Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters 9780415890380, 9780203157978

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon. Youna Kim is Associate Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France. She was formerly at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she taught after completing her PhD at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. Her books are Women, Television and Everyday Life in Korea: Journeys of Hope (2005, Routledge); Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (2008, Routledge); Women and the Media in Asia: The Precarious Self (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan).

Routledge Research in Gender and Society

1 Economics of the Family and Family Policies Edited by Inga Persson and Christina Jonung 2 Women’s Work and Wages Edited by Inga Persson and Christina Jonung 3 Rethinking Households An Atomistic Perspective on European Living Arrangements Michel Verdon 4 Gender, Welfare State and the Market Thomas P Boje and Arnlaug Leira 5 Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union Simon Duncan and Birgit Pfau Effinger 6 Body, Femininity and Nationalism Girls in the German Youth Movement 1900–1935 Marion E P de Ras 7 Women and the Labour-Market Self-employment as a Route to Economic Independence Vani Borooah and Mark Hart 8 Victoria’s Daughters The Schooling of Girls in Britain and Ireland 1850–1914 Jane McDermid and Paula Coonerty

9 Homosexuality, Law and Resistance Derek McGhee 10 Sex Differences in Labor Markets David Neumark 11 Women, Activism and Social Change Edited by Maja Mikula 12 The Gender of Democracy Citizenship and Gendered Subjectivity Maro Pantelidou Maloutas 13 Female Homosexuality in the Middle East Histories and Representations Samar Habib 14 Global Empowerment of Women Responses to Globalization and Politicized Religions Edited by Carolyn M. Elliott 15 Child Abuse, Gender and Society Jackie Turton 16 Gendering Global Transformations Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity Edited by Chima J. Korieh and Philomena Ihejirija-Okeke 17 Gender, Race and National Identity Nations of Flesh and Blood Jacqueline Hogan

18 Intimate Citizenships Gender, Sexualities, Politics Elz·bieta H. Oleksy

27 Overcoming Objectification A Carnal Ethics Ann J. Cahill

19 A Philosophical Investigation of Rape The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine Self Louise du Toit

28 Intimate Partner Violence in LGBTQ Lives Edited by Janice L. Ristock

20 Migrant Men Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migration Experience Edited by Mike Donaldson, Raymond Hibbins, Richard Howson and Bob Pease 21 Theorizing Sexual Violence Edited by Renée J. Heberle and Victoria Grace 22 Inclusive Masculinity The Changing Nature of Masculinities Eric Anderson 23 Understanding Non-Monogamies Edited by Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge 24 Transgender Identities Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity Edited by Sally Hines and Tam Sanger 25 The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa Henriette Gunkel 26 Migration, Domestic Work and Affect A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

29 Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body Debra B. Bergoffen 30 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Diasporic Daughters Youna Kim

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Diasporic Daughters Youna Kim

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2011 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Youna Kim to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kim, Youna. Transnational migration, media and identity of Asian women : diasporic daughters / Youna Kim. p. cm. — (Routledge research in gender and society ; 30) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Women immigrants—East Asia—Case studies. 2. Group identity— East Asia—Case studies. I. Title. JV6347.K55 2011 305.48'895—dc23 2011020539 ISBN: 978-0-415-89038-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-15797-8 (ebk)

To OH, SOOAN and OH, JEILL

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

1

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity Diasporic Daughters Individualization and Mediated Migration Transnational Mobility, Diasporic Media, National Identity Cosmopolitanism in Question Longing to Tell: Methodological Reflections

1 2 4 8 12 17

2

Mapping the Diaspora: A Global-Historical Perspective Manifestations of the Global Diaspora Korean Diaspora Japanese Diaspora Chinese Diaspora Emergence of Diasporic Daughters Feminization of International Migration Provisional Diaspora: “Willing to go anywhere for a while” Temporary Sojourning as a Prelude to Settlement Mediation: The Media on the Move Experiencing the Global City: London

21 21 21 25 29 34 34 38 41 44 47

3

Female Individualization? Female Individualization in Transnational Flows No Choice Situation: “It’s the only exit” Relocation of the Self: “It’s like a gamble” The Rise of Global Woman: “We call it a golden certificate” Consuming the West: Imagining an Individual Everyday Media and Refl exivity: “The more I see it on the media, the more I think” Intentionality of Media Consumption: “Something you like always affects you somehow” Power of Mediation: “The decision to believe the media is made by us” The Precarious Self: A Conclusion

52 52 52 56 60 63 63 67 70 73

x

Contents

4

Diaspora: Lived and Experienced Banal Racism: “It’s the everyday little things that matter” Paradox of Choice: “because it is my choice, my responsibility” Gendered Global Subject: “because I am a Chinese woman?” Unspeakable Exclusion: A Conclusion

77 77 81 85 89

5

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media Ethnic Enclave and Mediated Disengagement: “the UK television is in my closet” Ethnic Media and Self-Identity: “I am solid Japanese” Feeling Nationalism: “feel like a woman warrior of China” Internet and Banal Nationalism: A Conclusion

93

6

7

93 97 103 107

Female Cosmopolitanism? Cosmopolitanism as a Western Concept: “we never invented cosmopolitanism” Imagined Cosmopolitanism: “just imagine through the media but cannot act” Why Be a Cosmopolitan?: “we are seen as a problem” Beyond Global Consumer Cosmopolitanism?: A Conclusion

114

120 126 133

The Nowhere Women: Feeling Stuck in Diaspora Imperfect Belonging: Going Home Again? The Media and Mythical Home Thick Nationalism, Thin Cosmopolitanism

138 139 142 145

Bibliography Index

151 167

114

Acknowledgments

I embarked on this project while teaching at the London School of Economics and Political Science after completing my PhD at the University of London, Goldsmiths College. The LSE Research Office assisted me in identifying funding organizations; the Nuffield Foundation and the GB Sasakawa Foundation graciously awarded research grants. My colleague Roger Silverstone (1945–2006) shared critical insights and intellectual resources from the start of this journey. Sonia Livingstone offered useful comments on my research proposal at its initial stage. My students in the graduate course, The Audience in Media and Communications, were particularly enthusiastic and helpful in reaching out to wider communities in the process of research. All these women in this project shared their intimate life stories and contributed enormously, for which I remain grateful forever. Nick Couldry and Daya Thussu have been good influences and friends throughout my work at the LSE and Goldsmiths College and afterwards. I am also grateful to Chris Berry for his constant support and especially for the questions of cosmopolitanism that I shared over a lunch together in London before moving to Paris. In Paris, Michelle Lennen, the principal of an international bilingual school in the 7th district, has consistently been helpful for my family from the moment of our relocation. Heartfelt thanks to lovely expatriate families in Champ de Mars Tour Eiffel, who have continued to offer much-needed caring and hospitality by looking after the precious small details of everyday life, especially when I had to travel abroad for research and meetings— Stephanie Xatart and her daughter Albane; Isabelle Tadmoury and her daughter Zena; Becca and Thomas Valente and their children Kate and Thomas have shared enjoyable times during their sabbatical leave here. Kathleen Chevalier, my guardian angel and art history scholar, has wisely shared the delicate beauty of life with her unique capacity to make one’s diasporic life condition more bearable and more meaningful. I am greatly indebted to her. Thanks also to Christian Joppke, a distinguished sociologist whom I have known in Paris, for sharing his scholarly inspiration and practical suggestions whenever sought in the exigencies of daily life.

xii

Acknowledgments

Kind invitations for teaching and talks have further enriched my research process; the University of California at San Diego and Irvine, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and the University of Cambridge were particularly stimulating experiences for me. The refreshing stay at La Jolla Cove with the visiting teaching at the University of California at San Diego during a summer time revitalized me in the demanding course of writing. I also want to extend my personal gratitude to Dan Hallin, Michael Delli Carpini, Arvind Rajagopal, Kent Ono, and anthropologist Nancy Abelmann for the thoughtful words of encouragement when much needed; and to Johan Fornas in Sweden for the email dialogue and sensitive comments on a part of this project. Delightful conversation with Ien Ang over a lunch together in Paris encouraged me to think more about the trajectories of diaspora. Champ de Mars, the beautiful park right in front of my living place, has been a joy for a morning walk every day and has helped sustain the writing process. Thanks to my dedicated PA and friend Diane Willian for helping me wherever I am. The publisher Routledge and Max Novick have continually been supportive and wonderfully cooperative, and the reviewers’ comments highly knowledgeable and pertinent. I am especially grateful to Anthony Giddens for his valuable advice and friendship, as always. Writing for two hours every day was not always easy, though I have endeavored to do this for this DDD project, Daring Diasporic Daughters, as he has called it. I have appreciated his continued interest and feedback on the work in this long journey which would otherwise have been a too solitary labor. This book is dedicated to my family and special mentor. I hope that Sooan, ten years old now, will read it someday and live in a compassionate world that enables her to become truly a “young cosmopolitan lady” as many people say to her. Youna Kim Paris, May 2011

1

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity

Women are travelling out of South Korea (hereafter Korea), Japan and China for very different reasons than those that sent them into diaspora only twenty years ago. From the mid-1980s onward there has been a rising trend of women leaving their country to experience life overseas either as tourists or students, eventually surpassing the number of men engaging in foreign travel. Now, 80% of Japanese people studying abroad are women (Kelsky 2001; Ono and Piper 2004), an estimated 60% of Koreans studying abroad are women, and more than half of the Chinese entering higher education overseas are women (IIE 2006; HESA 2006). This phenomenon is part of a larger trend described as the “feminization of migration” yet there remains a striking lack of analysis on the gender dimension (World Bank 2006). Today women are significant and active participants in the increased scale, diversity and transition in the nature of international migration. Studying abroad has become a major vehicle for entry into Western countries (Lucas 2005) and East Asia continues to be the largest sending region every year. In 2005, 53,000 Koreans, 42,000 Japanese and 62,000 Chinese moved to US institutions of higher education; 4,000 Koreans, 6,000 Japanese and 53,000 Chinese moved to UK institutions of higher education. Studying abroad has become a common career move for relatively affluent women in their twenties. These new generations of women, who depart from the usual track of marriage, are markers of contemporary transnational mobility, constituting a new kind of diaspora, a “knowledge diaspora.” Why do women move? Starting with this question, this book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitan identity formation as intersected with the media. It documents and analyzes the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational mobility and its relationship to the impact of media consumption in everyday life. While this

2

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transnational mobility has been recognized as important from an economic perspective in Western higher education (Nania and Green 2004), there has been very little research from a socio-cultural angle. In particular, scant attention has been paid to the gender composition of transnational mobility and what it actually means to the women on the move. Questions of identity are refigured in flows of desire that now operate transnationally, enacted by Asia’s economic growth and integration into globalization that have enabled new generations of women to experience and then create a different life trajectory using Western educational institutions as a contact zone. This book brings forth a deepened understanding of the consequences of transnational mobility and the role of the media, providing detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora.

DIASPORIC DAUGHTERS Taking a global-historical perspective, Chapter 2 of this book starts with mapping out the diaspora—Korean, Japanese and Chinese women on the move. It is necessary to analyze the historically specific circumstances that a particular group of women, defi nable as diasporic daughters, experience and are compelled to move away from, and understand these contexts in light of their complexities. Chapter 2 argues that this feminization of migration should be recognized as being of growing significance for several reasons. First, women’s active participation in the global migration circuit, despite its considerable magnitude, remains underestimated, or they are presumed to be companions to their male counterparts; such views tend to ignore equally important experience of women on the move. Second, this mobility forms a prolonged temporary status or diasporic sojourner mentality, “willing to go anywhere, everywhere provisionally” (Yang 2000) in pursuit of maximal opportunities, “greener pastures” (Kuah-Pearce 2006), potentially entailing an unending sojourn and settlement across national borders with unpredictable consequences on women’s transnational lives. Third, its unpredictable, temporary and transient nature is precisely one of the unique features that characterize today’s transnational mobility, calling for an understanding of a new formation of diasporic women. Last, but most significantly, this contemporary manifestation has been intensified by the proliferation of new media communications, digital technologies and the deregulation in the 1990s creating “multi-vocal, multimedia and multidirectional flows” (Thussu 2007), thereby making transnational networks and relations available with much greater frequency and regularity, as well as creating new meanings of being in the world. Women’s mobility is certainly on the rise, and its scale and meaning mark it out as quite distinctive. Women are now migrating more than ever; nearly half of the world’s migrants are women (World Bank 2006). The gendered phenomenon of “global woman,” whose broad-scale journeys go often

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 3 unnoticed, is part of a larger trend described as the feminization of migration, and a consequence that is increasingly shaped by the new economy of globalization and global inequality (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). In particular, migration from globalizing East Asia has become increasingly feminized, knowledge intensive, widespread and frequent through forms of study abroad and work, giving rise to “student diasporas” (Asmar 2005), “global knowledge diasporas” (Welch and Zhen 2007), sustained by the expansion of “international education industry” (Waters 2008), knowledge-based economies, and information and communication technologies. Transnational mobility of young people from Korea, Japan and China has increased massively since the 1990s, and women now constitute a considerable proportion of this cross-border flow and diasporic population (Ono and Piper 2001; Ryan 2002). However, there are relatively little insights with regard to the causes and implications of women’s movement. Historically, the migration literature tends to reveal that both migration and research on migration have been gendered processes, and more attention to understanding male migrants led to the unfortunate consequence that women’s experiences of migration became under-researched; but recent scholarship documenting the predominance of women in migratory flows makes the exclusion of women in research on migration untenable (Pessar and Mahler 2001). It shows how women’s mobility has been affected by global capital, men and hierarchical relationships, social differentiation, uneven regional development and the differential power geometry of time-space compression in relation to the movement, interconnection and change (Massey 1994). Rapid economic growth in globalizing East Asia has diversified and shifted the patterns of international migration towards movement of the highly skilled and knowledge intensive into Western countries (Lucas 2005). The majority of women make their way to the US, with the UK rapidly becoming a popular destination, although there is little evidence of grafting themselves permanently onto the wider societies of destination. Diasporic daughters are the new emblems of contemporary transnational mobility—nomadic, transient, individualistic and networked, risk-taking and multiply displaced subjects (see Chapter 2). The choice of study abroad is not just a legitimate channel for physical mobility and displacement, but importantly involves the very nature of identity itself emerging as an increasingly popular do-it-yourself “reflexive biography” (Giddens 1991), a self-determined yet highly precarious biographical strategy that is driven by imagined futures of individualization, work and economic power, selffulfilment and the enlargement of the self in confrontation with new and global forms of social life (see Chapter 3). These new generations of women thus depart from the often naturalized images of women as bearers of tradition who are confined to the realm of home, domesticity and limited spatial freedom, and who can only be visible as the dependent daughters or the wives of travelling men and families but rarely seen as independently

4

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

travelling social actors. This mobility is not an elite phenomenon, at least in Korea and Japan, but is fi rmly grounded in the middle classes, becoming an almost taken-for-granted and normal middle-class practice and expectation, rather than something exclusively confi ned to and marked out by an economic elite. The question of how these new contemporary features intersect with women’s everyday experience of the world—both lived and mediated—is the focus of the proceeding chapters. The question to be explored is not simply about who travels, but “when, how, and under what circumstances” (Brah 1996).

INDIVIDUALIZATION AND MEDIATED MIGRATION Why do women move? What are the social conditions, the push-and-pull factors that compel women to move away from Korea, Japan and China? How do the media play a role in this migration process? Specifically, Chapter 3 of this book begins by analyzing the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of each society, with a particular focus on systems of education and employment. It will argue that the attainment of higher education does not necessarily increase women’s work opportunities and the subsequent role of work in developing a new mode of identity formation—individualization. In Korea, there is an inverse relationship between women’s higher education and job opportunity; female individualization as an alternative, emancipatory life politics remains frustratingly limited for reasons that are structural to the labor market (Kim 2005: 169–177). With the rapid expansion of education through the 1980s and 1990s, the value of university education declined, guaranteeing neither employment nor middle-class life (Abelmann 2003). The unmet promises of education, the increasing awareness of inequalities and the lack of job opportunities have propelled a new surge of movement to the West. Similarly in Japan, it is increasingly common for women to quit their “office lady” jobs and move to a Western destination (Kelsky 2001). Half of the employed women in Japan are temporary part-time workers; highly educated women are often under-employed; and the rapid rise of youth unemployment since the 1990s has led to the ambivalent lengthening of the transition from school to work (ILO 2006). Ironically, some Japanese women rather feel that education could actually hurt young women’s chances of getting a job (Ono and Piper 2004). A new desire has emerged among young women making a Westward journey to redefi ne a work identity and to have a degree of control over the conditions of their individual lives (Ichimoto 2004). In contemporary China, increasing international openness linked to economic development since the 1980s appears to encourage conditions for job opportunities, yet traditional gender dynamics within Chinese work

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 5 environments limit women’s employment. In the urban labor market, young women graduating from university fi nd it particularly difficult to get their fi rst job (Jiang et al. 2004). Urban women tend to postpone marriage for the sake of a career, independence and personal freedom, seeking opportunities in Western higher education that would allow them to access international jobs outside of the Chinese labor system. Exposure to international education and progression to work in foreign-invested companies— effectively moving out of the domestic work environment altogether—may be one of the few legitimate avenues open to Chinese women to live in a non-traditional, personally emancipatory and individualized fashion (Turner 2006). Arguably, female individualization has emerged as a major mode of identity formation that is now operating in a transnational flow of desire, giving rise to the experience of increased freedom, as well as increased insecurity and personal responsibility for every move. A generalization about women’s decision to move can be grounded in an understanding of the transnationally dispersed sites, instances and cultures of female individualization that are refracted into various degrees, forms and interests. Educated women have a strong interest in the idea of individualization, autonomous choice and the aspiration for self-actualization; however, interest in individualization is a growing response not to the successful actualization of that aspiration, but to the frustrated desire for subjective autonomy that is increasingly felt in the “no choice” situation. Chapter 3 of this book intends to draw attention to the rise and the problematic of female individualization among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women in the context of transnational mobility, while making a case for a more interrogatory approach towards gender and social change in the male-stream debate about individualization. The individualization of life experiences has become one of the central claims of contemporary social theory (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Bauman 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). Education and career opportunities are generally regarded as the driving force behind the individualization of people’s lives and social mobility. It is suggested that labor market positions now are constituted less by determinants such as gender, class, age and place, but more by self-design, self-creation and individual performance: “The educated person becomes the producer of his or her own labour situation, and in this way, of his or her social biography” (Beck 1992: 93). The emergence of privatized work, the devaluation of social order by globalization processes, and the uncertainty of changing societies have become powerful individualizing forces as the borders between social institutions disappear and fluidity becomes more characteristic than structure (Bauman 2001). There is a tendency to emphasize the increased fluidity of contemporary social life, as well as the mobile reflexive individual and his or her freedom of movement along with a consequence of personal choice. This individualization process is characterized by a growing

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reflexivity, self-monitoring and awareness, and an expansion of disembedding mechanisms (Giddens 1991), including global flows of the media that lift social interactions out of the individuals’ local context and allow them to relocate themselves in a transnationally dispersed culture. The result of these social conditions is seen to be an individualized individual. It is up to the individual, who wants to or must be economically active (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), to be free to choose for herself, to plan what she will do with her choices and capacities. Significantly, work is regarded as a “motor of individualization” (Beck 1992: 92). A shared ground and possibility of individualization is predicated on the labor market—fi nding work and achieving equality as well as success in education. Chapter 3 of this book will argue that the claim that education encourages work freedom, economic power and the enlargement of choice can be illusory for educated women in Korea, Japan and China, where gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions persist and continue to structure labor market outcomes and lifestyles. Whose individualization? A contradiction lies at the heart of female individualization. The individualization of life experiences may refl ect a discursive shift in the ways women in today’s age “imagine” and “talk” about their lives, rather than a substantive change in actual life conditions, regulative dimensions of gender and social structure which continue to shape available opportunities and constrain personal choice and freedom. The resulting contradiction of female individualization and women’s stories that do “not reach beyond the narrow and painstakingly fenced off enclosure of the private and subjective self” (Bauman 2001: 12) now become apparent in the growing phenomenon of transnational mobility. Free mobility is itself a deception, since the seemingly voluntary movement or the women’s self-determined choice to move is a forced, gendered process mediated by larger forces that push women into different routes across the world. Against these social contexts, Chapter 3 of this book will consider a pull-effect of the media; which is women’s mediated symbolic encounter with the West that generates “imaginations of alternative lifestyles and work” (Kim 2005: 184–192). The media play a significant role as symbolic and cultural forms people live by, constituting “residual culture” (Williams 1977) that has been accumulated throughout a life history and that is still active as an effective element in the present. People seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they will live and work in places other than where they were born, and their plans are affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space (Appadurai 1996). Since the 1990s the media landscape of Asia has been rapidly globalizing; the growth in satellites, transnational television channels and online networks in Asia is said to be the most rapid worldwide (Thomas 2005). Such profusion of the media, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity, engaging everyday people to have a

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 7 resource for the learning of self, culture and society in Asia (Kim 2008). This plausibly powerful capacity of the media, deeply ingrained in what people take for granted, should be recognized in any attempt to understand the present phenomenon of transnational mobility. The linking of the media and migration is a relatively new and underexplored field of investigation, but recent studies have started to recognize the significance of mediated migration, the media’s role as a significant pull variable in migratory processes (King and Wood 2001). The symbolic dimensions of displacement have often been neglected in the approaches to the subject of migration, but should be integrated within a perspective acknowledging the complex ways in which migration emerges from the increased symbolic contact between societies that are different in their socio-cultural organization (Sabry 2003). Those who wish to move and those who have moved rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of the media. It is mass mediation, the expanding scale, circulation and impact of media consumption, which distinguishes the present transnational mobility from migration of the past (Appadurai 1996). Television, in particular, has become a key site for the emergence of a new contemporary subject, “migratory youth,” and for the construction of a “migratory project” (Mai 2004). This mobility is seen as an extension of the previous immersion of young people in consuming images transmitted from a Western destination, while dreaming of escape from their social constraints. Global television, including Hollywood movies, popular dramas and travel shows, helps to create an important condition for the practice of reflexivity, by opening up a rare space where women can make sense of their life conditions in highly critical ways and can imagine new possibilities of freedom, social mobility and individualization, within the multiple constraints of their social context (Kim 2005). In Asian society, where women’s social roles and public voices are otherwise highly constrained, women are either allowed to be, or coerced into being, the primary agents of cultural consumption (Skov and Moeran 1995). Under social controls that deny women the ability to act on their own, the chances for individualization become smaller, and individualization can be sought in ever greater participation in media cultural consumption, the complex symbolic project women engage with. Media consumption can be understood as a key cultural mechanism creating the emergence of individualized identities, both imagined and enacted. Chapter 3 of this book will therefore show how the West is represented in the imagination of young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women through engagement with the media in their homeland by which female individualization operates as a self-reflexive and imaginative social practice. It will argue for the potential role of the media in triggering enactment of transnational mobility; the interplay between media consumption and physical displacement towards a deliberately encouraging yet precarious movement of freedom.

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

Why do women move? Tackling this question requires that transnational mobility needs to be understood with multi-faceted insights; considering some of the key macro factors affecting women’s decision to move and the micro processes of the ways in which women experience the mediated world of everyday culture, while reflecting the interconnection of these seemingly opposite and contradictory levels of push-and-pull elements within the particular socio-economic and cultural contexts in which women live their everyday lives.

TRANSNATIONAL MOBILITY, DIASPORIC MEDIA, NATIONAL IDENTITY What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? Do women fi nd their transnational lives progressive or emancipatory? Chapter 4 of this book considers these important questions. In the contemporary discussion of transnational mobility, there is a widespread tendency to romanticize all forms of mobility as themselves intrinsically progressive, and this meaning has become celebrated as a transgressive and liberating departure from living-as-usual. Physical mobility is seen as the basis of emancipatory practice, and diaspora as the site of contingency par excellence because it generates stasis-disrupting forms of cultural displacement (Clifford 1994). It is further related to the possibility for endless hybrid self-creation, since it involves a translational sense of culture in new in-between spaces to initiate innovative, anti-essentialist signs of identity (Bhabha 1994). Transnational mobility is assumed as a journey that already destabilizes borders, transgresses all forms of boundary-making, and breaks barriers of thought and experience. Border-crossing by marginal Others, subordinates and ordinary people is conceived as an expression of a potentially subversive resistance “from below” or as “counter-narratives of the nation” (Bhabha 1990) that self-consciously disturb totalizing boundaries and ideologies, essentialist discourses and identities. In the extreme “beautification of the nomad in Western epistemology” (Peters 1999), transnational Asian women on the move may appear to be new signifiers of change or selfexpressive icons of hybridity with endless possibilities for self-creation, and their mobility may be seen as not only physical but also intellectual, liberating thinking from localism and breaking out towards a rootless life with transgressive power. However, Chapter 4 of this book will argue that the tendency to celebrate transnational mobility is often separated from mundane reality and obscures actual conditions and experiences; that is, the complex ways in which it is experienced by women within diasporic lives in larger relations to the social contexts of the world, which do not necessarily involve progressive dimensions. In such celebration, transnational mobility is endowed with a normative dimension that uncritically valorizes the painful nature

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 9 of diasporic existence, as if it were some kind of state of “cultural grace” (Cheah 1998). Attention needs to be given to the price women pay, the immense suffering, ambiguities and contradictions. Embedded in the liberal West or “liquid individualized society,” where individuals must plan, produce and accomplish their biographies themselves (Bauman 2001), women experience new burdens of choice and dilemmas of personal responsibility alongside increased personal freedoms, as well as global structures of domination and unspeakable inequality of racial relations. These difficulties, which often cannot be articulated and translated in the dominant language, have thus felt far from transgressive or emancipatory. The seemingly expansive reach and mastery imputed to global mobile subjects, their dominance and freedom from vulnerability, are far from complete, for an analysis of transnational global spaces should not conceal the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday lives (Ley 2004), with reference to the specific circumstances of particular social groups. “Diasporas are the sites of hope and new beginnings” (Brah 1996: 193). While it is worth recognizing any potentialities for self-invention and opportunity structures (e.g., new employment) that the diasporic condition may give rise to, however precarious and secondary they may be, it is equally important to recognize the quiet pain, sufferings, dilemmas and contradictions that it entails, as well as disarticulation that even the most educated diasporic subjects experience. By exploring these consequences and complexities, Chapter 4 of this book attempts to avoid romanticization of transnational mobility per se. It analyzes in detail how the diaspora is lived and experienced in the everyday, and what resources women adopt in their efforts to make sense of their transnational lives. How do women make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Do they feel they belong to the world, and is this connection facilitated by the media? How do they negotiate their identities in a temporality of cultural difference? Chapter 5 of this book explores women’s experience of the media and paradoxical consequences for identities. It highlights that the media are among the integral resources that shape diasporic experiences and identities. Because of the sheer multiplicity of the forms in which they appear and the rapid way in which they move through daily routines, the media provide resources for self-imagining and engines for the formation of diasporic spheres (Appadurai 1996). The Internet and television create key spaces where people are variously invited to construct a sense of self—whether as “us” and “them,” “insider” and “outsider,” “citizen” and “foreigner,” “normal” and “deviant,” “the West” and “the rest” (Cottle 2000). Displaced from their homelands, diasporic subjects attempt to re-create their own imaginative or mythical space of home and connectivity by developing transnational communications networks that use a variety of the media, information and communication technologies, while negotiating cultural difference and identity between home and host countries (Gillespie 1995; Cunningham and Sinclair 2001; Karim 2003).

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

Diasporic media space is a transnational site of contestation, in which nation, race, gender, class, culture and language continuously interrelate to produce complex identities. New kinds of transnational mobility and media flow are creating unpredictable patterns of identification, as well as insecurities and uncertainties about being and belonging in the world (Gillespie 2002). By exploring the nature of the diasporic media space, Chapter 5 of this book seeks to capture some of the most complex manifestations and consequences of media use—with a focus on the questions of belonging, processes of negotiation and new possibilities for the formation of identity among young Asian women. Diaspora is a place of identity, living with, living through difference, and the diasporic are always producing themselves anew and differently, finding ways of being the same as and at the same time different from, the others amongst whom they live; identity is a “production” that is never complete, always in process, always constituted within, not outside, representation, and it must be negotiated (Hall 1990). The nature of diaspora involves identity as a subjective condition marked by contingency, differences of power and position, internal differentiation, inner conflict and contestation, indeterminacy and continual construction. Identity is partly inherited and partly modified, as well as partly produced. Yet, this way of thinking does not automatically assume that identity is somehow self-selected, freely chosen, freely mixed and freely shaped through the voluntaristic agency of individuals or migrants without the limits of differential power, differences of material and cultural resources, constraints and the discursive relations of subordination and exclusion in the representation and the production of identity. If the women’s identity is in the process of production in the new contexts of transnational encounters, what would that identity be like? Global me (Zachary 2000)? If transnational mobility leads to the inner mobility of an individual’s own life or to the “globalization of biography” (Beck 2000: 77), precisely what does that globalization of biography mean to the young Asian women on the move? Chapter 5 of this book will argue that transnational mobility does not necessarily diminish but rather enhances national identity. Women’s experience of social exclusion in the lived reality produces paradoxical consequences for media use and new identity positions. The ethnic media are mobilized as key resources to manage the difficulties of everyday life; racial marginalization, self-questioning and eroding confidence, disengagement and disconnection from the host society, still unresolved tensions within it all remain perpetually unable to be articulated in the dominant language. The degree of social closure and disarticulation leads to the likelihood that women will withdraw to their ethnic enclaves, their own communication spaces, channels and networks as daily sustainers inside them. While engagement with the Western media back home once had a powerful influence on women to imagine new ways of being and create a new desire to be mobile (Kim 2005, 2008), such engagement decreases dramatically after

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 11 moving to a Western destination; in this different context women’s ethnic media become of more importance as their ethnic media affirm a sense of belonging, self-esteem and confidence. The ethnic media—mainly, popular cultural forms—are originally from a national homeland but are circulated transnationally, often reproduced and amplified by digital technologies and the strategic, self-determined use of the Internet generations forming ethnic online communities. Today’s ubiquitous media flows from the periphery to the West, with greater access through the Internet, create national space and identification within the transnational field, changing the dynamics of diasporic identity in an unpredictable manner. It is now increasingly recognized that diasporas follow a broadly similar strategy of rejecting straightforward integration into their host society, but instead rely to a large extent on their ethnic cultural resources as a means of reconstructing their own little worlds on their own terms (Ballard 1994). This is especially the case with the diaspora consisting largely of the older generation of migrants building themselves home communities even parochially through the routine appropriation of their ethnic media and cultural practices in everyday life (Aksoy and Robins 2000). As a consequence, the viability of the ethnic media today comes to be viewed by governments as obstacles to the integration of diasporic groups into their chosen host society, even if the mundane ethnic media sources such as newspapers also carry significant amounts of material on civic issues relating to its public sphere (Karim 2002). In new and seemingly contradictory ways, culturally displaced subjects, whether of younger generations or older generations, educated or not, are now able to shape and sustain their own distinct cultural identity through diasporic media networks and purposefully enact national selves in everyday transnational lives. Diasporic nationalism, as will be argued in Chapter 5 of this book, emerges as reactionary ethno-nationalism within global knowledge diasporas of those who appear to be bilingual cross-cultural negotiators moving regularly between different cultures and participating in exchanges across national borders. While the significance of nationalism in a transnational context, or long-distance nationalism, has been recognized (Anderson 1992; Smith 1995), the focus of this book is on a relatively less studied phenomenon of women’s transnational mobility and its unique nature—the syndrome of young Asian women who are highly educated mobile transnationals “willing to go anywhere for a while” is something quite new, in part enabled by the transnational Internet. Reactionary ethno-nationalism can be caused by the ways in which exclusionary social conditions, ambiguities of racism, marginality and conflictual interaction give rise to a primacy of identification with ethnically defi ned cultural nationalism—a distinct, highly conscious and sometimes resistive force—as a defensive strategy in terms of status positioning and affective support in an increasingly transnational, wider yet uneven world of power.

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Transnational practices do not necessarily evoke higher levels of identification with transnationalism or a multiple sense of belonging to more than one nation, but can cause a turn towards nationalism, thus challenging the post-national assumption—the decentring and decline of the nation as a result of the increase in transnational connections (Hannerz 1996; Beck 2000). What can be found and also limited in much of the global and transnational studies is a series of assumptions about this kind of highly educated and skilled international migration, but these assumptions need to be critically interrogated and more specified in the light of concrete empirical studies (Smith and Favell 2006). Serious concerns have been raised about the use of the popular term transnationalism, mostly prompted by an exaggerated characterization of transnational mobility today. Adopting an “embodied approach” to the study of transnationalism is a powerful corrective to the dangers of exaggerating mobility and footloosedness, allowing a more complicated and realistic picture to emerge across a racialized praxis, ethnicity, nation, gender and so on (Dunn 2010). The nation and the meanings of the national can be re-worked, even re-essentialized and reinforced through transnational mobility, shaping women’s understandings of their own positions to the extent of their becoming re-nationalized. It is worth distinguishing between “ways of belonging transnationally” and “ways of being transnationally” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Women studied in this book may not feel a sense of transnational belonging, yet still engage in transnational practices as part of everyday life and ways of being. The ethnic media from a national homeland arise at the heart of the paradox of transnational experience, as electronic mediation intensified by the Internet provides a necessary condition for the possibility of diasporic nationalism. This book therefore considers how young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women make sense of transnational lives and the media and paradoxical consequences for identities, by further questioning general assumptions behind transnational mobility and cosmopolitanism.

