (Anderson 1991, 12). Nations refer to an event in a distant past in order to justify their existence today. Images of the past are promoted by national leaders and the media in order to galvanise the people behind the nation. While Anderson refers to the distinction between nations, a problem occurs if ethnicity comes into the picture. Singapore was created by the British to be a trading port in 1819. The concept of “nation”—let alone a community of “Singaporeans”—never existed until 1959. The British also did not promote any spirit of bonding among the different ethnic groups in Singapore. Each ethnic group managed its own affairs. By the time Lee Kuan Yew resigned as prime minister in November 1990, the Chinese in Singapore had already forged its own “imagination” as a community. Closely tied with the attempts to forge a new Singapore identity is the complexities of managing existing racial categories. The PAP government could not ignore the fact that 75 percent of the island’s population was ethnic Chinese.

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The PAP’s management record of the Chinese community in Singapore has varied over the decades—from downplaying “overseas Chinese-ness” in the 1950s and 1960s, to the promotion of Chinese culture and heritage tied to Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by an insidious sinicisation programme since the 1990s. The Lee government had to change the mind-set of the Singapore Chinese as the sense of “overseas Chinese-ness” had pervaded the Chinese community long before selfgovernment in Singapore in 1959. Adam McKeown, in his study of the international Chinese diaspora, notes that culture had held the disparate Chinese communities together before 1949 —a perceived common language, cuisine, material culture and even body language were “the shared forms of inscribed behaviour” for Chinese people all over the world (McKeown 1999). However, the situation changed with the proclamation of the PRC in 1949. The overseas Chinese (especially merchants and intelligentsia who would be among the first to suffer under a communist regime) had to reassess their position on returning to their ancestral motherland. When the Citizenship Ordinance was introduced in Singapore in 1957, about 220,000 ethnic Chinese were offered citizenship so long as they pledged their loyalty to Singapore (Turnbull 2009, 268). At the same time, the geopolitical situation in East and Southeast Asia made it unfavourable for the Chinese in Singapore to continue maintaining political ties with the PRC. Communist excesses such as the Cultural Revolution would not have endeared the communist cause for the Chinese in Singapore, especially when news arrived that things were not going well in the mainland (Lee 1998, 254). The Chinese in Singapore were expected to distance themselves with the PRC, except for correspondence to family members. The impact of geo-politics such as the Cold War also plays a role in getting the Chinese in Singapore to “imagine” itself as a community. Tu Wei-ming argues that Chinese traditional culture has been preserved and promoted in the “periphery” areas of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the overseas Chinese, in contrast to its deterioration at the “core” of the PRC (Tu 1994). As part of that “periphery”, the Singapore Chinese would decide what was acceptable in Chinese culture. It had to look inwards and define its identity based on community heritage and engage in “cultural activities” with other Chinese communities (such as in Hong Kong and Taiwan). The PAP government had no problems about the promotion of any Chinese identity so long as it was tied to Singapore and not the PRC. It is an implicit admission by the PAP government that the “Chinese culture” promoted by the ROC in Taiwan was acceptable and that “Chinese culture” would not destabilise the country as long as it did not

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become a political tool. Wang Gungwu notes that, after 1949, “to resinicize was therefore seen by many to mean siding with the [Chinese] communists”. He also notes that “if they [the overseas Chinese] still wished to, some could look to the defeated regime on Taiwan, or revert to traditional sojourner behaviour and try to preserve as much of their Chinese identity as they could” (Wang 2000, 86). The promotion of Chinese culture from the ROC in Taiwan and the chaotic conditions within the PRC caused the Chinese in Singapore to accept a definition of “Chinese culture” that was eventually tied to the ROC. The death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976 and the subsequent opening to the world in 1982 by Deng Xiaoping resulted in a scramble for accumulation of wealth in the PRC. The lack of social graces can be attributed to the loss of the knowledge and application of Chinese traditions of respect, honour, and courtesy due to the Cultural Revolution. On the other hand, while the ROC government did not officially promote Chinese culture and heritage in Singapore, it promoted them in Taiwan and publications on these topics were freely available in Singapore. By the time Chinese from the PRC began arriving in Singapore in large numbers from the 1990s, the Singapore Chinese saw themselves as sophisticated, with a diversity of clan, dialect, and kinship associations. Chinese identity is a complex issue in Singapore. At the outset, it is important to recognise that there is no single unique “Chinese culture”. Yet, the PAP government has frequently made statements that allude to a common cultural identity between the Chinese in Singapore and the PRC. This very simplistic approach assumes that the Chinese in Singapore (as overseas Chinese) have not been localized and share the same cultural, social, and political outlook as the Chinese in the PRC. Current studies of the overseas Chinese take a similar approach, where “the Chinese diaspora, understood as the dispersion of ‘ethnic Chinese’ persons around the globe, stands as a universalizing category founded on a unified ethnicity, culture, language, as well as place of origin or homeland” (Shih 2007, 23). The PAP government has taken the approach of Western academics in the 1950s in assuming that ethnic Chinese everywhere share the same characteristics. Back then, as the PRC had closed its doors to research work for foreigners, Western academics would study the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia in order to understand Chinese society in the PRC. Wang Gungwu criticised these academics for failing to recognise the distinctiveness of overseas Chinese communities (Wang 2004). Public opinion captured in the Singapore media reflects how the twin trajectories of nationalism and overseas Chinese-ness have finally crossed paths in twenty-first century Singapore. However, by this time, the PAP

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government has taken a very different attitude towards the Chinese in Singapore due to the economic rise of the PRC. Since 75 percent of the island’s population is Chinese, the government has used Chinese identity in Singapore to tie in with the rise of the PRC as Mandarin is now the common language for the ethnic Chinese in both countries (Barr 2000). However, it comes at a time when Singaporeans (especially young Singaporeans) have had an ideological diet based on thinking of themselves as Singaporeans first and ethnic Chinese second. Here then is the crux of the issue—the Chinese in Singapore do not see their past as dating back to some legendary period and call themselves “descendants of Emperors Yan and Huang” (䀶湫⫸⬓). For the Chinese in Singapore, especially with the “nation building” message since 1959, their origins start with the migration of their ancestors to the city-state from the early nineteenth century. Their ancestors had come mainly from the southern Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong but they can only trace their lineage to real historical personalities who had arrived in Singapore. The lingua franca was not Mandarin (now the official language of the PRC) but dialects from Fujian and Guangdong. As Shih noted, “those who settled in various parts of Southeast Asia also rarely speak the standard language defined by the Chinese state, but various old forms of topolects from the time when and the place where they emigrated from” (Shih 2007, 29). These dialects became “Singaporeanised” over time. Furthermore, after almost five decades of “nation building” where the community has been expected to renounce all ties with “China” (regardless whether they were supporters of the ROC or the PRC), it is inevitable that the community will regard only known individuals as their ancestors. In the words of a letter writer to The Straits Times in 1988, “China has 2,000 years of history and heritage: it is for it to keep. We have 25 years of history; so be it” (JS 1988). A Singapore Chinese will point to his/her great-grandfather, for instance, who made the arduous journey from either Fujian or Guangdong and settled down in Singapore. His/her great-grandfather could have taken part in anti-Japanese activities in the 1920s and 1930s due to Japanese aggression in China and helped raise funds for China whenever natural disasters struck the country. However, the “nation building” message was that these activities took place in Singapore and not China. By the time Singapore was awarded selfgovernment in 1959, the new PAP government expected the Chinese community to transfer their loyalty and patriotism from the entity known as “China” to Singapore. The Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore were spared communist excesses in the PRC such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. PRC citizens in Singapore

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miss the point that the “Chinese culture” they see in Singapore date back to a period long before the communist victory in 1949, and which could have become “Singaporeanised”. The forces of trans-nationalism and globalization has led to the debate about Chinese identity outside the PRC —the creation of new diasporas and the expectation of what “Chineseness” really means for older diasporas. There is the expectation that the Chinese diaspora should speak standard Mandarin. This line of enquiry looks at questions of Chinese identity and the need for local Chinese communities to react to the “new migrants” by asserting, among other things, their inability to speak Mandarin. Even the use of a Chinese dialect is no longer seen to be “Chinese” enough. An ethnic Chinese who does not speak Mandarin is seen as an anomaly (Ang 2001) by the Chinese from the PRC living in Singapore.

Contemporary events Wang Pengfei’s online tirade against the Singapore Chinese can, therefore, be understood within the context of differing identities between the ethnic Chinese in the PRC and Singapore. Since ancestors of most of the Singapore Chinese did arrive from Fujian and Guangdong, Wang’s attitude that reflected northern Chinese disdain for southern Chinese struck a raw nerve. Mandarin is essentially northern Chinese speech that became the “national language” for the whole of China, a process that began after the 1911 Revolution had overthrown the Qing dynasty. Wang’s behaviour revealed a form of cultural snobbishness prevalent in China—northern Chinese were better educated and led better lives compared to the uneducated peasants in southern China who spoke a cacophony of dialects that were mutually unintelligible to each other. What Wang did was to transfer that cultural snobbishness from the PRC to Singapore. Like the Chinese in Hong Kong, some of the Chinese in Singapore received an English education. Conveniently lumped together as the “English-educated”, they have little or no affinity with “China”. As Singapore headed towards the end of the twentieth century, an English education is emphasized and the English language is the official language of commerce and public administration. Chinese education effectively ended in 1987 in favour of the use of English as the medium of instruction. Although it is not the primary focus of this chapter, one should not discount the impact of Chinese popular culture emanating from Taiwan and Hong Kong as it had shaped how the Chinese in Singapore came to see themselves and what was generally accepted as “Chinese”. Hong Kong and Taiwan, however, had created and promoted their own version of

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Chinese culture through the popular mass media (Shih 2007, 4). By the mid-1970s, the Taiwanese music scene had come to be influenced by “campus folk songs” (㟉⚺㮹㫴). This genre of Chinese popular music was immensely popular among the Chinese in Singapore, especially the young. The “campus folk songs”, however, were a reaction to domestic events in Taiwan and the changing international status of the ROC. It reflected changing times in Taiwanese society after the ROC lost its seat in the United Nations in 1971. By the early 1980s, some young Chinese students in Singapore began composing and singing their own songs, collectively known as “Singapore ballads” or xinyao ( 㕘 嫈 ). Xinyao remains popular among the Singapore Chinese and it has aided the construction of a distinct local identity (Kong 1997). In addition, Hokkien, and Cantonese songs from Taiwan and Hong Kong remain popular in Singapore. The Taiwanese film industry was also vibrant in the 1970s especially with tearjerkers starring Chin Han and Lin Ching-hsia. The Singapore Chinese became more familiar with films from Taiwan and Hong Kong as Golden Horse Award ceremonies from Taipei were publicized in Singapore. In recent years, Chinese films written, produced, and directed in Singapore tend to emphasize the cultural identity of the Singapore Chinese through the use of southern Chinese dialects that most new migrants from the PRC would not understand. The government of Singapore has long prepared the country for closer cultural and economic ties with the PRC (Barr 2000, 158-174). Since Lee Kuan Yew’s visit to the PRC in 1976, he has always reiterated the message that Singapore must learn to accommodate the rise of China. Since the 1980s, the earlier calls to the Singapore Chinese not to ally themselves too closely to the PRC due to Cold War concerns are discarded as the Singapore government opens the country to mass migration of PRC citizens. As early as 1979, a letter writer to The Straits Times asked, in response to the launch of the “Speak Mandarin Campaign”: Why must Mandarin be that unifying language? Why can’t the unifying language be English? We don’t just want the Chinese of various dialect groups to unite as one—but rather all Singaporeans, all races. Why the sudden emphasis on unity among the Chinese? Has there been a lack of it in the past? (Quo Vadis 1979)

The frustration with the PAP government in getting the Chinese community to speak Mandarin was revealed when a Senior Parliamentary Secretary said that “the small group of Chinese Singaporeans who cannot speak Mandarin and feel it is unnecessary to learn the language need to be persuaded to change their attitude” (The Straits Times 1987, 13, emphasis

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added). By the mid-1980s, the economic value of Mandarin was emphasized when Ong Teng Cheong, then Second Deputy Prime Minister, noted that “China, with a population of more than one billion, is a large market. … We shall no doubt face competition in our trade and economic activities with China, but we have an edge over others in our bilingual ability” (The Straits Times 1985, 1). In 2004, then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong called on Singaporean Chinese to be “bi-cultural” (Goh 2004). The government expects elite Chinese students to be both part of the English-speaking “Western” world (with an eye on the United States and the United Kingdom) and the PRC. The sinicisation programme has not been welcomed by non-Chinese communities in Singapore but the government has continued to allow large numbers of Chinese from the PRC to settle down in Singapore. As a consequence, the government’s reaction to any public antagonism between the ethnic Chinese from the PRC and Singapore has ranged from muted nonchalance to the standard public call that Singapore needs foreigners and the Chinese from the PRC should be welcomed. There was a slight variation in the official response when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called on foreigners in Singapore to respect local customs and racial sensitivity. It is usually up to anti-government websites such as Temasek Review Emeritus that brings up simmering tensions between the ethnic Chinese from the PRC and Singapore.

Conclusion Most of the Chinese in Singapore trace their genealogy directly to their ancestors who had migrated to the island from Fujian and Guangdong in between the establishment of a trading post in 1819 to self-government in 1959. Since 1959, the PAP government has continued to reinforce the message that Singapore is a multi-racial country even though 75 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese. Mandarin remains just one of four official languages in the city-state despite the visibly stronger signs that Mandarin has been emphasized even more over the last few years. The reaction by the Singapore Chinese towards the presence of large numbers of Chinese from the PRC has been condemned by the Singapore government as “xenophobic”. However, this label does not tell the complete picture as it is a reaction of one Chinese community towards another such community. The Chinese in Singapore have taken a divergent route from that of the Chinese in the PRC. There was no communist revolution in Singapore and while there were Chinese in Singapore who supported the CCP in the 1940s, it should be seen in the context that there

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was no promotion of a “Singaporean identity” at this stage. The proclamation of the PRC was followed by news of disasters and repression in China, beginning with the Great Leap Forward and culminating in the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The Chinese in Singapore had turned away from China and began questioning its own identity. In addition to greater participation in local events with nonChinese Singaporeans, the cultural influence from Hong Kong and the ROC (Taiwan) also played a part in making the Singapore Chinese identity. It is no wonder that as large numbers of PRC citizens began migrating to Singapore, the balance had become upset as the Singapore Chinese see the Chinese from the PRC in a negative light. If the Singapore government had assumed that all Chinese were culturally the same in order to bring in more Chinese people to maintain a 75 percent proportion of the national population, it is very much mistaken. Nationalism in Singapore means not only the Chinese defending what it sees as inherent in its identity but also the sense that racial sensitivities should be observed. The Chinese in Singapore may be an “imagined community” marking itself out from the ethnic Chinese from the PRC but the distinction was born out of nationalism, government policy and geo-politics during the Cold War. The rise in nationalism in Singapore feeds onto the sense of identity among the local Chinese community. In a way, the emotions driven by the Chinese in Singapore is a result of the government attempts since 1959 to create a “Singaporean identity” that was built on the premise of the four major ethnic groups channelling their loyalty and pride towards all things Singaporean. Since the 1970s, the Singapore Chinese have been bombarded with messages that they have to be inward-looking and regard “China” as a foreign country.

References Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London/New York: Verso. Ang, I. 2001. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West. London/New York: Routledge. Barr, M. 2000. Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs behind the Man. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Cai, J., and V. Yu. 2013. “Xi Jinping Outlines His Vision of China’s ‘Dream and Renaissance’.” South China Morning Post, 18 March. Carstens, S. A. 2005. Histories, Cultures, Identities: Studies in Malaysian Chinese Worlds. Singapore: NUS Press.

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Cheowyonglee. 2008. “Too Many Chinese PRC in Singapore!” Discussion list message, SGForums, 30 April. Http://sgforums.com/forums/10/topics/316040. Department of Statistics, Singapore. 2010. Table 8: Resident Population by Age Group, Place of Birth and Sex for Year 2010. Http://www.singstat.gov.sg/Publications/publications_and_papers/cop2 010/census10_stat_release1.html. Dikötter, F. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst & Company. Duara, P. 2009. The Global and Regional in China’s NationTransformation. London and New York: Routledge. —. 1997. “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900-1945.” The American Historical Review 102 (4): 1030-1051. Goh, C. B., and S. Gopinathan. 2005. “History Education and the Construction of National Identity in Singapore, 1945-2000.” In History Education and National Identity in East Asia, edited by E. Vickers and A. Jones, 203-225. New York: Routledge. Goh, C. T. 2004. “Groom Our Young to be Bicultural.” The Straits Times, 18 December: 11. Hanson, B. 2007. “When in Singapore, Do as S’poreans Do.” The Straits Times, 30 September: 28. Harrison, H. 2001. China. London: Hodder Arnold. Holcombe, C. W. 2004. “Southern Integration: The Sui-Tang (581-907) Reach South.” Historian 66 (4): 749-771. JS. 1988. “Let’s Do Our Best to Preserve our 25 Years of Heritage.” Forum section, The Straits Times, 26 November: 28. Kong, L. 1997. “Popular Music in a Transnational World: The Construction of Local Identities in Singapore.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 38 (1): 19-36. Lee, K. Y. 2000. From Third World to First – The Singapore Story: 19652000. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. —. 1998. The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. Singapore: Prentice Hall. Lim, J. 2013. “Coming of Age of Nationalism: The 2011 Elections in Singapore.” Paper presented at the 18th Symposium of the Malaysia and Singapore Society of Australia, Sydney, 5 December. Loh, C. K. 2006. “Breaking the Barrier: What Will It Take to Remove the Differences that Stand Between S’poreans, Migrants?” Today, 30 August: 1. McKeown, A. 1999. “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949.” Journal of Asian Studies 58 (2): 306-337.

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National Archives of Australia (NAA). 1967. Series Number A1838, Control Symbol 3024/11/161 Part 2, “Singapore—Relations with United States of America”, 1967-1969.” Transcript, Meet the Press, 22 October. Nikkei Report. 2012. “Speculation Rife over Xi’s “Renaissance of Chinese Race.” 26 August. Ong, S. K. 2013. “‘Chinese, But Not Quite’: Huaqiao and the Marginalization of the Overseas Chinese.” Journal of Chinese Overseas 9 (1): 1-32. Peh, S. H. 2006. “Foreigners Making Presence Felt in Singapore.” The Straits Times, 22 August: 3. Quo Vadis? 1979. “Back Campaign Arguments with Clear Thinking.” Forum section, The Straits Times, 12 October: 19. Shih, S. M. 2007. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Smith, A. 2001. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Straits Times. 1980. “Use Mandarin Drive Not a Chauvinistic Move: Devan.” 21 January: 9. —. 1985. “Bilingual Advantage.” 29 September: 1. —. 1987. “Mandarin Drive: Small Group Has Attitude Problem.” 26 October: 13. —. 1989. “Entry of Hongkongers Won’t Upset Racial Mix.” 21 August: 17 Suryadinata, L. 2004[1997]. Chinese and Nation-Building in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic. Teo, L. 2007. “New Chinese Migrants Educated, Tech-Savvy and Proud.” The Straits Times, 28 October: 10. Tu, W. M. 1994. “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center.” In The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, edited by W. M. Tu, 1-33. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Turnbull, C. M. 2009. A History of Modern Singapore, 1819-2005. Singapore: NUS Press. Wakeman, F. Jr. 1997. “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism.” The China Quarterly 150: 395-432. Wang, G. W. 2004. “A Single Chinese Diaspora?” In Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu, edited by G. Benton and H. Liu, 157-177. London: RoutledgeCurzon. —. 2000. The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO DIASPORIC “UNBELONGING” TO MALAYSIA AND SINGAPORE: SECOND-GENERATION MALAYSIAN-CHINESE MIGRANTS IN SINGAPORE SIN YEE KOH

Introduction Malaysia’s practice of pro-Bumiputera (“sons of the soil”) affirmative action has institutionalised a culture of migration, particularly amongst the Malaysian-Chinese. The typical Malaysian-Chinese emigrant has been “a skilled, highly educated migrant” (Cartier 2003, 73) seeking better life opportunities, particularly in Singapore. As Malaysia does not permit dual citizenship, many Malaysian-Chinese residents in Singapore have taken up Singapore permanent residency (PR) while retaining their Malaysian citizenship. This is also a common strategy amongst second-generation Malaysian-Chinese migrants in Singapore. In this chapter, I use “secondgeneration Malaysian-Chinese” to describe ethnic Chinese migrants residing in Singapore who were born in Malaysia or Singapore, and whose parents are/were Malaysian citizens who have engaged in some form of residence in Singapore. Such forms of residence include daily to-and-fro commutes between Singapore and Malaysia, transnational household arrangements across the Malaysia-Singapore border (e.g., husband resides in Singapore while the rest of the family resides in Malaysia), as well as temporary and permanent stays in Singapore. This chapter examines how and why second-generation MalaysianChinese in Singapore actively take on diasporic consciousness vis-à-vis Malaysia and Singapore. I argue that what appears to be economic considerations in these flexible citizens’ (Ong, 1999) rationalisations of (citizenship) identity and migration intentions—articulated as diasporic

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“unbelonging”—need to be contextualised to their specific diasporic condition that is caught in between Malaysia and Singapore. As Christou (2011, 249) puts it, “belonging is the mediated representational practice of the diasporic condition articulated through experiences of homing and exile”. I begin by discussing existing literature on three interrelated themes: firstly, diaspora; secondly, diasporic consciousness and second-generation migrants; and thirdly, citizenship, identity, and belonging. Second, I provide some background to the emigration of Malaysian-Chinese to Singapore. Third, I describe and analyse narratives of three secondgeneration Malaysian-Chinese in Singapore. Finally, I conclude by highlighting common themes emerging from their narratives.

Diaspora and citizenship; identity and belonging Diaspora “Diaspora”, originally used in reference to the Jewish dispersal from Jerusalem, has connotations of exile, displacement, loss, alienation, and a yearning for the homeland. However, there has since been an expansion of the term beyond its original context. “Diaspora” has been used to refer to a group, a process, a sense of identity, and a state of consciousness (e.g., Hall, 1990; Brah; 1997; Dwyer, 2000). In reference to a group, it has been used to describe practically any de-territorialized or transnational community, even those uprooted for economic reasons (Braziel 2008). In this sense, diasporas are no longer seen as victims—instead, they become challengers to nation-states (Cohen 1996) due to their simultaneous affiliations to both sending and receiving countries. Vertovec (1997) has proposed three ways of conceptualising “diaspora”: (1) as a social form; (2) as a type of consciousness; and (3) as a mode of cultural production. The first defines diaspora as a group with a shared history and geography; the second captures a sense of being “here” and “there” while not fully belonging to either; and the third entails the construction and reproduction of an imagined belonging. While these three ways of conceptualisation move beyond seeing diasporas as a community with a sense of shared origin, they continue to rely on notions of boundaries—bounded or unbounded. For the former, boundaries such as ethnic, religious, or national are assumed to be static. Though imaginary, these boundaries translate into practised juxtapositions of “us” against “them”. For the latter, emphasis is placed on a sense of “diasporic consciousness” where boundaries are dynamic, shifting, and

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shaped by differential power relations. This view sees people in the diaspora exercising agency in shaping the very nature of their diasporic existence. Here, I agree with Mavroudi’s (2007) suggestion to conceptualise diaspora as process—i.e., something that is constantly evolving at various scales while simultaneously subjected to changing power relationships within and across these scales. This perspective focuses on the temporality of diasporic consciousness while acknowledging the presence of institutional frameworks circumscribing the actual development and practices of diasporic consciousness.

Diasporic consciousness and the second generation However, how do diasporic consciousness arise, and what conditions encourage their survival and perpetuation? How does this play out for second and future generations? To examine this, we need to consider who and what constructs and perpetuates diasporic consciousness. On the one hand, diasporic identities are “impinged upon, determined, demonized, or encompassed by the … nation-state” (Axel 2002, 426). On the other hand, as diasporas exist in a triadic relationship with both the origin and host societies (Safran 1991), they are often caught paradoxically “here” and “there”. This complex in-between position often results in “diasporic individuals … focus[ing] on their attachment to symbols of their ethnicity” and simultaneously feeling “emotionally invested in the ‘homeland’” (Agnew 2005, 14). Thus, while diasporic consciousness is a genuine feeling experienced by people in the diaspora, it has also been mistakenly understood to be attached to ethnicity and country of origin. This is further complicated for second-generation diasporas, who may engage with their “homeland” through imaginations translated from their parents’ experiences and memories. While Axel (2002) uses the “diasporic imaginary” specifically in reference to the dialectical relationship between diaspora and the homeland nation-state, I see the transfer of diasporic imaginations occurring within diaspora families to be equally—if not more—significant in constructing and sustaining second-generation diasporas’ sense of diasporic identity.

Linking citizenship, identity and belonging A citizenry’s sense of identity and belonging is also intertwined with its citizenship. Citizenship in the Anglo-Western liberal sense refers to a social contract (with accompanying responsibilities and obligations)

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between the citizen and a citizenship-conferring territorial entity (Marshall 1950). However, citizenship has also been conflated with national identity (Miller, 2000). This is further complicated when a sense of national loyalty is implied with the conferment of citizenship. According to Isin and Wood (1999, 20), citizenship and identity are both group markers. However, citizenship carries legal-political weight, while identity carries socio-cultural weight. In contrast, Faist (2000) sees both “dimensions of citizenship” and “realms of membership” as part of and parcel of what constitutes “citizenship”. In particular, he brings attention to the co-existence of, and tensions between contractual (i.e., legal-constitutional and political-institutional) and societal recognition of “citizenship” (e.g., national identity). While diasporas may have legal-constitutional rights in their host societies, these may not come with societal recognition and acceptance. Consequently, this could influence their conscious estrangement as “strangers” and “others” in their host societies. Equally, the nature of their diasporic emigration from the “homeland” may bring about a paradoxical sense of attachment. On the one hand, there is yearning for “home”, yet on the other hand, there is a sense of misfit in the “homeland” society due to years of living away in the diaspora.

Background Emigration of the Malaysian-Chinese Malaysia’s Bumiputera-differentiated citizenship has been institutionalized as a result of political compromise between the ethnic-based political parties during Malaysia’s independence days in the 1950s (see Cheah 2002). The Bumiputeras (predominantly ethnic Malays) enjoy certain constitutional citizenship privileges such as special rights to land ownership, education, and civil service jobs. Practices of affirmative action, introduced in 1971 in the form the New Economic Policy (NEP), have resulted in significant emigration of the non-Bumiputera MalaysianChinese and Malaysian-Indians (Sidhu 2006). The World Bank (2011) estimates that the Malaysian diaspora (Malaysian-born migrants) has reached one million in 2010 compared to 750,000 in 2000, while the Malaysian brain drain (tertiary-educated Malaysian-born migrants, aged 25+) is estimated to be a third of the overall diaspora. In 2000, the five largest destination countries hosting the Malaysian diaspora are Singapore (46%), Australia (12%), Brunei (9%), United States (8%), and the United Kingdom (8%). The Malaysian

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diaspora in Singapore are overwhelmingly the Malaysian-Chinese (Table 22-1). Table 22-1: Malaysian diaspora in Singapore (by ethnicity) 2000

2010

Chinese

85.0%

88.0%

Malay

9.0%

6.0%

Indian

5.0%

5.0%

Source: The World Bank, Malaysia Economic Monitor: Brain Drain, 2011

Pro-Bumiputera public university placement1 and scholarship quotas meant that some Malaysian-Chinese sought alternative paths towards social mobility through migration. Singapore has been a favoured destination due to the “close geographical proximity, historical and economic ties, and relatively high wages” (Pillai 1992, 5). Since the 1970s, Singapore has implemented various policies to attract Malaysian students and workers. These include funded university education with accompanying employment obligations in Singapore; preferential access to Singapore permanent residence and/or citizenship; opportunities to work in public sector and universities; subsidized rental of older Housing Development Board (HDB) apartments in the 1980s (discontinued in the 1990s); and Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Scholarship schemes implemented since 1969 to the present (Ho and Tyson, 2011, 136). This active recruitment of students, skilled and semiskilled labour from Malaysia presents a strong pull factor for the exodus of Malaysian-Chinese. In addition to education and employment opportunities, the MalaysianChinese are also attracted by “prospects for advancement in Singapore’s ‘meritocracy’” (Lam et al. 2002, 136). Indeed, promises of “multicultural meritocracy” (Lam and Yeoh 2004, 147-148) in Singapore contrasts distinctly with ethnic-based institutions and practices in Malaysia. For example, university education followed by a permanent public sector job are desirably perceived by the Malaysian-Chinese to be “iron [rice] bowls” (Kee 2004, 14), a path that would have been curtailed in Malaysia given the practice of pro-Bumiputera policies.

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Malaysian-Chinese in Singapore It is common knowledge that many Malaysians in Singapore have taken-up Singapore permanent residency and/or citizenship. However, requests for such statistics have been refused on the grounds of them being “confidential and sensitive” (Ahmad 2002).2 My request to the National Population and Talent Division (NPTD) in December 2012 for the number of Malaysians (citizens and Malaysian-born persons) who are Singapore permanent residents (SPRs) and/or Singapore citizens was refused as the information “is not available for release” (personal communication 2012, 18 December). I was instead directed to a Parliamentary reply where SPRs and new citizens are stratified by region of origin (Teo 2011). However, it is possible to estimate the numbers indirectly. From 2000 to 2010, about half of Singapore’s resident population were born in Malaysia (The World Bank 2011, 100). Since Singapore’s resident population in 2010 is 3.77 million, there were roughly 1.88 million Malaysian-born persons resident in Singapore that year. To be counted as a member of Singapore’s resident population, these Malaysian-born persons would have had acquired Singapore permanent residency or citizenship. Adding to the numerical significance of Malaysians in Singapore, there are also those who engage in daily commutes to Singapore for work and education, while residing in Malaysia. Since they are not resident in Singapore, they would have been excluded from the earlier estimation. The number of daily work commuters was estimated to be 24,000 in the 1990s (The Star 1991, Feb 13, cited in Pillai 1992, 25). By the 2000s, this has increased to 150,000, as reported in New Straits Times (2009).

Three narratives In this section, I focus on the narratives of Lim, Tan, and Wong, who are second-generation Malaysian-Chinese in Singapore.3 Lim and Tan are SPRs, while Wong has taken up Singapore citizenship. Lim is in his late20s and single; Tan in his late-30s and is married with two children; and Wong is in his late-30s and single. I have chosen to depict their narratives here, not because they are representative of all second-generation Malaysian-Chinese in Singapore, but because they individually and collectively highlight the various ways diasporic consciousness are constructed, sustained, and operationalised.

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Lim Lim’s parents moved to Singapore more than 30 years ago. Upon arrival, they took-up Singapore PR. Lim was born and raised in Singapore. The family makes annual visits to his parental hometown in Malaysia during school holidays and Chinese New Year. As a second-generation SPR, Lim was required to serve compulsory national service in Singapore. While he will be residing in Singapore for the time being, he does not dismiss the possibility of “returning” to Malaysia for retirement in the future. As a non-Singapore citizen, Lim is constantly aware of him being “different” from his Singaporean peers and feeling “a bit marginalised sometimes”. Official encounters remind him of his official status as a nonSingapore citizen. Let’s say, like Edusave scholarships.4 So what if your results were good? You know, you don’t get it. When you get your identity card it’s blue in colour, everyone else’s in the classroom was pink. … In university, I was applying for something to go to Japan, and they thought I was a Singapore citizen. When we submitted the documents, my Vice-Dean actually apologized saying that they were told to take Singaporeans over foreigners. … So here and there yes, you do feel it.