COSMOPOLITANISM IN QUESTION Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Can they afford a cosmopolitan identity? Chapter 6 of this book intends to interrogate the notion of cosmopolitanism and challenge the general assumptions of cosmopolitan identity formation as intersected with the media. Providing empirical data, Chapter 6 will discuss three main arguments. (1) The possibility of becoming cosmopolitan subjects is contingent upon discursive encounters with Others and relational experience; no cosmopolitan yearning, or if any, a situated but characteristically thin cosmopolitanism arises from the experience of the actual conditions of transnational lives, unequal relations of power and discourses of exclusion and inclusion. Frequent border-crossings in the wake

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 13 of globalization do not necessarily generate greater levels of cosmopolitan attitudes and motivations. (2) Rather, a more cosmopolitan sense of style, eager exploration of global Others and heightened motivations emerged through the increasing experience of the media imaginary among women while inhabiting in their homeland, embracing the world at a reflexive distance. Cosmopolitanism was readily identifiable by globalized media cultures and media talk as imagined cultural space but not as lived experience. (3) Paradoxically, there is a contradiction that emerges from the simultaneous growth of transnational mobility and nationalism, consciously and purposefully as one of the main forces for an overarching feature of identity and belonging in diaspora. Cosmopolitanism entails motivational problems in the uneven transnational field; why be a cosmopolitan? In the current debate of transnational mobility, cosmopolitanism has become the privileged, prime term of analysis for characterizing qualities in people and their identities. Transnational groups are figured as the bearers of de-territorialized cosmopolitanism, as “always already cosmopolitan,” which goes beyond the grip of any individual state. Their cultures are characterized as worldly, productive sites of crossing and as exemplary instances of active resistance to national cultures and localism (Bhabha 1994; Clifford 1992). The recent re-vitalization of cosmopolitanism has been in fashion since the 1990s, amid intensifying globalization of late liberalism, capital, mobility and the media. Greater frequency of travel and transnational media cultural flows create a zone in which emergent global forms of cosmopolitanism are brought into a conflictual relationship with nationalist forms of culture (Appadurai 1996). Such a condition called cosmopolitanism, mixed with the vision of a global, hybrid and rootless culture, has been celebrated as an alternative to ethnocentric nationalism. Cosmopolitanism suggests a more outward-looking disposition, a mode of engaging with the world and such experiential openness and willingness towards divergent cultural experiences (Hannerz 1990). In cultural and political dimensions, cosmopolitanism lives a double life; a pop cultural evocation of openness to a larger world, and a political claim about the moral significance of transcending the local, even achieving the universal (Calhoun 2008). Invoked as a moral and ethical ideal, cosmopolitanism means “learning from each other’s differences through conversation and taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (Appiah 2006). It represents a normative philosophy transcending all identities—a universal identification that does not place love/loyalty of country ahead of love of mankind, universal humanity (Nussbaum 1997) assuming that extensive learning of human diversity will lead to a fi nding of common human qualities and purposes. Despite the tension between the universal and the particular, cosmopolitanism assumes a shared post-national identity based on the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the boundaries and limitations of nation states (Benhabib 2006; Habermas 2003). A cosmopolitan

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

position of the so-called “citizen of the world” indicates the impending obsolescence of national cultural identity or national self that is understood as an ideological or naturalized constraint to be overcome (Beck 2006). This emergent form of cosmopolitanism has come to be cast as a potentially libratory space, a locus of progressive politics and rejection of parochial nationalist positions. In short, much of the theory on cosmopolitanism suggests that existing transnational movements give rise to the emergence of new world communities with emancipatory forms of global consciousness and lifestyles. But who is it that experiences cosmopolitanism? Are transnational groups becoming cosmopolitan subjects by virtue of sheer mobility? The question here is, how exactly they are cosmopolitan subjects, in what ways, and whether they construct for themselves a cosmopolitan position. There is little description or analysis of how contemporary cosmopolitan subjects, outlooks or practices can be formed (Vertovec 2000). There may exist a whole variety of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” (Robbins 1998), substantive European and non-European, thickly textured and thin, stronger and weaker forms of cosmopolitanism, or non-cosmopolitanism in different transnational contexts. Without recognizing the differences depending upon situational openness and relational experience in transnational interactions, the term cosmopolitanism functions as a Eurocentric standard and political ideal. But even in Europe, European capital cities, how real is cosmopolitanism? Theoretically claimed openness and recognition of difference suggest new forms of societal and political organization, yet these theoretical concepts of cosmopolitanism are overwhelmingly normative and hardly specify the ways in which cosmopolitanism or global belonging is constructed “from below” (Pichler 2008). Cosmopolitan perspectives deemed vital in Europe’s ongoing transformation become a way of imagining ethical life and political responsibilities. Nevertheless, the social reality of cosmopolitanism is much more ambiguous, marked by global structures of power and inequality, exclusion and inclusion governing one’s relationship to Others and the world. Who wouldn’t want to be a citizen of the world? The possibility of cosmopolitan identity requires taking account of the uneven social relations of power, ethnic cultural differentiation and situated human contexts in which one defi nes the self and Others, not necessarily in terms of pleasures but in terms of tensions to cope with. Chapter 6 of this book will foreground the tensions and struggles at the heart of the cosmopolitan subject in a hierarchically defined world of the West, where Asian women strive to negotiate their status transnationally. Cosmopolitanism as lived experience awaits realization; forms of situated, thin cosmopolitanism or non-cosmopolitanism exist in unexamined sites that should be recognized. To many women studied in this book, cosmopolitanism is evaluated as a Western concept that does not motivate them enough to connect with, for lack of identifiable dialogic relationships. Thin

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 15 cosmopolitanism is based on a motivational difficulty and arises from selfconscious, subaltern voices against a totalizing global project inherent in uneven, Western-centric universalism. Rather than being part of a cosmopolitan community, whatever this normative conception of community means, thin cosmopolitans or vulnerable subordinate groups encountering the global structures of exclusionary practices and asymmetries of power, rather seek to express the very specificities of their cultural identities, ways of being and social organization without embracing a strong cosmopolitan aspiration and a further willingness to enter into dialogue. Apparently however, in localized settings back home, more widespread and mundane experience of the cosmopolitan existed as new forms of consumer subjectivity, cultural disposition and practices and cultural transformations invoked by the global forces of the media and networks transcending national boundaries. As Chapter 6 of this book will demonstrate, it is a world of media consumption, mediated experience and media talk that generates imagined cosmopolitanism and its multiple articulations as a contested characterization of social reality in question. Imagined cosmopolitanism at a cultural level proliferated among many young women, who could relate themselves to the wider world as consumers, if not as citizens, and could appropriate signs and images of cosmopolitanism without a stable meaning. At a distance, imaginary experience of global Others was embraced by the women as somehow enabling mechanisms that were connected to individualized cultural anxiety and deployed as an alternative site of detachment from gendered socio-economic and cultural constraints in the nation. They took memorable pleasures from the presence of distant Others within the local habitats, and sought to express the self fully and transcend the constraints of locality. Such encounters with the global media, new symbolic objects of identification and contestation, became a part of everyday experience and a process of conceiving themselves as culturally global, albeit imaginary, in their identity work. Intentional and multicultural eclecticism of the cosmopolitan was welcomed; more positive than critical, or potentially transformative meanings were reflected in the local settings. These new cultural conditions and practices of consumption appear to manifest “pop cosmopolitanism” (Jenkins 2004) that has been facilitated by popular media culture of neoliberal capitalism and performed by mobile generations since the 1990s, increasingly crossing national borders in their imagination. But the consequence that follows from the actual border-crossing movements may not produce thicker conditions for the development of a post-national or cosmopolitan identity, but may involve rejection or resistance rather than more openness and a will to action. This book will recognize a resulting paradox. In the wake of the recent re-valorization of cosmopolitan identity, more cautious questions have been raised. Do existing transnational movements translate into actually existing popular cosmopolitanisms? (Cheah 1998)

16

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

Or ironically, do they engender a more national consciousness rather than a cosmopolitanism and lead to “no global identity-in-the-making, nor aspirations for one?” (Smith 1995) Do the increased border crossings necessarily or easily engender new forms of cosmopolitan imagined community? The vision that emerges is not one of cosmopolitanisms played out under the guise of globalism, but of longing for one’s own national cultural identity, despite the fact that the over-determined term “cosmopolitan” has started to resurge since the 1990s with greater frequency in the midst of an obviously central, globalizing of experience and outlook, the mobility of capital and the transnationality of transnational corporations simply celebrating the idea that globalization means having occasional board meetings in London or Paris (Brennan 1997). It is suggested that, despite the increased border crossings and the cultural mixings, the need to be a part of a historical social and cultural unit that is called “home” “homeland” refuses to fade away; yet at the same time, it is also recognized that this kind of contemporary migrancy may involve a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain, and that the promise of a homecoming may become an impossibility (Chambers 1994). Against the positive assumptions and over-determined use of the term cosmopolitanism, Chapter 6 of this book will demonstrate that the consequence of greater movements is the increasing significance of the nation and the development of national sentiments, rather than idealist or celebratory sentiments of cosmopolitanism that may considerably obscure the tensions and struggles in the confl ictual inhabitation of the world. This often hidden contestation and inevitable negotiation is operating within the uneven transnational social field and intimately linked to the expressive reinforcing of national identity. Even as the nation was seen to subordinate women and remains repressive for its asymmetrical gender relations and constrained conditions, it becomes the most meaningful manifestation of identification, affective belonging and acceptable legitimating for the women on the move. Despite the optimistic theorizing of cosmopolitanism and the mystery of the sense of belonging in the transnational flows of desire, female cosmopolitanism is more of mystery. Women have to leave in order to gain some sense of individualization as an alternative and emancipatory life politics that remains frustratingly limited within the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of their homeland, particularly systems of education and employment (see Chapter 3). The gendered conditions and gendered bodies are intimately linked to national identity and justify the initial exclusion of women from the national realm, from the representation and imagination of its core national identity and affinity with the nation. Would it be the case that in the end, many women returning home, by choice or not, come to “reject blanket affi liations with the West” (Kelsky 2001), enunciating a renewed nationalistic identification with their homeland? If so, why?

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 17 Cosmopolitanism looks for test sites of theory. It is necessary to turn much of the theory into empirical questions for an understanding of the complex dimensions of cosmopolitanism and the loci where the everyday experience, both lived and mediated, may intersect in an unpredictable and not always celebratory manner. This book based on empirical research will be a useful test case in assessing the conditions for cosmopolitanism, the possibilities for the becoming of cosmopolitan self, whether and how it is capable of being realized by the contemporary mobile transnationals—young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women under study.

LONGING TO TELL: METHODOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS In order to explore the nature of women’s transnational migration, media and identity, this ethnographic project undertook a two-stage approach to data collection; personal in-depth interviews and diaries during 2006– 2008. Interviews were conducted with sixty Asian women (twenty Koreans, twenty Japanese and twenty Chinese) who had been living and studying in the UK/London for three to seven years. The women’s ages were between twenty-six and thirty-three years; single women of middle-class and upperclass positions. They were recruited by the snowball method of sampling, based on (Asian) friendship networks of the participants, and several snowballs were used to ensure that interviews were conducted with women from different universities. Interviews were open-ended and unstructured, supplemented by some fi xed questioning on the social and cultural backgrounds of the participants. At least three follow-up interviews were conducted for a consistent flow of data. On the fi rst day of meeting, I did not bring up specific research questions, but instead shared my personal stories in reciprocity of theirs. Staging this kind of interpersonal dialogue was deemed important as a part of managing “fi rst impressions” to sustain an extended series of interactions involving the same participants, and also because “it is on the basis of this initial information that the individual starts to defi ne the situation and starts to build up lines of responsive action” (Goffman 1969). This kind of person-specific research on the category of experience, or an intimate dialogue with women, is predicated upon their participation and willingness to expose by a felt degree of trust in the research process (Kim 2005). From the second meeting, I started to bring up specific research questions. Interviews usually began with a question on the women’s everyday life, especially their study, work, leisure, the media, social activities and relationships. Most interviews were tape recorded, unless they requested otherwise, and each interview lasted between one-and-a-half and two hours, with four to five follow-up interviews on average to ensure a maximum flow of relevant data.

18 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women The overall process of the interviews was sustained deliberately as openended and unstructured in a sense that they were not asked the same questions but encouraged to talk and develop their particular interest and views on the subject. In this way, the direction and structure of the interviews was determined freely by the women themselves in their own words and rhythms. Overall, the tenor of the interviews with these women was so serious and lively, and their dialogic energy was so intense and keenly felt that in most cases it was difficult for me to call an end to the meeting. This willing participation indicated their general disposition to exploring, experimenting and reflecting on their new transnational living world, while simultaneously suggesting that the women’s own need and desire to talk and communicate with people surrounding them was not adequately met in the day-to-day living conditions of diasporic lives. This kind of desire for “reciprocal dialogue” in a new and distant world—particularly a desire that universities and educators should recognize the existence and the value of many different realities and knowledges concerning global cultural Others—may develop particular subject positions for foreign students and the ways in which the foreign students accept and reject these ways of talking about them and of placing themselves in storylines of agency and empowerment, along with a dialectical sense of alienation, confusion and longing to belong (Koehne 2006). Their longing to tell stories or the evocation of travelling narratives from the margins and the marginal spaces of diaspora, as manifested in the interviewing context, mutually led to another method of conversation— email diaries. A panel of thirty diarists (ten Koreans, ten Japanese and ten Chinese) were recruited from the women interviewed; they were asked to write/email diaries about their experiences and to express in detail key issues raised by the interviews. This method was designed to generate biographical material accounts from the women and incorporate a reflexive biographical analysis. These middle-class and upper-class single women were of relatively affluent socio-economic status in their homeland, placing an emphasis on centrality of education, self-development and future work performance, and currently living with a relative lack of social and leisure activities in their diasporic conditions. Hence, a defi ning feature of everyday life was commonly described as “simple,” “study, work, home,” “not colorful,” “alone” or “lonely” (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6). Storytelling was felt to be central, and sometimes even compulsive, for the significance of these stories women tell about themselves in various contexts of travelling worlds and circumstances gives access to an understanding of their subjective experience of migratory trajectories and social relations, inner mobility or their reflexive understanding of the self creating a globalization of biography of their own. Equally significant is that it is ever more difficult to tell a story of the lived experience of social space without also telling a story of the experience of “media space,” the intersecting mediated experience of the media,

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity 19 as the contemporary electronic media increasingly organize and saturate everyday life and practice (Couldry and McCarthy 2004). An important consequence of storytelling is to learn about the subjective meanings that relatively marginalized individuals, or diasporic women in this study, attach to their everyday experiences and actions, their social structural situations and constraints at the interface of macro and micro processes of diasporic existence. It allows intimate access to the women’s emotions and the ways in which they reflexively accounted for their own experience. The longing to tell is intrinsically linked to a new identity potential, the heightened process of engagement with the self that may be enmeshed in, and often prompted by, these transnational encounters in an uneven social world, generating both the opportunities and the constraints of new articulations or disarticulations as they manifestly occur at the level of everyday experience. The self is reflexively understood, constituted and reconstituted via a set of biographical narratives (Giddens 1991), albeit expressed and limited in available language codes. Nations in East Asia, Korea, Japan and China, have been historically under the influence of Confucianism commonly sharing, to some extent, traditional gender roles associated with Confucian moral codes and assumed subordination of women (Gelb and Palley 1994), regardless of difference in the historical specificity of culture, race and language. Language is a key boundary marker of nationality and of national identity, especially in encountering global cultural Others. All interviews and diaries were communicated in English, and occasionally in Korean with Korean women participants. The working of the language is an unwitting regulation that governs and allows for the possibility of research. But also importantly, the extent of research on the lived experience of women is contingent upon specific dynamics of research relationship including a positioning for a felt degree of trust, both enabling and limiting the degree and pattern of exchange between the researcher and the researched (Kim 2005), as well as women’s willing participation and longing to tell their life stories despite possible language barriers. Women long to tell stories and enlarge the sense of how another form of life can go in the available language, particularly a case for these women whose lives and identities are socially and culturally in transition as a consequence of encountering and contesting with disparate discourses through study abroad and broader cultural contacts. What if a Japanese or Chinese woman researched these women, how would its effect be different from this one produced by a Korean woman? This questioning is not to suggest which one is better than the other, but to pay attention to a view of research as “necessarily partial,” performed and constituted in a particular research moment and recognize the consequences, both the value and the limitations of research (McRobbie 1997; Kim 2006). Data, as will be presented in this book, cannot be claimed as purely neutral and objective, representative of a whole truth, but understood as a result of discursive practices of

20

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

research which produces culturally-specific situated knowledge; a different degree of intimate knowledge that can be shared and produced based on the assumed sameness or difference of socio-cultural experiences through (partial) articulations of available language codes with (partial) capacities. Given that a great many portrayals of cultural truths have been reflecting Western domains of White experience, the (partial) articulations here about the non-Western, Asian women’s experience attempt to tell and understand what is going on in the world and what is happening in themselves at this particular historical and cultural juncture.

2

Mapping the Diaspora A Global-Historical Perspective

MANIFESTATIONS OF THE GLOBAL DIASPORA

Korean Diaspora The number of Koreans living abroad is estimated at about 7 million, approximately 10% of the population of the Korean peninsula’s 70 million, and women comprise significantly more than a half of this diasporic population (Korea Focus 2008; Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade 2009). Korea ranks fourth in the global diaspora in terms of sheer numbers, following China, Israel and Italy, but ranks fi rst in terms of the percentage of the homeland population. Asia has the largest share of overseas Koreans with about 4 million (57% of the total), followed by Americas with 2.34 million (33%) and Europe with 650,000 (9%). Specifically, there are about 2,337,000 Koreans in China (33% of the total), 2,102,000 in the US (30%), 913,000 in Japan (13%), 223,000 in Canada (3%), 222,000 in Russia (3%), 126,000 in Australia (2%), 53,000 in Germany (0.8%) and 45,000 in the UK (0.6%). The Korean diaspora is distinctive both for its relative size and the fact that it is almost entirely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Until the twentieth century, the fi rst stage of the Korean diaspora—affl iction-driven and confi ned mostly to Russia, China, Japan, and the US—had passed into history leaving very little record of its traumas (Kim 2002). The Korean diaspora has experienced centuries of mass migrations from the indentured laborers in the sugar plantations of Hawaii in 1903 to the affluent and highly educated professionals of today (Bergsten and Choi 2003). Each wave of Korean migration has been shaped by different historical factors, and the motivations and characteristics of Korean migrants in each period are substantially different (Yoon 2005). In the post-Korean War era of the 1950s, war orphans, wives of US military servicemen and children of mixed parentage moved to the US for adoption and family reunion. In 1962, the Korean government established an active emigration policy as a means of controlling the domestic population and alleviating unemployment, resulting in many

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Koreans leaving for industrialized Western countries. The second stage of the Korean diaspora since the mid-1960s has largely been a voluntary, opportunity-seeking migration to the US, Australia and Western Europe. The dynamics of the diaspora during that period were powerfully shaped by the economic imperatives. Koreans were among the most rapidly growing communities of immigrants to the US after its passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which lifted the previous restrictions on non-European immigration to the US. From the 1970s, migration patterns were closely associated with development processes as the organized labor export undertaken by Korean conglomerate companies facilitated monetary and trade gains (Lee 2005). Korea’s transformation from a labor exporting country to a labor importing one since the late 1980s has resulted in a paradox—the increasing influx of cheap laborers from Asia and the outflow of unemployed yet highly educated young Koreans to overseas. A new wave of migratory movement has emerged since the government’s liberalization of overseas trip regulations in 1989 (Korean National Tourism Organization 2006). Since the early 1990s, the nation-state has played a key role in the globalization of Korean society by shifting its economy towards global competitiveness and more interconnections with the world in the socio-economic and cultural spheres, while emphasizing core economic actors and leadership in the global economy system and a call for a “de-territorialized national community among Koreans” (Kim 2000). With the unprecedented ease of travel and economic development, the number of Koreans travelling abroad has shown a rapid increase from 730,000 in 1988 to 4.7 million in 1996 and 7 million today, with an annual increase of 26% (Korean National Tourism Organization 2006). Although the 1997 Asian economic crisis interrupted this growth trend, with the rapid recovery of the economy the number of overseas travellers soon recovered to 4.3 million in 1999. Now, more and more Koreans travel abroad, of which tourism (48%) is the main purpose, followed by business (23%), visiting friends and relatives (9%) and study (5%). What is distinctive about the historical patterns of migration is the difference in those today who are leaving Korea, and with what consequences, in terms of class structure, education level and social transformation. In the 1970s and the 1980s, most Koreans who left the country were of the lower middle-class and working-class seeking to improve their economic status, whereas since the 1990s there has been a strong tendency among highly educated upper- and middle-class Koreans to leave the country. Korean migration has changed in character by the educational exodus of middleclass younger generations yearning for a differentiation of lifestyle and the power of social and cultural capital through education abroad. Educational migration, the trans-border flow of students, has generated a new form of “global householding” (Lee and Koo 2006; Douglass 2006) in which sustaining a new transnational family structure is emerging as a flexible, yet

Mapping the Diaspora 23 complex and continuous process of social reproduction and transnational practices among Korean middle-class and upper-class families. This type of migration is now a widespread and almost normal middleclass phenomenon, including short-term frequent travel and study abroad sojourning not only by university students but also by pre-university students, which is driven in part by “valorized ideologies of English” (Park and Bae 2009), the practical and symbolic value of the English language as a marketable commodity and occupational mobility in the global labor market. Significantly, this trend has been intensified by the mainstream media, particularly the class-specific media discourse of “neoliberal personhood” (Park 2010) within Korea’s social transformation, neoliberal logic of human capital development, and neoliberal capitalism, pervaded by massive inequalities of resources, differential power and opportunities in life politics. Media cultural discourses informed by the identification of a vaguely cosmopolitan stance create a multimodal realization of the world, which may allow a particular kind of agency aligned with the world to signify power and competency, a differentiating marker of identity and social mobility in a global order. The urban spaces and cultures of contemporary Korea have increasingly been affected by globalization as a mediated cultural force, evidenced in the mobilizing patterns of everyday life, media cultural practices in an extended relation to global Others, lifestyle choices and new identity formations (Kim 2005). This effort to be mobile generates experiential tensions and conflicts in women’s lives that are often negotiated through everyday media culture and consumption practices. Globalization creates both new desires and widespread anxieties about becoming involved in global material cultures, transnational flows and electronic networks of activity among younger generations (Yoon 2006). These extended cultural resources and frameworks of non-local mediated knowledge in the urban middle-class consumer culture can alter the conditions for the construction of social identity and engage young people to have the capacity to move away from a singular location of the homeland. The movements of young Koreans for study and training abroad have grown rapidly to exceed 350,000, and women comprise more than a half of Koreans entering higher education overseas (Korean Ministry of Education 2006; IIE 2006; HESA 2006). In the international comparison, Korea has the third largest absolute number of university students studying abroad in institutions of higher education. The number tripled from about 54,000 in 1991 to 160,000 in 2003 and continued to 190,000 in 2006. The top five destination countries and the approximate number of Korean students in each country are the US (53,000), Japan (22,000), Australia (12,000), as well as Germany (5,200) and the UK (4,000) becoming popular destinations in recent years. From a perspective of the education sector, Korea’s dearth of top universities is seen to be a key push factor in its annual student diaspora (Chronicle of Higher Education 2009), coupled with a problem in

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the Korean state education policy that market competition among higher education institutions is “heavily restricted by the government” (Kim and Lee 2006), which shows a dilemma between the remarkable level of Korean education, its role in the nation’s rapid socio-economic transformation, and its fundamental structural weakness. Driven by the new wave of migration and the growing awareness of domestic limitations, the number of non-immigrant Korean sojourners for long- and short-term periods, including students, temporary workers and exchange visitors, has dramatically increased in the US. More than half a million (565,000) international students enroll in US institutions of higher education, and Asia continues to be the largest sending region, representing 58% of the international enrolment (IIE 2006). Korea ranks third (53,000 students), following India (80,000 students) and China (62,000 students). The number of international students for English language programs in the US is about 44,000, among which Korean students (10,000) and Japanese students (10,000) account for almost half of the international enrolment. Recently, Korean students have moved to the UK partly because of visa difficulties in the US and aggressive educational recruitment campaigns by the UK. Each year, about 4,000 Koreans come to study in UK institutions of higher education (HESA 2006). Quantification of migration, especially a temporary influx of study and travel, is a difficult enterprise as the vast majority of this population tends to be undocumented. The existing statistics can present a much higher figure when taking into account an undocumented, increasing number of Koreans moving to engage in English language programs and professional training courses. As for the enrolment in English language programs in the UK, the largest nationals of international students are known to be Japanese (11%), Chinese (9%) and Korean (7%) (Language and Travel Magazine 2003 July). For young women today, studying abroad remains a major vehicle for entry into Western countries, and rapid economic growth in Korea has shifted the patterns of international migration towards movement of the highly skilled and knowledge intensive into Western countries (Lucas 2005). As a member of the OECD now, Korea is classified as a high-income economy (GDP per capita $28,000 in 2009) and ranks sixth on the Research & Development index and tenth on the Human-Capital index measuring the percentage of people with university/college degrees; however, Korea ranks 61st out of 109 countries surveyed in Gender Empowerment Measure, indicating severe gender inequality in terms of women’s participation in socio-economic and political domains (JoongAng Daily Newspaper 2010). Remarkably, in “education fever” Korea 95.3% of women go to high school and 63% of the women go on to higher education, yet only 46.7% of university graduates are employed, mostly in traditional female tracks, non-managerial and secretarial positions unrelated to their educational qualifications (KWDI 2006).

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Despite its rapid economic growth and the sharp reduction in fertility, the Korean economy is limited in utilizing many of the highly educated workers entering the non-agricultural workforce in urban cities, and these surplus workers, women in particular who encounter the discrimination of employment systems, tend to move the strategic locus of self and the new yet precarious life politics of individualization in transnational flows (see Chapter 3). Currently, Korea is one of the countries having the world’s lowest birth rates, 1.15 in 2009, as a growing number of women delay marriage/family life in pursuit of a career and self-development in transnational flows of desire. The traditional family system with its basis on gendered patriarchal norms is being challenged by women moving and crossing national boundaries in a globalized mobile world. While educated Korean women are increasingly pursuing an alternative, career-oriented lifestyle and leaving the country, a new social demand is emerging for more traditional, foreign brides from developing countries of East and Southeast Asia in order to reproduce and maintain families and households. Facing new global politics of reproductive labor, Korea is entering the fi rst phase of multiethnic and multicultural society. Rapidly increasing international marriage since the mid-1990s has challenged Koreans’ self-identity, a once supposedly homogeneous nation known for strong ethnicity and nationalism; international marriages currently account for 14% of all marriages registered, and 33% in rural areas (Lee et al. 2006). Migratory flows of women are not new phenomena in the history of human mobility, but their increasing role and significance, female perspectives and experiences tend to remain largely underestimated and underexplored under the problematic assumption that humans on the move are male. The feminization of international migration today is not merely a matter of individual choice entailing individual causes and consequences. Rather, it is a much more complex intersecting reality that is emerging as a reaction of circumscribed gendered situations against women, restructuring the traditional family system and constituting a transnational family structure, as well as possibly producing new sites of existential tensions and contestation to be addressed in both research and policy making.

Japanese Diaspora The Japanese diaspora is estimated at about 2.5 million, approximately 2% of Japan’s population of 127 million, and the great majority of the Japanese living abroad are found on the American continents (Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2006). The largest of Japanese diasporic communities are in Brazil and the US, as well as in the Philippines and China. The most significant period in the history of Japanese migration is thought to be from the late nineteenth century up to the end of the Second World War, when indentured migrants left Japan to work in the plantation farms of the American continents (Izuhara and Hiroshi 2001).

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This early wave of migration was facilitated by Japan’s painful transition to a modern economy in its early stages of industrialization that produced large-scale, rural unemployment, civil disorders, population growth and low wage levels. Hawaii and the US mainland were the major destination until anti-oriental movements during the Wars forced the Japanese government to shift state-officiated immigration destinations to Latin America (Endoh 2009). Brazil officially accepted immigrants from Japan, a surplus of peasant farmers, and treated them with a certain respect due to Brazil’s booming coffee plantations and Japan’s newly acquired global status as an emerging industrial power (Tsuda 2001). After the Immigration Act of 1965 in the US, a large scale of Japanese movement to the US was resurged and maintained. The largest Japanese community in Europe is found in Britain, with over 100,000 Japanese mainly moved for business, trade and economic purposes, as well as for study and cultural production. In contrast to the organized labor movements of the Japanese to the American continents and consequently becoming more established, collective and salient communities, the existing Japanese residents in Britain have moved individually and occupied relatively invisible positions since the post-war period (Izuhara and Hiroshi 2001). The number of Japanese corporations and businesses abroad and the size of Japanese overseas assets have risen dramatically, simultaneously increasing the presence of the Japanese diaspora in the world. The Japanese response to globalization since the 1980s has generated contradictory and competing forces—the advent of transnationalism and the increasing flows of people, but at the same time, the resurgence of nationalism in both state-led and popular forms (Ryuhei 2001; Sugimoto 2006). With Japan’s full integration into the global economy, unprecedented ease of travel, and the emphasis on internationalization promoted by the government and private corporations, the number of Japanese individuals travelling, studying and working abroad has been on the dramatic rise. The increase was especially rapid in the latter half of the 1980s, from about 5 million in 1985 to 11 million in 1990, due to Japanese economic growth and the increased power of the Japanese yen during that period (Yamashita 2008). Today, the total number of Japanese travelling overseas exceeds 15 million, which includes tourists (80% of the total), a large group of business people, professionals and students temporarily spending time abroad from several months to years (Japan Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2006). Contemporary Japanese migrants are predominantly attracted to English-speaking countries in the Western world (79% of the total). Since Japan’s economic growth of the 1980s, the nation has witnessed a transformation of international population movements with a massive increase in the scale, complexity and diversity of migration, in which migration of Japanese students significantly contributes to this transformation (Ono and Piper 2001). The number of Japanese students overseas increased from 12,000 in 1977 to 64,000 in 1997, and recently, over 100,000 (Ichimoto

Mapping the Diaspora 27 2000). The top destinations for study abroad include the US (42% of the total), the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Canada and New Zealand (Yamashita 2008). In US institutions of higher education, Japan is the fourth-largest sending country (42,000 students), following India (80,000 students), China (62,000 students), and Korea (53,000 students), and as for English language programs, Japan is the largest-sending country (IIE 2006). The UK has the second largest group of Japanese students studying abroad; each year, about 6,000 Japanese come to study in UK institutions of higher education (HESA 2006). Overseas travel has become so common among middle-class young people that the US is taken as part of ordinary life or “too ordinary” and certain popular locations such as Hawaii are dismissed as vulgar and passé (Kelsky 2001), whereas the new movement to Europe such as the UK tends to be perceived as “distinguished” experience (Fujita 2008). Knowledge is itself an object of consumption in new Japanese consumer culture, as is apparent from the way the Japanese regard “education as a commodity to be consumed” (Delanty 2003). Historically, Japan distinguished itself from other countries by having experienced travel for the purpose of play in a popular way that was not so frequent and phenomenal in other parts of Europe and Asia (Anguis and Moon 2008). Today, travel is seen not merely as a play or pleasure but also as a necessary cultural resource in the contemporary transition to adulthood, in the process of working towards a reflexive project of self. One of the most remarkable characteristics of contemporary Japanese migration is the active involvement of young women—single women in their twenties and thirties with a pink-collar occupation, or the so-called OLs (Office Ladies) who quit a job after working for several years and go abroad to study and experience a different lifestyle (Yamashita 2008). Evidently, the travel and study abroad booms in Japan are predominantly female phenomena (Burton 2004). These Japanese women on the move are seen to be the most enthusiastic and committed travellers of any demographic group in the world. Since the early 1990s, Japanese women travelling abroad have outnumbered men two to one, and today 80% of study abroad students are female (Kelsky 2001; Yamashita 2008). New images of Japanese women are found in the visible manifestation of the growth of migration, entering the wider space of globalization precisely through the means of study abroad (Ichimoto 2000). Although women in Japan have a multitude of differences based on class and educational background, the new generation of women tend to share an enthusiasm for travelling and living abroad, as well as pursuing higher education and delaying marriage in order to achieve self-fulfi lment through a career choice. Japan’s birth rate continues to decline (1.27 in 2008), and the population is aging more rapidly than in any other OECD country (Japan Times 2008). The population of productive age is shrinking in this rapidly aging society, while paradoxically its economy needs to deal with

28 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women the structural problems as workforces and supply capacities are in excessive supply in many industries (Itoh 2010). The strong ideology of homogeneity, which once guided its modern nationhood, now poses a major dilemma for Japan in the face of recent demographic and economic changes (Goodman et al. 2003). Amidst an increasing number of women delaying marriage and moving away from Japan, the nation is doomed to face a decreasing number of children and the labor shortage, and thus compelled to accept more foreign workers and migrants from Asia (Japan Times 2008). This salient phenomenon of female migration is closely linked to some aspects of cultural resistance to Japan, persisting gender inequalities embedded in everyday life; oppressive corporate and family structures, limited employment opportunities and career prospects within Japan’s male dominated corporate culture, as well as rigid social conventions and traditional lifestyles constraining women’s lives (see Chapter 3). Migration can be understood as a systematically gendered process intertwined with gendered socio-economic and cultural constraints, and with women’s marginalized experience of the gendered society, both lived and mediated. Rather than having a desire to live in a particular Western country, these women may just feel at times an “urge to leave Japan” (Fujita 2008) to escape the circumscribed conditions of their lives and to seek a broader sphere of cultural experience and emancipation. Investment in higher education overseas is seen as a legitimate channel and a strategy to move beyond boundaries or to resist a traditional gender role-oriented, collective biography. In the past, most Japanese women travelling abroad tended to accompany their husbands on overseas work assignments, but in recent years more and more women choose to go abroad independently for their own study, work, or experimental tourism. Typically, these emerging “internationalists” are highly educated, career-motivated, middle-class women, who are in part influenced by the significance of cultural globalization, particularly Western influence in Japanese everyday life and Western liberal values through global media discourses. With new forms of global consciousness and cultural distinction through discriminating class tastes and the increasing dominance of the English language, these women are expressing feelings of inadequacy in Japan, while demanding a new order and searching for a place of belonging elsewhere in the world (Kawakami 2009). In a cultural realm, this decisive shift towards the outward-looking disposition towards the world is intimately linked to the capitalist and marketdriven, globalized cultural expressions of media images and narratives—a major embodiment of the transformation of national culture. The globalization of media imaginary and its signification and “playfulness” (Delanty 2003) appears to suggest that the self is now capable of reinventing itself through the unrestrained consumption of the self in urban middle-class consumer culture, as a kind of aesthetic and cultural cosmopolitan in this mediated, blurred or borderless landscape. It gives rise to individuality and diversity of the self, the heightened awareness of the self in relation to global

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Others in the Japanese imagination, which is operating at multiple levels of the material and cultural, reflexive, and new lived experience beyond national borders (see Chapter 3). Experiential tensions and confl icts around gendered constraints are often negotiated through the contested terrain of media cultural practices and politics of consumption. Japanese women today stand at the forefront of transnational forms of life, while embracing the imaginary creation of the world, moving across national borders and exploring cultural difference in a new transnational social field. These new social and cultural aspects of migration are creating a unique mode of female diasporic culture and identity in a globalizing university contact zone (Kenway and Bullen 2003). Globalization of educational institutions in the West includes recruiting more and more students from around the world, resulting in diversified student demographics and the rise of student diaspora (Asmar 2005). The current trend towards temporary migration of highly qualified students constitutes a complex phenomenon of “knowledge diaspora,” a new contemporary formation which does not fit into the traditional conditions, experiences and communities of permanent migrants, or the traditional categories of diaspora which are characterized as “relatively poor, uneducated, oriented to physical labour and permanently diasporic peoples” (Cohen 1997). This new form of migration and displacement tends to form a prolonged temporary status or diasporic sojourner mentality, thus calling for an understanding of differentiated forms and experiences of migration today with unpredictable consequences on women’s lives.