However, this does not happen in everyday encounters with his Singaporean friends. They actually treat me like one, you know, like a Singaporean. They only remember sometimes. I mean, they do know that I am Malaysian. So sometimes they forget until later on they realize: “Yeah, you are a Malaysian”.

While Lim conceptualises citizenship as “only a document”, his decision to keep his Malaysian citizenship has been informed by both pragmatic and emotional factors. For the former, keeping Malaysian citizenship is crucial because his parents own real estate property in Malaysia. For the latter, his annual visits to his parental hometown have instilled in him the yearning for a nostalgic return which he is considering for his future retirement. The possibility of returning for retirement is also something his parents had planned for themselves.

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Well, because of the property in Malaysia and all that, yeah, it does hold significant meaning. And it’s just this idea that one day if you really want to retire. Because like my hometown … the pace of life is actually slower than in Singapore. It seems like a nice place to relax and retire. So you have this idea that you work here, earn a certain amount of money, and then of course you can go back. … Even my parents have talked about going back to Malaysia to retire when they reach a certain age. So it seems like a nice place to go back when everything is done.

In contrast, he rationalises that he has “not benefited from Singapore that much” throughout his stay in Singapore. Having gotten used to being a non-Singaporean residing in Singapore, he does not see the need to convert to Singapore citizenship. More importantly, keeping his Malaysian citizenship provides an alternative plan in case he wants to “return” to Malaysia in the future.

Tan Tan comes from a family of nine siblings. When he was three years old, his family engaged in a transnational household arrangement. He moved to Singapore with his mother and three siblings, while his father resided in Malaysia with the five elder children. Throughout his stay in Singapore, the family makes at least three annual visits to his hometown in Malaysia: once during Chinese New Year, and twice during school holidays. Tan took-up Singapore permanent residency after graduating from university. He married a Singaporean, and his children are Singapore citizens. Tan considers himself “a Malaysian who is no longer a Malaysian”. At the same time, he does not consider himself a Singaporean despite residing for more than 30 years in Singapore. He describes this ambivalent and complex sense of belonging: It’s a very complicated feeling. In Singapore, I feel this contradiction when others talk about conflicting issues concerning Singapore and Malaysia. Then I will feel that I am Malaysian. I will stand by Malaysia and speak from that perspective. I don’t consider myself Singaporean. Why? I think it’s a sense of identity. Since young my father instilled in us that we are Malaysian. We are Malaysian, so naturally we don’t have a sense of belonging to Singapore. But I will say that this is where I live. My family and my friends are here. But I don’t identify myself as a Singaporean.

Tan is very aware that his “roots grew in Malaysia”, yet “the shoots emerged in Singapore”. As a result, he is caught in-between and does not

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have a “complete” sense of belonging towards either. Despite permanently residing in Singapore, he has always looked towards Malaysia as a place of nostalgic familiarity. Although Malaysia and Singapore is only divided by a stretch of water, the feeling is totally different. I don’t know why. Although I say that I am not a complete Malaysian, I feel this strong sense of familiarity whenever I go back there. It feels like where I originally come from. Perhaps it’s just my own wishful thinking (laughs). Especially when I return to my parental home, I always feel emotionally moved. Even though I didn’t really spend that much time there, and as a three-year old I couldn’t have that many memories. But every year we go back for holidays, there are still some memorable things. Also, my family is there. My grandmother, my parents. There is a kind of connected emotion there.

As a Chinese language teacher, Tan prefers the quality of life in Malaysia, which he perceives to be rich and diverse compared to that in Singapore. He appreciates the cultural atmosphere for the Chinese language in Malaysia. In contrast, he found that he was unable to find likeminded friends in Singapore with whom he can connect with culturally. This has caused him to question whether his “difference” and sense of distance from his Singaporean peers has been a result of his nonSingaporean identity. His recount of the following incident demonstrates this “difference” between the Malaysian-Chinese and the SingaporeanChinese. I went to China with a group of Chinese teachers. There was only one Malaysian in the group, and the rest were Singaporean. The tour guide kept referring to us as “we the Chinese people”, but the Singaporean teachers complained: “Can you please don’t say that we are the Chinese people? You are Chinese, but we are not. We are Singaporean.” … After the incident, the tour guide explained: “Actually when I said ‘we the Chinese people’, I meant the Chinese cultural community and not the Chinese nation.” … The only Malaysian present said: “Actually I don’t mind. Even if you said we are the Chinese people, we can accept this. Because China is after all made up of the Chinese cultural community.” … So there is this problem. Singaporeans tend to be narrow-minded when it comes to these things. It’s either/or, not possible to compromise.

Wong Wong was born in Singapore. His family moved back to Malaysia shortly after, and he grew up commuting between Malaysia and Singapore. When he was 14, his parents took-up Singapore permanent residency and

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applied the same for him. Like Lim, he had to serve national service as a second-generation SPR. Wong subsequently took-up Singapore citizenship along with his father and two sisters. His mother, however, kept her Malaysian citizenship. At the time of the interview, his family resides in Singapore but makes weekly visits to their family home in Malaysia. Growing up across the Malaysia-Singapore border has given Wong a sense of dual identity and belonging that is not in conflict with one another. While his Malaysian identity is linked to his formative years in Malaysia, his Singapore identity is deeply influenced by his national service days. He appreciates the national service training for instilling in him a sense of dignity and independence which he perceives as crucial in building his character. However, Wong regrets giving up his Malaysian citizenship for Singaporean citizenship. Firstly, he saw how his Malaysian peers were being celebrated as “foreign talents” during the time when the Singapore government actively recruited foreign skilled labour. In contrast, he was struggling to find a job as a Singaporean citizen. He thought to himself then: If I were to retain my PR status, I’m a foreign talent! You know, you will be treating me differently, right? So I got very disappointed with them in that respect. Very, very disappointed.

Secondly, he recalls how his family made the decision to convert to Singapore citizenship out of uncertainties of how they would be treated as Singapore PRs and non-citizens: … we are worried that they might revoke our PR status if we don’t take up the citizenship. Because they keep asking, coming to us … And I already served two-and-a-half years National Service. Imagine if they are going to revoke my PR status. That means I’ve already served the two-and-a-half years for nothing (laughs), right?

Thirdly, he regrets giving up the right to an alternative way of life and other livelihood options with his renunciation of Malaysian citizenship: … if I am still a Malaysian, I will still get a chance to … set up a business in Malaysia. So much easier. If I set up in Singapore it’s so much more expensive. Such a small place. In Malaysia the whole country is so big. There are a lot of opportunities there.

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In contrast, he feels trapped in Singapore, especially with increasing inflation and housing prices. His weekly visits to Malaysia become an escape that he appreciates. You just throw out everything, you know? You can do whatever you want. You can sit under the sky. Alfresco. Cheap coffee. Have a glass of teh tarik [“milk tea”] under the sky. … So it’s a different kind of lifestyle. So much [more] relaxing in Malaysia.

Discussion and conclusion Drawing from the narratives of three respondents, I have identified four observations from my research that add to the literature on diaspora and citizenship. Firstly, their Malaysian citizenship is a symbol of identity and back-up plan for future migration. Secondly, structural factors and existing socio-institutional practices contribute towards their diasporic “unbelonging” to both Singapore and Malaysia. Thirdly, while the awareness of their estranged selves does not conflict with their everyday lives, this does not remove their continual negotiations as citizen-diasporas caught in between Malaysia and Singapore. Finally, citizenship as identity and citizenship as strategy are intertwined.

Estranging selves: diasporic “unbelonging” For diasporas, “home is always somewhere else” (Barabantseva and Sutherland 2011, 5). Despite growing up and permanently residing in Singapore, Lim, Tan and Wong continue to nurture a sense of belonging to an imagined “home” elsewhere in Malaysia. For them, “home” is reinforced by their parents’ continued attachment to their hometown and the presence of their extended family there. Their annual home visits become rituals of performance that constantly remind them of the existence of another home. The presence of a physical family home to return to enables the imagined home to be materialised concretely. In this way, they continue to nurture their incomplete belonging to Singapore. Official and unofficial encounters contribute towards the sense of being an “unbelonged” stranger in Malaysia and Singapore. Both Tan and Wong talked about discriminatory experiences when they had to renew their Malaysian passports. Malaysian immigration officers would deliberately speak to them in Malay, knowing that they did not understand the language. The approval process would be prolonged, causing unnecessary anxiety and uncertainties. Lim’s Singaporean friends may forget that he is Malaysian and treat him as one of them, but he is

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constantly aware that he is not one of them because his blue identity card marks him as such. In everyday encounters, Tan feels himself a stranger in Malaysia as a result of jeering from his own siblings during home visits to Malaysia (“The ‘Singaporeans’ have arrived!” or “That’s the way ‘Singaporeans’ speak!”). At the same time, he feels himself a stranger in Singapore because he finds difficulty to connect with what he considers some Singaporeans’ narrow-minded perspectives. As Waite and Cook found in their research, second-generation migrants engage in transnational social fields in their everyday lives that exposes them to “ideas, practices, people and goods from their ancestral homelands which often evoked emotions of comfort with country of origin identifiers” (2011, 240). The presence of these identifiers makes real their sense of difference while living amongst people in the host society. I further argue that it is not just interactions with “origin identifiers”, but also comparative interactions with host identifiers that accentuate the stranger amongst my respondents. Hence, second-generation diasporas become estranged selves—not because they want to, but because there are constant reminders in their lives that they are strangers in the midst of familiar others.

Diaspora as strategy However, we should caution against over-sympathising the diasporic stranger in host societies. As the three narratives demonstrate, underlying the articulations of diasporic consciousness are fundamentally economic, pragmatic, and strategic motivations. Lim, for example, is keeping his Malaysian citizenship because this ensures access to his parents’ property in Malaysia and his right for a possible return for retirement in the future. Wong’s regrets at giving-up his Malaysian citizenship signals his late realization that he has “trapped” himself with Singapore citizenship. Tan is retaining his Malaysian citizenship not only because he has an emotional belonging to Malaysia, but also because his status as a Singaporean’s spouse and father to Singaporean children means that he can continue to reside permanently in Singapore without changing his citizenship status. The diasporic consciousness articulated by Lim, Tan, and Wong relates to something more than just nostalgic memories. Their emotional affiliation to Malaysia may have originally arisen from their growing-up years and/or parents’ influences. However, the subsequent perpetuation of their diasporic consciousness is also fed in part by their realization that a diasporic link to Malaysia via their citizenship status offers the possibility of an exit from Singapore—if and when they need to exercise that option.

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In a way, they are “flexible citizens” (Ong 1999) who are “trapped” in between Malaysia and Singapore, resorting to claiming to be diasporas as a form of pragmatic survival and emotional rationalization. The ways through which nationalism is practised and enacted in everyday life (Mavroudi 2010) are crucial to our understanding of how diasporas actively and reactively construct their estranged selves in host societies. While existing research has focused on the construction of strangers by individuals and collectives in host societies, I have argued that the strangers also co-construct themselves as a form of survival strategy.

Notes 1. Lee (2012, 236) notes that quotas were discretionary although it has been publicly reported that 55 percent were apportioned to Bumiputera candidates from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. 2. Statistics on the total numbers of SPRs and new citizens are publicly available, but this is not stratified by country of origin or country of prior citizenship. 3. This is drawn from my PhD research involving interviews with 67 Malaysian skilled migrants in Singapore, London, and returnees to Kuala Lumpur. 4. One-time monetary awards to Singaporean students (upper-primary and lowersecondary) who are the top five percent or ten percent of their cohorts.

References Agnew, V. 2005. “Introduction.” In Diaspora, Memory and Identity: A Search for Home, 3-17. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ahmad, Y. 2002. “Sleepless in Singapore.” Malaysian Business, 16 June. Axel, B. K. 2002. “The Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Culture 14: 411-428. Barabantseva, E., and C. Sutherland. 2011. “Diaspora and Citizenship: Introduction.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 17: 1-13. Brah, A. 1997. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. New York: Routledge. Braziel, J. E. 2008. “Introducing Diaspora: Key Terms.” In Diaspora: An Introduction, 1-36. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Cartier, C. L. 2003. “Diaspora and Social Restructuring in Postcolonial Malaysia.” In The Chinese Diaspora: Space, Place, Mobility, and Identity, edited by L. J. C. Ma and C. L. Cartier, 69-96. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Cheah, B. K. 2002. Malaysia: The Making of a Nation. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

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Christou, A. 2011. “Narrating Lives in (E)motion: Embodiment, Belongingness and Displacement in Diasporic Spaces of Home and Return.” Emotion, Space and Society 4: 249-257. Cohen, R. 1996. “Diasporas and the Nation-state: From Victims to Challengers.” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) 72: 507-520. Dwyer, C. 2000. “Negotiating Diasporic Identities: Young British South Asian Muslim Women.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23: 475-486. Faist, T. 2000. “Transnationalization in International Migration: Implications for the Study of Citizenship and Culture.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23: 189-222. Hall, S. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222-237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Ho, Y. J., and A. D. Tyson. 2011. Malaysian Migration to Singapore: Pathways, Mechanisms and Status.” Malaysian Journal of Economic Studies 48: 131-145. Isin, E. F., and P. K. Wood. 1999. Citizenship and Identity. London: Sage. Kee, G. H. 2004. Being Non-Bumiputera: Ethnic Chinese Youths’ Modes of Resistance and Identity Formation. An Ethnographic Study of the Impact of the National Language Act and Quota System Policy at a Malaysian National Secondary School. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh. Lam, T., and B. S. A. Yeoh. 2004. “Negotiating ‘Home’ and ‘National Identity’: Chinese-Malaysian Transmigrants in Singapore.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 45: 141-164. Lam, T., B. S. A. Yeoh, and L. Law. 2002. “Sustaining Families Transnationally: Chinese-Malaysians in Singapore.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 11: 117-144. Lee, H. A. 2012. “Affirmative Action in Malaysia: Education and Employment Outcomes since the 1990s.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 42: 230-254. Marshall, T. H. 1950. Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge: University Press. Mavroudi, E. 2007. “Diaspora as Process: (De)constructing Boundaries.” Geography Compass 1: 467-479. —. 2010. “Nationalism, the Nation and Migration: Searching for Purity and Diversity.” Space and Polity 14: 219-233. Miller, D. 2000. Citizenship and National Identity. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

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New Straits Times. 2009. “Malaysians in Singapore ‘last to be let go,’” 5 April. Ong, A. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The Cultural logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pillai, P. 1992. People on the Move: An Overview of Recent Immigration and Emigration in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Strategic and International Studies. Safran, W. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homelands and Return.” Diaspora 1: 83-99. Sidhu, R. K. 2006. Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market. Mahwah, N. J.; London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Teo, C. H. 2011. Twelfth Parliament of Singapore (First Session) Questions for Written Answer, Tuesday, 22 November 2011: Applications for Citizenship and Permanent Residence. Https://www.nptd.gov.sg/content/dam/nptd/Parliamentary%20reply%2 0on%2022%20Nov%202011.pdf. The World Bank. 2011. Malaysia Economic Monitor: Brain Drain. Washington, D.C.: The World Bank. Vertovec, S. 1997. “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’, Exemplified among South Asian Religions.” Diaspora 6: 277-300. Waite, L., and J. Cook. 2011. “Belonging among Diasporic African Communities in the UK: Plurilocal Homes and Simultaneity of Place Attachments.” Emotion, Space and Society 4: 238-248.

PART VI: SOUTH ASIAN MIGRATION AND DIASPORA

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE INTRODUCTION: SOUTH ASIAN MIGRATION UPDATES RIMI NATH

“South Asia” is a geographic region of relatively recent construction— only about six decades old. It has principally encompassed seven diverse sovereign states (now eight, with Afghanistan being roped in): India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Some also include Myanmar, which was a province of British India until 1935 (known then as Burma) (Bose and Jalal 2004, 3). Although there is heterogeneity in the different countries of the region (which is also evident in the migration trends and government policies), one can still find common grounds to club South Asian nations together. This can be done if one takes into account the shared history of colonialism/imperialism and its implications for South Asian nations. Other common grounds are the South Asian nations’ shared traditions or practices; while one can also take into consideration the geographical boundaries which “set the whole of the subcontinent apart from the rest of the world” (Bose and Jalal 2004, 3). Out of the 214 million international migrants in 2010, the number of international migrants in South Asia came to an estimated number of 14.3 million and is considered to be on the rise (IOM 2010). In 2010, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan were ranked in the top 10 emigration countries; and India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka figured in the top 30. From 1960 to 2000 the percentage of female migrants from South Asia in comparison to the total number of international migrants from that region shows a decline from around 46 to 44 percent (Zlotnik 2003). Although female migrants are still actively on the move from this region, the number of male migrants from South Asia has continuously outnumbered that of female migrants due to the high demand for male workers in the oil-producing countries of Western Asia (OECD-UNDESA 2013). The following sections will relate to readers two aspects of South

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Asian migration, intra-regional migration, and migration out of the region, as well as some prospective projections.

Intra-regional migration One can say that South Asian migration has been an important part in the societal formation and history of South Asia. Large-scale migration in the region (within South Asia) occurred at the onset of South Asia’s postcolonial history. The partition of India and Pakistan (1947) resulted in mass migration in the region. About five million Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan for India, and about six million Muslims moved to Pakistan from India, while the region as a whole witnessed mass communal violence and atrocities. Again, many Bangladeshis (East Pakistanis) took refuge in India during the formation of Pakistan (having two wings, East and West) as a separate state from India in 1947. They also did this during the war between East and West Pakistan, which resulted in the separation of Pakistan into two states—Pakistan and Bangladesh in 1971 (Kumar 2009). The question of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants still remains a major concern in India. Regional migration such as that between the neighbouring countries of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, and Afghanistan also has been dominant historically. A large group of Indian Tamils migrated to Sri Lanka to work in the tea plantations. History has also witnessed the returning of Tamils to India with the gearing up of the Tamil-Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka. Many Indians migrated to Myanmar to work on plantations or other menial jobs. A majority of Nepalese migrants still go to India for work. However, they are not officially considered migrants as there is no visa policy between India and Nepal. Many migrants from Afghanistan moved to Pakistan (and Iran) during and after the Soviet invasion in 1979, the mujahedeen victory in 1992, and the rise of the oppressive Taliban regime in 1994 as well as during the U.S.-led war between the Taliban and coalition forces in 2001. Religious and cultural affinities as well as geographical proximity made Pakistan (and Iran) clear choices for Afghans who wanted to flee their country (Ashrafi and Moghissi 2002). Insurgency and separatist movements have been common in South Asian nations and this has also caused intra- and inter-regional migration. South Asia has experienced economic growth in recent years but poverty remains rampant in the region. Poverty can be seen as a major driving force behind migration as is evident from the South Asian nations of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Other factors that emerge are aspirations for economic empowerment, better educational opportunities,

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and shelter or escape from political conflicts (such as the Maoist insurgency in Nepal) or social and ethnic turmoil (such as the TamilSinhala conflict in Sri Lanka or the civil war among ethnic militias in Afghanistan) which are recurrent in South Asia. In the present age, rapid expansion of modern technology and means of communication also helps in the dissemination of information regarding foreign employment. Migrants are, however, often seen from dual perspectives—as people who harbour economic benefits for both their home and host country (by being valuable human resources in the host country or through sending remittances to the home country), and also as people who pose a security threat (relating to terrorism, human trafficking and so on). In June 2013, the South Asian state, the Maldives, for instance, was placed on the U.S. State Department’s Tier Two Watch List for Human Trafficking for the fourth consecutive year. Many Bangladeshis have been subject to human trafficking in the Maldives (Merrett 2013). Illegal immigration is perceived as a serious problem and immigration from some South Asian states is often seen as a threat associated with global terrorism (especially after the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001). Migrants from countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan have often been subjected to discrimination especially in the West.

Migration out of the region There has been substantial migration beyond the region only since the nineteenth century and this has been conditioned by imperialism. The abolition of slavery in the European colonies between 1834 and 1873 led to new sources of labour. This need for labour, especially plantation workers, was supplied in part by the system of indentured labour. Major destinations included Trinidad, Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji, South Africa, among others (Vertovec 2003). In 1920s the indenture system was abolished but immigration to such colonial zones still continued. South Asians who migrated to British East Africa were neither indentured nor contract labourers. They initially came to build railways and then stayed on as shopkeepers and professionals. Besides indentured labourers, there were still many South Asians, particularly Indians, who migrated to various colonial territories around the world. Many also went there as traders and administrators and settled (Colin, Peach and Vertovec 1990). In the twentieth century, while South Asian migration continued along the traditional routes (such as Mauritius, Trinidad etc.), many found new destinations for migration, such as to the United States, Canada, the United

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Kingdom, and European countries, and later to Australia and the Middle East. Large numbers of South Asians started to migrate to the United Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s and by the second half of the twentieth century there were approximately two million South Asians in the U.K. (Ballard 2003). Many South Asian professionals were also drawn to Germany. Because of the liberal policies on granting political asylum in Germany, many Tamil refugees fleeing from the conflict in Sri Lanka took refuge in Germany, and later in Canada (Refuge 1986). In Nepal, however, before the 1960s, the peculiar trend of migration was that of Nepali workers who were recruited into the British and Indian armies. The early 1970s created a huge demand for different categories of labour in the oilproducing countries of the Middle East, due to the spurt in oil prices; these countries started investing in infrastructural development in a large way. This lured many South Asian workers to the Middle East. Since the mid1980s, South Asian migration expanded to the newly industrialised countries in South East Asia and East Asia like Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong which faced a shortage of labour force willing to join the socalled 3D jobs—dangerous, dirty, and degrading. Globally, the United States remains the most popular migration destination, and this holds true also for the South Asian migrants. The 2010 census states that there are over 3.4 million South Asians living in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Although South Asian immigration to the New World (America, Canada, and Australia) started during the early twentieth century, the sharp restrictions on immigration in the 1920s and 1930s that barred non-white immigrants from entering in the New World brought immigration to a halt. These restrictions were sharply eased with revisions to U.S. immigration law in the 1960s and also revisions of regulations in Australia and Canada. This led to great waves of South Asian migration to the United States, Australia, and Canada in the 1960s (Ludden 2014). Of the 36 million international migrants from South Asia (U.N. Press Release, 2013), 13.5 million resided in the oil-producing countries of Western Asia. South Asian migrant workers had a long history of involvement in the Gulf area, but their numbers rapidly expanded after 1973. East Asia and the Persian Gulf region have become important destinations for South Asians since the 1970s, specifically because of the oil-driven construction boom in the Gulf region. Migrant workers from South Asia joined the labour market predominantly in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, and Libya.

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With rapidly growing economies in Southeast Asian and East Asian countries since the mid-1980s, such as the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong, we witness new destinations opening up for South Asian migrants.

Future prospects It can be predicted that the migration trend within and from South Asia will continue in the years to come. Many South Asian nations are economically and politically unstable. South Asian migration is likely to increase in future as many South Asians want to escape socio-economic and political distress. Political instability in the region, violence, poverty, lack of proper opportunities for higher education, and human trafficking may continue to facilitate migration. South Asian countries have been a victim of internal conflicts and the trend still continues. Both conflicts against the state or civil war and ethnic conflicts have been rampant in the region. Parts of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka have been experiencing a long-running conflict whereas the conflicts and tensions in Pakistan and Afghanistan have also been striking. Internal conflicts have resulted in three times as many deaths as wars between states since World War II (Fearson and Laitin 2003). These conflicts often lead to unrest and violence which compel many people to leave their homelands in search for a secure and better place. Migration from this region will also be enhanced due to global economic and climate crises. Researchers predict that South Asia will be hard hit by climate change. Existing development measures may be thwarted because of climatic changes. Extreme weather such as floods and cyclonic activity seem very rampant. India and Bangladesh are likely to be exposed to one-thirds of the global threat from coastal flooding. These conditions may lead to internal and international migration across the subcontinent. Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, testified to the U.S. Congress that climate change will exacerbate poverty and increase social tensions, leading to internal instability and conflict, and giving parts of the global population additional reasons to migrate (Fingar 2008). Again, the rapid growth of population in South Asia may lead to rise in the number of the working-age population (15-64 years). This may put pressure for emigration on a large scale in the near future because of the demand for labour in other regions (where population growth is stifled) and because of the lack of adequate employment opportunities in the region. It may be speculated that in the years to come over the next quarter

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of a century, migration flows will be determined by the demand for labour. It is seen that in spite of the global recession in 2008, a steady stream of work and migrant flows from South Asia continued to countries like the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia, amongst others. The countries in the region also benefit from the remittances they receive from the migrants. The top five remittance recipient countries in South Asia in 2010 (in USD billions) are: India ($ 55.0 bn), Bangladesh ($ 11.1 bn), Pakistan ($ 9.4 bn), Sri Lanka ($ 3.6 bn), Nepal ($ 3.5 bn) (The World Bank 2011). South Asia’s economy has become increasingly a “remittance economy” and government policies may facilitate further migration from the region. It is likely that the growing economies of East and Southeast Asia may pull a large number of migrant workers from South Asia in the near future. This may have far reaching socio-cultural, economic, and political consequences. A point of concern, however, is that if there will be an upsurge of international ethnic conflicts (which was seen in the past) and if that will affect temporary or permanent migration in the future. It is again important that documentation of illegal migrants needs to be done in order to get a real picture of migration from South Asia and to curtail security issues and inter-state conflicts that illegal immigration may ensue.

The chapters The chapters that follow examine the problems, prospects, and motives of migration of South Asians to locations such as the United States and Ethiopia. In “Migration from South Asian Nations (Pakistan and Nepal): A Literary Perspective” I analyse, from a literary perspective, migration from Pakistan and Nepal to the United States of America. The chapter, by dealing with a Pakistani and a Nepali novel in English: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, respectively, examines the diasporic characters’ concern with cultural distinctiveness in relation to their homelands and their quest for identity as they try to get away from or later try to associate themselves with their homeland. The diasporic condition of estrangement is examined, and how the conflicts, politics, and images of violence within the nations’ or the outsiders’ views about them affect the immigrants’ identity is analysed. The chapter finally talks about the ambiguities of return migration. In “University Boom in Ethiopia & Professional Abundance in India: A New Wave of Highly Skilled Migration to Africa?” Sophia Thubauville analyses how Ethiopia evolves as a new destination for migration of Indian academics. The chapter discusses the recruitment of Indian

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academics and the current situation at Ethiopian Universities. The university boom in Ethiopia has met with a shortage of expertise at Ethiopian universities. Only with the help of foreign lecturers and a decrease in the needed qualifications for university staff can a minimal curriculum be offered. Most of the foreign lecturers, who are in the country today, are from India. Despite the high demand for Indian lecturers, such job positions seem very insecure. The chapter analyses whether and how this migration can be understood as highly skilled migration.

References Ashrafi, A., and Moghissi, H. 2002. “Afghans in Iran: Asylum Fatigue Overshadows Islamic Brotherhood.” Global Dialogue 4 (4): 89. Ballard, Roger. 2003. “The South Asian Presence in Britain and its Transnational Connections.” In Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, edited by B. Parekh, H. Singh and S. Vertovec. London: Routledge. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 2005. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, second edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Clarke, Colin G., Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec, eds. 1990. South Asian Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fearson, James, and David Laitin. 2003. “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.” American Political Science Review 97: 75-90. Fingar, Thomas. 2008. “Statement for the Record before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” The United States House of Representatives. Http://globalwarming.markey.house.gov/tools/2q08materials/files/0069 .pdf. IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2010. World Migration Report. Http://publications.iom.int/bookstore/free/WMR2010_English.pdf. Kumar, Chirantan. 2009. “Migration and Refugee Issue between India and Bangladesh.” Scholar’s Voice: A New Way of Thinking 1 (1): 64-82. Ludden, David. 2014[2002]. India and South Asia: A Short History. London: Oneworld Publications. Merrett, Neil. 2013. “Bangladesh halts worker migration to the Maldives.” Minivan News (Independent News for the Maldives), 24 September. OECD-UNDESA. 2013. “World Migration in Figures,” October 2013.

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Refuge. 1986. “An Interview on the case of the 155 Tamil Refugees.” Refuge 6 (1). Https://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/refuge/article/viewfile/21493/ 20168. The World Bank. 2011. Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011 (second edition). Washington, DC: The World Bank. U.S. Census Bureau. 2010. United States 2010 Census. Vertovec, Steven. 2003. “Indian Indentured Migration to the Caribbean.” In The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, edited by Stephen Castles and M. Miller, 57-62. Basingstoke, Palgrave-Macmillan. Zlotnik, Hania. 2003. Global Dimensions of Female Migration. Washington DC: Migration Policy Institute.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR MIGRATION FROM SOUTH ASIAN NATIONS (PAKISTAN AND NEPAL): A LITERARY PERSPECTIVE RIMI NATH

Introduction The bringing together of nations under the rubric “South Asia” is not without its problems considering the differences as well as strife between these nations. However, it appears to be convenient, considering the geographical boundaries which “set the whole of the subcontinent apart from the rest of the world” (Bose and Jalal 2004, 3).1 Now, talking about the yet another encompassing term called “South Asian diaspora”, we find that South Asians have migrated to different parts of the world, mainly to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and European countries, and later to Australia and the Middle East. The United States appear to be the most popular destination. Great waves of South Asian migration to that nation began in the 1960s.2 The 2010 U.S. census states that there are over 3.4 million South Asians living in the United States (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Greater economic opportunities, standard of living, freedom, and greater opportunities for college and graduate studies in the United States attract many young South Asians to that country. This chapter, from a literary perspective, analyses migration from two South Asian nations, Pakistan and Nepal to the United States of America at specific points of time. The chapter thus takes up two novels in English, one from a Pakistani writer and one from a Nepali writer: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, respectively, for the purpose of its study, as these novels explore immigration to the United States. This chapter examines the diasporic characters’ concern with cultural distinctiveness and quest for identity in relation to their homeland.