Chinese Diaspora Estimates of the number of Chinese living overseas run as high as 35 million, the world’s biggest diaspora, and this figure amounts to about 2.5% of China’s population of 1.3 billion (UN 2005; Lucas 2005). Although China’s international migration may be small relative to the total population, almost all of this migration stems from a few coastal areas. Recent migration from China suggests that over one-quarter of those departures originate in Shanghai, Beijing, Fujian and Guangdong. There are about 7 million Chinese in each of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, as well as 3.3 million in the US, 1.3 million in Peru, 1 million in Russia, 700,000 in Australia and 400,000 in the UK. The early history of mass migration occurred from the nineteenth century to 1949, particularly during the growth period of the frontier economy in the US when Chinese immigrated mainly to the western US as miners, railroad workers and agricultural laborers under the indenture system (Poston and Luo 2006). The early waves of migration were largely driven by China’s poverty, wars and confl icts, and overwhelmingly most migrants were proletarian, semi-literate or illiterate, rural peasants, manual laborers and craftsmen, or distinctively caused by employment in the catering

30

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

industry. During the period between 1949 and 1978, Chinese international migration policy allowed immigration only into socialist countries, which occurred on a very small scale. During the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976), migrating overseas was not only forbidden by policy but also morally denounced as a betrayal of the socialist motherland. However, China’s open-door policy in 1978, after decades of relative isolation, heralded in a period of unprecedented economic growth, modernization and opening up to the outside world and direct foreign investment, while boosting new flows of international migration from China (Pieke 1998). Economic and political reforms from 1978 brought a completely new mobility regime, a constellation of policies, cultural norms and networks, leading to a substantially increased level and diversification of migration within larger social transformations (Lam et al. 2009). A new migrant culture was discursively constructed and managed by the state as a new national project to earn foreign currencies for the nation, wherein the process of “leaving China” was not only encouraged but also celebrated as a “patriotic and modern act” within a state-promoted process of modernization (Nyiri 2001). Particularly, after 1985 when most restrictions on foreign travel from China were lifted, and after the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989 and the suppression of the protests, Chinese migration reached an unprecedented scale with a new wave of departures by highly educated, middle-class students, professionals and entrepreneurs. The “leaving China” fever reached a peak in this period. Many Chinese left for the US, Canada and Australia, and the most significant migration flows from China to the UK commenced during the 1980s. A defi ning historical feature of the 1980s was seen as a time of limited triumph of fi nancial capital over political capital, as state-based redistributive inequalities gave way to social stratification based on individuals’ performance in the growing market-oriented economy (Biao and Shen 2009). International migration in this context was construed as an individual choice for a better life that should be facilitated by the state. In 1997, the government officially admitted that there is no longer an escape from the globalization of economy, science and technology; there is no choice but to reform, restructure and open up state-owned enterprises if China is not to forfeit its global citizenship (Kim 2000). New Chinese migrants were among the better-off people who benefited from the new discourse of globalization, the development of the globalized market economy, and some degree of autonomy from state intervention (Shen 2005). Chinese international migration flows in the 1980s and 1990s were not only immeasurably larger, but also qualitatively different from the trickle of migration in the earlier period (Pieke et al. 2004). Since the 1990s, China has moved to a period of wealth concentration that benefited a few, while the gap between the haves and have-nots have become unprecedentedly wide, with all forms of socio-economic, cultural and political resources converging among an emerging elite group (Biao and Shen 2009). The

Mapping the Diaspora 31 structure of Chinese society is viewed as an inverted “T” that consists of a massive low-income population, and a few wealthy people who possess disproportionately large amounts of resources. The substantial wealth and the ongoing Chinese economic boom with its increasing interconnections with the global have further accelerated travel abroad (CEAIE 2006). Even as the Chinese economy has improved so dramatically today and the country is seen as the world’s leading economic power, more Chinese want to get out of their country than the citizens of almost any other (OECD 2010). Remarkably, 31 million Chinese travelled abroad in 2005, compared to 10 million in 2000. The number of young people in their twenties and thirties seeking to move out of the country is continually rising, not falling, sustaining the new idea of migration as a normal and popular social trend in contemporary China. Among the new, most visible and unprecedentedly mobile Chinese are students. The growth of educational migration has been driven by the encouragement of government policy, free markets and the accumulation of personal wealth, rising disposable incomes in urban one-child households (Zhang 2003). Today, 93% of Chinese students studying abroad are self-fi nanced, with the remaining 7% fi nanced by employers (China Ministry of Education 2006). Students of the early 1980s were mainly sponsored by the government and mostly took postgraduate work or short-term training courses overseas, whereas the majority of educational migrants since the 1990s are self-fi nanced or supported by overseas scholarships. In general, Chinese families spend 10% of their savings on education, and a growing number of middle-class families borrow money to fi nance the international education for their only child—regardless of gender. This emergent subject of the student migration phenomenon is a privileged group of affluent, primarily single, young people who are supported by their middle- and upper-class parents, “new entrepreneurial elites” (Pieke et al. 2004). Central to the production of an urban middle class in China are shifting modes and techniques of governing through the family that are anchored in a “market ideology of education” (Crabb 2010). The idea and practice of school choice among urban middle-class families is part of a naturalized consumerist dynamic in contemporary China, wherein the transformation of education into a market-supplied commodity is legitimated and animated within a neoliberal discourse of competition, meritocracy and self-determination. The prestige of foreign degrees and advancement in English as a linguistic capital are the key factors for securing a well-paid job in the era of Chinese globalization and knowledge-driven economy (Shen 2005), which is in turn converted into cultural and political capital legitimating and consolidating the Chinese new rich’s emerging status (Biao and Shen 2009). International education is intrinsically linked to social stratification and mobility since it enables individuals to accumulate various types of capital and further lifts them to a higher scale of

32

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capital conversion. As a consequence, study abroad has become a prominent aspect of social change in China over the last thirty years that needs to be recognized importantly. Study abroad represents a major channel of migration, as more and more Chinese swell the ranks of skilled professional migrants and knowledge diasporas (Welch and Zhen 2005). Chinese students are the largest international student population in the world (Liu-Farrer 2010). Each year, over 100,000 Chinese students go abroad to study, and by the end of 2006, over one million Chinese students and scholars had left the country (China Ministry of Education 2006; Sina.com 2007). While the absolute number of returnees is increasing, the percentage of staying abroad and thus the number of Chinese in the diaspora is increasing even more. From 1978 to 2003, almost 700,000 Chinese went abroad to study, of which only 170,000 Chinese have returned, which indicates the emergence of educationally channelled labor migration. The international migration of students is often assumed to be temporary and visa restrictions are applied accordingly, but in reality many students do not return to their home countries on completion of their degrees; the highest rates are found among Chinese students (Alberts and Hazen 2005). The main destination for Chinese students is the US, and the proportion of returnees from the US is only about one fi fth (OECD 2010). In US institutions of higher education, the number of Chinese students (62,000) constitutes the second-largest group of international students, following India (80,000) (IIE 2006). Chinese students comprise over 10% of all foreign university students in the US (Poston and Luo 2006). It is worth noting that three countries of East Asia—China, Korea and Japan—account for about 30% of total international student enrolment in the US (IIE 2009). Chinese are increasingly adopting a mobile transnational lifestyle, moving from one country to another as new opportunities present themselves (BBC News 2005). In recent years, the number of Chinese students has drastically increased in UK institutions of higher education, from 35,000 in 2003 to 53,000 in 2005, emerging as the largest group of overseas students in the UK (HESA 2006). Initially, Europe only received a trickle of Chinese students mainly because of limited funding made available to students; gradually, however, Europe, particularly the UK, Germany and France, has become a new popular destination among Chinese students (Pieke et al. 2004) since the September 11 attacks tightening US visa requirements and growing concerns over security in the US. Big urban cities including Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing have been furnishing a growing number of migrants to Europe. Highly mobile Chinese students are also visible in Australia (40,000 Chinese students), New Zealand (23,000) and Canada (17,000) where there is an increasing tendency to promote concentrations of this kind of educational migration (IIE 2008). Women’s migration is certainly on the rise. Since the mid-1980s women have outnumbered male migrants to Western countries, and this shift is due

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33

to the increased movements of women from Asia, especially from China (Ryan 2002). With the advent of the market economy in China, a new social figure called the “rice bowl of youth” has gained wide currency since the early 1990s, symbolizing a new labor force and a model of social mobility, alongside the rise of a consumer culture endorsed by the official ideology of “democracy of consumption,” a consumer revolution in which all could participate, to prevent social unrest since the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989 (Zhen 2000). “Feminine youth” is simultaneously seen to be the most potential bearers of Chinese modernization, globalization and social transformation with Chinese characteristics. Educated young women in urban cities tend to delay marriage and childbearing in order to capitalize on a newfound post-socialist freedom and to fulfil an individualizing self, a seemingly empowering subjectivity and liberation that was previously unimaginable but is currently expressed through the proliferation of neoliberal, capitalist, cultural consumption in the increasingly commodified consumerist society of China. Tradition has, to some extent, been replaced by the rising culture of consumerism. Modernity is embodied and performed by young female bodies in transit, as classinflected consumers and subjects of desire, and their bodily practices try to capture a desire to transcend embedded locality or represent a potential to transcend Chineseness, a nation-state imagination (Rofel 2007). In the post-Mao reform era of China, the desire to be modern, individual and mobile has crucially been mediated by the realm of global media culture and everyday cultural practices. Contemporary Chinese experiences become increasingly mediated, diversified and lifted out of locality, whether progressive or regressive, by a global consumerist regime of “media populism” (Latham 2000). The constant presence of global media images and narratives, proliferating consumerism and individualism, alternative lifestyles trigged by new forms of media populism, such as global advertising, consumer magazines, television and the Internet, create a new space for the Chinese social imaginaries of modernity. This mediated space is intimately intersected with individuals’ search for and construction of new class and gender identities, mobile and transnational aspects of subjectivity, fragmenting the state’s mass public into the stratification and differentiation of class, gender, educational and occupational status, while simultaneously generating tensions and contestation between competing discourses of the global and the national. The modern mass media increasingly enable national subjects in urban China to inhabit trans-spatial and trans-temporal imaginaries that dissolve the fi xity and boundedness of historical nationhood, the national sphere of experience, and state territorial imperatives (Yang 2001). Engagement with global media culture expands individuals’ capacity for reflexivity and awareness of the wider world outside, as evident in the emergence of an urban transnational space and Chinese women’s reflexive identification with global cultural Others in everyday life (see Chapter 3).

34

Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

Chinese women have become active participants in international education and lifelong learning capacity, playing an important role in the emerging global economic and social environment (Hyam 2002). They are seen to network and forge connections all over the world that not only complement their male counterparts but also stand as the vanguards of new global alliances—the most significant change that distinguishes contemporary overseas Chinese women from their predecessors (Ryan 2002). The new generation of women, contemporary mobile transnationals, constitute a significant proportion and a role in the phenomenon of transnational mobility today, yet there are little insights with regard to the implications and experiences of women on the move.

EMERGENCE OF DIASPORIC DAUGHTERS

Feminization of International Migration International migration was once largely considered as an economically motivated male phenomenon, confi ned to male laborers looking for work as a means of meeting their own socio-economic needs. However, new generations of women in globalizing Asia are now migrating more than ever, not merely to accompany families or husbands as dependent daughters or wives, but to move independently on their own and of their own will as social actors. They are travelling increasingly for long-term study abroad to develop a career trajectory, for work in foreign-affi liated companies, for short-term language training, as well as for experimental visits and tourism. Today, it is generally acknowledged that migration worldwide is increasingly feminized; nearly half (49%) the world’s migrants are women (OECD 2001; Morokvasic et al. 2003; Klein-Solomon 2006; Badkar et al. 2007). East Asia, including Korea, Japan and China, is known to be prominent in this global flow and change, becoming important sources, and also destinations, of migrants today. Such fi ndings have importantly drawn attention to the growing presence of women in international population movements, the categorization of female migration, and the changing image of women from sedentary to mobile beings within the broader impact of globalization, while challenging the existing paradigms of “who are migrants,” the commonly held assumption that men migrate and women stay behind to look after home. Yet, there is not much detailed and substantial empirical research on the new generations of women in East Asia and the role of gender in this particular form of transnational migration driven by educated, skilled, middle- and upper-class young women, except for a few notable works concerning Japanese women (e.g., Kelsky 2001). A knowledge and understanding of women’s transnational engagements, both lived and mediated

Mapping the Diaspora 35 experiences in everyday life, as well as a detailed analysis of their particular features and complexities of identity, still remain underexplored. The choice of research agendas and its emphasis in the mainstream or malestream research has played a part in the relative invisibility of women and gender relations, by focusing more on male-dominated migration streams, skilled male migrants and managerial elites, and the movements of male professionals within transnational corporate spheres of influence affected by economic globalization centered on world cities. This resolutely maledominated world of work in itself—both domestic and global—further renders women’s migration and significance invisible. While gender can be viewed as a crucial category for the study of transnational movements and processes, there is a lack of exploration of gendered dimensions of migration from East Asia as intersected with gendered underpinnings of everyday media consumption, as well as women’s intimate experiences and trajectories of migration, their precarious positions and possibly different effects of global migratory movements, all of which are often obscured by the pervasive assumption in the global economy where men are the dominant representative of global flows and forces. Within this male-centered perspective, despite the growing significance of the feminization of international migration and its considerable magnitude, the specificity of the movement of women from an experiential point of view, the emphasis placed on women’s agency and how their experiences are embedded in, and negotiating with, layers of socio-economic structures in new transnational social fields, tend to remain in silence or are underestimated, not as equal and independent agents but as dependents dominated by male and family as a migration unit. This tendency further obscures a complex set of gendered motivations, problems and consequences emerging from contemporary migration processes and transnational experiences. Until the 1990s, the feminization of migration from Asia was generally associated with low-skilled or unskilled migrants, particularly lowpaid labor migration of domestic workers, nurses, factory workers and so on from less developed countries such as Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where female workers comprise about 62–75% of authorized, legally deployed migration to more developed countries (Asis 2005). Since the 1990s, however, temporary migration of skilled, educated, career-oriented, middle-class and upper-class women from more developed parts of Asia to Western countries, particularly the US, western Europe and Australia, have become widespread, dense and frequent to the extent of being visible and ubiquitous at various levels (Hugo 2007). Although migration as a research area has been growing considerably in recent years, much of the literature has tended to focus on low-skilled migrants moving from less-developed countries to Western industrialized ones (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). Far less attention has been paid to the relatively more skilled and educated, new generations of women who move abroad for academic, professional or personal reasons for medium- or long-term

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women

periods. International migration has a long history in Asia, but in recent years it has acquired an unprecedented scale and diversity of mobile populations. Present-day gendered migration from Asia encompasses a much greater diversification of form and content, as an expanding number of educated young women are taking part in these cross-border movements as active agents, simultaneously generating a significant influence on the socio-economic, cultural and demographic transformations of home nations in Asia. Particularly, the ever-increasing transnational mobility of students, including the growing presence of young women and their increasing significance, is more ubiquitous than any other form of human flows in the contemporary globalizing world. The development of this very specific group of educated, skilled, transnational movers, coming to be known as “global knowledge diasporas” (Welch and Zhen 2007) and particularly visible in developed OECD countries, is a new and arguably important phenomenon that has been sustained by continual increases in global migration flows, changes towards more knowledge-based economies and global labor markets, and the internationalization of higher education and its increased commodification and marketization (Waters 2008). Significantly, the development of global knowledge diasporas has also been enabled and perhaps accelerated by the rise and ubiquity, frequency and density of global media, information and communication technologies today. It should be recognized that international education becomes a potentially important channel of labor migration and multiple cross-border activities among highly educated and skilled movers. Established through an institutional channel, typically a university as an initial contact zone, this educationally channeled labor migration from less-developed to more-developed nations forms a new kind of contemporary diaspora, an often neglected category of transnational migrants. The notion of diaspora is no longer a concept strictly associated with the particularities and experiences of the historical dispersion of Jews, Africans, Palestinians and Armenians (Cohen 1997). Its traditional understanding was often linked to the fractured trajectories of the people who were forced or exported to move across the globe, with a deep sense of displacement or trauma, as de-territorialized ethnic groups living beyond the borders of home nations. In recent work on international migration, however, the concept of diaspora refers to much wider and diverse categories. Since the late 1980s, it has been expanded to encompass and describe the diverse movements of people, whether forced or voluntary, and various ethnic groups in massive migration across national borders along with the formation of transnational communities, where the migrants live in marginal situations within a dominant culture of a host society, dealing with cultural difference while at the same time sustaining connections to the countries of origin—thereby possibly forming a sense of belonging “here” and “there” in varying degrees contingent upon specific transnational contexts. The

Mapping the Diaspora

37

traditional defi nition and understanding of diaspora can be broadened to recognize many different migratory situations, new and emerging migration flows, forms and the contexts in which these new diasporas originated in and are being formed, potentially with further movements, complexities and the unpredictable consequences of contemporary mobility. The concept of diaspora now reflects the changing nature of processes and experiences of displacement and mobility. Its contemporary forms require a different understanding of diaspora focusing on “migration, culture and identity” (Safran 1991), diasporic identity as a “production” (Hall 1994), and its cultural representation and alternative space which may be less dominant and less visible in the mainstream popular imagination. An equally important consideration is given to different categories of migration emerging from their own specific conditions and distinct motivations, new transnational networks and opportunity structures, allowing some degree of freedom, fluidity and creativity but also uncertainty and risk of migrants as social actors not merely as victims on the move. Also evident in the contemporary phenomenon are shifting movements within the global migration circulation (Kuah-Pearce 2006), from relatively stabilized and predictable longer-term migration to more fluid, less fi xed, often provisional and unpredictable shorter-term mobility, although the two patterns can be intertwined and converged at times. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The contemporary forms of migration and diaspora generate new and distinct characteristics, including the unprecedented diversity and the increasing mobility of global knowledge diasporas, the growing presence of women and their relatively invisible yet significant role in the human flows of the globalizing world. Such global mobility of women in this study has become a normal and almost taken-for-granted part of the life course in the transition to adulthood, and particularly this phenomenon can be understood as an emerging yet precarious process of female individualization (see Chapter 3). This trend is fi rmly grounded among upwardly mobile middle-class and upper-class young women living in urban transnational consumer cultures, although social discourses on women and the nation in Korea, Japan and China tend to construct women’s status as subordinate citizens in relation to men, and women are often devalued for their gendered, marginal status but at the same time paradoxically valued as motherly, reproductive symbols or bearers of the nation. Thus, women’s transnational migration can be seen to some extent as a gender-liberating act of resistance to the nation seeking alternatives, more inclusive life politics elsewhere, by moving on to a more free, creative, yet unknown, highly contingent and much more risky trajectory afar. Women’s particular transnational existence can ambivalently rework, both subvert and appropriate, their gendered and nationalized subjectivity (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). Yet simultaneously, middle-class and upper-class women’s relatively privileged economic status may, in fact, encourage them to be more mobile and transnational in

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cultural outlook and consumption, albeit with unpredictable consequences and new features in diaspora.

Provisional Diaspora: “Willing to go anywhere for a while” In the transformational nature of international migration today, one of the most striking features is a strong symptom of provisional circularity, prolonged temporary circular movements (“willing to go anywhere for a while”), as evident among women in this study. It is important to recognize the formation of provisional diaspora in the emergence of a circulatory migration chain that is highly uncertain, multiple or repeated in the multiple loci of cultural identifications and the processes of diaspora formation. To a large degree, this form of diaspora towards a global nomadic orientation remains provisional and distinct from other more constrained or linear types of mobility and other more stabilized forms of diaspora. This suggests that the mode of migration embraced by younger generations, or women in this study, is a new modern type in which the level of mobility is extremely high, possibly continuous and open-ended. The new pattern of circulatory migration flow, and this relatively recent and largely unexplored nomadic symptom, may involve multiple cross-border activities and multiple transnational forms established between home and host countries, challenging a traditional understanding and framework of migration and diaspora that often assumes linearity and permanent settlement or return. The recognition that contemporary migrants do not necessarily follow linear migration pathways of departure, settlement, assimilation or return, may demand a reconfiguration and rethinking of migration, culture and identity, as well as home, nation and diasporic imagination, in the much more complex light of globalizing processes. Since the 1990s, there have been direct, sometimes twice or thrice migrants relatively more visible in global cities within the global migration circulation. It has been observed that, rather than staying in one particular locale as their traditional forebears did, contemporary migrants sojourn at any given time and place, willing to go anywhere, everywhere provisionally, which may entail to some extent an “unending sojourn and settlement across national borders” (Yang 2000). Contemporary migrants no longer settle permanently at one place but gradually move to multiple places for various reasons and for various periods of time. They may become “locked into the global migration circuit” until they decide to settle down in one locale of destination or return to their original locale of home (Kuah-Pearce 2006). For the highly mobile transnational migrants, the migration circuit does not stop in a single destination, but rather, the site of destination can serve as a transient stop provisionally, or a hop-over point to another, until the next move to somewhere that is also contingent and unguaranteed. In this highly contingent mode, contemporary migration is no longer seen as a one-off temporary or permanent movement (Badkar et al. 2007).

Mapping the Diaspora 39 The salience of provisionality and the nomadic symptom (“willing to go anywhere for a while”) has increasingly been recognized by the rise of international student migration, in particular, the most sophisticated and highly educated professionals in the migration chain, as they attempt to enter the circulatory flow and move onto other diasporic communities in the wider social world. A consequence of the dramatic rise in international student mobility today is a growing trend for international students to remain in the countries in which they study after graduation (Gribble 2008). When international students do not return home but seek to work in the countries where they received their education and further training, their decisions raise important questions about whether this new trend of migrants marks and develops a distinct form of diaspora. Present-day transnational migration can involve not only single but also multiple cross-border activities, which is prompted by the specific situations of education and employment, and facilitated by the internationalization of higher education, and therefore the provisional diaspora is constituted through educationally channeled labor migration established through a university as an initial contact zone. The students-turned-migrants are a rapidly growing migrant group particularly in OECD countries, in part due to uncertainty over employment in their homelands. Many female migrants may initially intend their sojourning of study abroad to be temporary, whether short or extended sojourns until the completion of study in a host country. However, labor market conditions, possibilities and lifestyle outcomes can be relatively more uncertain and vulnerable among these female migrants, perhaps more than among their male counterparts, which may prompt them to enact an ability to perform a more spatial job search, and thus, extended spatial mobility as an unintended consequence. This resulting flow, or the high propensity of mobile students to repeat migration, is usually enacted by a high degree of uncertainty over post-study employment situations, contingent upon both actual and perceived opportunities in the domestic and the global labor markets. This educationally channeled labor migration is directed towards the major global cities of the developed world, such traditional host countries as the US, the UK and Canada, but also towards newly emerging destinations including Australia, New Zealand, Germany and France. Even if a large number of international students may return to their countries of origin upon the completion of study in a host country, this return migration or the meaning of “going home” today does not necessarily imply the closure and completion of their role in the international migration of the highly skilled and educated. Rather, their cumulative social and cultural capital, the social networking and transnational relationships developed through the experience of study abroad, alongside persisting limitations at home particularly in the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of employment and family, can further induce repeated and continuous, circular migration flows at any given time and place. The

40 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women notion of return migration has increasingly become complex, going beyond the previously taken-for-granted assumptions of “going home” as somehow unproblematic, straightforward adaption and assimilation due to the assumed familiarity and belonging without recognizing new strangeness. The assumed idea of home-as familiarity, what “going home” actually feels like, can be questioned furthermore not essentially as a diasporic option but rather as a new predicament. For women, the experience of education overseas in a long period of sojourning can generate to a large extent new standards for life and expectations for upward mobility that did not exist before in their homelands, while reshaping and transforming individual motivations and notions of identity as looking-forwardness that make re-integration into the old lifestyles of their home communities more difficult and sometimes conflicting challenges. These challenges may remain unresolved in women’s lives and further trigger re-migration whenever possible as a student, a worker or a tourist. The constraining circumstances surrounding educational and occupational arrangements point to a planned, strategic use of migration for personal and professional development. Career-based mobility, one’s decision for moving or staying for a career, is thus seen to be integral to the shaping of contemporary circular migration and provisional diaspora. Crucially, international education has become the phase-one conduit of a global labor migratory trajectory of the new generations of women in this study, the new emblems of nomadic and transient transnational mobility. Indeed, this nomadic provisionality, a defining characteristic of present migration patterns, has been initiated by particular circumstances of the sending countries with extremely high value of education yet an extremely high level of uncertainty in the labor market, and this uncertainty has increased the likelihood of migration; in a sense, the new generations of women in this study are perhaps moved by a “myth of education,” a human capitalfocused view that may not necessarily work for particular social categories. This global mobility often stems from an individualist faith or myth that the “human capital of education” can take one where one wants to go, and make it work anywhere, regardless of social structure or social reproduction (Smith and Favell 2006). The promise of higher education, or the assumed enlargement of choice, can be particularly illusory for highly educated women in Asia, where gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions persist and continue to structure labor market outcomes and lifestyles (see Chapter 3). Ironically, it may turn out that these women who have opted to migrate even provisionally, albeit coming from individually privileged socio-economic positions with routine access to international travel and educational experience under present conditions of globalization, are often career-frustrated women, whose experience is increasingly characterized by “negotiating risk” (Kell and Vogl 2008), or who tend to “gamble with dramatic spatial mobility” (Smith and Favell 2006) in their education and career abroad to improve social mobility opportunities otherwise blocked at the

Mapping the Diaspora 41 conditioning of their home countries. If educated women in Korea, Japan and China had a far better chance of success in their career choice and selfdevelopment at home, they would be without needing to propel themselves individually, or to force themselves to move out to a precarious international stage or within a provisional circuit of multiple migrations. It may be the case that women come to accept living and working anywhere as long as a satisfactory level of work opportunities are available and considered to be empowering them, or even accept positions below their qualification level in early employment outcomes as migrants. They may detach themselves temporarily from the persisting limitations of home, entering a floating world of mobility as mediated by new context and contingency, differential perceptions of opportunities available, or not available, in host and home countries. This mode of mobility and provisional diaspora is intimately linked to the ways in which female migrants view their self, home and the world, and the impact of this mobility on identity formation and transformation in local, national and transnational contexts. To a certain extent, they may constantly sojourn and settle within the global migration circuit in search of maximal opportunities or “greener pastures” (Kuah-Pearce 2006) not only for economic and employment reasons but also for socio-psychological and political landscapes in which more emancipatory lifestyles or individualization are now of paramount significance. Staying or moving, for women, is critically contingent upon the development of self, the process of self-expression and self-formation, the degree of its acceptance or rejection in the particular contexts of movement. In a sense, most of the recent, educated, middle-class and upper-class female travellers from Korea, Japan and China can be seen as “lifestyle migrants.” It is interesting to observe that in recent international tourism the distinction between tourism and migration has become blurred, as repeated tourist visits or long-staying tourism can lead to migration settlement, while searching for a new self or an alternative lifestyle yet simultaneously sustaining, not abandoning, the home country from which they have migrated (Yamashita 2008). Lifestyle—whether work-oriented lifestyle or balanced lifestyle, autonomy and personal freedom—plays an important pulling role in female migration and the very real consequences on the self and identity, which, however, remains relatively underexplored compared to economically motivated, often male-centered, migration flows, despite its growing magnitude in scale and diversity, as well as its potentially blurring meaning of the temporary and the permanent in a new understanding of migration today.

Temporary Sojourning as a Prelude to Settlement This new type of international migration, educationally channeled labor and lifestyle migration, is now an established structural feature of migratory

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movement from Korea, Japan and China. When students ultimately become migrants, this shift from study to migranthood raises new questions about the complex nature of modern migration itself (Gungwu 2007). With heightened mobility and its highly unpredictable contingency and provisionality, temporary sojourning and permanent settlement today cannot be understood as mutually exclusive or isolated from each other; but rather, the both are simultaneously integral components of international migration and cannot be distinguishable from each other. The line between the two categories, temporary migration and permanent migration, is becoming blurred since these categories are not very rigid but frequently overlap in transmigrants’ practices, although the distinctions between the two categories tend to be important from a policy point of view with regard to policy formulation and evaluation. For transmigrants, such as students and knowledge diasporas, the boundaries of sojourning (connoting temporary, intermittent, short-term stay) and settlement (permanent, long-term stay) become blurred and converged at any point of migration over a long period of time. Thus, it should be importantly recognized that sojourning, as a global phenomenon of an experimental migration, is a “prelude to settlement” (Yang 2000). In a globalized and interdependent world, international education is increasingly used as an important conduit for labor and lifestyle migration and eventual settlement (Kell and Vogl 2008), or a potential “springboard towards permanent legal immigration” (Hazen and Alberts 2006), either in the course of study or through subsequent recruitment in the labor market. In this context, the relationship between international education and migration is a transforming journey from sojourning student to provisional or permanent migrant. Linkage between higher education and migration is seen to be a growing trend with concentrations of international students, and especially the nexus with migration is evident by a growth in graduate school participation and postgraduate mobility as an intermediate period between temporary and permanent migration. The increasing numbers of students from relatively less developed countries migrate to more developed OECD countries in order to study, but subsequently remain after graduation, while some OECD countries have immigration regulations favoring recruitment of these students as they are seen as ideal migrants having qualifications recognized at the destination (Hugo 2007). This phenomenon of “two-step student migration” is proliferating worldwide, particularly in the majority of OECD countries, expanding temporary entry options and targeting international students, and facilitating the transition of students and workers from temporary to extended or permanent resident status (Hawthorne 2010). Thus, it is now increasingly acknowledged that student flows represent a new form of migration of qualified labor and also a precursor of subsequent migrations. Global student mobility is an integral part of skilled labor migration for OECD countries (OECD 2002), although there is no systematic, precise data as yet on stay rates after completion of study (OECD 2008).

Mapping the Diaspora 43 Existing studies have so far argued that the movement of students should be seen as an integral part of transnational migration systems in recent years. This is not least because the transnational networks they forge often lay the tracks of future skilled labor circulation, but importantly the very substantial experience of being a foreign student in a pseudo-migratory or pre-migratory environment significantly increases the likelihood of being a skilled migrant or a permanent resident at a later stage (Vertovec 2002). Indeed, this suggests that migrants often move from one category to another in the course of a migratory trajectory, and therefore it would be a mistake to think of students as merely a temporary migratory flow completely unrelated to other flows of long-term or permanent migrants (Pieke et al. 2004). An increasing proportion of migratory movement today is said to be “temporary” (Gribble 2008) at the initial entry level that is often transient, circular and provisional, and these temporary forms of spatial mobility are not officially classified as typical state-to-state immigration. The data compiled in the area of temporary migration—ranging broadly from international students to researchers, exchange visitors, seasonal workers and trainees—are far from complete because temporary movements in the context of free circulation regimes can be particularly difficult to capture, and also because these are considered to be relatively low-risk forms of migration and thus reporting requirements may be entirely waived (OECD 2008). One of the unique features that distinguish much of today’s migratory flows from those in the past is precisely this seemingly, initially, temporary nature (Ono and Piper 2001). Yet, this assumption related to the temporary in its initial entry tends to underestimate the extent and the possible transformation of its status, as well as its significance in a new contemporary formation of diasporic individuals crossing continually the borders between home and host countries. Since it is simply assumed as a temporary, sojourning and short-term, “passing” phenomenon, its potentially enduring and wider implications are often overlooked in favor of more immediate attention to permanent, longer-staying migration. The rapid increase in non-permanent international migration at the initial entry level is most evident in the number of students travelling abroad in recent years, and this free circulation is of major significance for global economic and social change (Hugo 2007). Despite a diverse and bewildering array of migrant groups today, and despite the large number of international students who adjust their status and eventually shift their temporary status to permanent immigration (Hazen and Alberts 2006), little is explored in detail and known about how a wide arrange of social actors, such as students and women in particular, form, develop and maintain “transnational social space” (Crang et al. 2004), the everyday transnational communities, social activities and networks, relational experiences, hidden struggles and confl icts emerging from that seemingly free, and evident flow of migration.

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The experience of an international student or traveller is often assumed to be that of a sojourner and no more, or a “frictionless” mobility that is characterized by an absence of any kind of meaningful encounter and contestation in a host society. But, in fact, the experience in this time dimension, anywhere between three months and five years for study, can often lead to a kind of immigrant experience, not a frictionless mobility but rather a differently tracked mobility with its own costs and constraints that should be recognized (Smith and Favell 2006). This time period in international student mobility is likely to modify diasporic life trajectories by affecting the ways in which sojourners come to envisage their own future, albeit uncertain and precarious, in relation to the limitations and the possibilities of home and host countries. Provisional sojourning characterizes contemporary migrants, making movements back and forth between a variety of communities yet sustaining connections to the particular culture of their own home, while being unable, or sometimes unwilling, to organize themselves according to the dominant mainstream culture of the host society and without being integrated by it, to a large extent. The actual conditions of their transnational lives, social relations and modes of interaction, and thus migratory outcomes on identity can be routinely mediated by a strategic and affective use of mediated spaces, transnational media networks and communication channels that are deemed crucial for a continuous, social and ontological sense of being and belonging in this global mobility that is unlikely to end soon.

Mediation: The Media on the Move Underlying the rapid development and the processes of contemporary migratory flows, modes of social organization and transnational experiences are the ubiquity and intensification of the global media, information and communication technologies. The mediated social networks, new and proliferating channels of communications result from the accelerated globalization of the media, the Internet in particular and its time-space compressing capacity. It can be argued that today’s circulatory migration and provisional diaspora is significantly enabled, and driven in part, by the strategic and mundane use of the new mediated cultural spaces, through which movements are not necessarily limited but are likely to increase in their impact, and further sustained in various transnational contexts. It is transnational networks that precondition and perpetuate the intermittent, short-term but provisional patterns of movements typifying contemporary skilled migrants (Vertovec 2002). The mediated networks, established through newer, cheaper and more efficient modes of communication and the transnational ethnic media on the move, have been instrumental in facilitating these changes in contemporary movements, allowing dispersed yet networked migrants to maintain transnationally their home-based relationships and to regulate a dialectical

Mapping the Diaspora 45 sense of belonging in host countries. Thus, it is not just the increasing, circular flows of people that are of significance here within the transnational migration systems and processes, but also the increasing, multi-directional flows of the media, information and communication technologies that parallel the people’s transnational back-and-forth movements creating new conditions for identity formation in diaspora. The media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects. Since the mid-1980s, dramatic changes have occurred in the media cultural industries, producing a new global media landscape and developing the basis for a new kind of media regime. The proliferation of satellite and cable television and online networks, enabled by sophisticated digital technologies and the deregulation and liberalization of broadcasting and telecommunications, as well as the formation of new transnational and global audiovisual markets and distribution technologies, have created a complex terrain of multi-vocal, multimedia and multi-directional flows, including contra-flows from the periphery to the West, offering enormous challenges and opportunities (Thussu 2007). Since the 1990s, the new borderless media have penetrated the emerging markets of affluent Asia, capturing the imaginations of people who were accustomed to the traditional domestic media under government control. Today, the growth in satellite platforms, transnational television channels and online communication communities in Asia is said to be the most rapid worldwide (Thomas 2005). The profusion of the media today, with new imaginations, new choices and contradictions, generates a critical condition for reflexivity, engaging everyday people to have a resource for the learning of self, culture and society in a new light (Kim 2008). Middleclass and upper-class women in urban cities of Asia are seen to be primary agents of transnational media cultural consumption in everyday life. These significant upheavals since the 1990s have created the emergence of new transnational cultural spaces and migratory projects, both imagined and enacted, in rapidly globalizing Asia. It is now generally acknowledged that contemporary migrants are routinely able to establish transnational communities that exist across two or more cultural spaces, since the scale and intensity, frequency and simultaneity of current long-distance, cross-border activities of economic transactions and new kinds of transnational networks, primarily the Internet and satellite television, shape the meaning of transnationalism among distinct categories of migrants in particular transnational contexts (Portes et al. 1999; Aksoy and Robins 2000). The frequent back-and-forth flows of migrants, moving images, new concepts and narratives thinking across time and space are now seen to be routine parts of contemporary transnationalism. Transnational activities require regular and sustained social contacts over time across national borders, marked by the increasing presence of the ethnic media from the countries of origin and Internet-mediated communications with which a new means of social organization can be developed

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and maintained in the actual conditions of diasporic lives. Today’s migrants on the move are enabled to create multiple networks of connection to their homelands through the new dis-embedding, yet at the same time, re-embedding media technologies with much greater frequency, speed and regularity than their predecessors in the past waves of migration. It is therefore worth highlighting that the present wave of migration differs significantly from previous waves in that contemporary trans-border movements and activities of migrants have been intensified and diversified, and their migratory nature and duration have been changed and extended as a result of the development of advanced media, information and communication technologies. Importantly, distinctive modes of thinking including a provisional nomadic sensibility (“willing to go anywhere for a while”), as well as new cultural and social forms of management of diasporic everyday life, have been facilitated by the mediation of the rapidly evolving media technologies, connectivity, and imaginary, virtual and physical forms of mobility, which are more readily available, much quicker and easier than ever before. These new kinds of transnational networks, connections and various capacities of mobility are now changing not only the scale and patterns of migration but also the nature of migrant experience and thinking, and therefore the complex conditions of identity formation in diaspora. The diasporas proliferating nowadays may be quite different from earlier diasporic identities, in which the processes of electronic network-conditioned mobility have created, whether deliberately or unwittingly, new meanings of diasporic subjectivity and possibly new consequences that are yet to be known and understood in detail. Contemporary diaspora distinguishes itself from past forms of migration because today’s mass-mediated imaginaries frequently transcend the boundaries of national space, and the identity politics of integration into host countries, as well as the decisions of move, stay and return, are deeply affected by mass-mediated images, models and narratives (Appadurai 1996). Migration flows can often continue beyond the original intentions, depending on new transnational social networks and the ethnic media from homelands that ensure the continuation of connectivity, and of a rooted sense of ontological security and stability to a certain extent. Today’s provisional diaspora with the nomadic symptom (“willing to go anywhere for a while”) may present a profound paradox resulting from the double capacity of the ethnic media use to produce and organize new space of one’s own that enables quotidian dwelling “here” and hyper connecting “there.” Engagement with a diverse range of transnational practices are often grounded in the self-sustaining and reflexive use of the ethnic media space to maintain more regular, more familiar and more intense forms of connections to homelands than the earlier forms of long-distance relationships attempted by past diasporic generations. But at the same time, contemporary diasporic subjects, or digitalized mobile transnationals, routinely involve the proliferating ethnic media resources to deal with

Mapping the Diaspora 47 the challenges of sustaining the very mobile lives and the seemingly self-determined motivations of moving away from the boundaries and constraints of their home nations. It should be noted that the media and technological change is socially constructed and does not emerge itself without the involvement of the users who have to accept it as relevant in everyday life (Kim 2008). The rapid spread and global ubiquity of the modern media technology itself is not inherently transformative, but the intention of the media users in their migratory trajectory, global circulation and politics of incorporation can alter social organizations, everyday diasporic practices and relationships in unpredictable ways. The present “hyper-connectivity” facilitated by the rapid development of the media and communication systems may allow hyper mobile transnationals, such as women in this study, to sustain stronger, more intimate and emotionally close relationships, however partial or mythical, with their home and nation than ever before. Transnational connectivity is not a completely new feature, but a thick web of mediation today with great speeds at which media images, texts, capital, labor and people move regularly and instantaneously, represents significant shifts in the expansion and the nature of transnational migration, marking not only a quantitative change but also a subtle qualitative shift with its deepening impact, intensity and complexity. Central to the aim of this book is therefore to explore the often takenfor-granted important role and place of the transnational media as mundane migratory resources, individualistic and networked relations that affect the circular flow and provisional trajectory, the extended and selective spatiality, the everyday experience and subjectivity of women on the move. Contemporary manifestations of the provisional diaspora should be understood in its close intersection with the use of the mediated space, a major feature driving transnational circular migration, and its increasingly intertwined effects on the lives and experiences of diasporic groups in global cities—the world’s leading transnational flows and conditions, leading information industries and networks, “hierarchical dynamics and processes deeply articulated with the global economy” (Sassen 2001).

EXPERIENCING THE GLOBAL CITY: LONDON International student mobility is one of the most dynamic transnational types of contemporary movement, and London represents a large component of these flows in the context of the expansion of the global knowledge economy, the capital mobility and the globalization of education and labor market formation. It has recently become an increasingly important part of the global higher-education landscape. International education is a growing and lucrative industry in many developed OECD countries actively promoting their educational institutions in targeted source regions

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(Hawthorne 2008). Traditionally, nearly more than 90% of international students have enrolled in higher-education institutions in OECD countries with three main destinations, the US (565,000 international students), the UK (330,000) and Australia (280,000), recruiting approximately 45% of the total 2.7 million international students in 2006 (Verbik and Lasanowski 2007), compared to just 600,000 in 1975 and 1.5 million in 1996 (UNESCO 1996; Ichimoto 2000). Foreign students contribute $13 billion to the US economy annually (IIE 2005). However, the US’s overwhelming dominance of international higher education may be eroding, as higher education undergoes rapid globalization, intense competition and aggressive recruitment based on a “revenue generating approach,” which increasingly treats international higher education as an important “export industry,” like business generally (New York Times 2004; Hugo 2007; Healey 2008). A resulting tendency is a growing commercialization of education systems, often identifying international students as a global commodity, “capital and subjugated Others” (Rhee and Sagaria 2004). Despite high tuition fees and the high cost of living, the UK has emerged as the world’s second-largest higher-education destination with the enrollment of over 415,000 international students in 2008 (IIE 2009). The recruitment of international students to universities in Britain has become a central issue, while an economic competition rationale is dominant within the discourse of globalization (Bolsmann and Miller 2008). The forces of globalization and the internationalization of education systems are “increasing institutional dependence on international students” (Verbik and Lasanowski 2007) and are currently transforming the demographic patterns and characteristics of British universities. The number of foreign enrollments in the context of the internationalized academy is exploding as a significant feature of Asian economic growth produces millions of “new middle-class students across Asia” (New York Times 2004). Considerable competition for these Asian students from the British higher-education market indicates that international full-fee-paying students from Asia make a sizable economic contribution to the universities at which they enroll, and largely to the economy of Britain. The international migration of students, everyday experiences, dynamics and consequences on identity have been relatively under-researched, yet the relevance of this exploration is evident given the rise of new forms of student migration today and growing significance in such phenomena (King and Findlay 2007). Increasing flows of international students not only make an economic impact but also reshape the demographic, social and cultural characteristics of the host society. Britain can now be characterized by “super-diversity” (Vertovec 2007), a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a super-diverse condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small

Mapping the Diaspora 49 and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated, ethnic migrants and ethnic minorities, including upperclass and middle-class international students increasingly from Asia. However, to become a respected part of the national cultural life is part of an ongoing struggle for Britain’s ethnic minorities as they are often excluded from the nation’s cultural life that cannot deliver a sense of belonging, respect and certainty (Stevenson 2003). Current developments towards globalization, migratory flows and transnational connections appear to have opened up a space for the transformation of national identity in Britain. The government, since 1997, has promoted the idea of a “multicoloured Britain” to compensate for, and to deal with, an aging population and declining economic competitiveness, and in this context the concepts of race relations, racism, migration, immigration and integration have fi rmly become part of public discourse and institutional structure (Pieke et al. 2004). Crucially, however, the key issue of the migration processes involving mainly non-white people is not all about economics, nor is the discourse just about race; rather, it is much more about cultural implications, “culture and ethnic and personal identity, personal choice and, thus, at the end, about human rights” (Menski 2002) in this multicultural or the so-called “cosmopolitan” society. Britain was a center of the 1990s boom in talk of cosmopolitanism, during which “cosmopolitan Britain” became standard speech evoking a positive orientation toward European integration and engagement with the rest of the world; furthermore, commercial cosmopolitanism came on the heels of the late 1990s re-branding of Britain itself as Cool Britannia in the cultural and fi nancial life of British cities, London in particular (Calhoun 2008). Yet, the utopian notion of a cosmopolitan, post-national, New Europe has been challenged by the new and emerging waves of migrants that some view as a potential threat to the formation of European, postnational identity (Loshitzky 2010). Ironically, those who celebrate diversity and difference in the British, or Western, popular imagination tend to prefer the derogatory view of the Other that is essentially underdeveloped, backward looking, weak and morally inferior (Macfarlane and Yan 2004; Furedi 2008). Britain’s mainstream popular media are currently seeking to foster a culture of fear, anxiety, prejudice, and thus a social climate of collective fear and paranoia to a certain extent, including the exaggerated fear of excluded minorities; as a consequence, today is profoundly caught up with the question as to who belongs and who is respected, how people collectively deal with fear and anxiety, cultural difference and perceived threats, while promoting a culture of respect and tolerance (Stevenson 2003). Today’s many urban cities are increasingly deploying cosmopolitan images, celebrating cultural difference, cultural mix and mélange, and competing with one another to re-brand themselves, their markets and lifestyles as cosmopolitan in order to attract more flows of capital, investment,

50 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women business links, cultural activities and tourism. Flows of capital, labor, commodities, information and images characterize much of the mobile societies of globalization today (Lash and Urry 1994). International migration flows into European capital cities are now more diverse than used to be the case, as the movement of less-skilled labor migrants has been replaced by the global circulation of highly skilled and educated professionals, particularly the increased flows of students and independent young people (White 1998). London’s role as a hub of global life from finance to the arts has attracted migrants from all over the world, who now account for one-quarter of the city’s population (Pieke et al. 2004). While London has historically prided itself in being one of the most diverse and multicultural places, representative of a kind of vernacular cosmopolitanism of European capital cities, it continues to coexist with parochialism, a highly implicit manner of prejudice and discrimination, racism against particular transmigrant groups alongside that inclusive, cosmopolitan rhetoric. The allure, gloss and excitement of living in London, with its image of a cosmopolitan location and many transnational inhabitants, is confronted with new racializing strategies, notably as a result of the terrorist attacks in 2005 and implicit yet amplified social fear, and some of the governmental responses to them (Yuval-Davis et al. 2006). It is in a British culture driven by fear and risk, high anxiety and ambivalences that it is very difficult to promote issues of recognition, inclusion and respect; the more a culture is driven by anxiety the more likely it becomes that some of these ambivalences become projected onto migrant groups and ethnic minorities whose different cultures, traditions and ways of life do not immediately seem to be normal (Stevenson 2003). In this highly ambivalent situation evoking both a more inclusive cosmopolitan disposition and an exclusionary suspicion of difference and amplified fears of difference, it is worthwhile to interrogate the politics of inclusion and exclusion in local specificities and understand the extent to which government-inspired and articulated re-visioning of the cosmopolitan city resonates comfortingly or uneasily with the lived realities and situated experiences of relatively silent or invisible groups of migrants, such as Korean, Japanese and Chinese women in this study (see Chapter 6). The presence of Koreans and Japanese in London is dominated by expatriate communities, business travellers and their families as well as individual students, rather than distinctively characterized by permanent residents. There is a general tendency that Korean migrants are largely forgotten, if not all ignored, in the mainstream popular media imagination and in the cosmopolitan willingness to accommodate otherness. The isolated and segregated representation may further suggest that Koreans themselves are not interacting in a meaningful way with other parts of the host society, but rather living and working almost exclusively or mainly with other Korean migrants. Japanese migrants, too, tend to occupy individual and invisible positions in the British society (Izuhara and Hiroshi 2001).

Mapping the Diaspora 51 Similarly, Chinese migrants in Britain are traditionally considered as “quiet” ethnic groups (Shen 2005), marked by the invisibility of the population, marginalization and widespread social and economic exclusion from the mainstream society as a result of racism, language and communication difficulties (Lam et al. 2009). The experiences of international students in terms of perceived discrimination, the central issues of racism, differ significantly depending upon their nationality and geographical origin, where they come from, and they tend to experience more social discrimination off campus compared to on campus (Hanassab 2006). The question of how cultural difference is represented and accommodated in wider communities, and how diversity can be achieved without reducing otherness and amplifying a sense of fear and disrespect, has come to be a major task and dilemma in the multicultural or self-proclaimed cosmopolitan society, while encountering the embodied cultural dimensions of migrants in the current context of the continually high levels of migration from Asia. It is in this social context that this book considers the significance of the often silent conflicts, contestation and dilemmas involved in the transnational lives of Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in London, by reflecting on socially differentiated realities behind overly positive and glossy assumptions about the transnational flows of the middle-class and upper-class, economically privileged, educated and skilled, contemporary mobile subjects. It explores the everyday reality and experience of transnational mobility, the “human face” (Smith and Favell 2006) hidden behind the aggregate quantitative data and structural capitalist logics of global cities and networks. It considers the defi ning features and consequences of transnational lives and experiences; the specific ways in which diasporic women engage with small details of everyday practices, power and uneven relations, familiar and unfamiliar elements and issues related to belonging and identity formation in their chosen host society. This approach recognizes that there is a need to pay more attention to the actual conditions of transnational lives and individual social biographies—both lived and mediated—in an attempt to understand the complex processes, consequences and nature of the current phenomena of cross-border movements. In what follows, this book based on empirical research will offer insights on the relational experiences, causes and implications of women’s transnational migration, media and identity.

3

Female Individualization?

FEMALE INDIVIDUALIZATION IN TRANSNATIONAL FLOWS

No Choice Situation: “It’s the only exit” Education guarantees nothing. In Korea, the more women are educated, the more we would find it difficult to get a job. Not just any kind of job that doesn’t need a university degree or just a low-paid secretary. . . . There was no job future, no hope to make my own life. It’s the only exit. I am doing another MA degree (in the UK), moving from this country to another country, until I fi nd a solution. Don’t know if another degree will give me a better job in Korea, or the same job, or a jobless life. . . . I don’t think higher education in Korea gives a good job opportunity. I also don’t believe higher education overseas will necessarily promise a better job opportunity, but I will give it a try anyway as there seems no other choice. I graduated from one of the so-called first-class prestigious universities in Korea, but it was still hard to get a proper full-time job. At some point, I was not looking for a job anymore because I knew I couldn’t fi nd one. Why do women move? What are the social conditions, the push-and-pull factors that compel women to move away from Korea? “Education without a guarantee” is illustrated in contemporary Korea where 95.3% of women go to high school and 63% of the women go on to higher education, yet only 46.7% of university graduates are employed, mostly in traditional female tracks, non-managerial and secretarial positions unrelated to their educational qualifications (KWDI 2006). A wage differential of 76% compared to male wages gives women little economic security, and

Female Individualization? 53 the gendered division of the labor market is a site of continuing inequality. A contradiction of female individualization lies in the gap between the growing expectations of education and the reality of work inequality. The culture of uncertainty is so pervasive that women’s work identity is fraught with feelings of hopelessness and ambivalence. Since 1990, Korean women’s employment rate has remained largely unchanged from 49%, falling below the 55.3% average of OECD countries. A substantial portion of Korean women’s economic activity is found in small companies, not in large companies with knowledge and information-intensive forms of work. In this context, educated Korean women can be seen as “reflexivity losers” (Lash 1994: 133) as they are excluded from the new labor spaces of reflexive production in large companies. Basically, this continues as female university graduates are systematically discriminated against in the recruitment processes, particularly by large major companies in Korea (Kim 2005: 171–172). Ironically, there has been an inverse correlation between the level of education and employment, since female university graduates have difficulties in fi nding positions commensurate with their educational qualifications (Rowe and Kim 1997; Janelli and Yim 2002; KWDI 2006). Since the Asian economic crisis (IMF) in 1997 caused widespread unemployment in Korea, companies reducing workforce have cut temporary, part-time, low-level positions staffed mostly by women (Kim and Schreurs 2002). With the experience of frequent temporary employment, long-term unemployment and the pervasive culture of uncertainty or scepticism about employment, some middle-class women have been discouraged from seeking work or have given up the search for work entirely (“not looking for a job anymore”). There has been a remarkably impressive increase in educational attainment for middle-class women in modern Korea and with universal access to education historically being regarded as a crucial means of national development and upward social mobility, gender inequality is generally thought to be diminished or non-existent at the educational level of the middle class. However, those women equipped with work knowledge and marketable skills are often confronted with male privilege that has been perpetuated within the domestic labor market system and organizational corporate culture, from the processes of recruitment to job assignments, promotion, rewards, work identity and satisfaction. Feeling I was getting smaller and smaller every day, exhausting myself, I quit the job and moved to study. Job satisfaction was very low, even erosive to the self. Working from morning until 9 p.m., 10 p.m. with everybody as a team, there was no self. Is this work for me? What do I work for? Work was self-destructing, not self-building. I was constantly searching for my self.

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What actually happens in the workplace and to the role of work in defi ning women’s identities is often revealed as “self-destructive,” “self-erosive.” Koreans work the longest hours in the world (OECD 2007), overtime work until late evening is the norm and work-life balance is a serious concern. This enormous work stress can produce a paradox; people work intensely under great pressure but their relations to others remain curiously superficial (Sennett 2006), leading to a diminution of collective consciousness based on corporate familial structure and to a more competitive self-oriented individualism (Park and Kim 2005). Work identity is a central feature of women’s modern life. The workplace can be a distinctive site for the construction of identity, and work satisfaction can build a renewed sense of self, however, little of this seems necessarily available to Korean women. Nevertheless, the seemingly non-existent element of, and the ambivalent sense of, work identity is primarily and most intimately connected with their conceptions of self-identity. The self is sought in work biography, the working-self. If work life is not fulfilling, mothers’ generation would choose marriage. We try to fi nd an alternative, such as studying abroad, hoping to fi nd better work. Work comes fi rst, marriage later. . . When will I be able to marry? Finding the right man is equally difficult as my expectations are much higher than my mother’s. I want happiness. I want both work and marriage, not to self-sacrifice like old mothers, however illusory having it all is. I am highly educated and believe I can have it all. But nothing is certain about work or marriage. With the rising expectations of education, the younger generation of Korean women seek to fi nd their individuality through work and somehow feel obliged to construct their own identities in opposition to their mothers’ lives (“self-sacrifice”), yet simultaneously expecting their own feelings (“happiness”) to be fulfilled also by marriage and family life. Consequently, there emerges an ambivalent sense that they have to take on a self-fulfi lling but less predictable life course and the burden of the choices; the illusion of “having it all” or the belief that women “can have it all” becomes an imperative rather than a choice for educated women. This highly ambivalent desire to “have it all” is commonly expressed and shared, marking a generational difference between younger women and their mothers. While marriage is not repudiated but postponed temporarily, the Korean women’s socio-economic status has not been improved enough to operate individualization through work. Middle-class young Korean women’s dramatically shifting notion of marriage is a critical differentiation, in contrast to the strong and romantic

Female Individualization? 55 idea of marriage held by older generations of Korean women (also see Kim 2005: 174–177). There is clearly a generational divide now between younger women and older women in terms of defi ning the meaning of marriage. Compounded with the awareness and also the fear of the rising divorce rate, nearly 50% today, there is a growing uncertainty about the maintenance of the meaning of marriage. Korea is one of the countries having the world’s lowest birth rates, 1.15 in 2009, as a growing number of women delay marriage/family life in pursuit of employment and self-actualization (KWDI 2009). The notions of marriage/family are becoming more open and flexible, and understood less in terms of moral obligations but more in terms of “negotiated” or strategic commitments. Young women’s subjectivity, desire and life politics is organized around an insurance-based, equality-oriented, and highly calculable mode of thinking about potentially negative outcomes or effects of life decisions, particularly concerning marriage. In a sense, their day-to-day life becomes increasingly reflexive and calculable in a desire to “colonize the future with some degree of success” (Giddens 1991: 202). It can be said that, by choosing different ways of living and being in the world, young Korean women desire to take total charge of their own life and constitute themselves as a “designer, juggler and stage director of their own biography and identity” (Beck 1994: 13). They struggle to ally themselves with a new mode of life politics, a politics of self-actualization that is no longer obligatory and embedded in the constraints of traditions, normative gender roles and subjectivities. Commonly, educated middle-class young women in contemporary Korea demonstrate intense aspiration for work, believing that it is only through work that they can invent a life of their own (also see Kim 2005: 167–177). The emerging trend towards individualization—delaying marriage temporarily yet not completely repudiating marriage, aspiring work participation in the domestic or the international job market, pursuing personal freedom yet manifesting itself in close ties with the family—has become almost a constant focus of the women moving away from Korea. Despite the fact that younger generations of Korean women in today’s age have attained as much education as their male counterparts and are relatively free to compete and excel in the domain of education, women’s achievement in higher education does not necessarily lead to the viability of, or the invitation to, the regime of individualization—better job prospects, economic and social rewards, enlarged freedom and choice. Apparent education in contemporary Korea does not necessarily signify the society’s openness, nor necessarily indicate increases in open mobility; rather ironically, increases in education for women are even weaker indicators of open mobility (Abelmann 2003: 142). It is important to recognize that the educated person does not necessarily or eventually become the producer of her own labor situation, and in this way, of her own social biography. Women’s willpower, performative agency and education

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alone cannot be an effective transformative force in the identity politics of individualization. As a consequence, the seemingly unachievable idea of individualization is endlessly played out in the women’s “imagination” and “talk” and thus remains an unresolved identity in everyday life (also see Kim 2005: 184–192). This disjuncture between education and labor market conditions, the persistence of gender inequality, and the women’s desire to plan a more self-determined life politics are some of the main forces that have led to growing transnational mobility. Whose individualization? A contradiction lies at the heart of female individualization, for which this study calls into question the assumed freedom and choice of educated women from Korea. I was looking for an escape from that hopeless job (in Korea). It’s the only exit, however uncertain. Finding a new job was difficult and other jobs would be the same. If you can’t get a good job and don’t want to marry yet, but while approaching the age 30, you become not desirable in the marriage market either, then what can you do? There was no choice. I am willing to move until there is change in my life. “It’s the only exit.” This indicates a deep dissatisfaction with the systematic contradictions that make Korean women feel that there is little they can do to change the “no choice” situation. Women are frustrated in varying degrees by the way they fi nd themselves disempowered in social conditions that limit work possibilities and lifestyle choices. The lack of fit between the role of education in opening up the possibility of mobility and female individualization, and women’s unemployment and underemployment propel them to move away from Korea, which may be an expression not only of their own hopes, but also of their rage against the unproductive consequences of education and the determinacy of structure. They are becoming a “nomadic subject” (Braidotti 1994), expressing a desire for an identity made up of transitions and changes and a discursive freedom from dominant fi xity, while moving with the indeterminacy of risk or a gamble.

Relocation of the Self: “It’s like a gamble” Education is consumption. We pay for it without expecting economic returns, because there is no guarantee for a job or a better salary (in Japan). It’s not easy to get a good job, even with a top university degree. Job recruitment works favourably for men. . . . I disliked the ordinary office job. The salary was low, though I had a materially good life living with my parents.

Female Individualization? 57 I am not sure if a MA or a PhD overseas will help me fi nd a fulfilling job in Japan. It’s like a gamble. Without knowing the chance of success, I try it. The perception of education has become “consumption,” a thing to be consumed by Japanese women without any expectations as to the consequences. Japanese women are among the world’s best educated but most under-utilized (Social Science Japan 2005). High-school education has reached equal levels for men (96.0%) and women (96.7%), and 45.3% of women advance to higher education. However, Japan’s male-dominated labor system divides recruits into “career track position” and “general clerical work,” with 80% of women being hired in the second category. Shorter-term work and clerical tasks are reserved for women, who are widely known as “office ladies” (OLs). Japanese women in full-time employment earn only 65% of male wages. Unlike their parents’ generation, many younger workers are getting parttime or temporary employment—a situation that is neither efficient nor equitable (Japan Times 2007). This inequity, along with the rise of youth unemployment since the early 1990s, has caused the phenomenon of “Parasite Singles,” referring to Japanese who continue to live with their parents for a longer period of time than in previous generations; 60% of single men and 80% of single women between the ages of twenty and thirty-four live with their parents, indicating an ambivalent extension of the transition to a self-sustaining independent adulthood or an individualized subject position. They are the fi rst new generation of women to stay single beyond their twenties, pursuing a lifestyle different from their mothers, while recognizing the social pressure to get married in Japan. A woman who is not married, does not have children and is over thirty, is called a “Defeated Dog” (title of a Japanese bestseller book), a loser in life. We laugh about it, but are serious too. . . . No matter how successful I am in my profession, society will see me as a personal failure if I stay single. Work is important in my life, travelling with women friends, having fun, too. . . . I am not excluding marriage. But it seems so difficult for women to have work, freedom, marriage and children. . . . I am not sure if having it all is possible for women, but possible for men. I am not sure when I will be able to marry. The popular expression of “Defeated Dog” is seen as a personal responsibility that must be dealt with individually by women who fail to live up to the society’s exacting standards and expectations, especially in terms of an age-specific hetero-normative biography: getting married by age thirty and establishing a normal family. This institutionalized normalization, along

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with society’s fears regarding the declining birth rate of 1.29, excludes the wishes of young women who aim to establish a career fi rst and hesitate to prioritize marriage. Single women fear that it is unlikely they will be able to continue in full-time work after marriage and when dealing with childcare, and they will eventually become part-time workers with no career future. Approaching thirty and unmarried is precisely the age when women’s longings to move abroad generally peak, in conjunction with the social pressure to marry, which also peaks at thirty (Kelsky 2001). Since the early 1990s, the trend towards delayed marriage and the declining birth rate have become a constant national focus of the Japanese mainstream media and public debates (Wagatsuma and Nakano 2002). Between 1975 and 1995, the ratio of unmarried women among the age twenty-five to thirty-five groups doubled from 21% to 48%. These single women are seen as “Japan’s new material girls destroying society by refusing to get married and have children” (Washington Post 2000). Young women are even encouraged to think that their middle-class mothers want to let their daughters do what they themselves were unable to do in the more constrained traditional lives of their own. However, it should be noted that many young women in this study do not repudiate marriage but only postpone it temporarily because of its gratuitous demands and perceived incompatibility with the self-fulfi lment of work. An unresolved and anxious question for them thus comes to be “when” they will be able to marry. They are interested in marrying sometime in the future but deeply uncertain about when. They try to have it all—a career, economic independence, individual performance, as well as family life—and the ways young women imagine the transition to an independent adulthood and their future as an individualized subject reveal a “not-yet-become hope” (Bloch 1992). Waiting is a female destiny (Rich 1976), which is still the case with these modern women. This waiting to achieve the not-yet-become hope and to accelerate a shift towards individualization is being sought precariously in transnational flows of movement. Lacking such possibilities and fulfilment in Japan, more and more women cross national borders and turn to higher education abroad in pursuit of self-development and a greater degree of freedom (Ichimoto 2000). This feminization of migration has been triggered not only by the socioeconomic constraints but more importantly by the cultural-biographical factors (Habu 2000). Gender is commonly sidelined in scholarly research on migration, whether it takes a traditional or transnational perspective (Pessar and Mahler 2001). While women were often presumed to play passive roles as companions of travelling men, the predominance of Japanese women in today’s migratory flows is increasingly being recognized as independent social agents in their own right. This type of international migration has become a widespread and almost normal middle-class activity among Japanese women, not an exclusive phenomenon only practiced by an economically privileged upper class.