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As “homeland” has varied connotations, 3 I would like to specify it by describing it in terms of “home-country” or “nation”. The concept of “nation” and “homeland” can be coalesced by assuming that “nation” is the subject and object of nationalist narratives and “home” is the concern of literary narratives (George 2008, 11-12). With shifting locations and melting boundaries in the present globalised milieu, home has acquired a multi-layered meaning. Avtar Brah, in Cartographies of Diaspora describes “home” as a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination (Brah 1996, 192). “Home” can also be seen as a continually shifting concept. Home is “both here and there, past and present, local and global, traditional and modern” (Nasta 2002, 244). The chapter tries to analyse the diasporic characters’ quest for identity as they try to flee from or later associate themselves with their “homeland”. The idea of homeland raises the issue of national identity. We find that identity cannot be fixed or singular as it keeps shifting with varying positions. Identity can be personal, group, social, political, occupational, cultural, psychological, and sexual, or it can be related to one’s different roles in society. Critics are now also dealing with ideas like “possible” (or future) identities (Schwartz 2011, 117-145). Identity can be seen as a “production” which is always in process and always constituted within, not outside representation (Hall 1994, 392). Identities are also subject to choice; but the choice, again, has its inherent constraints. Emigration, new experiences, and time, are some factors which render the identity unstable in relation to one’s homeland, as new identities are constantly formed and reformed. While talking about identity in relation to one’s homeland or home-country we cannot evade the concept of “national identity”, so I will concern myself with the concept of “national identity” in this chapter. National identity is fundamentally multi-dimensional, in the sense that it contains class, religious, linguistic, ethnic (and other) dimensions in it; but these “sub-categories” which come within the ambit of “national identity” is not my focus. Here the focus is on the myths of “national identity” which typically refer to territory or ancestry (or both) as the basis of political community (Smith 1991, viii). National identity, again, can be said to be a “continually negotiated process” of affirming or rejecting national identity claims (Bechhofer et al. 1999, 527). This chapter addresses the diasporic condition of immigrant characters and their affirmation or rejection of identity in relation to their homelands. It analyses how the socio-economic condition, conflicts, politics and images of violence within the nations or the outsider’s views about them affect immigrants’ association with national identity, their sense of belonging, and their sense of value or worth. The term “immigrant” is

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mainly concerned with the act of arrival, while the term “diaspora” broadly suggests a “process of becoming and changing and the dynamic cultural mixing” (Vertovec 1999, 5). The chapter addresses the characters as immigrants while analysing their diasporic condition in their host land, and again, at times, their condition back in their homeland. The chapter, in this regard, will deal with the ambiguities of return migration. We can note here that the migrations taking place in the novels are principally voluntary migrations.

Historical contexts: the state, migration and politics The nature of conflicts is specific to the particular location. Those in Nepal are more political, whereas the internal politics of Pakistan is coloured by the image of terrorism and Muslim identity. Both these countries are economically poor. These aspects affect an immigrant’s identity in relation to the homeland. This chapter also takes up the texts from two different locations, Pakistan and Nepal in order to see how we can negotiate the idea of migration in the literary productions of two different cultures and thus highlight heterogeneity of the “South Asian experience”.4 The effect of “home” on a migrant’s identity is in a large way dependent on the site and situation from which they are studied. We must note that the subcontinent (South Asia) gets much media attention due to the ever-growing unrest in the region. Since 2001, incidents of terrorism and associated fatalities were on the rise in South Asia. The economically backward regions of South Asia mainly become victims, and immigration from these regions is on a rise. Hisaya Oda estimates that there are four million overseas Pakistanis, forming diaspora communities in various parts of the world.5 Compared to migration to Britain, migration to the United States is a recent phenomenon but it now constitutes a major destination for migrants from Pakistan. The September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers have changed the migration situation from this population group. Hisaya Oda notes, “The number of Pakistani migrants to the United States followed an upward trend until 2001 but the 9-11 incidents put the flow into reverse” (Oda 2009, 5). 6 On the home front, the role of religion and the role of the military have complicated the task of stabilising democratic structures and have hindered socio-economic development in Pakistan. Pakistan posits itself as a land of conflicting identities. Ethnically and linguistically, Pakistan is a pluralistic society. But because of the centrist and unitary policies of the state, Islam, as the dominant religion, has been used as a justification for

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the unitary character of the state. Ian Talbot in Pakistan: A Modern History observes that five decades after its creation, Pakistan still faces the question whether it is a land for Muslims or a nation of Muslims moving towards its destiny as an Islamic state? (Talbot 2009, 1) Talbot also notes that a striking change in the half century since independence has been the establishment of a large Pakistani oversees community with a range of transnational linkages with the “homeland” (Talbot 2009, 18). Immigrants from Pakistan often get enmeshed into a kind of conflicting identity in relation to their homeland and as such discourses on society, migration and belonging become pivotal. Nepal, on the other hand, experienced a failed struggle for democracy in the twentieth century. During the 1990s and until 2008, the country was in civil strife. In June 2001, King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah and his family of Nepal were killed in a massacre, and the world took new notice of Nepal. Nepal has gone through troubled times with a Maoist insurgency, government counter-insurgency, political instability, and corruption. A peace treaty was signed in 2008 and elections were held in the same year. Many of the ills of Nepal have been blamed on the royal family of Nepal. In June 2008, Nepalis ousted the royal household, but politically Nepal remained unstable. Economically, Nepal is one of the poorest countries of the world; there is also political censorship and monopolistic control of the press. However, Nepal has long been considered the “mythical ShangriLa”7 (Thapa 2005, 116) and it is arguably denoted as a Hindu nation.8 The Nepali diaspora, unlike other South Asians who had immigrated to the United States since the 1950s, started migrating to the United States in large numbers only recently (Nath 2009, 106). The troubles in Nepal incite many Nepalis to leave “home”9 as the fact that “Nepal was, after all, one of the poorest countries of the world” (Thapa 2005, 52).

The settings: two novels under discussion The protagonists of both Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight migrate to America. Postcolonial literature is “now widely perceived as a reflection of that globalized world” (Boehmer 2005, 247) and the study of migration from these locations might help in providing an insight into the present context of post-colonialism or the trans-active or transcultural aspect of colonialism, where mass migration is a dominant phenomenon from these locations. Migration, in a sense, however, may also highlight the failure of postcolonial nations.

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Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, examines the shifting identity of a Pakistani man who is at odds with both his home country and the country that has been his home for years, America. Changez, throughout the narrative tries to come to terms with his assimilated identity in New York and his acquired identity as a reluctant fundamentalist in Pakistan. Changez initially enjoys his position in America, but after the 9/11 incident, he gets the feeling that his position in New York is thrown into instability; and he returns “home” (Pakistan). In the novel, the protagonist (who now stays in Pakistan) meets an American stranger in Lahore whom he assures: “Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America” (Hamid 2007, 1). He recounts to the American his own experiences in America, graduating from Princeton and working in corporate New York City. Later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York, the protagonist recounts the circumstances that leads to his return to his homeland, Pakistan, after rejecting his profession which involves assessing the value of companies and shutting them down if they fall short of market “fundamentals”. Changez, on his return, is perhaps tempted by a different sort of fundamentalism. The identity of the American stranger remains ambiguous in the novel. However, we can trace the mutual suspicion that the two men (and also the two countries) have for each other. The protagonist, Changez’s identity in relation to his homeland can be examined, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Religion, here, can be seen as an important element in ethnic formation for immigrants coming from a country like Pakistan. As Timothy Smith in “Religion and Ethnicity in America” argues that the religious factor in ethnic formation is strengthened by the migration experience (Smith 1978, 1174). This gains striking emphasis in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in New York. Prema, the protagonist in Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, wins a lottery (the DV lottery, i.e., Diversity Visa lottery, which is a program that allows people to get immigrant visas to the United States from nations that are historically underrepresented in terms of migration) and makes her way to the United States of America. Prema seeks to reinvent her identity in America. The instability of the political situation in Nepal perhaps convinces her that she could make America her “home” and progress there. The condition of Nepal remains unstable during Prema’s stay in Kathmandu and Prema is convinced that the war in her country will escalate. She wonders if she should not leave this “shabby third-world country”. As such we may question how valid is the notion that home is a safe, “stable physical centre of the universe” (Rapport 1997, 73)? However, Prema feels lost in America as she keeps wondering what she is doing there. She keeps moving from one job or place. Relationships seem

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hollow for Prema, and she does not find solace in the Hindu religion when she encounters Mata Sylvia in Los Angeles. In a desperate attempt to find her place, she tries to trace her past step by step in America, but that endeavour too seems futile. The novel mainly deals with Prema’s experience of “being Nepali” in the United States and her dilemmas at the thought of returning “home”.

Notion of repulsion and affection: migrants’ relationship with their homelands In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez emanates both shame and pride in his national identity. After his stay in America, he feels uncomfortable with the idea that the place he comes from (Pakistan) is “condemned to atrophy” (Hamid 2007, 97). In the course of the novel when Changez comes to Pakistan from New York, on the first instance, he experiences a sense of shame at his Pakistani identity: “…I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smaked of lowliness” (Hamid 2007, 124). Changez realises that he has changed, that he was looking about him with the eyes of a foreigner. The distance from home makes his eyes critical to the conditions of home. In Seasons of Flight, when Prema leaves her village and goes to Kathmandu, she realises that her family was poor, and later when she goes to America she gauges how poor and less recognised her country is. A simple question like, “where are you from?” (Thapa 2010, 1) and the line of conversation following that, touches upon her sense of national identity. She is from the country of Mt. Everest. In America, Prema is often mistaken for an Indian. When people ask where Nepal is, it appears convenient to locate it with the term “near India”. Prema finds that more commonly Americans confuse Nepal with Naples, as if it was a part of Rome. In America, Prema discovers the existence of a “little Nepal”. Prema initially stays there with her compatriots Neeru and Sushil, but she does not stay there for long. She feels a sense of repulsion inside her; she seeks to break free, to discover more of herself and America. Poverty and unfavourable conditions in their homeland (including the state of being a less recognised nation), and an implicit desire to break away from that (homeland) tie, somehow makes these immigrant characters feel repulsion towards their homelands. This distance from home can also make one appreciative of the inherent qualities of home. In New York, Urdu was spoken by taxi-cab drivers, there was a samosa-and-channa-serving establishment called the

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Pak-Punjab Deli. Changez could locate his “home” in America through these markers, and he felt he was “immediately a New Yorker” (Hamid 2007, 32). We find that Changez also emanates a sense of pride at his national identity as he later discusses Lahori food with the American stranger in Pakistan, and talks about the history of Lahore. It is like the affirmation of an identity (that has once been disfigured or supressed) through a retelling of the past. Changez recounts: We are not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and – yes – conquering kings. (Hamid 2007, 102)

Prema, on the other hand, seems amused when Luis, her LatinoAmerican boyfriend says he had “dull-bath” (daal-baat) for dinner one night, which Luis describes as a kind of “Nepali food”. Again, Prema’s excitement at seeing “momos” in America exemplifies her affection towards her homeland. We can thus see that homeland can incite both affection and repulsion in migrants from these South Asian nations, as depicted in the novels.

Estranged migrants We find that a sense of estrangement can be located both in Changez and Prema’s immigrant identity in tune with what Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, highlights as “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world” (Bhabha 1994, 9). In America, before 9/11, Hamid’s protagonist, Changez, at times feels disillusioned and he appears to assess his fragile identity: “I lacked a stable core. I was not certain where I belonged—in New York, in Lahore, in both, in neither …” (Hamid 2007, 148). Again, in Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, although Prema convinces herself that she will live forever in America she feels lost there, as she keeps on wondering what she is doing in America. She lives there “with a transient feel” (Thapa 2010, 2) owing perhaps to the facts that she has been disembodied from her location, language, cuisine, and religion. Such sense of estrangement can be normally seen as a part of the diasporic existence. For Changez, America becomes a space of both accommodation and resistance. Although at times Changez experiences a sense of estrangement, he initially enjoys his position as a corporate worker in New York. He gets assimilated into the cosmopolitan nature of that city: “I (Changez) often did miss home, but in that moment, I was content to be where I was” (Hamid 2007, 27).

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This contentment in Changez soon fades away with the change in situation. After 9/11, his mind constantly turns homewards. We find that when Changez gets the news of the collapse of the World Trade Centre, his observation of his initial reaction perhaps makes him aware of a changed attitude in him. His initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased. He smiles (although later there is a constant murmur of reproach at his response to the tragedy). He appears to be pleased at the fact that America, the superpower, is so visibly brought to her knees. The Muslim identity in Changez becomes dominant and this later perhaps makes him feel an affiliation towards Afghanistan. America’s daring raid on a Taliban command post in Afghanistan incites a kind of rage in Changez. He says: My reaction caught me by surprise; Afghanistan was Pakistan’s neighbour, our friend, and a Muslim nation besides, and the sight of what I took to be the beginning of its invasion by your countrymen caused me to tremble with fury. (Hamid 2007, 100)

The events following 9/11, the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq makes it difficult for us to see the world as simply “postcolonial” as the word “neo-imperialism” gains worldwide currency. A few days after the 9/11 attacks, as Changez returns from Manila with his business associates, at the airport he is made to join a separate queue for specific interrogation. His Muslim identity facilitates new circumstances for Changez as Cornell in “The Variable Ties that Bind: Content and Circumstances in Ethnic Processes” argues: “While circumstances construct identities, identities, via the actions they set in motion, are also capable of reconstructing circumstances” (Cornell 1996, 267). Changez’s Muslim identity appears dominant here even though a person’s identity cannot solely be defined by religion and there can be variations and heterogeneity in one’s religious, moral or social convictions. To give an example of another Pakistani novel dealing with the 9/11 incident, we find that the narrator, Chuck, in Naqvi’s Home Boy is asked how he felt about what happened on September eleventh, and if that has made him happy. Unlike Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Chuck did not smile when the World Trade Centre collapsed; he finds the question ridiculous. However, after the attacks, the Muslim identity is often called into question. Men with beards (being seen as a marker of Muslim identity) get the sense that people look at them suspiciously. In defiance, we find that Changez, when he returns to America after his visit to Lahore, the baggage that he carries is also an unshaved two-week-old beard. It is like a total rejection of his Western self. However, nothing in the book suggests that Changez is not wholly secular. But Changez finds

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himself no longer comfortable in America and restlessness creeps up on him and incites him to return “home”. However, on his return, he is not able to fully assimilate in Pakistan as well, as he carries much of America into his being when he eventually leaves America for his homeland, Pakistan We, in any case, find a shift in Changez’s identity from a cosmopolitan individual in New York to a reluctant fundamentalist in Pakistan. Changez, in due course, finds himself as a victim of certain prejudices which dismantles an identity (cosmopolitan) that he once sought for. Changez’s change in attitude makes him maintain a distinction between “us” and “them” (Pakistanis and Americans). Working as a lecturer in Pakistan, Changez relates: When the international television news networks came to our campus, I stated to them among other things that no country inflicts death so rapidly upon the inhabitants of other countries, frightens so many people so far away, as America. (Hamid 2007, 182)

Changez, towards the end of the novel, however, comforts the American stranger by saying that he should not imagine that Pakistanis are all potential terrorists, just as Pakistanis should not imagine that Americans are all undercover assassins, as Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence notes: “…even when we are clear about how we want to see ourselves, we may still have difficulty in being able to persuade others to see us in just that way…” (Sen 2006, 6). Prema in Thapa’s Seasons of Flight, on the other hand, seeks to reinvent her identity in America. Prema, in America, initially stays there with her compatriots for some days. But Prema seeks to break free, to discover more of herself and of America, and so she abandons “little Nepal” and goes out on her own to see more of life. The diaspora’s efforts to settle in a host land are described by Vertovec (1999) as a continuous process. He also describes it as a process where they try to define their identity (Vertovec 1999, 6). Prema’s encounter and attempt to seek her identity with Mata Sylvia (a preacher of the Hindu religion) in Los Angeles, takes her back to her “Nepali home”, yet she does not feel “real” enough to experience authenticity. Prema, in America, cannot seek solace in her national and cultural markers. She has a Latino-American boyfriend, Luis. However, she finds it difficult to explain her past to him. In this process we may question how far Prema has succeeded in assimilating her identity into the vague pluralism of American multiculturalism. Years away from “home” when Prema thinks of Nepal at all, she thinks of the war as Renan perceives that where national memories are concerned grief is of more value than triumph (Renan 1990 [1882], 11).

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In search of her identity, Prema trails back to the past step by step. She gets a creeping sense of losing all sense of direction. Prema now seeks to re-connect with her homeland, as she feels detached from current events of Nepal. Through the Internet, Prema gets to know that Nepal is now a republic.10 She begins to see it in a more positive light. The new image of her homeland transmitted through the media challenges Prema’s previously established and hazy notions of it. In Sheeba Shah’s novel, Facing My Phantoms, the protagonist, Sanjeevani, states: “The expatriate community was the one completely bluffed, I thought, or was it that they were never able to grasp the truth that is Nepal” (Shah 2010, 180). Nepal and America pulls Prema both ways. Prema cannot bear to live with Luis anymore and she finally gets a desired job in America where she teaches school children about the California floral region. . Prema however, decides to visit her village in Nepal after years of detached existence from her homeland. But Prema again goes back to America all the while wondering whether she should leave America and go back to Nepal for good. Perhaps the greatest challenge Prema faces is trying to find a niche in the homeland that she has left behind. These immigrant characters, to a large extent, seem estranged from both their homeland and the host land.