Female Individualization? 59 In the homeland, educated middle-class women become fully conscious of the reality of the Japanese labor market, working situations, discrimination by gender as well as by age, limited opportunities and reward structure of women. Almost all “internationalist” or “adventurous” Japanese migrant women express that gender discrimination in the domestic workplace is their main motivation to study abroad as a means to enhance their human capital, while at the same time expecting that Western countries may offer more meaningful lives, equal opportunities and career potentials (Ono and Piper 2004; Yamashita 2008; Kawakami 2009). Women’s lack of mobility within the male-dominant economy of the national space of work has resulted in a pronounced gendering of both transnational mobility and transnational space. Although modern Japan has developed an egalitarian education system for both sexes, women’s world changes notably after they start to work and encounter conservative social norms and limited career mobility that do not permit self-development, personalized difference and individual diversity (Habu 2000; Yamashita 2008). Individual women’s career orientations are relatively fi xed as larger factors outside the workplace also play central roles in determining women’s career move (Ichimoto 2000). It is often seen to be so difficult or expensive for women to maintain both a successful career and a rich personal family life that they are eventually driven to choose one option or the other in an “either/or” situation. The ambivalent desire for “having it all” remains an unattainable myth without any significant changes in social policy and the structure of labor market system, making it possible for women to combine and reconcile their imagined careers with marriage/family demands. Clearly, the extent of women’s awareness and transgression of traditional gendered roles and social expectations is widely manifested in the transnational actions and choices they take now, whereas the socio-economic structural relations interlocked in gendered cultural norms remain largely unchanged in Japan. “Women would simply go abroad if they sense that they don’t have the opportunities here, so they are choosing not to participate” (Japan Times 2007) but to escape or turn to the foreign in order to create their own version of life politics and identities outside a normative model of home traditions. However, this seemingly free changing and choosing of place is not without ambivalence. Women’s move to a desirable alterity with the choice of individualization is seen to be highly uncertain like a gamble, giving rise to a mixture of hope and risk for every move. It’s like a gamble. I think we women are more willing to take a gamble, willing to move around to fi nd a better life, because there is no better life in Japan anyway. . . . We are uncertain but not afraid. We want work and marriage, all important things in life. I wanted to get away and fi nd something new. . . . I think about my self, my work, my independent life, marriage someday when I can find

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women the right man, regardless of whether he is a Japanese or Western man, understanding of my self-fulfi lment, not just his own. . . . We women want happy family life, don’t we?

“It’s like a gamble.” Japanese women are willing to be risk-takers in a denormalization of gendered roles through transnational relocation in order to find an individual and independent self, albeit with uncertainty and precarious freedom. They thus appear to break out of virtuous feminine selves and perform their individuality. However, the search for self is a kind of gamble in a limited sense since Japanese women are “not always willing to forsake their traditional selves in order to take on the new” (Rosenberger 2001). Hetero-normative marriage and family life is temporarily delayed, not discarded, within the new transnational framework of self in which Japan is seen as failing in its attitude towards women as individuals. Rather than a desire to live in a particular Western country, what seems to be the case is that women often feel trapped within, and have an “urge to leave Japan” (Fujita 2008) or seek to escape it for a time. Contemporary Japanese society has become something to escape from rather than to find one’s place within.

The Rise of Global Woman: “We call it a golden certificate” We all know it is difficult to get a job for women, and extremely difficult to get a satisfying job in China. After graduating from university, luckily I got a job but a very ordinary one where I could not expect self-development, so I quit. It is hard to fi nd a job when you have just graduated from university, though you are so ready to work! Just a BA degree is not sufficient to get a good job in the competitive market (of China). An overseas MA degree with English and work experience is preferred. We call it a golden certificate. Although modern Chinese women have learned to seek and embrace “self-development” through pursuing education, the Chinese labor market impedes such possibilities. Education in China has witnessed a rapid development since the 1990s. The enrollment rate for women in highereducational institutions reached 44% in 2003 (China Ministry of Education 2004), in Shanghai and Beijing more than half of those who are school age can go on to higher education. However, the rise of unemployment in the urban labor market creates great pressure on China, where a million people join the workforce every year, and women are removed from the workforce to control surplus labor problems (Jiang et al. 2004). Educated women are discriminated against in hiring and are euphemistically called “waiting for work” (Wallis 2006). Though “so ready to

Female Individualization? 61 work,” new women graduates in urban cities have a hard time in locating their fi rst job. Chinese companies think women are not profitable as we will leave on maternity. They follow their own rules. . . . We call ourselves a “Super Girl.” Most of us are from a one-child family, growing up as “Super” encouraged by parents. At work, we seem surprisingly ordinary, nothing. Young women like me prefer to work in foreign-invested companies. They have a modern culture appealing to women. . . . An overseas degree is called a golden certificate. I want to have a global career and a life of a global woman, not like old mothers staying inside China for life. Young Chinese women self-proclaim themselves to be a “Super Girl” (referring to the Chinese version of the popular TV show, American Idol), since China’s one-child policy has enabled them to grow up with significant parental investment in education and domestic empowerment. Yet the perceived discrepancy between the women’s empowerment in the private sphere and disempowerment in the work sphere presents a puzzling paradox to these women. Traditional gender identity and the ghettoizing of women in the workforce are governed by unwritten rules and the market logic of productivity, which treat women as less efficient and an economic liability. There emerges a desire for what they call a “golden certificate” to access a “global career” and a life of a “global woman,” effectively moving out of the constraints of the domestic work environment. It is against this context that Chinese women manifest an emerging attitude towards individualization and the construction of a self-responsible life politics. We can’t rely on men! I want to be self-reliant, not dependent on a husband for my happiness. My parents expect me to marry before thirty. . . . Actually, we can’t fi nd a man (in China). A highly educated woman is not approved of by a man’s family. A woman with a MA degree should fi nd a man with the same level of education or higher. Marriage becomes more difficult for a highly educated woman aged over thirty. Do it myself! I will find a suitable job, a suitable husband, a suitable place to live in. . . . Don’t know how. I am not eager to go back to China. “We can’t rely on men!” What comes across forcefully is a self-determined attitude towards individualization, highlighting the degree to which Chinese women desire to become the actors in their own biography and for the happiness of their own existence. “Do-it-myself” identity is embraced as a positive yet anxious expression of life politics, as well as a marriage

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relationship, without the sacrifice of independence and self-realization. Commonly, Chinese women too feel pressure to get married before the age of thirty, recognizing hidden costs and stringent criteria within a gendered discourse of power relationship: “A highly educated woman is not approved of by a man’s family.” In a society that places a primary value on family life, men also feel the burden of family pressure to marry younger and less well-educated women (Higgins and Sun 2007). Highly educated professional women are emerging as a “new social class” (Turner 2006) or a new minority that may not fit into the mainstream of Chinese society but is potentially marginalized from dominant aspects of family social life. Arguably, female individualization has emerged as a major current mode of identity formation that is now operating in transnational flows of desire, albeit at the expense of growing uncertainty, instability and personal responsibility. Refracted into various degrees and forms, a generalization about the women’s self-determination to move can be grounded in an understanding of the emergent signs, instances and cultures of female individualization. Many educated women in today’s age have a strong interest in embracing the idea of individualization and believing, or intellectually mastering to some extent, the notion of autonomous choice; it is up to the educated individual, who is surely assumed to have work freedom and wage-earning economic power, to be now free to choose for herself and must be responsible for her choices, to develop what she wants to do with her capacities, and to invent her life politics of selfactualization. This aspiration for self-development and self-actualization has become central to the new formation of female subjectivity in modern culture, as well as to the rise of transnational move. Does one ever move freely? The women’s seemingly free and voluntary forms of mobility with self-determined goals and decisions can be understood as an enforced process of journey taking on both possibilities and risks in an uncertain transnational world. There is a lack of fit, or a non-fit, between women’s higher education and its rewards in the socio-economic domains and cultural identity possibilities in China. Educational attainment is certainly an indicator of social status and prestige in Confucian society, but not necessarily linked to employment opportunities, occupational status and corresponding work identity, which seems a problem more acute for “women who are highly educated” (Turner 2006). Higher education is a necessary, even essential, but not sufficient condition to bring about women’s empowerment and control of lifestyle outcomes. Gender is not losing its determining influence today despite a remarkably high level of education. Traditional gendered norms, practices and expectations still powerfully operate in the public sphere of work with strengthening patterns of inequality, coupled now with the “return of a traditional, subordinate image of women that has paradoxically grown in much media and public discourse” (Wallis 2006). The resulting, unresolved contradictions of female individualization may be growing, prevail and become more apparent in the transnational flows of movement. There is a widespread desire to leave China, a consequence of

Female Individualization? 63 the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of the Chinese regime and the recognition of new possibilities in the global-local work sphere through the attainment of what Chinese urban women call a “golden certificate.” The seemingly unachievable individualization in the homeland— delaying marriage temporarily or repudiating the patriarchal marriage system not at the sacrifice of independence, aspiring work participation in the domestic or the international labor market, and pursuing personal autonomy and freedom, while at the same time respecting or not denunciating the importance of family kinship relations—has led to the current trend of transnational movement. Movement outwards, greater spatial freedom and the gendering of transnational space have become a growing and intrinsically female, rather than male, phenomenon well beyond the traditional confines of home. The practice of international study has emerged as an increasingly popular, selfresponsible life politics, albeit not necessarily without constraints, or the production of a reflexive biography to pursue imagined career trajectories, while recognizing the socio-economically and culturally bounded limitations to the application of individualization at home. The individualization process is being operated by a heightened reflexivity and an expansion of “disembedding mechanisms in a post-traditional order” (Giddens 1991). Significantly, such disembedding mechanisms include global flows of the media and mediated cultural domains that lift social interactions out from women’s local embeddedness and constraints of home traditions, and relocate them in an increasingly imaginary space and a transnational process of de-traditionalization in which a reflexive project of the individual self is being constructed.

CONSUMING THE WEST: IMAGINING AN INDIVIDUAL Despite the paradoxical outcomes and anxieties of where women actually stand regarding a move towards individualization, multiple ways of imagining such a possibility are widely available in mediated cultural domains with proliferating resources for the mobilization of self. The women’s desire to move is constituted by the contradictory socio-economic relations, as well as by the cultural-symbolic forms by which everyday life is lived out, re-thought and re-articulated in its intersection with the emergence of precarious individualized identities. This is frequently figured in their imagination of the West through the everyday media.

Everyday Media and Reflexivity: “The more I see it on the media, the more I think” I don’t like marriage pressure from the whole family, “When will you get married?” Everybody interferes in my life. . . . One time, I wore a

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women shoulder-revealing top and took a bus. Everybody stared at me! Nobody would make such interference in men (in Korea). I was once smoking on the street and nearly hit by an old man, “How can a woman dare to smoke on the street?” Life is under the eyes of society (in Korea). . . . In Western society, people choose any kind of life they want. The more I see it on the media, the more I think. If I go there, wouldn’t life be free? I imagined such a possibility. Something impossible to do in Korea seems possible there.

“The more I see it on the media, the more I think.” The media are implicated in the imaginative pull towards mobility and the emergence of fledgling individualized identities within Korean women’s socio-cultural landscape, public and private sites, where the multitude of quotidian constraints and expressions for a not-yet-realized-self take place in their lack of choice and control. Gender inequality and modes of “neo-Confucian governmentality to control the female body and self” (Kim 2003) remain active and surface through the surveillance of Korean society. While the Korean society does not encourage women to pursue different ways of being without external intervention, notions of a new self, an individualized individual, are effectively discovered and articulated within their mediated experience in a culture-specific manner. It can be argued that although young Korean women strongly desire to be unleashed from traditional norms and expectations, to escape the multitude of the quotidian constraints of their provincial existence, and to create a self-determining identity of their own, it usually turns out to be the case that the freely chosen game of identity is played out often within the women’s imagination and media talk (also see Kim 2005: 173–177). In a modern consumer society but with the high level of surveillance, consequently, these young women cannot be certain about how to place and present a liberated consumer body or a freely chosen consumer identity in neo-Confucian society, how to make sure that people around them accept this new choice and placement as normal and proper. Choices may appear to be free to take on, but are framed and highly constrained by structural forces and socio-economic and cultural boundaries that are still operating powerfully in contemporary everyday life. Identity is now said to become more mobile, free-floating, multiple and personal, increasingly mediated by cultural globalization in a contemporary world of movement and mobility, according to the (Western) discourse of identity and (post)modernity. Identity is not fi xed but created as an ongoing project of self, always in process. However, it should be importantly acknowledged that identity is also a “social, other-related, mutual recognition” (Kellner 1992: 141–142) as one’s identity is dependent upon recognition from others combined with self-validation of this recognition. In the society of modernity, there is still a structure of interaction with socially

Female Individualization? 65 defi ned and available roles, norms and expectations, among which one must choose and appropriate in order to gain identity in a complex process of mutual recognition. The modern self cannot be thought to become a fully autonomous agent, merely free to choose as an abstract cultural notion, but it is embodied in a whole series of regulatory practices in the hierarchically gendered society. The modern Korean society still shows fear and resistance towards Western individualization, and female individualization is perceived as much more problematic and deviant in the eyes of the society, where fundamentally “modernities are gendered” (Kendall 2001) and socio-economic structures rigidly defi ne what it means to be male and female. Young Korean women’s changing lifestyles and identity politics, pivoting on the notion of individualization, are still circumscribed and limited by the gendered boundaries of possible identities based on socially mutual recognition. Nevertheless, a yearning for a new identity and a new mode of life is continually expanding in the increasingly globalizing, mediated world of everyday life, which stimulates a high degree of reflexivity in close relation to lived experience and further interweaves its relevance structure into an ongoing process of the self (Kim 2005). This mediated experience becomes articulated self-reflexively in terms of the changing socio-economic shifts expected by educated Korean women, and these very expectations in light of consuming the symbolic West have led to more complex dilemmas and contradictions in a culture-specific manner. For instance: She (in Sex and the City) works only briefly at night, sitting alone and writing, and during the day, she meets friends, chats and laughs. It’s totally unrealistic. But Western people work much less, they would not work like us from morning until late evening (in Korea). They would have their own life. I don’t envy free sex, sleeping with any man you like, but envy the individual life (in Sex and the City). There is no self-sacrifice or social pressure. They get what they want. They get a career, their own life and are happy. . . . We are highly educated, but why can’t we live like that? This reflects how a US cultural text intersects distinctively with a sociological moment in Korean culture that continues to be a site of contestation. Its appeal is associated not primarily with sexuality and sexual identities, but with issues of work, economic freedom, women’s individuality and choice, although the world of work ironically disappears from their TV viewing. This irony might be an emotional resolution of a continuing contradiction in Korean women’s lives, or a wishful projection of opportunities for educated women in the labor market and the balance they wish to seek between work and life. The careerists on TV, in their “totally unrealistic” representation, are seen to be “happy.”

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women My job might be OK, my life might be OK compared to my mother’s. But I didn’t feel happy, couldn’t be satisfied with just that! I have bigger desires. . . . The more I got to know bigger things through the media, the more I thought about them. I asked myself, am I having a happy life? Why can’t I live like that? This (Korean drama) showed beautiful scenery of Cambridge and London where they met while studying. It’s a typical romance, an illusion made by TV. But I wanted to believe that could happen. Life would feel different there. . . . I imagined myself and anticipated to go.

Young Korean women appear to have more choices and capacities in life, higher education, more knowledge and better material provisions compared to past generations, yet this does not necessarily translate into greater happiness. Expectations of satisfaction have risen, affected by what other people have or an insatiable endless desire to have, which occurs through the intrusion of cultural Others into everyday consciousness via the media and has the consequence of causing both rising expectations and rising frustrations. The construction of an autonomous illusion (“I wanted to believe that could happen”), the ability to create an illusion that is known to be false but felt to be true, suggests that the knowing individual creates an existence for herself in her imagination, as both actor and audience in her own drama, thereby obtaining pleasure as she “constructs a more realistic anticipation of those events yet to come” (Campbell 1987). Considerable meaning is gained, not merely from the illusion, but from “imagining that illusion as actuality,” mobilizing the self towards a hoped-for-future. The knowing individual’s self-conscious engagement with, and symbolic exploration through, the media develops resources for self-imagining as an everyday social project that has a potential to transform everyday discourse of subjectivity and to mobilize the imagined self in actuality. This imaginative social practice as mediated by the everyday cultural consumption is grounded in deliberate agency and lived experience, generating multiple points of everyday reflexivity, self-monitoring, self-confrontation and selfanalysis (“am I having a happy life?”). Younger generations of educated women today, more knowledgeable than previous generations, can be characterized by a growing reflexivity and the imagining of more choices or a “choice biography against a normal biography” (Giddens 1991), constantly choosing, changing, competing and constructing an identity, albeit predicated upon structural constraints, thereby a sense of happiness is heavily driven by the situation of imagined global Others and a “heightened desire to keep up with other people” (Layard 2005). Young Korean women become increasingly aware of differences and changes in the socio-cultural position of women elsewhere in a wider world, while at the same time the process of their self-reflexive imagination in mediated popular culture can cause a sense of unhappiness and a prolonged decision to act upon.

Female Individualization? 67 Such self-reflexive imagination in an increasingly mediated world may not always present or lead to immediate action, but it is a historically accumulated quality through long-term exposure to the everyday media that can potentially form a powerful yet taken-for-granted, staging ground for the conduct of physical movement or a very firm orientation towards mobility. Though media consumption may not lead to dramatic social and identity change in the short run, and though the importance of the transformations generated by the everyday media in the long run are problematically obscured by the attention to shortrun immediate effects (Martin-Barbero 2003), people’s mundane changes, imagination and critical reflection triggered by the media and expressed in the practices of everyday life can be the basis of social constitution and new subject positions (Kim 2008). Significantly, media consumption is constitutive of the process of transnational mobility, female individualization and identity work, not to be seen as an entirely determining force but to be understood as a mediating cultural experience within an imaginative, seductive, yet highly selective and intentional, everyday social project of the self.

Intentionality of Media Consumption: “Something you like always affects you somehow” I always liked watching European films, beautiful images of cities, buildings, diverse cultures. They look better (than Japanese). Although real things might not be beautiful as the images I anticipated in my memory. I have gathered bits and pieces of images from TV, magazines, websites (in Japan). Something you like always affects you somehow. . . . You wait for that moment and go, at least once, to fulfil an endless desire to go. “Something you like always affects you somehow.” Bits and pieces of media cultures, self-constructed collage effects of images, have been elaborated in mediated memory in order to contain pleasure, an element of possibility or an “endless desire to go.” The media play an important role in inducing transnational mobility for many young Japanese (Fujita 2008). They have grown up much exposed to Western architecture, landscapes of cities, cultures and lifestyles, while reconfiguring intentionally a preferred view of the world and an ideal lifestyle they desire. The desire for the foreign permeates many Japanese women’s lives with a belief that the Western is better (Kelsky 2001). Such a belief resonates in the representation of the West in the Japanese women’s imagination: There is no one standard for all, the Western is open to diversity. In Japan, one standard dominates. If you don’t fit into this, you are seen as a failure like the Defeated Dog. . . . I wanted to move away and develop my own self.

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Those women (in Sex and the City) are old but still enjoy romance! They are over thirty-five or forty, have lots of wrinkles under make-up. How can women enjoy life at that age? They live like young women in their twenties. That’s unimaginable in Japan.

“There is no one standard for all.” “How can women enjoy life at that age?” The West is idealized in a desire for cultural diversity, an unfi xed heterogeneous self and a greater range of possible lives, which marks a contrast to their own living conditions as constrained by gender and age in Japan. The significance and the intentionality of media consumption cannot be separated from the particular socio-economic and cultural contexts within which they are embedded and which they are called into. In Japanese society that asserts a fairly homogeneous identity, despite the visible presence of ethnic differences (Lie 2001), everyone should conform to the classificatory status and role to which they are assigned (Skov and Moeran 1995). A desire to move away from such a collectivist self can be seen as one of the possible outcomes of the mediated relationships to the plurality of individual lifestyles and the process of disembedding from the hierarchically gendered society. Multiple forms of individualization are seen, encountered and imagined routinely within Japanese women’s lived experience as mediated through the complex prism of global imaginaries present in a contemporary condition of widespread “banal globalism” (Szerszynski and Urry 2002). Global TV dramas, popular women’s magazines, advertising, movies, the Internet and so forth and their massively wide-ranging global processes interplay and circulate as everyday backdrops, becoming new resources for reflexivity and simultaneous imagination. Today’s educated Japanese women are increasingly aware of the changing status of women around the world, multi-layered cultural identities and new possibilities, which is a consequence not only of the increased level of higher education but also of the proliferation and diversification of the contexts of mediated interaction and knowledge through everyday media consumption enabling and often prompting a reflexive interrogation of the women’s own experience of the living world. The intentional appropriation of transnational media culture can operate as a rare but important locus of female individualization and self-forming practice that is usually denied to Japanese women in other social spheres of the nation. Experience of transnational culture, both lived and mediated, is becoming thoroughly ordinary, at least to these young Japanese women of the middle-class, individualistic and networked, mobile and transnational group. Myriad suggestions of ways of being and living, particularly the individualized lifestyles, personal freedoms and self-expression, emancipatory and egalitarian relations are generally associated with the imagination of the West through the symbolic, reflexive and emotional encounters. Multiple mobilities, physical, imaginative and virtual, transcend geographical

Female Individualization? 69 social distance and transform the little worlds of locality into a far wider field of possibility with a specific utopian vision of cultural subjectivity. Young Japanese women’s daily experience of the transnational flows of the media impacts upon their migratory project and conceptions of the West not merely as distant exotics any longer, but actually as accessible ordinaries, “normal and possible lives and identities” (Fujita 2008). Japanese women’s magazines showed photo essays about experiences of travelling and living abroad, which inspired me a lot. . . . A thirtyyear-old TV announcer quit her job because old women are not considered suitable for that job in Japan. Her job was replaced by a younger woman. So she moved to Paris to study. . . . Her photo essay shows, Paris is beautiful! The beautiful illusion arouses such a good feeling that you want to be there. So sick and tired of office work, one day I decided to do nothing and watched this film Notting Hill. Romance, freedom, laugher, London parks are so green! I felt, go there! It makes you feel something good can happen there. . . . You know that is an illusion but you want to believe that illusion and go. The aestheticization and romanticization of Western cities is known to be false but felt to be true or suggestive of possibility, “something good can happen there.” A general awareness of the link between media consumption and physical displacement exists in the women’s emotional investment in the media at a level of utopian sensibility. It is intertwined with good feelings that the media embody and evoke; “utopian feelings of possibility” (Dyer 1992) acting as temporary answers to the specific inadequacies of society and showing what solutions feel like. The media certainly construct an illusion or an image of something better that Japanese women’s day-today lives do not provide. But it is the intelligently detectable illusion that is put to work by the knowing individuals with intentionality of mediated knowledge: “You know that is an illusion but you want to believe that illusion and go.” In modern social life, educated young women are generally expected to be far more aware of, and indeed they are perfectly capable of recognizing, the illusion or the manipulation presented in the capitalistic logic of global consumer media culture. But at the same time, it should be importantly recognized that a decisive, key feature of mediated experience is a kind of utopian realism, operating as a highly self-conscious means of organizing an alternative reality and constructing an imagined self in not only cognitive and rational terms but also emotional and affective modes at a level of utopian sensibility. This emotional investment in everyday popular media culture is of considerable significance to these young women, because it is a logical extension of their repudiation with, and in a sense resistance to, the

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limits of constraining local and national cultures in which they are embedded, and furthermore because it rearranges and crafts them in the utopian imagination that becomes distinctively pleasurable. Pleasure is not simply a quality of experience, but a deliberately self-illusioned quality of experience (Campbell 1987). An increasingly insistent and subtle interplay of mediation in everyday culture and collage-like characteristics of mediated experience can have the effect of imagining and reconfiguring the world not as a whole as what it actually is, but as a highly selective and intentionally utopian reconstruction of the world as what it should feel like. Enabled by this intentionality of media consumption practices, the knowing of the self and the making sense of the social construction of identity can be articulated and often invited, the situated self-reflexivity can operate with specific reference to the conditions of particular social groups, the search for a new and alternative self can be played out in the imagination, and the reflexive production of identity can powerfully take place, routinely and deliberately.

Power of Mediation: “The decision to believe the media is made by us” While watching Western movies (in China), I found them open to expressing self, there seemed more space for self-development. . . . When I see a good image that I really like, I want to believe that is true, although that may not be true in reality. The decision to believe the media is made by us. The media help me see things that cannot be seen in real life (in China). It’s a different kind of knowledge. . . . While noticing differences, more freedom and choice, I was curious to go and experience. It may sound silly, but I cannot deny the power of the media. “The decision to believe the media is made by us.” Media culture is a powerful pull factor in stimulating mobility, but this symbolic power of mediation is certainly recognized and intentionally allowed by educated Chinese women living within social constraints. This intentionality is at center stage in the way the media are actually used and the meaning is mobilized by the knowledge class. The significance of media consumption can be understood as a dynamic and transformative process, often involving active and intended engagement and generating unpredictable consequences (Kim 2008). The construction of transnational subjectivities among the Chinese is facilitated by the mobility of media images and the media images of mobility (Sun 2002). The flow of the media, as the global stage, is a significant mediator of knowledge and an extension of social imagery from which Chinese women can reconstruct their conceptions of

Female Individualization? 71 self, the preferred world of self-development, in relation to the lived realities of global Others. Their life looked so free (on DVD dramas). Is it true? I must see it myself. . . . Here in London I like walking along the Thames while listening to music and singing along. If I do so in China, people would look at me, “She is crazy!” I watched lots of movies. . . . Western men seem romantic, set the table, pull up a chair for a woman. Chinese men would not do so. . . . But I was surprised at sexual freedom in Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives. I wondered about real life. “Is it true? I must see it myself.” International travel is related to the increasingly mobile patterns of the everyday, taking on a new significance in the construction and narration of Chinese women’s life stories, mobility biographies. China’s young urban women are seen to be at the forefront of consuming international travel, computer, mobile phone and education abroad (Herald Tribune 2007). Travelling is apprehended as a “must see” practice, and part of what travelling means is affirmations of cultural differences acquiring a wider transnational meaning through the recognition and experience of differences in the realm of individual freedom and gender modality. Although the proliferation of the Western media in China has increased an awareness of greater freedom, attitudes to sexuality are much less open than in the West (Higgins and Sun 2007). The media constantly present the prisms of possible lives through which Chinese women can reflect upon their life conditions in a dialectics of imaginary closeness and distance. Whilst carrying a necessary degree of distance, Chinese women reflexively engage with the intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness that provides a critical condition for an awareness of the differences of global cultures, as well as for an imagined move towards individualization. This reflexive engagement with the everyday media transforms the ways in which young women conceive of their own positions and relationships in comparison to a variety of global cultural Others, through which they seek to displace unwanted influence, the regime of control and the undesirable identification with the practices of local cultures within these broader cultural shifts. This mediated experience is not simply to learn more about the world outside but also to realize a self through the transnational cultural encounters and the transgressing of existing cultural boundaries. What is of particular significance today is the extent to which these visual, material and mobile aspects of social life and the growing networks of mediated experience have created the various imaginary spaces of individualization, seeming suggestions of equality, personal liberation and self-expression, affecting the very perceptions of real life, its banality, its persistent constraints and new possibilities.

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The contexts of social knowledge, as well as the level of cultural resources for thinking about the self and society, are continually expanding and diversified in light of mediated experience. Discourses of global cultural Others routinely enter the everyday, merely presenting but sometimes powerfully evoking alternative forms of popular knowledge about the social world, culture and identity, albeit in a mediated fashion, which are unavailable in the local networks of knowledge and within the boundaries of immediate local experience. Contesting processes of identity construction and the reflexive storytelling of a mobile life are taking place at the critical intersection with the increasing proliferation of the media, offering multiple points of comparison and self-analysis for the reshaping of individual identity, and for the new placing of “narrative of the self” (Giddens 1991) in a wider world beyond the quotidian constraints of national community. Life in China is so competitive, crowded and stressful. People work so hard, try to survive and win in competitive society. . . . Bus is so crowded that you have to squeeze in. There is no space for your self. I started the every day with this crowded bus. . . . A bus ride in the West seemed fun, pleasant (on TV), people easily got on and got off. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in that environment? I saw this empty bus on TV a long time ago but still remember. . . . Here, London, bus is not crowded, most of time I can sit down and think. There is a space for thinking about my self. This mediated experience can powerfully create and allow a space for the self to emerge in the fluidities of transnational imagination, while engaging with a newly found curiosity and a search for a new self that can be played out and actualized. Different ways to conceive the self are emerging in more individualist terms, marked by an outward-looking reflexivity. Contemporary Chinese female identities are being shaped by cultural consumption within mediated transnational networks, thus complicating an understanding of women’s position within, and as belonging to, the nation (Ferry 2003). Chinese women have been subject to different imaginary social spaces, which enable them to reflect upon their lived experiences within multiplex and competing regimes of identification, expanding potentialities for self-invention that the divergent cultural experiences give rise to and mobilize. Overall this suggests that what drives and shapes the migratory aspiration is intimately linked to the long-term consumption of the symbolic West, proliferating media texts, images, new concepts and alternative lifestyles constantly transcending national borders and entering everyday consciousness. Educated middle-class and upper-class young women are becoming mobile transnationals in everyday life, de-territorialized in their physical, virtual and imaginary existence through regular travels and transnational media networks that simultaneously affect the meaning,

Female Individualization? 73 expression and experience of the self. Mediated experience involves the intended transgressing of national borders and cultural boundaries, becoming a powerful way of interrogating the very nature of identity itself, its continual de-construction and re-construction. In the mediated cultural spaces, the idea of female individualization is imagined in close relation to the women’s own society, social structures, everyday life conditions and their own lived experience shaped through confl icting, and often unresolved, interests and desires. The appeal of this Westward journey hinges on the precarious, individualized life trajectories that are both idealized by the popular media and articulated into the women’s own desire and imaginative compulsions towards mobility.

THE PRECARIOUS SELF: A CONCLUSION With a heightened self-awareness, educated women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the “intersections of personal biography and larger forces of social structures at work within everyday worlds” (Mills 1959) that are now operating transnationally, thus entering a much larger but precarious world at this particular historical and cultural juncture. From the 1980s onward, women in Korea, Japan and China have gained a remarkably high level of education and its commensurate expectations have become a driving motor in the women’s aspiration for work, economic freedom and imagined futures of individualization. However, they often experience the gendered labor market inequity setting limits on patterns of participation, women’s socio-economic position on the margins of work systems, hence the illusion of the language of choice or choice biography that the new capacities of higher education appear to promise. The limitations and contradictions of female individualization within the key parameters, particularly the enduring disjunctions between education and work, are continually salient yet unresolved, giving rise to transnational mobility as a temporary resolution and a form of defection from an expected normative biography. Signs of female individualization have been proliferating as a defi ning feature of contemporary modes of identity, albeit they appear precarious, untenable and ambivalent within the discursive regime of self, embodied in a whole series of regulatory practices in society, which does not put individualism at the heart of its culture. The notion of the self that is “free to choose” is not simply a cultural fact, but becomes an autonomous self when she is able to make life for herself in her everyday existence, to make herself the center of her biography. There are troubling signs of female individualization alongside an ambivalent extension of the transition from education to work/independent adulthood; thus the question as to whether and when to achieve such an autonomous subject position,

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separated from family economic resources, becomes a new arena of anxiety for young women. Gender is not losing its decisive influence; it is still in operation and people are more conscious of it. There is a lack of fit between the cultural shifts manifested in the transformation of women’s consciousness and the structural shifts largely unchanged in structural relations and systems, so the perceived gap between the cultural and the structural has become too wide for women to resolve within the nation they were born into. Women may have developed a different relation to the nation, since they are not represented by it and are generally in a subordinate relation to men; they may be quick to abandon it when it no longer provides strategies of survival and fulfilment (Kelsky 2001) and move the strategic locus of self in transnational flows. The media are central to the signs of emergent, transnationally dispersed cultures of female individualization, producing the alternative social, cultural and symbolic relations women wish to live within and to defi ne the kind of self they wish to become. Seeming suggestions of individualization are encountered, mediated through the global imaginaries that are present and often intentionally used as resources for reflexivity and self-imagining at a level of utopian sensibility. This intentionality provides a condition for an increased awareness of cultural differences and of women’s own positions in relation to global Others and new symbolic objects of identification and contestation. This increased awareness is not only the outcome of education, but also significantly the consequence of the proliferation of sites of mediated experience offering wider contexts of knowledge and images concerning different discourses outside local networks of experience. The mediated experience can have the effect of transforming women’s sense of self, of the world beyond and their imagined place in it, while mobilizing the sedimented always-already orientation towards displacement. The media are constitutive of transnational mobility, potentially compelling but taken-for-granted forces behind physical displacement. This suggests that the desire to move is affected, profoundly and subtly, by the micro symbolic dimensions where women evaluate, contrast and consider why and how to develop a migratory project in its intersection with the emergence of the precarious self, the new individualized identity. The desire to move is not constituted solely by the problematic socio-economic relations of higher education and labor market workforce and gendered cultural constraints, but also significantly includes the cultural-symbolic forms by which everyday life is lived out and re-articulated and by which a combination of push-and-pull elements is contested at social, cultural and personal levels. Even though a socio-economic form of individualization is not readily available to women, multiple ways of imagining such a possibility are widely open in mediated cultural domains within which precarious notions of female individualization have been nurtured and refashioned by

Female Individualization? 75 a proliferation of global images, narratives and new desires made available through everyday media culture. It therefore points to the important role of the media as a crucial mechanism and defi ning characteristic of contemporary transnational mobility, which distinguishes the present-day mediated migration from the movement of the past. A central source of the migratory imagination, inner mobility and actual physical displacement is the mass media offering a wide and constantly changing supply of possible lives and images of choices (Appadurai 1996). The unique and plausibly powerful capacity of the media, to affect the meaning making of everyday life experience and to trigger a heightened reflexive awareness of the world, has been recognized as being central to Asian transformations in the era of globalization (Kim 2005, 2008), especially at a time when the media landscape of Asia has rapidly been globalizing since the 1990s through deregulation and liberalization (Thussu 2007). The signifi cant place of the media in everyday life—ubiquitous, yet inconspicuous and deeply ingrained in what people take for granted as an essential component of contemporary experience—needs to be fully recognized and further integrated into an approach to understanding the current phenomenon of transnational mobility from the region of Asia. The symbolic dimensions of migration, displacement and mobility have often been neglected in an understanding of the subject of migration, its mechanisms, causes and consequences, but should be addressed within a broader perspective acknowledging the complex ways in which migration emerges from the symbolic contact between societies that are different in their socio-cultural organization, production and distribution of both economic and symbolic power (Sabry 2004). Commonly, images of wealth and free lifestyles in the West transmitted by the global media, whether these images and information are accurate or not, can act as an important factor stimulating migration in the transforming countries of the world (King and Wood 2001). The wider discursive process of media consumption encompasses and transcends geographical location and physical displacement, as it designates a range of desired and desirable identities, through which young people in repressive life conditions come to imagine themselves with reference to supervening social needs at home while being subject to different and competing regimes of subjectification (Mai 2004). When real-life situations in Asia are felt to be particularly constrained, mobility in a variety of capacities and forms becomes all the more important for those who are marginalized and alienated from social roles (Kim 2008). Women’s increasing role as consuming agents of media and cultural practices can affect the mundane gratification of their needs and the ability to escape expected life courses and rigid social controls that limit individual choices and actions to be made, or often deny women any opportunity to act on their own. Media consumption can be understood

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as a key cultural formation creating the emergence of a precarious, individualized identity in the new transnational spaces of desire, albeit highly uncertain and ambivalent, while women themselves come to know that such transnational spaces away from home are not necessarily without normative constraints and dilemmas in the lived experience of diaspora. This will be the focus of the proceeding chapter exploring the precarious ways in which the diaspora is actually lived and experienced.

4

Diaspora Lived and Experienced

BANAL RACISM: “IT’S THE EVERYDAY LITTLE THINGS THAT MATTER” What are the actual conditions of women’s transnational lives? Do women fi nd their transnational lives progressive or emancipatory? The motivations of Korean women to move abroad are related to the gendered socioeconomic and cultural conditions of society that persist and continue to structure labor market outcomes and lifestyles; particularly, the attainment of higher education does not necessarily increase Korean women’s work opportunities and the subsequent role of work in developing a new mode of identity formation—individualization (for details, see Chapter 3). Women expect a possibility for self-exploration and repositioning in transnational connections and momentary diversion. Yet, simultaneously, the culturally situated nature of narratives reveals what is still normative in Korea—marriage—representing a microcosm of societal rules. I can forget about my age (31). In Korea nobody is interested in me, but here (in London) people seem interested in Asian women regardless of age. . . . Every summer I go home but face the family pressure, “When will you marry?” Unlike Korea, work culture seems feminized, possible for married women to continue a career (in London). There are wonder girls or super girls, but no wonder women in Korea. Once married with children, women cannot pursue self-fulfi lment through work. . . . I sometimes pick up my landlady’s child from school and see daddies. Do they not work? This UK society may not see them as failures. There are possibilities for women. I am determined to make my own life. This suggests that Korean women within a transnational field have not deviated far, nor been liberated from the central modalities of marriage and family. Work is an integral source in the shaping of identity, but the lack of opportunity for meaningful work in Korea is most strongly recognized

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(“wonder girls or super girls, but no wonder women in Korea”). Self-reflexivity emerges in encountering Others and living with difference, constructing transnational frames of reference beyond the national standard. Diasporic consciousness creates new maps of desire and self-determination, the individual both as a self and as a will (“determined to make my own life”). Most Korean women embrace yearned-for concepts of individualization, self-fulfilment through work, however uncertain and insecure. Migrant women may use a transnational space as a rare and effective way to avoid conformity to normative gender roles, implicit neo-Confucian codes and regulatory obstacles to their individualization, in an effort to create self-identity without the shackles of home traditions in an extended process of reflexivity and a seemingly open and seductive culture of a world city. Disembedded from the gendered identity and everyday regulatory practices, women try to negotiate their way around out of the initial familial and social position, and hope to fi nd opportunities for a more self-fulfilling and independent lifestyle. Diasporic consciousness develops a new capacity to consider many little cultural differences in everyday encounters and to reflect on who they are in relation to cultural Others, while the increasingly self-steered phenomenon produces the disproportionate cost making them remain vulnerable to the unpredictable and constraining aspects of diasporic conditions. The world city of the multiplicity of Others is a place that is “open to everyone who has their own caravan and money to pay the rent” (Bauman 2001), but also a highly ambiguous place where every decision becomes a personal risk and the state of transnational existence is far from liberating. I will be always a foreigner, though having lived here for seven years. . . . I often moved room because of fleas, noisy neighbour, water leakage, blocked toilet that never got fi xed. Nobody cares. . . . People think moving is a good thing, freedom. But why bother to move if life is so good? I cannot articulate this repressive feeling but feel clearly. . . . It’s the everyday little things that matter. Racism is not like hitting but staring or just ignoring. Is it because we are Korean, Asian? We imagined England would be a country of gentlemen. I feel confused about racism, superiority over Asians. I cannot express but feel clearly. They rarely say “sorry” even though things are clearly their fault. The city space is beautiful if we don’t have to deal with people. . . . Life here in London is vulnerable and lonely, not colourful. When a problem (verbal assault) happened in a shop, I wanted to call somebody for help but suddenly realized I don’t even have a close friend to call here. It’s like proud B&B culture—people will always come to the city of Buckingham Palace and leave. It signals to foreigners, “If you don’t

Diaspora 79 like it, go back to your country.” I will never belong. . . . I do all on my own, feel so alone. It’s inevitable to invent a life as an observer. While living here, I am physically close but mentally distant. Korean women’s transnational lives are often described in terms of a struggle for articulation as a tool for progressive practice and emancipatory politics. This experiential lack of articulation with the yet-to-be-heard voices precludes the deeply felt tensions, while repressing a complex and many-sided translation of how the banal experience of the everyday (“little things”), thoughts and sentiments shape and defi ne the meaning of marginal discourses, different conditions of being and becoming. Ambiguous and subliminal forms of everyday racism (“not like hitting but staring or just ignoring”), inferiorization and alienation at an interpersonal level can be shocking when England was imagined to be different, cultivated (“country of gentlemen”). Racism is a sign of rejection that one will never belong (“always a foreigner”). In a changing Europe, built on economic models of mobility and integration, mobile transnationals appear not to face discrimination; however, seductive world cities like London are also national capitals, which exclude even the most privileged of foreigners on the “human dimension” (Favell 2008). Diasporic space is not primarily a sociable space to valorize, connect and exchange with Others, but a space of struggle to deal with societal insecurity and a tacit acceptance of individuated practice (“all on my own”). An observational and indifferent predisposition (“physically close but mentally distant”) emerges within lived and mediated experience at a symbolic level (for details, see Chapter 5). Asian students move abroad hoping to realize the liberal ideals of modern Western education in university, in which individuals can exit their comfort zones to realize their full potential regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality; however, these liberal ideals are often compromised by their experiences of racial segregation, the subtle day-to-day workings of race, stereotypes and the complexity of racial politics in everyday life, despite its paradoxical celebration of diversity and relative silence on race (Abelmann 2009). Factors such as the perceived racial discrimination and information received prior to the foreign sojourn, as well as the number of friends and friendship networks during the period of study abroad, significantly affect foreign students’ life satisfaction; furthermore, it is worth noting that the importance of these factors differs markedly for students from Asia and Europe due to the hierarchies of racial relations in operation (Sam 2001). Korean women in this study struggle to make sense of the intersected and possibly differential impacts of racism in differently racialized encounters, while negotiating and seeking new articulations of racial and ethnic identities in diasporic contexts that are already defi ned and hierarchically imagined by certain order of racial relations. Many women encounter an ambiguity about various and implicit forms of racism, the cultural logic of racism in relation to their own identity positioning, and how to interpret

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their diasporic existence that fi nds acceptance, belonging and respect difficult to attain: “Is it because we are Korean, Asian?” Confusions, struggles and painful silences continue to operate in the lack of articulation and social support. Reflection upon the subjective ethnic experiences of migration and displacement in ambiguous social situations of everyday life manifestly present unresolved tensions in conflict with banal racism (“everyday little things”), implicitly violent communication and adversity, disrespect, isolation and loneliness (“feel so alone”), as well as a necessary need to develop empowering friendship networks, intimacy and meaningful relationships both within and outside the confi nes of institutional zones and new social sites. Racism in its multiple forms of discrimination is a very personal and profoundly affective experience in diasporic everyday life, intersected with emotionally charged moments that are felt with sharp clarity but often defy description and legitimate representation (“cannot express but feel clearly”). The prevailing national cultures of the host societies marked by mundane “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995), alongside institutionalized racism and government-sponsored policy interventions, can affect processes of global mobility and the extents of willing integration or resisting non-integration in different ways. These powerful modalities can simultaneously create myriad and subtle forms of social exclusion, and crucially set “internalized limits on the vision and imagination of potentially mobile subjects” (Smith and Favell 2006). Fundamentally, configurations of power differentiate diasporic groups internally as well as situate them in relation to one another in uneven power, hierarchical order and representation (Brah 1996). The experiences of new migrant communities in today’s age, including those of the highly educated and skilled, relatively empowered, global knowledge diasporas, continue to demonstrate that racism is still endemic and systemic, not only problematically a thing of the powerful colonial past. Global inequalities and the exclusionary workings of race and ethnicity apparently concern and affect the relatively less disadvantaged migration of the higher social classes, even the most hyper-mobile transnational elites of the upper and the middle classes. Their privileged social class position and higher knowledge level does not necessarily prevent exclusion, vulnerability and precariousness in other ways since they can still be easily racialized or ethnicized negatively. The emergence of new racisms, subtle yet pervasive, and of new racialized identities in a multicultural world city of Europe with some form of imperialist history, such as London, is often a reflection of and perhaps a result of “fear of the unknown” that may be outrightly and unreasonably hostile to foreigners of any description (Menski 2002). As a consequence, the sojourning attitude as a perpetual foreigner (“will be always a foreigner”) is very common among these migrant women in this study in their mundane experience of social exclusion, with distinctive challenges more than opportunities for interaction with, and willing incorporation into, the mainstream of host society or even the

Diaspora 81 self-claimed multicultural cosmopolitan city, since diasporic individuals and ethnic minorities are frequently reminded of their non-belonging status. Racial discrimination makes subordinate groups withdraw to their ethnic enclaves in order to avoid hostility from the white dominant groups of the mainstream society (Li 1988), or come to engage in social and symbolic closure that may further lead to sustained and durable inequality in racial relations. The consequence of the lived experience of exclusionary practices in diasporic existence often means self-conscious distancing themselves from the mainstream society, and instead, ordering their own lives on their own terms with their own communication channels, mediated networks and cultural resources as a self-conscious choice of a coping strategy, while simultaneously producing new identity positions on the organization of the self that may paradoxically reinforce self-exclusion (for details, see Chapter 5).

PARADOX OF CHOICE: “BECAUSE IT IS MY CHOICE, MY RESPONSIBILITY” I am not here (in London) just for study but for life experience. I am having a self. . . . In Japan what it means to be a woman in her twenties and thirties is different. An unmarried, childless woman is called “Defeated Dog” (title of a bestseller book), a loser to the eyes of society. . . . Life here is not constrained by age or marriage. There seems more freedom for the choice of life. It may be better to live here. People in Japan judge by the academic title, “What university?” I was not from a top university. . . . Here (in London) I feel I can perform my self. I can even do a cleaning job without feeling inappropriate. I work part-time to meet people and practise English. Similarly in Japan, the perception of education has become “consumption,” a thing to be consumed by women without any expectations as to the consequences, and women are willing to be risk-takers in a de-normalization of gendered roles through transnational relocation in order to fi nd an individual and independent self (for details, see Chapter 3). Women reflect on gendered role expectations of the female life course, including Japan’s prevailing public discourses on unmarried women marked as a “Defeated Dog” or “dangerous gadfly” (Japan Times 2006) in the eyes of conservatives, who worry about the nation’s declining birth rate of 1.29. New experience of the world city seems crucial in shaping the perception of freedom of choice, self-realization and individuality (“having a self”) that are unlikely to emerge in the distant national rules and regulations. To contemporary Japanese women, this turn to the foreign/West and their various investments to internationalize mean, fi rst and foremost, an “individual project”

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(Kelsky 2001). The endless search for sources of self, individuated forms and conditions of existence in the world of many differences, encourage Japanese women to perform different selves and make themselves the center of their own elective biography. This performance, inflected by gender, age, race and class, is a new process of self-discovery and identity formation. This kind of transnational movement is therefore regarded primarily as a new and wider ongoing project of self-exploration and self-formation, an effective disembedding process that places an enormous emphasis on the development and maintenance of the individual self. The shaping of life politics has become explicitly a matter of choice as well as a personal risk for these Japanese women inhabiting in a larger and unpredictable transnational world, where the frames of reference and positioning for their lives and identities are not constructed on a national basis. It seems particularly the case that Japanese internationalist women are attracted to higher education abroad, not mainly for educational reasons but importantly for selfdiscovery and self-development in their chosen life politics, sometimes with little serious academic preparation, and therefore their somehow adventurous movement is best seen as a “personal journey with its substantial challenges” (Taylor 2008). A popular representation of the West in Japanese women’s imagination is an image of personal freedom, individuality and liberation without any discrimination that may be expected to empower all individuals and migrants, including Japanese women themselves (Yamashita 2008). While Japanese women may enjoy greater autonomy in a newly found place, they also suffer in silence greater burdens, dilemmas of choice and personal responsibility. My university tutor said, “Do you think you are here because you are smart?” That implied tuitions. Seminar is frustrating when English speakers dominate. Totally excluded, I wonder why I am here. . . . People’s knowledge of Japan is narrow. When I fi rst met a British family, they said, “You don’t look like a Japanese woman.” What did they expect? Geisha in kimono? I just showed a smile. . . . I cannot complain about life here because it is my choice, my responsibility. They (British) just leave us alone if we are not good at English. They do not make an effort to be a friend or be kind to Asian students, in general. . . . I sometimes feel bad about not being able to express well in English. It affects my self-esteem, who I am. No quality food, no caring for others’ feelings. . . . There are differences between us and them. . . . I stop fighting because it was my choice to move here, because my English is not good enough. I cannot even express frustration to outsiders as they say, “You live in attractive London!” My friend depressed in Paris hears the same, “You live in Beautiful Paris!”

Diaspora 83 The choice is burdened by responsibilities, ambiguities and hidden pains that cannot be expressed in the dominant language; not being able to articulate is not liberating. Disarticulation and unsympathetic response is the predicament that they never fully resolve in daily struggles of living in a world city, and coping with its glorified myth and the (mis)perceptions of outsiders. Problems and anxieties of exclusion and foreignness are often experienced as individual faults or weaknesses (“because my English is not good enough”) and individual responsibilities (“because it is my choice, my responsibility”). This tendency shapes a diasporic consciousness that individuals are responsible for their own choices and any unspeakable situations they happen to face and inhabit. Some tolerate mere presence in an academic community, where a mutual exchange and cross-cultural understanding is undermined by a “narrowly economic view of foreign students” (Habu 2000). Others are concerned with politeness and avoidance of confl ict by constructing a careful tactic (“smile”). Many reflect on why Japanese women are seen as exotic docile subjects, “paragons of femininity as in the geisha,” perhaps because the image of Japanese and East Asian communities is one of “invisibility” or “sub-humanity” in the absence of their diverse representation in the voyeuristic obsessions of the UK media culture (Aoki 2006). Points of difference are defi ned and continue to be deep in Japanese women’s mediated experience (for details, see Chapter 5). Overall, it can be recognized that Japanese internationalist women may have too much ability to realize their potential in the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of Japanese society, however, gendered stereotypes and discrimination as well as implicit racism in a desired Western destination are as equally real as experienced in their homeland. Also, it should be recognized that the alienated feelings of Japanese internationalist women are not different from those of other Asian migrants in their various diasporic existence, who tend to feel that they will never be accepted or integrated into the mainstream of host society and form a subjective sense of belongingness, not at least due to their physical difference and typical Asian appearance regardless of their economically privileged class status (Kawakami 2009). An irony apparent in educational globalization today is that it has helped to give new educational opportunities and more choices for self-development to economically privileged middle-class and upper-class women from Asia, but it has also created an international recruitment market in which some higher education institutions view foreign students mainly in financial terms as a “source of revenue” (Habu 2000). Concerns from an Asian student perspective usually include a perception of being treated as “cash cows,” who are wanted only for their tuition fees, and an isolating quality in such “commodified lives” within academic communities makes any meaningful affi liation and a sense of belongingness difficult to achieve (Kell and Vogl 2008). Transnational higher education in a competitive global economy model can encourage new forms of racial and social differentiation

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and exclusion. Passivity and compliance are underlying general assumptions that position foreign, particularly Asian, students as subordinate to the social norms of the host communities in which they live and study. Expectations operating within these assumptions are that Asian students should be the same but they are subject to differential and discriminatory practices that identify them as different, and perpetually foreign. Reflective narratives of foreign students in the classroom as an “existential space” (Burnapp 2006) can intimately reveal their view of themselves, their differentiated sense of self and identity as an Other in relation to many global cultural Others surrounding them, and can create their varying feelings of identification or dis-identification with the bounded spaces of the host communities within which they are segregated and marginalized. Often, confusions and self-questioning (“wonder why I am here”) as well as the repeated self-blame and simultaneous self-acknowledgement (“because it is my choice, my responsibility”) become ineluctable in the paradox of choice. The consequence of the choice is far from clear but remains ambiguous; whether or not, and to what extent, the choice of turning to higher education overseas and of having access to global knowledge gives Japanese women a positive self-image and a certain degree of empowerment and independence, “greater power to take control over their lives” (Ichimoto 2000), as decisively intended in their initial movement. While Japanese women may appear to enjoy personal freedom in a world city, the choice remains unavoidable as a “life necessity and duty” (Bauman 2008). The challenges that they face in reacting to a different place and a different language are intimately linked to self-representation and self-expression, although many of the Japanese women tend to adopt the self-blame and tacit acceptance of whatever consequences, in order to avoid direct, or potentially violent, confrontation of these problems temporarily in self-confronting diasporic conditions. Even in a racially problematic and discriminated situation, where they are not treated like a normal human being, some Japanese students tend to rationalize such treatment in terms of their English language handicap (Nishimuta 2008), and therefore, a personal responsibility. When trying to make sense of their diasporic lives, these Japanese women generally view and deal with social inequalities, their everyday troubles and predicaments, worries and crises in light of individual failings and cultural differences, and by doing so, their private experiences and the permanence of such social inequalities may continually remain invisible and intact. Points of difference are defi ned in all sorts and dimensions of categories—from everyday food to caring and the structure of feeling—to the extent that Japanese women’s repeated emphasis on differences between “us” and “them” at the internal level in line with social exclusion, relations of power and domination continues to widen such differences, while simultaneously framing the transnational cultural experience in terms of the distinctive Japanese cultural nature or the “Japanese cultural scenario”

Diaspora 85 (Taylor 2008). This insistent differentiation and nationalizing tendency can lead in many cases to the transnational encounters and their difficult situations at odds with the academic and socio-cultural expectations of the host communities of the West. Potentially, this can further question and undermine “transnationalism, the nature and form of migrant multiple ties, interactions and links with two or more national locations” (Vertovec 2004). The general tendency to characterize the practices and identities of transnational migrants as “counter-narratives of the nation” (Bhabha 1990) may turn out to be implausible; instead, unintended consequences on identity dimensions can be deeply implicated in, and therefore better understood by, the uneven and constraining nature of a transnational social field, as well as the discursive limits of global cultural subjectivity (for details, see Chapter 5).

GENDERED GLOBAL SUBJECT: “BECAUSE I AM A CHINESE WOMAN?” I enjoy visiting museums freely and walking around parks in London, open space where I can sit down and think about my self. . . . China is full of people, no empty space in parks, buses, wherever you go. Time all for my self, totally belonging to me! In China I need to devote time to the family, relatives, go to weddings for those I don’t even know. I need to care about how others see my family. . . . Here (in London), no pressure to marry before thirty. My parents always ask over phone, “When will you fi nd a man?” I will do it myself. . . . But I worry about getting a job after study, if I can have my own life. A generalization about the Chinese women’s decision to move can be grounded in an understanding of the transnationally dispersed sites, instances and cultures of female individualization (for details, see Chapter 3). Visions of a good life and freedom are embraced and explored in the open space of a world city with reference to international standards, lifestyles and comparisons that go beyond national frameworks. This implies a shift from a Chinese collectivist standard and social self, emphasizing “interpersonal relationships and socio-emotional labor for the extended family” (Lee et al. 2002), towards an individualistic “do-it-myself” biography through education, work and self-development. It is a decisive shift towards a caring self (“all for my self”), a private self that is less bound by traditional roles of women as markers of communal duty and self-sacrifice (“how others see my family”) intersected with gender, class, family and marriage. In neo-Confucian Asian societies, the private self fi nds no space for self-expression and actualization of its ideological thoughts and orientations (Kuah-Pearce 2006). Displacement over such long distances, however,

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also suggests the unavoidability of familial pressure and conformity, even while living in the new ambit of individual freedom of choice. The women’s future in work is considered to be the most important and enduring source of self-identity and individualization. A decisive feature of the diasporic consciousness is thus a shift from a normative standard biography to an individual work biography through the women’s own choices and individual performances. Work is seen to be a driving force for transnational mobility and individualization, since limited and far less secure work conditions at home constrain the options for self-development and quality of life. Generally, what Chinese women like about London include museums, green parks on bright days, open spaces and personal freedom that are closely associated with their imagined lifestyles and the cultural images of a world city that had been formed through the popular media prior to their foreign sojourn. Surprisingly though, like these Chinese women, many Chinese migrants living in London are said to like the weather, preferring the temperate climate to China’s more extreme temperatures (Lam et al. 2009). Individual Chinese women attempt to subvert and free themselves from the gendered locations and the social modalities of gendered power that previously governed and regulated their lives, and instead, they are now in a position to rework and engage with a process of embedding themselves in a new transnational social field that appears to suggest almost unlimited freedom, individual choice and fulfi llment. But Chinese women’s choice often confronts trouble, tensions and contradictions in struggling to achieve a certain level of self-expression and fulfi lment. I still cannot express myself in English. This hurts me. . . . I don’t fight racism, though it happens, because I’ve got a new habit of thinking it’s always my problem, always blame me, because of the language. People have very low expectations of Chinese women. Working parttime (in London) I hear, “You’ve done a brilliant job!” It’s a too simple task for me with an MA degree. . . . A top-class Beijing woman is suddenly a second-class. . . or becoming a nobody, I am afraid. People at the workplace are mostly European, and they do not value a Chinese woman or my country China. Things related to China are lower than European in their judgement. . . . My life back home Beijing was lively with friends, busy with social activities and invitations. Life in London is simple and isolated. I will never belong here. I live with my boyfriend (white British). His mother says, “Take care of my son, you are so lucky!” His friends are similar. From their views, I am so lucky to marry a British man, I should feel happy, not complain about anything. . . . I never cooked in China as my mother did, but now cook dinner two times—Chinese for me, Western for him. I thought

Diaspora 87 Western men would cook. Is it because I am a Chinese woman? I am confused . . . do I really love him? Everyday encounters and communication in the dominant language sometimes disturb ontological security and confidence (“always my problem, always blame me”), intensifying Chinese women’s vulnerability to social marginality and ambiguous forms of alienation. Employment conditions and interpersonal relations with unbearably low expectations (“you are so lucky!”) tend to confi ne them to a socio-economically and psychologically inferior status (“second-class”). Those in wage labor often experience the racialization of the global economy, assigned to low job positions because of the devaluation of a place-bound ethnic identity, which does not have the potential for liberating Chinese migrants but, rather, widens transnational inequality. Racialized dimensions of labor inequality intersect with other structures of subordination to shape the lived experience of gendered global subjects in interracial intimacy with hierarchical worldviews associated with a particular national culture (“because I am a Chinese woman?”) that generate the new regulation of race and romance, the tension and ambiguity expressed within it (“do I really love him?”). It indicates that, while interracial marriage emerges as an important means of producing transnational networks and relationships, it also produces unarticulated forms of gender inequality and gendered global subjects to be negotiated as normative constraints. It is the dialectical engagement wherein Chinese women position themselves and understand both the limited social reality and the limited symbolic, mediated relations (for details, see Chapter 5). The actual impact of migration on gender, and on gendered relations of women living closely with global Others, may unsettle and challenge to a significant extent any positive assumption that these global women of the relatively privileged social class, by virtue of the migration act in itself, enjoy gender equality and better social status and therefore more empowerment and control over their lives, than in their country of origin they had left. However, it should be importantly recognized that gender relations are not necessarily transformed or moving forward progressively through transnational migration, since it is highly likely that gender inequality is structured on a transnational level and these Chinese women face many of the same constraints, re-enunciated gender roles and the re-construction of gendered global subjects across national borders. It may be the case that gender relations for these global women from China, as well as from Korea and Japan, in effect remain unchanged in their transnational lives, similarly facing a potentially subordinate feminization of roles imposed upon them, and sometimes contesting an unequal, gendered domestic division of labor and caring, unexpected household burdens, cooking and so on within the closed doors of the private contexts. As an unintended consequence, gendered transnational domestication can be reconstituted, powerfully enacted by the intersecting mechanism of racial, ethnic, national and

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sexual hierarchies, although its degree is contingent upon the specific relations and contexts of interactions with global Others. Chinese women’s distinctive experience in their diasporic existence is thus concerned with enduring control and domination from both racialized and gendered patriarchal social relations, reconstituted gender-role performance, assumed female subordination and ambiguity. A profound paradox is evident in the existing and perhaps more rigid gender-national hierarchies within a profoundly transnational setting. Chinese women’s both racialized and gendered status does not easily become free from marginalization but becomes twice marginalized. Lived social contexts of migrant women’s intimate lives and experiences can expose the contradictory nature of diasporic existence, which they come to learn in its complexity and must somehow reconcile for a coherent sense of identity in displacement. This paradoxical, highly ambivalent and often painful experience inevitably engages in a dialectic of self-conscious opposition and resistance to the hegemonic logic of globally structured inequalities, creating unintended consequences on the formation of an ethnic national identity in a contesting transnational social field (for details, see Chapter 5). For highly educated and skilled migrant women, the work environment is at least meant to function well as a rare space where human capital is recognized and convertible. Here, too, however, transnational migration has costs more than possible benefits, since highly educated and skilled mobile transnationals, due to their foreign status, can often face glass ceilings, discrimination and work positions “not commensurate with education, experience or professional attainment” (Smith and Favell 2006). This is a particularly pronounced case for highly qualified migrant women from non-OECD countries; many migrant women with university degrees work in jobs that usually require a high school education or less in OECD countries (Badkar et al. 2007). Existing studies also suggest that transnational migrants’ employment outcomes vary substantially and crucially shaped by ethnicity, nationality and birthplace, pointing to the very cultural specificity of human capital and its decisive stereotypes in operation, alongside language ability and credential recognition. In a similar vein, Chinese women tend to have greater difficulty in having their education and professional qualifications recognized and rewarded accordingly, and even if employed, they are likely to be over-qualified for the job they undertake and often encounter stereotypical limitations in advancing furthermore. Wasted human capital and knowledge skills can occur frequently as ethnic minority migrants end up accepting work positions below their qualification level in the force of an unequal and racialized global economy, to the detriment of both individual migrants and nations. This tendency implies that transnational migration can lead to dramatic “downward mobility” in its consequence, moving from a highly educated and skilled status to less skilled, low paid or systematically underpaid, low status, precarious forms of paid work; in particular, women’s perceived loss

Diaspora 89 of status and of social recognition of spatial global career paths. Transnational inequality and the racialized structural barriers to achievement lead to a drop in job levels, wages and socio-economic power, thus resulting in a status change in women’s diasporic lives, overall. Chinese women’s perceived status changes, or is felt to be changing dramatically, from a relatively privileged elite socio-economic position at home to a second class of a global woman, one of the ordinary or below that is not even recognizable. The bitter experience of discrimination and declining social status marked by racialized identities, national hierarchy and gender inequality is seen to be very common among many Asian migrants, and female migrants in particular (Kawakami 2009). This can further evoke a fear of the loss of self-identity (“becoming a nobody”) recognizing a precarious and even deteriorated status, or a world upside down in an uneven transnational social field. Any rosy and libratory perspective (e.g., Bhabha 1994; Beck 2000), which tends to valorize transnational forms of life or assume that transnational migration of the educated and skilled subordinate groups leads to personal empowerment and overall improvement in life politics or the globalization of biography, may not easily and smoothly apply here. Chinese women’s lived experiences do not conform neatly to the prevailing theory celebrating a progressive dimension of transnational mobility while obscuring larger relations of domination, unequal power and unspeakable exclusion in the everyday diasporic conditions.

UNSPEAKABLE EXCLUSION: A CONCLUSION Korean, Japanese and Chinese women on the move in this study represent contemporary manifestations of the increasingly diversified, regular, sustained, knowledge-intensive phenomenon of transnational mobility. They are emblematic of modern sojourners—nomadic, transient, risk-taking and multiply displaced subjects, with a possibility of permanent settling. This move may appear to be a new defi ning signifier of change or a libratory locus of individuated freedom and choice in the seductive spaces of a world city. But commonly, the lived experience of diasporic conditions is full of deep tensions, existential predicaments and limitations within the larger relations and structures of transnational inequality, racial hierarchy, marginalization and exclusion. This remains largely unresolved, unarticulated in the dominant language, and creates a defensive position of non-belonging and being at a distance from the host society. A fantasy of belongingness or imagination of home is an ineluctable consequence of the way in which subtle processes of unspeakable exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced in the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday lives (for details, see Chapter 5). Embedded in the individuated liberal West or the so-called “liquid individualized society,” where individuals must plan, produce, stage and

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cobble together in order to accomplish their biographies themselves (Bauman 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), transnational Asian women in this study experience new and greater burdens of choice and dilemmas of personal responsibility alongside increased personal freedoms, as well as global structures of domination and unspeakable inequality of racial relations. Unequal gender relations, too, present emotional and psychic costs in their heightened ambiguity in the most personal locus of interaction, the often hidden domain of interracial intimacy and marriage choice as well as of work. Although this type of transnational migration of the educated middle-class and upper-class women from Asia may be seen as a supposedly gender-liberating act possessing a broader range of choices than in their single national location of origin, various dimensions of women’s transnational experience do not easily transcend intersectional hierarchies of gender, race or ethnicity but continue to frame the limits of their emancipation and socio-economic status. These difficulties and dilemmas, which often cannot be articulated and translated in the dominant language, have thus felt far from transgressive or emancipatory, while unwittingly masking and mystifying the unspeakable forms of exclusion. Racially hyper-visible and invisible, Asian migrant women of the relatively privileged classes face ambivalent challenges in their ongoing yet frequently uneven transnational encounters, socially and emotionally, which is not necessarily free from the strengthening patterns of subordination and vulnerability. Globally structured inequalities and the perpetually unresolved vulnerability in everyday life can lead to a form of “transnational fragility of lifestyle” (Smith and Favell 2006). Indeed, the vulnerability of foreign students and of their mental and physical well-being is widely evident (Kell and Vogl 2008), yet the issues of health and social security concerning this group of transnational migrants remain relatively under-explored. Asian migrant women are subject to various forms of social marginality, vulnerability and possible exploitation in personal and intimate relationships, domestic household arrangements, employment relations and social conditions, where many migrant women possess little formal protection, few legal provisions and entitlements to preserve their right equal to that of citizens in the host society. Not only the lack of empowering friendship networks in everyday diasporic lives, but also the typical situation “without the knowledge of anyone in power and authority” can crucially affect social security and a subjective sense of safety, thus particularly restricting the daily activities of migrant women as independent social agents (Lam et al. 2009). A major benefit of transnational migration for females, especially for the more educated and skilled, is seen to be behavior and lifestyle change usually generated by living in a different economic and social environment that can have positive effect on gender equity (e.g., Rallu 2008). However, the lived experience of Asian women in this study would reveal in sharp contrast to the general assumption that the more educated and highly skilled

Diaspora 91 migrants may face fewer problems, trouble-free movement and the least barriers linked to social exclusion, particularly the central issues of racial discrimination, gender inequity and subordination, economic exploitation and persisting limitations from host communities than do other types of less privileged migrant actors, the less well-educated and less skilled of lower social classes. This recognition calls for a need to consider the social, economic and cultural impact of transnational migration and displacement embedded in everyday life, as well as the mundane and situated character of the diaspora. The evidence in a specific context suggests that there are social groups for which migration, despite their qualification levels and embodied or accumulated cultural capital, may not allow them to improve their socio-economic positions within the different characteristics of migratory regimes, social conditions and dominant cultural expectations of the receiving society they interact with, and that the socio-economic status of highly qualified Asian migrant women can even have ambivalent and possibly negative consequences. While Asian women’s transnational movements can indeed be suggestive of potentially transformative and transgressive acts, they are by no means always progressive or emancipatory in their migratory consequences. The very constraining nature of the diaspora in lived reality can challenge a privileging logic of mobility in Western epistemology, the inflationary tendency and the widespread discourse to conceive of border-crossing by marginal Others or subaltern groups and their diasporic existence and the ontological condition of the diasporic imagination as something intrinsically progressive, innovative and performative as well as more fluid and porous forms of life (Clifford 1992; Bhabha 1994). A tendency to celebrate a performative character and an expression of a fluid or flexible life politics can be countered and questioned by those migrants who have the differential power over the conditions of their lives and thus experience the very real difficulties in their diasporic existence. Without an emphasis on, and a critical understanding of, the constraining nature of the global structures of power and domination, prevailing inequalities and unspeakable exclusion, and what these uneven power relations actually mean for those differentially situated migrants in their everyday diasporic conditions, the celebrated and progressively imagined agency of highly educated and skilled migrants and mobile transnationals may become a de-contextualized, oversimplified and often reified subject. The expansive reach and mastery supposedly imputed to hyper-mobile global subjects, their dominance and freedom from vulnerability and marginality, turn out to be far from complete in the intersecting reality of circumscribed everyday life (Ley 2004). Despite a great deal of interest in transnational migration, mobility and the cultural identities of global subjects in today’s age of globalization, there has been relatively insufficient attention to, and the under-exploration of, the centrality of human agency and everyday life at the heart of debates. There has been little “human level research” (Smith and Favell 2006) on the

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diverse dimensions and manifestations of globalization in the educated and skilled, knowledge diasporas or professional categories, which is attentive to “everyday practices of disembedded actors” (Conradson and Latham 2005), and which calls for more micro-level, phenomenological studies of the everyday reality of transnational mobility behind the faceless accounts of the hyper-mobile space of flows and the global economy articulated with the “structural capitalist logics of global cities and networked societies” (Sassen 2001). This relative lack and missing link points to a growing need to reground a conceptual construction of transnational mobility and diaspora not to be approached as a free-floating entity somehow separated from mundane reality and normative constraint, but to be recognized as a socially constructed and situated one fi rmly embedded in particular contexts of everyday life and the taken-for-granted texture of daily existence, by exploring in detail the lived experience of diasporic subjects. At the same time, consideration needs to be given to its increasingly intertwined consequences of mediated experience, the question of how the lived experience is constituted and contested within everyday diasporic media spaces and cultural practices with the production of new identity positions, which will be the focus of exploration in the next chapter.