Conclusion: the ambiguity of return migration After 9/11, Changez’s identity, which has been shaped by the West, has been thrown into fundamental instability. Prema, on the other hand, tries to negotiate her identity as a girl from a poor hill village in Nepal through her association with the Shiva-Parvati temple, the ammonite given by her mother, Nepali language and food, with her Americanization. Away from homeland, her identity faces crisis and instability. Since identity seems to be unstable, perhaps we should define identity not as a given condition, but in terms of identification. This is because it can “emerge, crystallize and fade away in particular social and political circumstances” (Cooper 2005, 85). Now, perhaps we can suggest that identity is relative and reactive. Therefore, unless identity is threatened, perhaps we can also suggest that it need not become an issue at all. Again, if the questions of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism are complicated by posing the question of exclusivity of national borders, we can say that they are also threatened by an identity politics built upon fundamentalism. We can say that many first world nations tightening their borders against outsiders further complicate the identity of immigrants. In the above discussion, we see how the politics of location colours the

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identity of immigrants and how dislocation amounts to increased estrangement. Claims to identity are caught up in the binaries of inclusion and exclusion, inside and outside. Allegiance to a particular religion, language, or nation facilitates identity-sustaining connections. Changez’s flaunting of his beard as a marker of identity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist or Prema, seeking solace in the Hindu religion in Manjushree Thapa’s Seasons of Flight show a kind of search for identity-sustaining connections. Perhaps these identity-sustaining connections to a large extent facilitate return migration. Again, in this age of advanced technology and communication, diaspora communities remain, in many ways, connected to their homeland (through travel, Internet, phones, tapes, CDs, television, etc.). This may again, to some extent, also facilitate the idea of return migration, based on the given circumstances. The nation seeks to impose a homogenous identity. Difference and diaspora, however, unsettles it.11 Modern societies have become marked by multiple and also return migrations of people which defy the simple logic and analysis evident in talks of refugees and immigrants. Prema’s thoughts of return migration is perhaps to some extent triggered by the positive vibes coming from her homeland and the growing sense of restlessness that she experiences in her host land. Changez’s return migration entails from his inner restlessness following the 9/11 attacks, his sense of responsibility towards “home” and a kind of reaction against or assertion of his identity as the racial scenario changes in the United States. Here, return migration or the desire to go back is not driven by economic forces, one of the most important factors governing migration. Here, return migration or the thought of it is in some ways triggered by the role of specific historical and political conditions in particular countries at different points of time. Such socio-political and historical conditions can be seen as pertinent to international migration. Distance can entail disconnection, complexity, and ambivalence, and as Stevenson (2003) notes, the processes of transcultural dialogue, difference and displacement emphasize how we are all “out of place”. The very idea of one’s people and place may change. Changez feels disconnected with his homeland on his return while, Prema’s sense of disconnection makes her wonder if she should in any case return. Because of such transformations, homecomings may often contain “elements of rupture, surprise, and, perhaps, disillusionment, besides the variety of practical problems that returnees usually confront…” (Markowitz 2004, 4). Hence, we witness the ambiguity of return migration. To conclude, we can say that we cannot deny the specificity of particular location and the specificity of particular experience in analysing

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the nuances of immigration. The immigrants’ experience in a particular place can vary as the nature of places, connotations of the homeland and host land, and nature of identification may change over the passage of time. Now, while putting forward a literary (imaginative) perspective, we can here consider that fiction can give varied meanings to the ideas and connotations of migration. To the protagonists in the novels, “homeland” can signify a desire that is fulfilled or denied in varying measures.

Notes 1. The concept “South Asia” can be seen as useful for varied purposes, such as, creating a kind of lobby for the socio-political changes in the region or it may be useful for creating venues for artistic expression, etc. 2. Although south Asian immigration to the New World (America, Canada, and Australia) started during the early twentieth century, the passing of immigration laws in the 1920s and 1930s that barred non-white immigrants from entering the New World brought immigration to a halt. These laws were lifted in the mid-to-late 1960s. 3. Homeland can mean a hometown, a city, a region, a country, or the world. 4. The aspect of homogeneity of South Asia can be described in terms of shared history of colonialism/imperialism and its implications on South Asian nations and these nations’ shared tradition or practices. However, the social, economic, political, or religious condition of these nations shows heterogeneity. 5. Pakistanis are scattered mostly around Middle East, United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. 6. The American attitude towards Muslims, including Pakistanis, adversely changed and this has led the American authorities to adopt tougher stances on immigration applications from Pakistan. However, after 2004, the number of immigrants from Pakistan began to recover. 7. Nepal appeared to be cut off from the rest of the world because of its geographical remoteness, poor roads, lack of communication facilities, and politically imposed isolation. The rest of the world had little information regarding the political turmoil in this country.. People thought the country was a pre-political idyll, a Himalayan Shangri-La. However, the royal massacre and Maoist insurgency jolted and mystified the world. 8. The Constitution of 1990 declared Nepal a Hindu state although Nepal has a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious fabric. However, the population in Nepal is predominantly Hindu with significant presence of Buddhists, who were once a majority in the past. 9. Manjushree Thapa herself has felt (in 2001) that “Any effort to make a life here would prove futile; the country was heading for all-out war” (Thapa 2005, 142). 10. In June 2008, Nepalis ousted the royal household. There had been a mass uprising against the king and the army. An election was held and the monarchy was abolished.

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11. Notions of diaspora seek to break the plain connections between nation and culture, place, and identity.

References Bechhofer, F., D. McCrone, R. Kiely, and R. Stewart. 1999. “Constructing National Identity: Arts and Landed Elites in Scotland.” Sociology 33 (3): 515-534. Bhabha, Homi, K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Boehmer, Elleke. 2005. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, second edition. New York: Oxford University Press. Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 2005. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 2nd edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge. Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. London: University of California Press. Cornell, S. 1996. “The Variable Ties that Bind: Content and Circumstance in Ethnic Processes.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 19: 265-289. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 2008. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. DV Lottery. 2008. Http://www.dvlottery.com. Hall, Stuart. 1994. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 392-401. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Hamid, Mohsin. 2007. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Markowitz, Fran, and Anders H. Stefansson, eds. 2004. Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Naqvi, H. M. 2010. Home Boy. Harper Collins: New Delhi. Nasta, Susheila. 2002. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diasporas in Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nath, Lopita. 2009. “A Little of Nepal: Nepali Diaspora in the US in an age of Globalization.” Bodhi: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (1): 106119. Kathmandu: Kathmandu University. Oda, Hisaya. 2009. “Pakistani Migration to the United States: An Economic Perspective.” Institute of Developing Economies, Discussion Paper no. 196. Rapport, Nigel. 1997. Transcendent Individual: Towards a literary and

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Liberal Anthropology. London: Routledge. Renan, Ernest. 1990. [1882] “What is a Nation?” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 8-22. London: Routledge. Schwartz, Seth J. et al., eds. 2011. Handbook of Identity Theory and Research, Vol. 1. New York/London: Springer. Sen, Amartya. 2006. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. London: Penguin Books. Shah, Sheeba. 2010. Facing My Phantoms. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin Books. Smith, Timothy L. 1978. “Religion and Ethnicity in America.” American Historical Review 83 (December): 1155-185. Stevenson, Nick. 2003. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Questions. Berkshire: Open University Press. Talbot, Ian. 2009. Pakistan: A Modern History. London: Cambridge. Thapa, Manjushree. 2005. Forget Kathmandu. New Delhi: Penguin Books. —. 2010. Seasons of Flight. New Delhi: Penguin Books. U. S. Census Bureau. 2010. United States 2010 Census. Vertovec, Stevan. 1999. “Three Meanings of Diaspora Exemplified among South Asian Religions.” Diaspora 7 (2): 1-37. Http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/ diaspora.pdf.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE UNIVERSITY BOOM IN ETHIOPIA AND PROFESSIONAL ABUNDANCE IN INDIA: A NEW WAVE OF HIGH-SKILL MIGRATION TO AFRICA?1 SOPHIA THUBAUVILLE

Since the turn of the millennium, Ethiopia has substantially expanded its higher education institutions. Most of today’s 30 universities have been constructed from scratch or through the upgrading of former colleges. With this emphasis on the expansion of higher education, Ethiopia expects greater general development and the creation of a larger middle-class. However, the explosion of higher education institutions and its long time brain drain of professionals have created a great shortage of expertise at Ethiopian universities. It is only with the help of foreign lecturers and a lowering of the required qualifications for local university lecturers that a minimal curriculum can be offered. Most foreign lecturers, who are in the country today, are from India. Since there is a high demand for Indian lecturers, several Indian agencies specialise in their recruitment for Ethiopia. This migration of Indian academics to Ethiopia is one phenomenon of a recent trend of south-south migration. Extensive studies in this field, especially regarding high-skill migration, are still to be done. In this chapter, I will take a closer look at the Ethiopian as well as at the Indian higher education systems and the expansion of higher education in both countries. I will then explain how Indian academics find their way to Ethiopia. Finally, I will ask whether and how this migration can be understood as highly skilled migration.

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University boom in Ethiopia Ethiopia has a 1,700-year old tradition of elite education that was perpetuated by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Secular higher education was established only in 1950 under the rule of Haile Selassie when Ethiopia’s first university was founded in Addis Ababa. In the following years a few specialised colleges were also started (Saint 2004, 84; Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 160). In 1970, still under Haile Selassie, tertiary enrolments numbered 4,500, which led to an enrolment ratio of 0.2 percent, at that time one of the lowest in the world. However, the university sector soon faced an even more challenging period during the socialist regime that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974. Intellectual life of the still new and not-yet-fully-developed university sector withered, the education system became isolated from the western world, and the academic brain drain increased (Saint 2004, 84). Today’s government, with the ruling party EPRDF (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front), took over control in 1991. By 2000, it had managed to expand the higher education sector to two universities and seventeen colleges. The number of students rose to 31,000, which meant a rise of the gross enrolment ratio to 0.8 percent.2 That was still very low; the average tertiary level enrolment of Africa at that time was four percent (Saint 2004, 89). A larger expansion and reform of Ethiopia’s university sector which had been planned and recorded in policy papers was visibly implemented around the turn of the millennium (Ashcroft 2004, 24; Ashcroft and Rayner 2011, 54). In 2004, the number of universities had already been raised to nine, mainly by merging colleges and upgrading them to university status (Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 162). Additionally, in the same year, 12 universities were newly established. As a result the annual tertiary enrolment growth rate exploded to 28 percent (Saint 2004, 85-89). The university sector today consists of 30 public universities (see Map 25-1).3 Even though much of the financial needs to develop the higher education sector came from the World Bank and other bilateral and multilateral donors,4 the Ethiopian government has increased the proportion of the government budget for education expenditure tremendously, largely at the expense of the military budget (Saint 2004, 88). As Ethiopia tries to be inclusive in its higher education policy, the government had offered not only free tertiary education, but also free accommodation and food to university students. In the academic year 2003/2004, a student cost-sharing scheme was introduced (Saint 2004, 85), which now covers parts of the expenses of the public higher education

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sector.5 The costly re-alignment of Ethiopia’s higher education system is in direct support of the national strategy for economic growth and poverty reduction,6 as more than 80 percent of the Ethiopian population is engaged in subsistence farming. The current extension of the university system aims at building a larger middle-class and becoming a middle-income country within the next 20 to 30 years (Yizengaw 2004, 3). To adjust the curriculum of Ethiopia’s higher education to suit the country’s needs and to control the quality of higher education during the time of rapid development, a special agency, the Higher Education Relevance and Quality Agency (HERQA), was established by the Ministry of Education in 2003. The strategic planning of this institution, however, remains vague.

Map 25-1: Map of Ethiopia with its 30 public universities

Problematising the expansion of the university sector Due to the abovementioned explosion in tertiary enrolment growth, the number of students in each of Ethiopia’s universities has risen tremendously. However, tertiary admission has become more competitive, because the number of qualified students from secondary schools has also

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increased (Saint 2004, 93). However, the low performance of university students because of poor-quality preparatory-level education and centralised allocation of students is often criticised (Shibeshi 2009, xiv, xxi). The rapid increase in universities and students has led to several shortfalls, which currently threaten the quality of the Ethiopian university sector. Several of the new universities do not fulfil the Ministry of Education’s criteria to attain university status. Criteria to attain this status are the following: having a minimum enrolment capacity of 2,000 students in regular programs; having three academic units larger than departments; having a record of at least four consecutive classes of graduates; having a curriculum according to national standards; having the necessary academic staff; and having institutional governing structures. The universities also need to have teaching materials, classrooms, libraries, and laboratories. However, a subsequent sub-paragraph in the Higher Education Proclamation allows universities to be established with the aim to achieve the aforementioned status “in an acceptable time” and therefore set aside any of these standards for the transitional period (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 2009). Additionally, to the partial absence of the abovementioned criteria, some of the recently established universities are located in towns which have barely any infrastructure in terms of transport, information and communication linkages, security of water, and electricity supply (Shibeshi 2009, xxi). Some university towns additionally face civil security problems and a barely functioning secondary school system (Ashcroft and Rayner 2011, 64). A further problem is the proportion of disciplines: while the UNESCO recommendation is 60:40 (sciences/technology: arts/humanities), in Ethiopia the division was the opposite 31:67 (sciences/technology: arts/humanities) in 2004 (Saint 2004, 104). A reversion of this proportion is already being implemented by allocating comparably fewer students to social sciences departments and setting up and expanding technical institutes. Apart from the set-up and proportion of disciplines, new universities mainly suffer a shortage of academic staff. The lack of lecturers can be explained by the fast expansion of the higher education system,7 but also by the meagre local salaries for academics and the academic brain drain.8 Most local academics who stay in Ethiopia, have to take on additional jobs like consultancies for international organisations as the low payment at universities is not sufficient for a livelihood. This reduces their time and energy for academic activities, especially research. Of the 113,838 Ethiopian expatriates in 2000/2001, more than 31

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percent were highly skilled (Getahun 2002). Many Ethiopian academics stay abroad after having scholarships for their graduate studies in North America or Europe. They do not only want to avoid the poor salaries at Ethiopian universities, but also the repressive politics in their home country that limit academic freedom. Calls by the Ethiopian government for Ethiopians in the diaspora to return and assist with the expansion of universities, evoked nearly no reaction. Only a few Ethiopian-born academics, who had become American or Canadian citizens returned to the well-established universities in Addis Ababa, where they are paid according to the pay scale for foreigners. No academic from the Ethiopian diaspora was willing to return from his or her host-country to assist in building up the smaller universities outside the nation’s capital. As return migration of academics has not been successful in Ethiopia, the government changed its policy regarding scholarships for graduate studies to avoid the out-migration of graduate students. Instead of sending the majority of such students to North America and Europe, it increasingly sent Ethiopian students to India, where tuition fees and living expenses are cheaper and where most students return to Ethiopia after graduation (Ray 2010, 236). As a consequence of the fast expansion of the university sector and the continuing brain drain, the percentage of lecturers possessing a PhD has declined from 28 percent in 1995/96 to nine percent in 2002/03 (Saint 2004, 106). The large demand in lecturers and short supply of MA and PhD graduates lead to new universities having 70 percent of their faculty only having a bachelor’s degree (Ashcroft and Rayner 2011, 30). The shortage of PhD holders in many universities calls into question these institutions’ ability to carry out research (Tettey 2010, 18).