5

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media

ETHNIC ENCLAVE AND MEDIATED DISENGAGEMENT: “THE UK TELEVISION IS IN MY CLOSET” In the fi rst year I watched television to know this society. Now (after three years) don’t watch. The more I watch, the more I feel alienated. . . . There’s no connection. It’s too British. I liked the British accent before (in Korea) because it sounded posh, but now that accent feels alienating, too. Now (after four years) I don’t even turn on TV. It’s ordinary, stagnant life, no representation of people like us (Koreans). . . . Then it’s shocking to see such content (Big Brother). My room is small, the UK television is in my closet. It’s just not interesting. . . . Why try to know them when they don’t try to know us (Koreans)? While living abroad we look for something better. How do Korean women make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Do they feel they belong to the world, and is this connection facilitated by the media? How do they negotiate their identities in a temporality of cultural difference? With a deeply emotional and existential doubt about belonging in their experiences of the ambiguous and subliminal forms of banal racism (for details, see Chapter 4), Korean women’s understanding of their social position further resonates in the symbolic realm of confrontation, disengagement or withdrawal. Everyday UK television and ethos, “very national in its orientation” with distinctive modes of address, humanly pleasing care structures and the inflexion of a voice, may work naturally on “those for whom it is made” (Scannell 1996); however, it is experienced differently by these Korean women, or not even there-to-be-found (“the UK television is in my closet”). Its defi ning character and image are often viewed as “too British,” “not interesting,” “alienating,” “no connection” within the national symbolic space, which makes foreign subjects feel disengaged. The degree of disengagement is suggestive

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not merely of indifference, but also of a small act of resistance and strategy to regulate the tension of belonging and avoid the unexpected surprise that disturbs the diasporic yearning (“something better”). This mediated experience, discontinuous with their feeling, reflecting and behaving, orients them towards a diasporic media space that is close to a deep and enduring relevance of experience. Engagement with the ethnic media and communicative activities is a logical choice and determining resource that “suddenly” gains a special meaning. I am suddenly addicted to our Korean media. I rarely watched TV in Korea as my social life was busy, colourful. . . . Through website Naver I get all information, how to make food, kim-chi, do everything myself as everything in London is expensive. There seems no other way; I have to do everything on my own. If I shout “help!” on the street, how many will care and help, other than thinking she is a strange Asian foreigner? I once got my bag stolen, but a police officer said that I should feel lucky for not getting stabbed by a knife. . . . My life in London is very alone and fragile. But I try to manage it in my own way in my own comfort zone, because basically there is nobody else here to rely on and I come to realize my weak position more and more, as I live here longer. It’s all there! Through the Internet I watch Korean dramas, download movies, music every night. On Cyworld I keep in touch with friends, express what I am doing, how I feel, what made me angry today. . . . I cried while watching Korean dramas alone. Perhaps the fi rst time I cried while living abroad, never cried over any hardship. It suddenly evoked a repressed feeling and made me realize home. Displaced subjects can find social ontological security in their own communication channels and become attached, or even more (“suddenly addicted”), to the inclusive mediated community, while becoming less interested or connected to the host society. The new connection to the ethnic media from the national homeland and its substantial impact can promote disengagement and further distance from the mainstream. New ways of being and feeling at home are created and sustained by means of virtual engagement. Variegated ritualistic links—via the Korean social networking website Cyworld, infotainment online portal Naver, food, drama, film, music as a constant background—are established in the structure of everyday life. This mediated experience away from home has multiple purposes; it is a response to the loss of belonging, a self-determined need to seek symbolic inclusion, a desire to connect with significant others back home, and a pleasure to expand the space for self-expression, understanding and articulation in the language of home. The habits and strategies for experiencing home in the

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 95 routines of diasporic lives develop into the Internet resources. But what is significant here is not just the sheer availability of the Internet now, but also the self-determination of users and the consequences of how they use it. They affi rm a sense of continuity, self-esteem and deliberate nationalism that is emotively marked and powerful. Keeping my distinct Korean identity enhances self-esteem when experiencing disrespect towards minorities. I am always a foreigner. . . . Change me depending upon who they are. Be cool, formal, less smile to the majority to keep respect for who we are. Although we like personal freedom here (in London) that is limited in Korea, there are essential differences between us and them. Watching TV back home I imagined life here, but living here I become indifferent. Never felt my essential self as Korean so strongly before. I become more Korean, unique while living abroad. . . . I don’t fit quite here or quite there. I can live anywhere in the world if there is a good job and the Internet connection for all Korean stuff. For many Korean women who are acutely aware of the reality of foreignness and how much they differ from the majority, their transnational lives do not easily result in emancipation (also see Chapter 4). Navigating and code-switching (“depending upon who they are”) is a life necessity but not a straight choice. A paradox evident is that the more physically close, the more they try to remain different, distinct. The search for uniqueness becomes intense and dependent on the ethnic media space where the symbolic construction of internal and external boundaries is regularly sustained. Although some aspect of lifestyle change can make Korean women feel incompatible with lives back home, there is a strong denial of association or influence from the West host society, fi nding themselves located neither “quite here” nor “quite there”; indeed, neither place is desirable any longer. To resist a Western influence is a quality that manifests itself in lived relations of difference, often as a reaction to the hegemonic racial order and denigration, as a conscious way of reclaiming status (“respect for who we are”). Diasporic nationalism emerges within a larger transnational framework, reinstating a territorial space for revitalized national perspectives and reifying the taken-for-grantedness of essentialist identities. Ironically, the choice to live in the world does not necessarily lead to an expanded world view or enlargement of self, but rather a constrictive one that is an inevitable consequence of the lived experience of social closure. Overall this indicates that Korean women in this study are not becoming so much globalized with more expanded multicultural and interpersonal or mediated contacts with the host society, but are rather becoming re-nationalized and re-essentialized to a certain extent in a transnational social field. When the dominant meaning system of a new culture in a new

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environment is seen as a constant source of irritation or a daily reminder of non-belonging, some migrants may deal with it in a direct and confrontational way, whereas many other migrants, including these Korean women, may decide to retreat into an ethnic enclave, physically, psychologically and symbolically. Transnational migrants and ethnic minorities, when feeling pushed aside and excluded from the mainstream of the host society, may spend significant parts of their everyday lives on their own communication channels and mediated networks in order to carve out imaginative spaces of control and of highly selective social interaction, or as an effort to seek to express the common experiences of social exclusion and marginality in their own national language and thus counteract dominant discourses in the present. As a consequence, it may become possible for them to live their everyday diasporic lives without much regular social interactions with the dominant groups of the host society and with the symbolic spaces of the mainstream media either, although their self-conscious and often strategic creation of alternative imaginative spaces of belonging and ethnic cultural practices do not necessarily displace the existing mappings of the dominant cultural geography. Regular engagement with the online, Internet-enabled, ethnic media space enables Korean migrant women to retain connections to the homeland culture by means of virtual, imaginary and ritualistic re-creations of home, which can be routinely established in their mediated experience and sustain a more inclusive, sometimes pleasurable and ontologically secure (“comfort zone”), primary diasporic contact zone. This can be seen as part of strategies or everyday tactical activities that lie hidden behind, much less visible, but that routinely make such mediated experience “habitable” in their mind and potentially “negotiate the unfamiliar in the sphere of familiarity” (de Certeau 1984). An increasingly significant channel for the construction of the habitable sphere of familiarity is through the Internet symbolic realm in today’s age, in which the lived experience of the diaspora is being re-organized and managed in the every day, and in which necessary cultural resources and frameworks for symbolic inclusion and a subjective sense of belonging are being formed in the margin, typically at an ambivalent distance from the conspicuous difference of the dominant, official culture of the host society. When a difference is no longer seen as a merely temporary irritant, one may urgently require arts and skills of living with the difference (Bauman 2008). The ethnic media space, as the necessary cultural resources and tactical arts of living, can often be appropriated and developed as defensive mechanisms among diasporas in everyday life. This defensive sense of inclusion, self-enclosing engagement with or retreat into an ethnic enclave and the imaginative spatialization of belonging, as enabled by the ethnic media space, is usually strategic and creative but also highly contradictory in its consequences. Self-exclusion, by choice or not, may be operating on a daily basis, when globally mobile migrants choose to engage with alternative spaces of belonging through their own

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 97 ethnic media as coping mechanisms, not merely to cope with loneliness but also to stay out of the subtle social exclusion in operation and of the local social structures of the host society, which they had chosen to migrate to and inhabit. Migrants caught up in this contradictory situation may remain ethnically distinct, socially constrained and excluded perpetually, while constituting and inhabiting a new imaginary symbolic home that is mythical yet meaningful temporarily across cultural boundaries. This imaginary connection with home is ambiguous and paradoxical in its effects on their everyday transnational lives, both constraining and facilitating the subsequent development of a felt, functioning sense of belonging and of their subsequent actions “here” or “there.” A paradox lies in the transitional process of Korean women’s learning of their self and cultural identity, gender and nation in a wider transnational world, along with a possible internal conflict that may remain unresolved. Their lived experience of transnational lives does not easily generate or automatically imply a much greater diversification of life; but rather, diasporic nationalism emerges as an expressive marker of the self, even as Korean women were so eager to stay away from the national home for its gendered socio-economic and cultural constraints and they were often trapped in secondary status in relation to the gendered modalities of power (for details, see Chapter 3). This unintended shifting and seemingly contradictory enactment of the national self (“becoming more Korean while living abroad”) should be understood in wider relational contexts; the ways in which the global structures and dialectics of inclusion and exclusion operate within the hegemonic politics of difference and identity that is intrinsically linked to differential power and inequality. Diasporic nationalism should be recognized as a situated character, a discursive condition of subjectivity marked by contingencies of differential power relations and uneven representation in transnational encounters, although its very forceful quality may be felt to be an essentialist subject formation and may often be expressed in naturalized and embodied terms (“essential self,” “essential differences”), defined as a solid marker of self-identity that may be perceived as unchanged or unchangeable.

ETHNIC MEDIA AND SELF-IDENTITY: “I AM SOLID JAPANESE” They are so different from us. I expected to see something better, thought Britain would be sophisticated like media images of Diana and Hugh Grant. Ordinary people are ill-mannered, why throw garbage everywhere, talk loudly over phone in public, not care about others. . . . Vulgar manners are dramatized in Big Brother. I watched TV to learn English in the first year. Now I don’t have a TV, don’t bother to buy. Occasionally browse news, documentaries on the

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Internet. . . . The British have a particular sense of humour. I refuse to watch TV together because when people laugh I cannot. Not being able to laugh with them is alienating. We Japanese are not familiar with joking about others. . . . It’s not interesting. Watching TV is another work!

A main reason Japanese women consume the UK media is to improve their English and their understanding of diverse cultural nuances that articulate elements that differ from their national frames of action, experience and sentiment (also see Chapter 4). A particular sense of British humor and exclusion of laughter (“not being able to laugh with them”) functions as an instant marker of difference. Laughter in its “dialectic exclusion and inclusion” (Pfister 2002) is significant as it affirms a community of laughers joined in the shared awareness of being different. In the condition of being foreign, some media images of comedy and reality TV are seen as disturbing the familiar and taken-forgranted character of Japanese predispositions, modes of appreciation, class aesthetics and illusions, radically disrupting diasporic fantasies of something better. “Watching TV is another work!,” sometimes a frustrating labor rather than an entertaining relaxation. The consequence of media engagement is not necessarily a cultural connection or belonging to the wider symbolic community, but a heightened awareness of cultural specificities, boundaries and differences, thereby knowing “us” better through “them.” Importantly, this particular tendency suggests that what is actually emerging in the process of media engagement among mobile transnationals is not necessarily an assumed cultural connection to the so-called world community promoting new and enlarged world views and structures of feeling that can be shared and recognized to some significant extent. Rather, the growing awareness and routine realization of marked differences in their lived experience and mediated experience of the host society eventually propel them towards a deep and enduring relevance of mediated experience in their own ethnic media space, as well as towards a new search for a sense of coherence in identity formation. This realization of contrast and displeasure orients Japanese women towards the constitution of a shared sense of subjectivity and a culture of relaxation. I get a headache for concentrating so much on English. . . . Relax! Through the Internet I get all Japanese content, use Mixi to write diaries to friends in Japan, my English is not improving! Watching TV is not something I enjoy on my own. We prefer enjoying together Japanese comedies, dramas, such familiar expectations and comfort. . . . I watch them on the Internet during my study break, but consciously try not to get addicted. At the end of day I email to my family and friends (in Japan) to express what happened, how I feel, to release frustration. I’ve got a new habit of

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 99 confessing my self. . . . They ask, “What do you eat? What sort of people do you meet?” I like cooking with Asian friends, listening to familiar music from the laptop, exchanging small talks, laughing together. In conscious distance and anxiety (“my English is not improving!”), a culture of relaxation is built around the Japanese-language media providing the capacity to participate in routine communicative activities and cultural spaces where talk and reflection allow for more pleasurable, self-referential modes of identification. The Internet, with multifaceted infotainment and active networks, including Japan’s biggest social networking site Mixi, music, drama, comedy and variety shows, plays a key role in amplifying the pleasure of a shared sphere of familiarity and connection, a unity of constructed styles and practices that can create a temporarily effective psychological comfort and directedness. Women on the move may be particularly avid users of the Internet as this resource is mobilized to deal with unresolved tensions and intricacies of interpersonal dynamics and relationships within the transnational social field. Internet use is not a practice of mere communication but of active articulation and significance. The self is made visible, presented and understood in narrative (Giddens 1991). The narrativization of the self—enacted through ritualistic and microelectronic engagement in the language of home—is an effective strategy and apparatus through which identity is produced and reaffi rmed. Personal confession, a ritualistic and sometimes compulsive narrative of the self, as many Japanese women acknowledge (“a new habit of confessing my self”), is formed and presented through the electronically mediated yet much engaged statements in their own language, by which a daily identity as a confessionary self comes to be accentuated, reflexively understood and reconstructed in a transnational social field. Internet use in this context is not just an act of gaining infotainment from the homeland, but also a more profound and performative one that seeks active interaction, inclusion and self-expression. The proliferating use of the Internet in everyday diasporic life, with its ready access to the familiar modes of identification and symbolic belonging, comes to be habituated and ritualized in a relatively predictable and comprehensive manner. Engagement with the ethnic media ensemble via the Internet is amplified and deliberately appropriated by its users in an effort to create a sense of order and control, continuity and ontological security, as well as to deal with fragile emotion and selfexpression within the crucible of diasporic life in a foreign environment. Foreign students, particularly those migrated from Asia, are subject to a range of stereotypes and myths, including a typical perception that they are passive compliant and disengaged from the host communities in which they live and study (Kell and Vogl 2008). Migration is often considered or imagined as a process of estrangement, a process of becoming estranged from that which was inhabited at home, involving both spatial dislocation and temporal dislocation as well as the experience of discontinuity between past

100 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women and present (Ahmed 1999). However, it should be noted that the diasporic ethnic media space can present new dynamics and significance into the management of estrangement and dislocation, while reproducing discursive distinctions between “us” and “them” at the internal level in relation to differential power and domination. Minority migrants, such as women in this study, have limited social voices to change or impact the new places to which they had migrated but do not feel they belong in any recognizable form and in any signifi cant sense. Yet, its consequence does not necessarily mean cultural isolation and perpetual loneliness in the host society, nor does it mean separation and distance from the homeland of the past and the present, since they are able to fi nd the necessary resources, and use their individual capacity, to create and organize more suitable and preferred cultural and linguistic networks and transnational communication practices, through which individual agency and alternative emotional links can be developed and maintained with members of the same or proximate origin of belonging. One clear consequence of the creations of the mediated and highly emotional spaces, situational connections and imagined networks of social relations and self-understandings, is the way in which diasporic subjects of today’s digital generation do not necessarily feel completely alienated or lost in their sense of the self, ways of being and belonging, in all the movements and sometimes disturbing conditions of displacement. I am solid Japanese. Never thought about this identity in Japan. . . . The fact that I’ve lived in foreign countries for seven years and speak English does not mean I am changing, it just means a physical move. . . . What is the quality of living and actual experience motivates whether or not you want to change. I envy Western styles less and less. I am a foreigner always. Growing older (29) I am becoming more Japanese. It’s easy to learn other cultures while living overseas, but in my self I am deeply Japanese. . . . Cleanness, sensitivity, caring for others, quality food, Japanese media are better. I want to live and travel everywhere, keeping my Japanese identity and connecting through the Japanese media. Japanese women’s use of Western imagery is a rhetorical tool of critique against their own society, patriarchy and gender norms (Kelsky 2001) within the context of the highly hybrid nature of Japanese media culture (Darling-Wolf 2000). But the lived experience in a Western destination also compels Japanese women to transform the perception of the West, re-imagine and reassert meanings of Japanese-ness to the extent of suggesting a growing awareness of national identity (“I am solid Japanese”) even as they engage in transnational cultural experience. For many young

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 101 Japanese, the imagined West becomes a problem after migration as the media back home provide desirable images of the West without informing people about social exclusion, racism and actual life conditions (Fujita 2008). The experiential consciousness of difference, de-centered social position and foreignness (for details, see Chapter 4), is deployed to articulate conceptions of long-distance nationalism that grows stronger in response to the predicaments and difficulties of inhabiting transnational spaces. An unintended consequence of the new connectivity and meaning of being in the world is a revitalization of national subjectivity, perhaps more than ever (“becoming more Japanese”), often expressing nationalized difference and uniqueness in the midst of massive transnational flows and reconfigurations. The ethnic media are at the center of the process of national identification, reclaiming bounded yet vital identity in the wired transnational world, assuming unbounded, spatially extended relations. Transnational identification is not available to all migrant subjects. Nations are inevitably in the making; transnational mobility can work to reinforce diasporic nationalism. Historically, the ethnic minority status and national identity of the Japanese diaspora has been subject to Japan’s changing position in the global order, particularly Japan’s relatively high global status in the global economic hierarchy, causing a majority to react by asserting an “ultra-nationalist” Japanese ethnic identity in logical opposition to diasporic difficulties and various forms of exclusion and marginality, as well as by making their ethnic cultural heritage a rooted source of prestige, pride and respect in floating lives (Tsuda 2001). In today’s age of digital migration as intersected with the Internet-based electronic mediation, it should be importantly recognized that the social and cultural dynamics of human motions, displacement and diaspora can generate much more decisive, self-conscious and strategic, yet unpredictable consequences in enacting distinct national selves and consolidating territorial boundaries, which may continually accentuate difference and articulate the situational significance of difference in identity construction. Diasporic nationalism, or the situational significance of national subjectivity in a diasporic context, is often articulated as difference and contrast. These Japanese women in their particular conditions of diaspora have learned to speak from difference, along itineraries of migrating and dwelling and living with difference, while simultaneously fi nding ways of being different from, perhaps much more than the same as, the global cultural Others amongst whom they live in both real and symbolic realms. Many Japanese women in this study, who critiqued and moved away from the national home, now self-consciously try to remain different from the Others encountered in the diaspora, and the practice of their notions of culturally and ethnically distinct national subjectivity may become even more salient, paradoxically, amidst the multicultural milieu and melange of a world city.

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As an imagined and deliberate social practice, the formation and articulation of national identity newly gains, and further develops into, a signifi cant meaning in the diasporic context of difference and contrast. Diasporas, as seemingly de-territorialized nations, do not easily transcend all the differences that continue to matter. But rather, diasporas are fundamentally constitutive of territorial nations, since diasporic consciousness forms viable, perhaps permanently enduring and fertile grounds for producing, reproducing and nurturing ethnically defi ned cultural nationalism that continually articulates the recognition of necessary difference and distinction in the uneven relations of power and difference. An integral and crucial element to such formation of differentiated cultural specificity and subsequent action towards diasporic nationalism in today’s digital age is the routine and almost ritualized use, whether intended or unwittingly, of the media and communication technologies, the Internet in particular, which has generated very significant implications for how contemporary migrants experience, feel and think about their transnational lives and mobilities in the every day. This ritualized and habituated, mediated cultural practice can produce and sustain a new mode of highly individualized, seemingly floating and footloose, yet highly networked and connected, diasporic nationalism (“want to live and travel everywhere, keeping my Japanese identity and connecting through the Japanese media”) in a manifestly nomadic way, yet with a clearly defi ned national identity of their own choice, not necessarily transformed by migration, all of which may distinguish contemporary migrants from those of the past generations. This emerging, mediated, nomadic symptom suggests that there is a need to consider the newly evolving nature of diasporic embeddedness and identity formation among contemporary, diversified, subordinate and especially female, nomadic subjects—who are potentially constantly on the move, mentally and physically, while requiring and facing a different type of ontological security in an era of transnationally wired and electronic connectivity, and at the same time, developing place-making strategies as part of life politics that enable them to go on with, and at times meaningfully sustain, their seemingly unending mobile lives within the mediated networks of meaning and mediated social relations, albeit partial and indeterminate, with some sense of rootedness and stability, not necessarily “no sense of place” (Meyrowitz 1985). The placemaking strategies through the appropriation of the diasporic ethnic media may enable them to create a new state and feeling of going global and simultaneously going home, disconnected and simultaneously connected, dis-embedding themselves and re-embedding at the same time. The electronic mediation of the Internet plays a significant role not just in facilitating the ongoing physical movement and mobility and possibly maintaining its long-term durability, but also crucially in constituting

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 103 and changing the way in which diasporic lives and subject positions are actually experienced and felt in otherwise a sense of placeless-ness.

FEELING NATIONALISM: “FEEL LIKE A WOMAN WARRIOR OF CHINA” To learn English and (the UK) society I began to watch TV, news, talk shows, dramas. . . . I don’t watch now (after three years), anyway I don’t belong here. I am always a foreigner. . . . I don’t have a TV. Watch BBC sometimes on the Internet. It’s not just the language. I have to think, who is Jon Snow?, many questions to understand. . . . I am surprised at the openness of media content (Big Brother), some see morality as nothing. . . . Cooking programs are universally appealing. I can easily get Western ingredients that cannot be found in China. I never used an oven in China. I tried Western food, but after one year, returned to Chinese food, my stomach is Chinese! Although the UK media can help Chinese women migrants gain some knowledge of the host society, and users try to make sense of mediated culture in the fi rst years of arrival, the sojourner mentality and how they think about belonging to the society (“anyway I don’t belong here,” “always a foreigner”) is a crucial determinant of the modality of disengagement from the media (also see Chapter 4). There seems to be no regular symbolic social interaction through the media because of the lack of shared knowledge and cultural contexts. UK television, the degree of its openness and construction of morality, including sexuality, is seen as inadequate in relation to their cultural knowledge of acceptable codes and conventions for the conduct of life. Chinese women feel defi cient in the possession of “cultural competence” (Brundson 1997) that is required to make sense of an extra-textual familiarity with other circulating discourses—whether moral, political, linguistic or artistic—to experience popular pleasure. The interest in food as embodied pleasure means that food is a prime mechanism of intercultural and cross-cultural engagement for the diaspora (Thomas 2004), but, at the same time, food and eating styles are the predominant marker of national distinction and identification (“my stomach is Chinese!”). Quotidian experience of their national home is sustained through the Chinese media, as Chinese women seek a sense of familiarity and inclusion that they rarely experience in a new disrupted place. If I have time to watch UK television, I would rather watch Chinese through the Internet. That’s why my English has not improved. . . . The

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Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women Internet is super! Every day, the fi rst thing I do is to open the Chinese website (Sohu) and read news. Anytime I can access through Chinese websites (Powerapple, Youku, Tudou), all information, fashion, travelling, Visa advice, sharing life experience abroad, diaries of Chinese women married to Western men. . . . While preparing Chinese dinner, eating alone, watching Chinese dramas on computer, I am home! I am feeling good, though Western flatmates mock, “Why do Chinese say yeng yeng yeng?”

The Chinese media, due to the de-territorializing Internet, are viable sociocultural resources to open up channels of information and pleasure, selfexpression and communicative encounter, to be sustained in the routinized activities of daily life. Media consumption becomes a ritualistic cultural practice that secures a connection to communal life at home and abroad through rich, eclectic and multifaceted content, whether news, online forums with the Chinese diaspora or dramas from the national homeland, affi rming a sense of connection through habituation. The Chineselanguage Internet is an “emerging transnational Chinese cultural sphere” (Yang 2003), a regularly shared resource for diasporic difficulties and the expressive emotional repertoire—from anxieties about interracial relationships, Visa troubles, food interests, to the meanings of home in the midst of displacement. Home is constantly invented in the diasporic imagination and is sometimes secured (“I am home!”) through its familiar sounds (“yeng yeng yeng”) and familiar smells (“Chinese dinner”) as mediated and experienced by the diasporic media in the humdrum of everyday lived culture. For mobile women, home is always simultaneously absent and present, and always being worked on. The sites of media consumption remain central to the home-building project and the pursuit of livelihood (“feeling good”), identity and status when threatened or challenged. I am usually quiet, but get loud when people say negative things about China. I hear my heart beeping fast. People look down, “Do you eat cats in China?” “Pigeons, too?” “Don’t buy, this is made in China, poor quality.” I feel like a woman warrior of China. I feel the wall, whether that is racism, invisible hostility, coldness, or superiority in culture. . . . I am becoming more Chinese while living abroad. This feeling grows. I come to know us better, who we are in relation to Western people here, and how much we are really different. My parents (in China) work harder to support me, my mom works night shifts. If I were not in London, their lives would be better. . . . Good investment on my education? Worth the four years of time I’ve

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 105 spent here? I haven’t yet started my career and built my own life. Stay or go back? Either way I lose. . . . I can live anywhere in the world as long as there is a career opportunity. The Internet makes a difference in feeling home. Chinese women’s experience suggests an emotional struggle (“hear my heart beeping fast”) and a hidden fight (“feel like a woman warrior of China”) to create a representational space and a defiant voice that can speak as a Chinese against various negative images in operation, inferiorization and violent communication (also see Chapter 4). This impedes or denies them the possibility of becoming transnational, transcending the national and existing boundaries, and instead compels them into ethnic particularism and its reified identity positions within a transnational field. Far from moving beyond nation-defi ned ethnic markers, the tendency is to foster a distinctly Chinese identity and de-territorialized nationalism (“becoming more Chinese while living abroad”). The Chinese in Britain are seen as “the least British” among all ethnic minorities, who prosper without changing their way of life to suit British social expectations, whether because of the inherent strength of Chinese cultural core (Lee et al. 2002) or because of real limits to what socio-economic indicators can tell about inclusion and participation in the wider society as revealed in the Chinese Internet discussions (Parker and Song 2007). The ethnic media use proliferating through the Internet resources is mobilized to sustain and consolidate diasporic nationalism in the trajectories of women’s nomadic voyaging (“can live anywhere”) as there is no yearning for a return and going home again is not a simple choice. Historically, the Chinese are known to be both a highly migrating people and one with a deep attachment to home place, a seemingly contradictory pair of statements that provides an insight into the historically embodied practices, attitudes and behavioral patterns of migratory Chinese in this doubly articulated interaction of movement and desire for rootedness (Wickberg 1994). Chinese living overseas in the past and the present have been dealing with such a paradox on their own terms. Since the 1980s, there has been a rise of new Chinese migrants, predominantly upper-class and middle-class students-turned-migrants, as well as manifestations of a reviving overseas Chinese nationalism through proliferating and enabling intermediaries, such as Chinese-language newspapers, websites and online discussion forums and popular TV programs in the multi-directional and transnational flows of movement (Liu 2005). In response to systematic exclusion and marginality from the mainstream of the host society, these informal, often intentional and possibly subversive, mediated networks can be a highly effective means of selforganization and of the formation of diasporic ethnic communities, as part of everyday cultural resources and micro-political strategies in the ongoing struggles for presence and representation, livelihood, agency and

106 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women a subjective sense of empowerment, to some degree. Having met similar patterns of structural constraint and social exclusion, Asian communities in Britain are known to have followed a broadly parallel strategy of rejecting assimilation into the host society, and have instead relied to a large extent on their own specific set of human and cultural resources as a means of building themselves a home away from home (Ballard 1994). Anxieties and insecurities associated with displaced Chinese subjects in the migration processes are generally mediated by their resourcefulness and determination to negotiate and create what they perceive to be a more independent and fulfi lling lifestyle in Britain, rather than being fi rmly integrated into it (Lee et al. 2002). The online versions of the Chineselanguage media, often freely accessible via the Internet, function as viable and conspicuous cultural resources to manage diasporic difficulties in everyday life and to reassure an imagined sense of belonging, historical cultural heritage, self-esteem and identities in the diaspora. Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming (Hall 1996), which is crucially contingent upon the mediated cultural resources available for enunciation, a personal and micro-political articulation of resistance in logical opposition to exclusion and marginality in the diaspora. The Chinese-language media from the national home know who the Chinese diasporas are, what they want and imagine, and significantly how racialized belonging can work through discursive practices. On the other hand, certain forms of cultural capital are usually required for an understanding of new cultural contexts for ready appreciation and acceptance of the national symbolic space of the British media that does not seem to include and welcome them, to their great disappointment. Racialized minorities in the margin of the host society do not just remain passive to social exclusion, racial oppression and perceived disempowerment. Rather, they react to it by becoming less committed to their host society, by constructing sometimes antagonistic discourses, practices and positions, and by appropriating alternative sociocultural mediations for connectivity, belonging and social ontological security in the continuity of displaced self-identities. The issue of what it means to be Chinese for these Chinese women in this study, and their forceful articulation of it and growing feeling in the diaspora, combine to suggest how significantly national identity matters, being reinforced rather than diminished, emerging as an oppositional social perspective that attempts to express a private form of enunciation and resistance against the perceived hegemonic forces within an uneven transnational social field. As an ethnic counter-identity, the centrality and intensity of diasporic nationalism is characterized by its very reactive nature and embedded tensions in hidden, implicit or explicit confl icts with global structures of power, structural disadvantages and foundational inequalities, including the central issues of racism and marginalization in the wider society. It should be recognized that Chinese-ness in this diasporic context

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 107 is not a natural entity, but a discursive construct of continual struggles along historical and social nodes through a negotiation of the inescapable tensions; a domain that can and needs to be defended against outside intervention, defi nitions of collective identities, and a consciousness of the oppressions that such defi nitions rest upon; in part, a redemptive psychic locus where many of the Chinese diasporic subjects tend to stay ever-vigilant reflexively against such intervention (Wong 2003). Chinese women’s forceful articulation of and growing feeling towards diasporic nationalism become defi ning moments of self-identity as they signify, pronounce and declare their being and belonging, simultaneously resulting in the new construction of a reified Chinese-ness, an enhanced historical aura that is clearly desired, preserved and perhaps continually being worked on in the present transnational mobility. Overall this tendency indicates that historical forms of one’s own national culture and ethnic identities may not just disappear through a process of blending and integrating the elements of the multicultural host society, although today’s migrants are often denied the right to practice their own national home cultures and are treated as ethnic Others (Menski 2002). Minority migrants have not, as expected by the dominant establishment of the host society, subordinated or abandoned their unofficial ethnic markers used for nationalistic purposes, daily reminders of identity and distinct identity positioning manoeuvring within the contesting, dominant official culture of the every day.