India’s expansion of its higher education sector Today, India has the third largest higher education system in the world after the United States and China and it leads the world in the overall number of institutions of higher education (Agarwal 2009, 4). As of August 2011, 611 universities and university-level institutions and 31,324 colleges existed in the country (University Grants Commission 2011, 9). However, the total enrolment number of students at Indian universities in 2011 was only about 1.8-2.0 million (University Grants Commission 2011, 110), which means 11 percent of the total population. This low number indicates that higher education is still elitist in India. Similar to Ethiopia, India currently places high priority on expanding its higher education sector that can be seen in the higher education budget for the last Five-

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Year Plan, which was nine times higher than that in the previous budget (University Grants Commission 2011, 37). Within this expansion, India plans to increase its university system to become at least number two worldwide (Agarwal 2009). To achieve this goal, the government has also attempted to upgrade state colleges to university status and expand the student intake of state universities by 25-50 percent during the current Five-Year Plan which covers the years 2012-2017. An increase in an intake of 30 percent would mean 200,000 additional students (University Grants Commission 2011, 110). India’s higher education sector is fastest growing in the segment of private higher education (Agarwal 2009, 22). Out of the 31,324 colleges in 2011, only 6,811 colleges were state funded and the remaining 24,513 were private (University Grants Commission 2011, 110). Nearly two third of the state and private colleges were founded between 2000 and 2011. Accordingly, the number of students enrolled doubled from nearly 8.4 million in 2000 to 17 million in this decade (Choudaha 2012). Driven by demand and commercial interests, many institutions take advantage of the negligent regulatory environment in India. They offer degrees not approved by the Indian authorities and often intentionally misinform prospective students. Even though several bills have been enacted since 2010, there is still a lack of transparency and quality control in the higher education system (Choudaha 2012). Two third of India’s colleges do not satisfy the minimum standards of the University Grants Commission. This is especially so for colleges in rural areas, where many are not fully functioning, under-enrolled, and have poor facilities (Agarwal 2009, 5). Considering the above mentioned achievements and plans concerning the expansion of the higher education sector in India as well as its shortcomings, two conclusions are obvious. Firstly, Indian graduates will become even more visible globally, particularly in technical and engineering fields, than they already are. Secondly, the recent quality of Indian degrees seems to be highly questionable. Higher education is a necessary qualification for a growing number of people of India’s workforce. However, because of the high enrolments at universities, unemployment and underemployment of graduates is increasing. The level of graduate unemployment is even higher than the overall level of unemployment (Agarwal 2009).

Indian academics in Ethiopia Even though India is expanding its higher education sector and plans for further development within the current Five-Year Plan of the

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University Grants Commission, there seems to be an overproduction of degree holders. Ethiopia, on the other hand, needs foreign professionals to implement its plans. The Ethiopian Ministry of Education has greatly increased its expatriate staff since the turn of the millennium, who are mainly from India.9 They also come in fewer numbers from Nigeria, Cuba, and the United Kingdom (Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 172), and more recently from the Philippines.10 At the beginning of the university boom, the number of expatriate staff doubled within only one year (2002-2003), from 150 to 397 (Saint 2004, 108). In the academic year 2004/2005, 12.5 percent of university lecturers were expatriates, with Indians being the majority (Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 191). By 2011, the number of Indian instructors had increased to 500 (Basu 2011). The First Secretary of the Indian Embassy in Ethiopia predicted that the number of Indians at Ethiopian universities would be around 1,200 in 2013. In the same year, at the three universities of Dire Dawa, Haramaya, and Jigjiga, the numbers of Indian lecturers were 13, 68, and 23 respectively. Of the 104 Indian academics at these three universities under study, 41 had newly arrived, indicating the continuous inflows of Indian employees in every academic year. A vacancy announcement by Arba Minch University through an Indian placement agency in spring 2013 listed 53 academic positions needed to be filled within one month. Between spring and autumn 2013, ten more Ethiopian universities announced a large number of vacancies via the website of the agency Global Placements. Ethiopia’s demand for foreign academics seems to see no end in the near future. Initially the Ministry of Education recruited foreign academics through a centralised plan for all Ethiopian universities. The salaries of expatriates were paid through a project by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). After the support of the UNDP discontinued, the financing and recruitment of foreign academic staff was put directly into the hands of the universities, which now use Indian-based placement agencies to help the search of academic staff. Interviews for placements in Ethiopia take place at different locations in India, mostly in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and recently also in Coimbatore.11 As the locations of the interviews suggest, academics come to Ethiopia from all parts of India. However, people from the southern states of Andra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala are in the majority. While currently only PhD holders, with few exceptions, are recruited in the social sciences and sciences, MTech (Master in Technical Sciences) holders are employed in the fields of technology and engineering. Because of Ethiopia’s policy to expand institutes of technology, there is currently a high demand for lecturers in these subjects. Moreover, most institutes are

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rather new and only enrol BA students, MTech is seen as a sufficient qualification. Many of the MTech holders in technical fields are employed with little or no teaching experience, while in the social sciences and sciences, fresh PhD holders, midcareer academics and retired professors can be found. The Ethiopian government believes that such a reliance on Indian academics is only a temporary solution for Ethiopian universities. As soon as enough local professionals are available to take over the positions, foreign academics, who receive a much higher salary, will not be hired any longer. Therefore, foreign academics in Ethiopia are only offered two-year contracts without a tenure-track for promotion. This leads to the situation that Indian lecturers, who have been at the same Ethiopian university for many years, are paid less than Indian lecturers who newly arrive at a university. This is because there is no increase in the salary of the contracted Indians while the payment for new arrivals is adjusted in response to pay rises in India and inflation in Ethiopia. Consequently, academic positions for Indians in Ethiopia are quite insecure and only attractive for a short period. Another factor that makes it hard for Indian academics to establish oneself in Ethiopia is the absence of international schools out of Addis Ababa. Even in Ethiopia’s second largest city of Dire Dawa, there are only local schools which use Amharic as a medium of teaching up to Grade Six. Apart from the lack of good education opportunities for their own children, the lack of healthcare and entertainment are challenging for Indian expatriates.

Recruitment agencies: gateways to Ethiopia The gate to a placement at Ethiopian universities from India is Indian recruitment agencies.12 They act as intermediaries between Ethiopian universities and Indian academics and are a major information channel (van Meijering and Hoven 2003, 176) for Indians to learn about job possibilities in Ethiopia. Currently, two agencies, Global Placements and Overseas Placements, both located in Hyderabad, are responsible for recruiting Indian academics for Ethiopian universities. More recently a third agency, Deep International, located in Delhi, has also joined this sector. About 15 years ago, Global Placements and Overseas Placements worked directly with the Ethiopian Ministry of Education for the recruitment, which is no longer the case. In the present time, Ethiopian universities have to hire foreign academics through the help of the three mentioned placement agencies. On the other hand, Indian academics obtain information about such job opportunities through different

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channels. Some read the advertisements of the agencies in major Indian newspapers, while others get the information via advertisement emails, or direct phone calls from the agencies to attend interviews for academic positions in Ethiopia. The placement agencies inform potential applicants about the fields of job vacancies, the offered salaries, possibilities of remittances, and perks like free flights via their job advertisements. The placement websites sometimes offer additional information like country information on Ethiopia or about the university towns in Ethiopia. Depending on their demand for Indian academics, the individual Ethiopian universities advertise job vacancies every year or every second year with the help of these placement agencies. Their academic committee visits several Indian towns, where the placement agencies arrange a place for the candidates to meet with the committee. The meetings are like casual walk-in interviews, of which some interviewees may not have applied for the post. Interested academics may bring along their resumes and copies of their degrees. Considering the high number of applicants and the short timespan for interviews, individual interviews may not take longer than ten minutes for each Indian academic who shows up. Decisions are made by the Ethiopian academic committee at the end of their recruitment trip which usually ends at the headquarters of the Indian recruitment agencies in Hyderabad. The agencies then disclose the decisions to the applicants. The hired academics for one university are arranged to travel together to their new work place and arrive there usually at the start of the semester. Bureaucratic matters like applying for a work visa, invitation letter by the university, and flight tickets, are all handled by the placement agencies, which ask in return for a service fee equivalent to a monthly salary from each hired person as advance payment. Most academics seek further information about their future country of residence via personal contacts in Ethiopia or from the Internet. The major points of concern here are if it is advisable to migrate together with spouses and children, country information about safety and climate and information about the availability of food items. After collecting sufficient information, they then decide if they will take the job in Ethiopia. University presidents who frequently travel to India for recruiting academics told me that only about 50 percent of the accepted academics would turn up at their university. The remaining academics might have found other jobs or decided against moving to Ethiopia because of personal or practical reasons. A further problem the Ethiopian universities face when recruiting lecturers from India is that how to verify the quality of the degrees held by the applicants. Many Indians arriving at Ethiopian universities with degrees may later turn out to be using forged documents and some with

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degrees from distance learning. A question which I still have to investigate is, if the Indian recruitment agencies can be of better help to the Ethiopian committees to verify Indian degrees or if they knowingly place unqualified people. One problem about the recruitment agencies for Indian lecturers is that they charge one month’s salary for a successful placement. This payment has to be paid in advance and only after this are the future lecturers supplied with their work contracts and papers for travel. The amount is regarded as too high, especially for those who have just graduated or are unemployed at the time of placement.

Highly skilled migration? Issues about highly skilled migration have been well debated in the West. Currently, European migration laws have distinguished between skilled and unskilled migrants and entrance of skilled migrants are comparatively easier. Similarly, the United States labour market welcomes migrants, who are fluent in English and is much less hospitable to unskilled migrants with poor language skills (Levitt and Jaworsky 2008, 133). Finding an academic position in Europe or the United States was a constant topic for Indian academics in Ethiopia. Many had already tried their luck or planned to apply for positions in Europe or the United States when their contracts in Ethiopia finished. It was quite obvious that they had chosen Ethiopia as a destination for migration as the entrance was easy and the jobs were quite well paid. It was similarly evident that most Indian academics whom I interviewed in Ethiopia would not be able to qualify for jobs in Europe or the United States because of the high requirements, keen competition, and bureaucratic barriers. Ethiopian universities, on the other hand, could easily recruit academics and graduates from obscure Indian private colleges as well as those from more renowned institutes but without the best grades. The case of Indian academics moving to Ethiopia is an example of a growing trend of south-south migration (see Bakewell 2009). By moving to Ethiopia, Indian academics clearly have one aim, that is, to gain financially. Other motivations which can be found in the literature for international migration of skilled workers such as career-path improvement and personal development (van Meijering and Hoven 2003, 176) do not play a significant role. Furthermore, Ethiopia itself was also not an attractive settlement destination for Indian academics. While many skilled and non-skilled workers from Asian countries move to Western

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countries to seek modern life style not available at home (Aguilar 1999), Indians in Ethiopia are deprived of their families as well as some of the comfort they have enjoyed back home. The detachment from the embeddedness of everyday life (Amid 2002, 146), which is a major reason for migration of skilled workers from Western countries, is not the case for Indian academics to move to Ethiopia. They are mainly concerned with a better payment, and sending large remittances home. My informants told me that they would be able to save between 75 and 80 percent of their salary in Ethiopia. Even though living costs in Ethiopia are low, after saving this amount of their salary, Indian lecturers will have no money left for extra expenses and have to live a very frugal life. The importance of remittances can also be understood when looking at the websites of Indian placement agencies, which mention that there are no restrictions concerning the amount of salary that can be repatriated.

Conclusion Both Ethiopia and India have experienced similar expansion of their higher education sectors, although India, being at the top of higher education providers worldwide and having a much longer tradition of higher education, does this on a much larger scale. The problems of the two countries concerning such expansion are similar, especially regarding the lack of transparency and a decrease in quality. Unlike Ethiopia, India has enough academics for its expansion plans and can even export some of its academic manpower. Top academics might leave for greener pastures to North America, Europe, or new upcoming Asian destinations, while academics who neither qualify for the mentioned places, nor for well-paid jobs at Indian state universities, leave for destinations like Ethiopia or the Middle East, where jobs are easy to find and payment is better than at the Indian private colleges. I would like to conclude by proposing that the migration of Indian lecturers to Ethiopia can be seen as a form of migration of a “second layer” of highly skilled workers. The qualifications of the recruited academics that I have shown above are not of top ranks and in some cases questionable. Major incentives for this south-south migration of highly skilled workers seem to focus on economic benefits and sending home remittances. While south-south migration of highly skilled workers, like other south-south relations, is an upcoming trend, it has so far been neglected by researchers and there is a chronic lack of statistical data on such movements (Bakewell 2009, 10). It would be an important area to look

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into more thoroughly, and to provide comparative cases to the well-studied and to date prevalent phenomenon of south-north migration of highly skilled workers.

Notes 1. Field research for this chapter took place in February and March 2013. Apart from qualitative interviews with nearly all Indian lecturers at three Ethiopian universities, interviews were also carried out with specialists at the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and academic vice presidents of the universities visited. The three universities that were studied are all located in the east of Ethiopia. While Haramaya University, established in 1954 as an agricultural college, is the second oldest university in Ethiopia, Dire Dawa and Jigjiga universities were established in 2007. The latter two have about the same intake of 7,500 regular students. Haramaya University has about 15,000 regular students. 2. For the same period, primary education enrolments were 64 percent of the relevant age group and for secondary education, 12 percent (Saint 2004, 88). 3. For a complete list, one can check out the website of the Ethiopian Ministry of Education (http://www.moe.gov.et). Apart from governmental universities, many international Higher Education Institutions have been established in Ethiopia, like the University of South Africa (UNISA) and the University for Peace (UPEACE) (Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 167). However, this chapter will focus only on governmental Higher Education Institutions. 4. External resources to Ethiopia’s education sector were US$154 million in 2001/02 (Saint 2004, 100). Ethiopia profited mainly from the World Bank’s Development Innovation Fund and it’s knowledge sharing initiatives (Tesfaye and Ayalew 2008, 180). Furthermore the German GIZ and KfW Development Bank were and still are very active in building and improving technical colleges and training. 5. The cost-sharing is done through deferred payment taxation. For more details, see Leka and Chalchisa 2012. 6. Compare Ethiopia’s current Growth and Transformation Plan: Http://www.mofed.gov.et/English/Resources/Documents/GTP%20Policy%20Matri x%20(English)2.pdf. 7. Looking at the numbers that show the shortfall in academic staff, one faces a seemingly unresolvable problem. Saint (2004) estimated that by 2007, 3,608 new academic staff would be needed. At the same time, only 30 PhD students had been registered at Addis Ababa University and in 2003, only four doctoral degrees had been awarded (2004, 107). 8. Around 91.3 percent of the Ethiopians doing a PhD in the United States do not return (Boeri et al. 2012, 226). That is why the Ethiopian government has changed its policy to send doctoral students to India, where education and living costs are cheaper and the return rate to Ethiopia is nearly 100 percent. 9. Under the rule of the Ethiopian king Haile Selassie, a secondary school system was built up in Ethiopia. Haile Selassie’s advisor in those days was Indian and

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many Indian teachers were recruited (Thubauville forthcoming). This historical fact together with the efficient practices of Indian recruitment agencies and the financial attractiveness of the jobs, have led to the majority of foreign lecturers in Ethiopia being Indians. 10. My own observations at Dire Dawa and Jigjiga universities in 2013. 11. The first time I saw an advertisement for an interview taking place in Coimbatore on the website of the agency “Global Placements” was in September 2013. 12. The existence of high numbers of labour recruitment organisations throughout South and Southeast Asia, not only in India, but also in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand has been well documented (Massey et al. 1998, 152).

References Agarwal, P. 2009. Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Aguilar, F. 1999. “Ritual Passage and the Reconstruction of Selfhood in International Labour Migration.” Journal of Social Issues in Southeast 14 (1): 98-139. Amid, V. 2002. “The Moving ‘Expert’: A Study of Mobile Professionals in the Cayman Islands and North America.” In Work and Migration: Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World, edited by N. Sorensen and K. Olwig, 145-160. London: Routledge. Ashcroft, K. 2004. “The Massification of Higher Education: A Comparison of the UK Experience and the Emerging Ethiopian Response.” The Ethiopian Journal of Higher Education 1 (1): 21-40. Ashcroft, K., and P. Rayner. 2011. Higher Education in Development: Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Bakewell, O. 2009. “South-south Migration and Human Development. Reflections on African Experiences.” Working Paper, International Migration Institute 15. Http://www.imi.ox.ac.uk/pdfs/imi-working-papers/wp-15-oliverbakewell-south-south-migration/view. Basu, T. 2011. Ethiopia Seeks More Indian Teachers, Agriculturalists. Http://in.news.yahoo.com/ethiopia-seeks-more-indian-teachersagriculturists-080334256.html. Boeri, T. et al., eds. 2012. Brain Drain and Brain Gain: The Global Competition to Attract High-skilled Migrants. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Choudaha, R. 2012. Transparency for a Change in Higher Education: Trends, Insights and Strategy on Student Mobility and Transnational Education. http://www.dreducation.com/2012/09/transparency-nationaldatabase-India.html. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. 2009. Proclamation No. 650/2009. Higher Education Proclamation. Http://www.moe.gov.et/English/Documents/hep.pdf. Getahun, S. 2002. “Brain Drain and its Effects on Ethiopia’s Institutions of Higher Learning, 1970s-1990s.” African Issues 30 (1): 52-56. Leka, W. and D. Chalchisa 2012. Cost Sharing in Public Higher Education Institutions in Ethiopia with Special Emphasis on Addis Ababa and Adama Universities. Addis Ababa: Forum for Social Studies. Levitt, P., and B. Jaworsky, eds. 2007. “Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future Trends.” Annual Review of Sociology 33: 129-156. Massey, D. et al. 1998 Worlds in Motion. Understanding International Migration at the End of the Millennium. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ray, N. 2010. “India and Horn of Africa: Towards a Meaningful Partnership.” In Trends in Indo-African Studies, edited by A. Dubey, 229-244. New Delhi: Manas Publications. Saint, W. 2004. “Higher Education in Ethiopia: The Vision and Its Challenges.” JHEA/RESA 2 (3): 83-113. Shibeshi, A. 2009. Quality of Higher Education in Ethiopian Public Institutions. Addis Ababa: Forum for Social Studies. Tesfaye, S., and E. Ayalew. 2008. “Ethiopia.” In Higher Education in Africa: The International Dimension, edited by D. Teferra and J. Knight, 159-207. Chestnut Hill: Boston College Center for International Higher Education. Tettey, W. 2010. Challenges of Developing and Retaining the Next Generation of Academics: Deficits in Academic Staff Capacity at African Universities. Calgary: Partnership for Higher Education in Africa. Thubauville, S. Forthcoming. “From Ancient Trade Routes to Cooperation in Higher Education: Indo-Ethiopian Relations and India’s Role in Ethiopia’s University Boom.” Journal of Sociology and Social Anthropology. University Grants Commission. 2011. Inclusive and Qualitative Expansion of Higher Education: 12th Five-Year-Plan. New Delhi. van Meijering, L., and B. Hoven. 2003. “Imagining Difference: The Experiences of ‘Transnational’ Indian IT Professionals in Germany.” Area 35 (2): 174-182.

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Yizengaw, T. 2004. “The Status and Challenges of Ethiopian Higher Education System and its Contribution to Development.” The Ethiopian Journal of Higher Education 1 (1): 1-20.

CONTRIBUTORS

Takeshi Akiba is Associate Professor in the Global Studies program at Akita International University, Japan. He obtained his Ph.D. at the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at University of California, Berkeley. His research has focused on constitutionalism and citizenship in Japan and the United States. His recent works include “The Japanese Nationality Act Case of 2008: Its Social and Political Context,” in Akita International University Global Review (2011) and “Judicial Policy Making and Cause Lawyering in the Japanese Nationality Act Case,” in The Sociology of Law (The Japanese Association of Sociology of Law, 2014). Yuk Wah Chan is Associate Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Department of Anthropology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her publications include The Chinese / Vietnamese Diaspora - Revisiting the Boat People and VietnameseChinese Relationships at the Borderlands: Trade, Tourism and Cultural Politics. She is an editorial board member of Amsterdam University Press’s Asian Borderlands Series. Heidi Fung is a Research Fellow/Professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She received an interdisciplinary doctoral training at the University of Chicago. She has long been interested in how to situate human development in socio-cultural contexts. Her research involves the socialization of emotion, daily disciplinary and moral training practices, and child-rearing beliefs across cultures. Currently, she studies how socialization and family ties are practiced across borders and across generations by Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan. David Haines is Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University, and currently at its new campus in Incheon, South Korea. He has twice been a Fulbright scholar (South Korea and Western Europe), is a past president of the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA), and was the convener of the Wind over Water comparative project on East Asian migration. His most recent books are

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Contributors

The Limits of Kinship: Vietnamese Households, 1954-1975, Safe Haven: A History of Refugees in America, and Wind over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context (co-edited with Keiko Yamanaka and Shinji Yamashita). Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore (NUS). She completed her PhD at University College London, after which she was awarded postdoctoral fellowships at Royal Holloway, University of London and also the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining NUS, she worked at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the citizenship dissonances arising from managed migration policies, return migration and forced migration trends. Whilst much of this research is on Mainland China, she has also studied migration trends in Singapore and Canada. Her current research addresses African migration to China and also borderworld migrations between Myanmar and China. Gloria Ko is the Head of Office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Hong Kong Office. IOM is the global, intergovernmental organization dealing with the entire range of migration issues and is dedicated to promoting humane and orderly migration for the benefit of all. It does so by providing services and advice to governments and migrants. Ko joined the Organization in 1972. She received her B.A. in Social Science from the Open University of Hong Kong. Sin Yee Koh is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Prior to her PhD studies, she has worked in architecture and urban development in the public and private sectors in Singapore. Her research interests are in postcolonial geography; citizenship (differentiated identity, belonging, rights); migration and mobilities; colonial legacies (particularly in relation to race, ethnicity, education, social class); urbanisation and social change; Malaysia and Singapore. Masako Kudo is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Kyoto Women’s University. Her major publications include “Mothers on the Move: Transnational Child-Rearing by Japanese Women Married to Pakistani Migrants,” Wind Over Water: Migration in an East Asian Context, David W. Haines et al. (eds.), (Berghahn Books, 2012); “Pakistani Husbands, Japanese Wives: A New Presence in Tokyo and

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Beyond,” Asian Anthropology, Vol.8 (2009); “Becoming the Other in One’s Own Homeland?: The Processes of Self-construction among Japanese Muslim Women,” Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, Vol 8 (2007); “Ekkyo no Jinruigaku: Zainichi Pakisutan-jin Musulimu Imin no Tsuma-tachi” (An Anthropology of Border-Crossing in Japan: Japanese Wives of Pakistani Muslim Migrants) (in Japanese), 2008, University of Tokyo Press. Stacy M. Kula, Ph.D. specializes in immigrant and minority education, achievement gaps, parent/community/school relationships, and effective teaching and teacher-training. Her recent research has focused on the experiences of Southeast Asian and Latino children from immigrant families within U.S. schools. As a former high school teacher, she has worked with diverse immigrant and minority populations directly, while as an adjunct instructor in the School of Education at Claremont Graduate University. She has also prepared teachers to work with diverse populations of English language learners. Dr. Kula recently co-authored a publication on immigration experiences of diverse Asian American groups that appeared in the prominent educational journal, Teacher’s College Record. Sug-In Kweon is Professor of Anthropology at Seoul National University, Korea. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Seoul National University and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University. She has been interested in the issue of identity politics, in particular, building of identities of marginal groups in modern Japan including local communities, ethnic Koreans in Japan, and Japanese-Brazilian laborers in Japan. During the last several years, her main research interest has centered on Japanese settlers in colonial Korea with a focus on daily lives and practices of the ‘ordinary’ Japanese migrants. Her recent works include “Japanese Female Settlers in Colonial Korea: Between the ‘Benefits’ and ‘Constraints’ of the Colonial Society” (2014) and “Princess Masako’s Ordeal and the Crisis of Japanese Imperial House: Gender and the Emperor System in Postwar Japan” (2013, in Korean). Jonathan H. X. Lee, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Asian American Studies who specializes in Southeast Asian and Sino-Southeast Asian American studies at San Francisco State University. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2009. He is the Program Co-chair of the Asian American religious studies sections for the American Academy of Religion, Western Region

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(AAR/WR) conference. His work has been published in Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice; Nidan: International Journal for the Study of Hinduism; History & Perspective: The Journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America; Empty Vessel: The Journal of the Daoist Arts; Asia Pacific Perspectives; JATI: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies; Amerasia Journal, and other journals and anthologies, both nationally and internationally. He is the editor of Cambodian American Experiences: Histories, Communities, Cultures, and Identities (2010); and co-editor with Kathleen M. Nadeau of the Encyclopedia of Asian American Folklore and Folklife (2011) and Asian American Identities and Practices: Folkloric Expressions in Everyday Life (2014). He has published widely on Chinese, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Chinese-Southeast Asian, and Asian American histories, folklore, cultures, and religions. Long S. Le is the co-founder and lecturer of Vietnamese Studies, and clinical instructor of global and international studies at the University of Houston. His work has been published in Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Far Eastern Economic Review, Harvard Asia Quarterly, Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, Journal of Islamic Finance, Education About Asia, and Harvard Asian American Policy Review. Jason Lim graduated with a PhD in History and Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia in 2007. He is Senior Lecturer in Asian History and Co-ordinator (Southeast Asia) of the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies at the University of Wollongong. He is also the China Book Review Editor of the Asian Studies Review, the journal of the Asian Studies Association of Australia. His major research interests are the history of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, modern Chinese history, and nationalism and politics in Malaysia and Singapore. He is the author of two books – Linking an Asian Transregional Commerce in Tea: Overseas Chinese Merchants in the Fujian-Singapore Trade, 1920-1960 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), and A Slow Ride into the Past: The Chinese Trishaw Industry in Singapore, 1942-1983 (Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing, 2013). Timothy Lim is a professor of political science at California State University, Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and his MA in international affairs from Columbia University. His past research focused on transnational worker migration to South Korea and human trafficking and smuggling (of

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Korean women in the US commercial sex industry), but has more recently examined the issue of multiculturalism in Asia. Dr. Lim is also keenly interested writing accessible books for undergraduate and graduate students, and has published two textbooks: Doing Comparative Politics: An Introduction to Approaches and Issues (Rienner 2010, 2nd ed.) and Politics in East Asia: Explaining Change and Continuity (Rienner 2014). A third textbook, Introduction to International Political Economy, will also be published as an open source book by the Saylor Foundation (Saylor.org). Weiqiang Lin is a doctoral postgraduate at Royal Holloway, University of London, with concurrent affiliation at the National University of Singapore. His research interests converge around issues of mobilities, in particular air transport, logistics, migration and transnationalism in the East and Southeast Asian context. In 2010, he won the Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for best Masters thesis at the National University of Singapore. As well, he has published in various edited volumes and peerreviewed journals in recent years, including cultural geographies, Environment and Planning A, Geoforum and Mobilities. His most immediate lines of flight will take him to explore socio-cultural aspects of airspace-making in Singapore, and the transnational mobilities that result from them. GraĪyna SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology of University of Warsaw. She gained her Ph.D title in the year 2011 and her thesis was entitled ‘What is happening to the traditional Vietnamese family? An anthropological study of the Vietnamese from Hanoi and Warsaw’. Her areas of research interest include Vietnamese diaspora and identity, and the changes in the institution of family. Dr. SzymaĔska-Matusiewicz is also expert on Vietnamese diaspora at the Poland-Asia Research Center. She has published academic work in both English and Polish languages. Rimi Nath is Assistant Professor at the Department of English of North Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong, Meghalaya of India. Her research interests include Indian writing in English and South Asian diasporic literature. She has presented her research papers at various national and international conferences and has published research articles in her specialized area.

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Contributors

Susan Needham is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at California State University Dominguez Hills. She is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic and linguistic research on symbols of community identity and the transmission of Khmer literacy, ritual practices, and the arts in Long Beach since 1988. She has several articles on topics related to the history of Cambodians in Long Beach and cultural transmission. Dr. Needham is a co-founder of the Cambodian Community History and Archive Project (www.camchap.org) and co-author of the book, Cambodians in Long Beach (Arcadia Publishing), with Dr. Karen Quintiliani, CSU Long Beach. Dr. Needham also serves on the Cambodia Town, Inc. Board of Directors and is the Program Director of the Cambodia Town Culture Festival held each spring in Long Beach. Karen Quintiliani is Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003. Dr. Quintiliani has conducted ethnographic and applied research in the Long Beach Cambodian community since 1988. She has worked as an applied anthropologist for community based organizations, specializing in developing and implementing programs focused on community health and education for Southeast Asians and their children. Her areas of research interest, publications, and community engagement projects include: cultural history of the Cambodian immigrant experience; social welfare policy; gender and sexuality; refugee and immigrant health; youth cultures; and program development and evaluation. She is the co-founder and director with Dr. Susan Needham of the Cambodian Community History & Archive Project (www.camchap. org). Dr. Quintiliani serves on the Board of Directors of Cambodia Town, Inc. and is also the Associate Editor for the journal Collaborative Anthropologies. Sophia Thubauville is research fellow and head of library at the Frobenius-Institute, Frankfurt. Earlier she has worked at the University of Mainz and the Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany and the South Omo Research Center in Ethiopia. She has done ethnographic field research among the Maale and Ongota of Southern Ethiopia as well as on Indian academics in Ethiopia. She co-edited the volume “Cultural Neighborhood in Southern Ethiopia” and the focus issue “Cultural Diversity in Ethiopia” in the journal Paideuma. Currently her writing is devoted to gender, questions of time and identity, cultural policy, migration and higher education.

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Tsai-Ping Wang is a Research Assistant at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She earned her Master’s degree from the Department of Psychology at the National Chengchi University in 2013. Keiko Yamanaka lectures in the Department of Ethnic Studies and in International and Area Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1994 she has studied international labor migration in Asia, focusing on immigrant communities in central Japan, including Brazilians and Nepalese. She also investigated feminized migration and civil activism in East and Southeast Asia. In more recent years, she compared impact of civil society on policy formation in Japan and South Korea. Currently, she is interested in social incorporation of marriage migrant women in rural Japan. Her latest publications include an edited book, Wind over Water: Rethinking Migration in an East Asian Setting (2012, New York: Berghahn Books), with David W. Haines and Shinji Yamashita. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. He will take up the position of Assistant Professor at Department of History, the University of Missouri-Columbia in September 2015. Dominic received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in late 2012. His dissertation looks into the lived experiences and collective memory of Chinese civil war migrants who followed Chiang Kai-shek's regime to Taiwan in 1949. The research is being revised into a book tentatively titled The Great Exodus: Trauma, Diaspora, and the Chinese Mainlander Identity in Taiwan. Dominic has been a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Canada. He is also the President of North American Taiwan Studies Association in 2013-14. His current project examines the intricate relationships between propaganda, education, missionary work, and transnational mobility in Asia during the Cold War. Yeng Yang is a doctoral candidate in the Department of BiculturalBilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), in which he has assisted and co-taught courses related to applications of second language acquisitions as well as cultural and linguistic diversity with emphasis on English language learners/language minority students to pre-service teachers. He currently serves as the Journal Manager for the online academic peer-reviewed journal, Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement. His research interests include bilingual and multicultural education, educational attainment, educational

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equity, cultural diversity, language socialization and other contemporary issues impacting Southeast Asian Americans.