INTERNET AND BANAL NATIONALISM: A CONCLUSION For Korean, Japanese and Chinese women on the move in this study, feeling at home in the world while living with difference is sustained and expressed in their own language through the mediated engagement, the often strategic, viable and resourceful use of the ethnic media from their national homeland. The Internet, in particular, has become a key resource and necessity, a habitable sphere of familiarity, which plays a crucial role not merely in providing circumstantial infotainment from home but also in constituting relational networks of meaning and expression of the experience of displacement and the paradoxes of diasporic lives. Its consequence is not trivial in matters pertaining to one’s daily identity or daily nationalism; “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995) is regularly conveyed, habituated, ready to be mobilized in the wake of catalytic events, and concretized through small familiar everyday practices—lived and mediated—less visible but deeply ingrained in diasporic consciousness. Diasporic nationalism, with its undeniable meaning and purpose, distinct place and identification, can be self-consciously selected and emotionally situated. It becomes particularly potent and perhaps more salient through transnational flows and movement, nationalizing both transnational spaces and the Internet’s

108 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women simultaneously dis-embedding and re-embedding capacities in forming a partial yet unending connection with home and thus possibly ensuring its long-term viability in the rooted experience of diasporic subjects. It is now generally assumed and sometimes acknowledged that the Internet as a de-territorializing and dis-embedding technology has become a new global phenomenon, introducing new transnational discourse and expanding mediated connection, and thereby enabling the creation and maintenance of new transnational subjectivity with potentials of liberating individuals from place-bound markers of identities, as well as with a new level of empowerment among transnational migrants, including subordinate and ethnic minority groups. New kinds of transnational networking, multi-directional connectivity and accelerated mobility, which are facilitated by the Internet in particular, are seen to be one of the crucial factors that have shaped diasporic experience today, changing the very nature of migrant experience and thinking and its consequences on identities. The intersection of this complex connectivity and of the processes of cultural reinvention and reconstruction that the diasporic condition sets in motion has transformed diasporic identities and produced the new spaces of inhabiting and imagining. It is thus suggested that diasporas in today’s digital era should better be understood as depending not so much on displacement but rather on connectivity, or on the complex nexus of linkages that contemporary transnational dynamics and networks make possible and sustain (Tsagarousianou 2004). Therefore, much emphasis has been placed on the potentialities of contemporary transnational migrants—the various creative possibilities and individual choices on the construction of new identities, multiple identity scripts and mobile narratives that are opened by travelling cultures detached and disassociated from territorial inscription; the transnational third space of intense and cutting-edge creativity and hybridity in such processes of identity construction; the de-territorialized diasporic symbolic space that is primarily created by the Internet communication networks and imaginaries; and the assumed fluidity and flexibility of such spatially defi ned and expanded, alternative imaginative space and the increasingly mediated activities of diasporas alongside existing mappings in everyday transnational contexts (Bhabha 1994; Appadurai 1996; Clifford 1997; Portes 1997). Transnational mobilization of individuals today, such unprecedented and intensive transnational movements, time-space compressing technological innovations, electronic mass mediation by the Internet, and instant and regular connections across national borders are thought to represent a necessary condition for the rise of transnationalism, multi-stranded social relations in the age of trans-border crossers (Portes et al. 1999), an explicitly transnational and even post-national era (Appadurai 1996) and the declining importance of nation and national identity (Hannerz 1996; Beck 2000).

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 109 Transnational media flows, accelerated and intensified by the Internet’s de-territorializing capacity, are situated at the center of these assumptions of transnational processes and consequences. It has been assumed that transnational migrants and diasporic subjects may eventually move beyond the national mentality and its fundamental and essentialist categories of identity, culture and belonging previously defined and constrained by territorial boundaries, and that they instead come to address the problems of national social relations and essentialism with new narratives of emancipation and further consider alternative possibilities of transnational subjectivity characterized by a much more performative mode and a significant degree of creativity in the new encounters of the wider transnational spaces. In this way of thinking, diasporas have often been conceived of as unsettling and transgressing the boundaries of the nation-state, forming new multiple cultural attachments beyond those limits of national subjectivity and culture, and initiating new signs of progressive or emancipatory identity. However, it should be importantly recognized that this type of view tends to overemphasize the ready appropriation of such possibilities based on an un-contextualized and utopic assumption that the infi nite process of identity construction is somehow self-selected and freely chosen, creative and libratory, or even safe in the broader frameworks and unlimited connections of the new transnational spaces. Evidence is also pointing the other way. The important question to be addressed arises as to the nature and characteristic of, and the actual content of, the “new transnational spaces” created by the Internet mediation and new patterns of connectivity and its consequences among different diasporic groups under different diasporic conditions of life. These new transnational spaces can be much more complex and even contradictory, as they are fraught with unresolved tensions, struggles and contestations in the hierarchically ordered and differentially intersecting contexts of diaspora. Even as today’s dominant systems of interactions, practices and mobilities operate transnationally and function intensively across national borders, and even as the Internet is thought to render national borders meaningless in a new era of hyper-connectivity and openness, individual transnational actors may have very different motivations that have been shaped, both enabled and disabled, by their own actual and concrete experience of this seemingly transnationalizing phenomenon. An important dimension of the actual experience of individual transnational actors, such as women in this study, suggests that national imaginings, national consciousness and national identities, as well as self-determined attempts and struggles to carve out such representational spaces, are globally intensified, deliberately articulated and fostered by the transnationally spatial interactions of diasporic subjects in the margins. The Internet, while purporting to transcend the national and disrupt existing forms of national identification, can also be appropriated to facilitate the transformation of a supposedly transnational condition of subjectivity into a new space of

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the national imagination and ethnic-national subjectivity, or “reactionary ethno-nationalism” as a self-consciously differentiated and distinct identity choice and a micro-political strategy of subjective empowerment in an uneven transnational social field. In this transnationally wired world without direction, what is emerging as an evident paradox is a self-conscious attempt to develop “territorial nationalisms insisting on their difference” (Eriksen 2006), a creation of powerful attachment to the ideas of national homeland, albeit mythical and ideologically reified, that can be more deeply territorial than ever. Current theories of globalization, transnationalism and the wired world, which emphasize their unbounded-ness, their unifying and universalizing effects, and signs of the decline of nation and nationalism, tend to overlook the very powerful ways in which people of diasporas re-inscribe difference and belonging, re-imagine nation and boundaries, and construct territorial loyalties and national identities, even as they increasingly engage in global processes and inhabit transnational spaces (Bernal 2004). More and more aspects of social life continue to take place across national borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state and national boundaries remains clear and strong (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Evidently, the nation is seen to be the defi ning nucleus of diasporic identity. A nationalistic perspective and the meanings of the national is not necessarily diminished or dissolved from the identities that are being expressed and elaborated by these contemporary transnational migrants such as the women in this study, the new nationals on the move. Contrary to general assumptions, such national subjectivity is rather being reworked, reinforced and even re-essentialized amidst a supposedly greater range of possible identities and choices in the proliferation of transnational flows and connections. The electronic mediation of the Internet, a de-territorializing technology not confi ned to national locations, rather plays a prominent role in re-contextualizing national aspects of life and in re-territorializing a nationalistic interpellation and a distinct national identification in these unpredictable identity trajectories. The nature of today’s diasporic media space facilitated by the Internet has become more diversified, potent and complex, as the flows of the media not only move from the West center to the periphery, but also from the periphery to the center in multi-voices and multi-directional forms of ethnic media contra-flows (Thussu 2007). Appropriation of the Internet-enabled ethnic media is usually established as a ritualistic cultural practice embedded in the routines and the banality of everyday life. This mediated and habituated ritual may allow displaced subjects to reconstitute themselves daily and to make the daily patterns of their diasporic living manageable and sometimes meaningful to a significant extent. A sense of belonging can be symbolically constructed through repetitive practices, such as the repeated and familiar patterns of everyday media consumption, the mundane ideological habits and self-conscious positioning articulating the dialectics of social inclusion and exclusion. As a

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 111 consequence, an identity is to be found in the “embodied habits of social life,” including those of thinking and using language as well as talking in everyday life (Billig 1995). The rituals, repeatedly performed in the diasporic media space, have a potential to construct and sustain familiar formulations of cultural connections, ways of attachment and feelings of belonging, a sense of consistency or imaginary coherence of self-identity that is exigently needed for reaching a closure of the disrupted and ever-changing experiences in all the movements and displacement. Simultaneously, such rituals have a potential to enable the daily reproduction of nationhood, a situated national identity in a de-territorialized and destabilized world. This ritualized communicative encounter in the mediated experience is thoroughly ordinary and quotidian, but never insignificant in its paradoxical relationship of the Internet and banal nationalism, the nationalization of the transnational spaces. Diasporic use of the Internet-enabled ethnic media is among the principal and integral means through which a certain type of transnational social order has been initiated, organized and sustained with a necessary sense of being and belonging. The actual capacity of, and users’ ideological investments in, the diasporic media space is significant and powerful yet often taken-for-granted in the banality of the every day. Use of the ethnic media space enables displaced subjects to transform themselves into active, deliberate, national cultural subjects, or vibrant and performative agents with some rooted sense of identity. This can be seen as a response to desire for “cultural fulfilment, rootedness and placeable feelings” (Smith 1995), ontological security and stability of identity in the midst of seemingly rootless movements, unpredictable transitions and changes. This form of nationalistic affect, with deeply personal and emotional meaning, can be particularly potent when experienced at a physical distance from national homeland, even if the formation of flexible, fluid and multiple forms of transnational subjectivity and such choices may appear to be possible and potentially opened up in the transnational flows of desire. This mode of experience points to a seeming irony but perhaps an ineluctable consequence that the intersecting experiences, both lived and mediated, of social exclusion, marginality and constant emotional struggles lead to heightened diasporic consciousness (“come to know us better”) that strengthens, rather than weakens, nationalism. The lived day-to-day experiential consciousness of the uneven transnational social field and foundational inequality, especially affective elements of consciousness and relationships, may critically evoke and intensify the processes of identity negotiation and contestation. This evoked situation and a new awareness arising within may compel marginalized diasporic subjects to engage with the reconstruction of their diasporic presence and positioning in implicit or explicit opposition to the global macro-social structures and established dominant discourses that continue to influence, if not entirely determine, their diasporic lives.

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Diaspora is a place of identity or a myriad of dislocated sites of identity contestation, ways of being and knowing anew and differently, which can reconfigure the meaning of nation and nationalism and produce new and sometimes unintended articulations of national loyalties often in the “unnoticed, small words which are routinely and widely repeated yet beyond the focus of conscious attention” (Billig 1995). Diasporic nationalism is not merely a product of the growing consciousness of the experiential dimension of dwelling in displacement, of social exclusion and marginality and predicaments entailed by it. Significantly, diasporic nationalism is also an active outcome of the routine engagement in these new connections and alternative spaces created principally by the forms of the ethnic media and Internet-based electronic mediation that express and articulate different elements from transnational cultures, as well as different frameworks of action and experience as relevant to the constitution of subjectivity in available national language codes. Often, existing studies have noted a general phenomenon that many migrants of older generations tend to look back with nostalgia to their national homes and live with little social interaction with the broader communities of their host society and with less developed skills in the language of their host culture; therefore, as both a cause and a consequence, their long-distance diasporic nationalism is more likely to be encouraged, promoted and sustained via the transnational ethnic media, various genres and narratives in everyday life (Aksoy and Robins 2000; Cunningham and Sinclair 2001; Gillespie 2002; Naficy 2003). However, relatively less is known and visible about younger generations; the ways in which today’s digital migrants, much more educated and skilled knowledge diasporas or hypermobile transnationals, may also create and sustain regular and purposeful networks that can possibly generate, and be intimately linked to, forms of self-narration for the formation of daily national identity and diasporic nationalism in both physical and virtual modalities. It is important to recognize that the motivation and development of alternative and significantly mediated networks linked to the home nation is likely to take place, when transnational migrants do not feel at home in the social world of the host nation, contingent upon constraints associated with “ways of belonging transnationally” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004), despite their ways of being transnationally and seeming “presence in both” (Portes 1997). Knowledge diasporas of the upper and the middle classes, with a high level of education, skills and mobility, are often held to represent an increasingly transnational outlook, predisposition and lifestyle as the very epitome of transnational subjectivity. Yet, despite the relatively privileged status, as Asian women in this study attest, they, too, paradoxically come to learn and have an increasing uncertainty or doubt about how they can meaningfully relate to the desired place of their migration, of their individual choice and self-responsibility, and how they can permanently deal with their precarious and unstable situation of “never quite belonging”

Diasporic Nationalism and the Media 113 within it, while at the same time contesting a hierarchically ordered global culture in common. Under what conditions do transnational migrants feel the need to articulate purposefully diasporic nationalism? Transnational social space, both lived and mediated, is an ambivalent, unstable and shifting terrain that can be experienced differently by migrants in the varied dialectic of individual connecting and disconnecting, belonging and non-belonging, and in the complex interplay with larger relations of power, domination and normative constraints. Global structures of race, ethnicity, nationality and gender operate powerfully in the everyday practices of inclusion and exclusion and affect intimately the dialectical sense of belonging and alienation with differences in the global framework and the degree of interaction and communicative activities. These modalities simultaneously constitute and articulate diasporic subjects, the limitations of their social positioning, and their ways of thinking, acting and being at a particular locus of their intersections in the diaspora. It thus poses an ineluctable question as to the nature and the possibility of a sustainable transnational, cosmopolitan or world city lifestyle, if any; how and to what extent it can constitute any meaningful social relations and progressive participations in an unevenly structured transnational realm of power and difference, of the politics of representation and contestation that have to be resolved. Under what conditions can transnational migrants possibly become cosmopolitan subjects, or can they afford a cosmopolitan identity? This important question will be critically interrogated in the proceeding chapter.

6

Female Cosmopolitanism?

COSMOPOLITANISM AS A WESTERN CONCEPT: “WE NEVER INVENTED COSMOPOLITANISM” I have lived in different countries and speak several languages. Western people say, “You are a cosmopolitan woman,” so I looked into a dictionary to see what cosmopolitan means. . . . In Korea it is so common to travel abroad. Or you become wang-tta (excluded). We have seen the world outside. . . . English is essential. I highlight “cosmopolitan” on my CV because it sounds good to put on the CV. Getting a job is extremely difficult for women (in Korea). I saw the word cosmopolitan from the women’s magazine Cosmopolitan. Are they related? That was the fi rst time I saw the word cosmopolitan (in Korea). . . . It may mean becoming Westernized, Western styles, individual freedom, sexual liberation, no self-sacrifice. It says, don’t sacrifice your self, enjoy your life, how to conquer men, which is different from our lives in Korea. Women in Sex and the City drink a cosmopolitan cocktail. They live their own life, open and daring with men. They kick ass. . . . Watching TV back home I imagined my life elsewhere. I wanted to know more and more about them. . . . Back in Korea, I wanted to travel New York, London, global cities and experience different types of life outside. The formal process of globalization in Korea, introduced in the 1980s and formally launched by the government in the 1990s, does not signal the end of the nation or the arrival of a borderless global society, but it is a dualistic process bringing global markets and new economic actors together from different cultures, yet, in this process, also provoking defensive nationalism (Kim 2000). The general public’s response to globalization has been shaped to a large extent by an instrumentalist view of ethnic nationalism, highly exclusive and ethnically based citizenship policies, intensifying rather than weakening the basic structure of national identity. Korea places

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nationalism above gender issues and individualism; women are generally viewed as subordinate citizens whose primary role is to produce sons for the community of men, and men are participatory citizens in society where the overwhelming majority subscribes to a common nationalism that is not fragmented by different cultural and ethnic groups (Kim and Choi 1997). Although most Korean women in this study try to figure out what cosmopolitanism may signal, they are not certain what the term exactly means, and none of them are self-declared cosmopolitans. Reflecting back on the homeland, they remembered a cosmopolitan disposition as a new cultural orientation, increasing experience of cultural difference through the global media and frequent mobility around the world (“have seen the world outside”), which is fi rmly grounded in the urban middle-classness. The urban cultural spaces in Korea have increasingly come to transform territorial national cultures, altering the conditions for the possible construction of de-territorialized identity and expanding individuals’ own framework of meaning and lifestyle, not only through increased physical mobility around the world but also through global cultural consumption and the media, imaginative engagement with distant global Others and marked cultural differences within the mundane experience of everyday life. Multimodal signs and images of cosmopolitanism are proliferating and encountered in the realm of media cultural consumption. For instance, the localized version of Cosmopolitan women’s magazine, targeting single women of eighteen to thirty-four years of age, signifies a playful, sexualized, assertive self and fantasy of power through fashion and bodily practices. The US popular TV show Sex and the City acknowledges women’s sexual desires, freedom and subjectivity subverting gendered roles (“kick ass”) often created by and celebrated over consumption (“cosmopolitan cocktail”). Travel shows explore alternative lifestyles and livelihoods, evoking the imagination of freedom, individuality and independence disembedded from local contexts, while displaying the world cuisines and curiosities in Others’ tastes of life. It is significant to recognize that the media are integral to global processes and cosmopolitanizing cultural experiences; electronic mass mediation and everyday mediated experiences should be understood as a general foundation of contemporary social life, of knowledge and imagination about the wider world afar, with a potentially pluralizing impact on identity formation and female individualization in particular (also see Chapter 3). It is individualist cosmopolitanism that fuels Korean women’s imagination of global Others in various cultural sites generating the expression of individuated self. Pragmatic cosmopolitanism, as a form of economic and social capital, is further fuelled by occupational strategies and distinction (“good to put on the CV”) encountered with the gendered labor market inequities that systematically limit women’s participation and the need for individualization (for details, see Chapter 3; Kim 2005: 169–177). Cosmopolitanism in this sense can certainly be defi ned as the discursive strategies

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and resources used by educated middle-class Korean women to seek their strategic positioning and mobility within the global and the domestic labor markets, and therefore, occupationally steered life politics and experiential alternatives. English works as an index of class mobility and cosmopolitan striving in the global order (Park and Abelmann 2004). Capitalist media consumerism reflects and articulates widespread self-making mobility cultures as well as heightened anxieties about becoming involved in the global. It encourages Korean women, particularly middle-class consumer subjects, to create and constantly engage with new forms of consumer agency and to reinvent themselves by drawing on a wide range of cultural resources, diverse cultural tastes and seemingly liberating styles, and transnational discourses of consumerist cosmopolitanism for their own identity work in a hierarchically gendered society. Korean women’s pragmatic need to be cosmopolitan, in whatever forms, is an ineluctable consequence of the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions, emerging as a contestation of the unresolved tensions of social reality while trying to be able to transcend the constrained social location and national self. What arises from the process of mediated experience and media talk is the imagined cosmopolitanism that operates intensely at a reflexive distance (“wanted to know more and more about them”). But the consequence that manifests through the actual embracing of the world and encountering of Others in proximity is not necessarily an increased significance and better potentiality of cosmopolitanism. Are these Korean women becoming cosmopolitan subjects, or can they afford a cosmopolitan identity? They (British) have no interest in us (Koreans). Whether inside school life or outside, depending on whom we meet, depending on the luck! Generally they don’t bother to know about us. Some (British) people ask, “Are you from North Korea or South Korea? When are you going back home?” I do not say it aloud but continually feel racism, everyday little things that I try to ignore. I say “not aloud” because what we have to say will not matter to them anyway. I don’t feel connection in human interactions (in London). I come to realize, why try to know them when they don’t try to know us? “They have no interest in us.” Much of the motivation and possibility of becoming cosmopolitan subjects depends on the contexts, discursive and communicative encounters and common existential experiences. Britain, London in particular, has been a center of the renewed talk of cosmopolitanism since the 1990s, with developments towards globalization, European integration and re-branding of cities to attract fi nancial and cultural investment and tourism, envisaging a space for the transformation of national

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identity to “cosmopolitan Britain” (Calhoun 2008). Cultural difference and human pluralism has been re-valued as a resource and an opportunity and appropriated into the re-visioning of the cosmopolitan space, yet it can present an exclusive rhetoric, rather than an open-minded interest or an awareness of the existence and equal validity of other cultures. In celebrating the supposedly inclusive cosmopolitan consciousness, which forms of cultural difference are seen desirable and valued, and which are excluded? A world of increasing flows of people and cultural melange with its allure of cultural diversity and cosmopolitan gloss may appear to be a comfort zone for strangers, but it can also be experienced with a highly implicit stance of racism (“everyday little things”), subtly signalled hostility that can co-exist without manifesting confl icts and come to be internalized (for details, see Chapter 4). The resulting consequence of everyday banal racism and exclusion, of this actual and repeated experience in everyday diasporic life, can be a self-conscious rejection to the mainstream host society, or highly selective social interaction within an ethnic enclave, rather than an enhanced or better enabled cosmopolitan disposition and openness towards the new and culturally different world. Any possible viability of cosmopolitan identity formation is seen to be a relative one (“depending on whom we meet”), hence, a matter of luck and contingency, more than a matter of choice; one cannot freely choose and operate its potentiality in one’s own agency. Cosmopolitanism should be understood by situated and relational experience. It is a dialogic formation in the specific contexts encountered, wherein the meaning of identity operates from its interaction with a system of differences and the inequitable exercise of power shapes the extent of one’s belonging, or non-belonging, to the world as a whole. A resulting response by the excluded ethnic minorities is often a feeling of rejection and self-doubt, a reflexive distantiation and potentially subversive resistance, or a self-determined withdrawal from the cosmopolitan openness (“why try to know them when they don’t try to know us?”) in the hidden contestation of asymmetrical knowledge and asymmetrical ignorance. I will always be a foreigner. I feel so alone (in London). There is a boundary like a wide river between us and them, which cannot be crossed. . . . We hear people in the classroom talk about cosmopolitanism. We just listen. Whatever that means, it is their idea. We never invented cosmopolitanism. If that means following them, losing our own identity, it is meaningless to desire that. “We never invented cosmopolitanism.” A strong disassociation or repudiation from the concept of cosmopolitanism as a Western invention, as well as its situated reason, can be underpinned by the marginalizing experiences of the unequal, West-centric contexts and sometimes antagonistic human interactions. This affective and lived dimension of displacement

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can reinforce non-cosmopolitanism, and even more, anti-cosmopolitanism. A discussion of diversity in the Western academy, with its unreflexive celebration of cultural difference, is inadequate without an engagement with the asymmetrical postcolonial flows of power in racial imaginations, and difference whose existence may escape such maps of imagination (Shome 2006). Europe has no significant existence of the Korean diaspora; interests in Korean indigenous knowledge and inclusive knowledge sharing through reciprocal cultural familiarity are unlikely to be promoted by individuals, social groups or educational institutions in Europe, if it is difficult for them to fi nd or imagine commercial economic values and related employment opportunities from this small-sized country, although Korea today indicates its increasing stature as an economic and political global player (Howard 1994). This situation often fails to make space for any serious interests and conversation across cultural boundaries, as well as space for ethical education and the moral idea of cosmopolitanism as “taking seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives and learning from others through conversation” (Appiah 2006). Belonging within Europe is a matter of uncertainty, and vulnerability to exclusion is a key indicator of not belonging (Bhabha 1998). Social exclusion and discrimination have been part of the process of constructing Europe that is rooted in nationality not residence. Ethnic minorities are often excluded from Britain’s national cultural life with its longstanding racialization of belonging; paradoxically, what a culture of liberty, or the vernacular cosmopolitanism of European capital cities such as London, cannot deliver is a sense of belonging and certainty (Stevenson 2003). An increasing awareness of global connectivity through the media and imagined cosmopolitanism back home may project an inclusive world of strangers that openly receives them, yet the actual experience of inhabiting the world is often devoid of social affi liation and can be unbearably lonely (“I will always be a foreigner. I feel so alone”), as acutely felt and expressed by many Korean women in this study. One’s own inability to stop being a foreigner comes to be a harsh realization that one has to accept in the uneven mode of human interaction and the inescapable difference in a pluralistic transnational world. What follows inevitably, as a response to unresolved tensions, is a paradoxical commitment to becoming a respected part of national life and attachment at a distance. Our country is so small, so weak that people outside do not take us seriously. It makes me determined to stay Korean and respect Korean culture rather than slip out and into that of the West. I rarely thought about my self as Korean while living in Korea, often thought about discrimination because we are women. But here (in London), we are always foreigners because we are Korean.

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We are essentially different from them (British). Living abroad, I am becoming more Korean. Distinctive Korean identity is to keep respect for who we are. . . . All my friends in London happen to be Asians, who are interested in Korean culture, TV drama and music. We tend to sit together in the classroom especially during class seminars because we don’t speak much in English, we eat together after class and sometimes cook together in the weekend. . . . It is a small Asian connection, does not go beyond that. Even between Asians, we imagine to be unique, different from each other. The consequence of increasing transnational movement is not the emergence of robust cosmopolitan subjects and a loss of distinctive identity, of difference that undermines its own cultural particularity. Rather, to a great extent, lived diasporic experience underlies the nation as a viable project of identity-building and reinforces the securing of national identity defi ned in ethno-cultural terms, in a world of different visions, hierarchical norms and values that may compete and conflict with each other. The construction of national identity occurs by a growing ethnic consciousness in the experience of the dialectics of power and the reason of feeling towards an unrepresentative position (“so small, so weak”) within the transnational. Nationalism is a conscious micro-political practice of positioning and struggle; feeling beyond nationalism, or cosmopolitanism, should be preconditioned on symmetrical representation and inclusion. Any possibility of the formation of cosmopolitan subjectivity is substantially constrained and circumscribed by the new racial hierarchies of insider/outsider status confronting tensions within the ways of asymmetrical representation, the lack of openness, as well as the lack of transcendence of ethnic difference in identity politics. Cosmopolitanism, as a lived human experience and as an existential thesis, could stand strongly opposed to, and feel far from, an idealist sentiment of the concept that considerably obscures and de-emphasizes, whether unwittingly or not, the significance of the constraining social structures, the enduring asymmetries of power and domination, inequalities and uneven dialogic relations, in which everyday transnational lives and practices are embedded, operate, and sometimes even reproduce and perpetuate such constraint. Cosmopolitanism as a normative, moral and philosophical ideal means “learning from each other’s differences through conversation” (Appiah 2006), or “overcoming national identity as an ideological or naturalized constraint” (Beck 2006) and transcending all identities by “a universal identification that does not place love/loyalty of country ahead of universal humanity” (Nussbaum 1997). However, this overwhelmingly normative ideal of cosmopolitanism, and its abstract formulation, or its utopian and automatic cosmopolitan vision, can be seen as merely celebrating cultural differences and human diversity, uncritically assuming an inclusiveness and engagement with differences, and also assuming an unconditionally

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motivating attitude towards all human beings across national borders and cultural boundaries. In the homeland, Korean women felt excluded from power and status commonly as a salient consequence of the gendered position (“because we are women”). In diaspora, they experience another common, yet subtle and unspeakable form of ethnic exclusion, which denies legitimate belonging (“always foreigners because we are Korean”). The home nation comes to be re-imagined as a counter-cultural, highly particularized or even essentialized, higher entity to the displaced women who feel excluded and marginalized from the realities of the global structures of power and status, and the discursive and internally differentiated regime of representation. National identity becomes an emotionally charged, ambiguously empowered, constitutive narrative of self-understanding that penetrates deep into their thoughts and feelings when there are confusions and doubts about belonging. Highly emotional, nationalistic identity politics is grounded in the way Korean women come to understand the distinguished relationship between the self and Others (“we are essentially different from them”), seeming implausibility of connection, longing for respectable self-identification (“who we are”) and the subsequent desire to sustain its dignity and uniqueness. Actual conditions of transnational lives can underline the new construction of boundaries and essentialized differences while stressing “the nation’s uniqueness as an indispensable legitimizing principle” (Conversi 2000). It is suggested that there is a tendency among Asian students to perceive a sense of solidarity and connection with other Asian students in the presence of European students in English speaking countries (Kobayashi 2010). Although such a tendency is also the case with women in this study, the formation of this context-bound cosmopolitan relationship prompted by unequal power relations of Asia/Europe broadly is also marked by, and limited within, their recognition of, and conscious search for, nationalizing differentiation and the national uniqueness of subjectivity (“imagine to be unique, different from each other”) within these shared communities of Asia. Transnational mobility and interaction does not easily generate a cosmopolitanizing experience of the world, a fluid and extended sense of belonging beyond national boundaries, but rather presents concrete manifestations of nationalism and the limits of imagined cosmopolitanism in the motivations of act.

IMAGINED COSMOPOLITANISM: “JUST IMAGINE THROUGH THE MEDIA BUT CANNOT ACT” Through the magazine Cosmopolitan, Japanese women heard of the word, but I never tried to translate it into Japanese to share our understanding (in Japan). . . . I like to adventure my self. Travelling is more

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fun with friends. We want to have fun before serious life. . . . making a career and marrying a modern man. I don’t know what it means but London is called cosmopolitan, because all sorts of people and food from the world are here? In Tokyo, we could taste everything from the world, speak English as people in Japan admire. I prefer European art film but enjoyed Friends, Sex and the City back in Japan. Their different styles were popular among us. . . . Western women don’t feel ashamed to say, “I am selfish,” “I love myself so much.” Western society seems open to diversity, individualism, your self, your own life, your own pleasure, very different from Japan. The Japanese response to globalization, since the 1980s, has shown a contradictory tendency of the advent of transnationalism and the revival of nationalism with its proclamations of Japanese superiority based on difference and uniqueness that has been promoted more by Japanese corporate business than by the state government (Ryuhei 2001). A global mélange of socio-cultural and economic forces is thought to lead to the emergence of transcultural Japan with a blurred borderland and a possible shift towards cosmopolitan movements (Willis and Shigematsu 2008). For many Japanese women in this study, the term “cosmopolitan” is vague and ungraspable, yet they stand in the forefront of transnational forms of life as they embrace and embody the cosmopolitan world of consumption without borders. Transnational mobility is seen as a resource and play in the transition to adulthood, and broadly within the transformation of life. Unlike Europe where travel was generally associated with the aristocratic elite, Japan historically experienced moving for the purpose of play in a popular way that was not so frequent in other countries of Europe and Asia (Anguis and Moon 2008). Middle-class Japanese women in urban consumer culture attempt to transcend the limits of gendered identity—delaying marriage into their thirties, creating a mobile biography through foreign travel and the media, developing global consciousness and distinction of English (“as people in Japan admire”), appropriating the language of global fashion styles and bodily practices in Western TV shows and magazines as sites for the articulation of individuality (also see Chapter 3). Internationalization represents a distinct project of self-identity among young middle-class women, who speak English, identify themselves as career-oriented, express feelings of inadequacy in Japan and search for a new place of belonging (Kawakami 2009). Many young women have emerged as Japan’s most enthusiastic internationalists, seeking education, employment, romance or marriage with Western men, in ways that seem to defy Japanese nationalism and long-standing relations of gendered power (Kelsky 2001).

122 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women The salient sphere of contemporary consumption and mobility stresses individuation (Delanty 2003), liberation of desire from established gendered structures, and the deconstruction of self in a process of imaginary signification and playfulness that can allow the existence of multiple levels of experience in Japanese everyday life. Hence, mundane cosmopolitanism in this context is intrinsically linked to the playful imagination of, and the routinized consumption of, the self in the new mediated symbolic space. This imagination centering on the self has a potential to mobilize and transform in the space of alterity through the mediated interaction with global cultural diversity, whether exotic foods, desired lifestyles or different media images, in the milieu of cultural globalism. Identity can be altered and reconfigured within the transnational framework of imagining while living in particular local contexts. Media consumption increasingly redefi nes Japanese ethno-cultural identity and forms the basis for imagined cosmopolitanism. When I was in Japan I really worshiped Western pop culture. They are tall, have longer legs and light skin. . . . My friends tried change by dying hair blond. I used whitening cosmetics. We imagined to be part of that Western culture and wanted to know more. We worshiped them. In Japan, Westerners are from other planets, but here (in London) they are just human! I want to live my own life. . . . My mom never worked outside, always keeps the house clean and shiny for the family. Men get a better job and a stable position in Japan. To fi nd a better life, women move around in the world out there. Studying abroad is another consumption to fi nd and gratify what we don’t have. “We worshiped them.” The gravitational pull of the Western media, particularly the imagination of “white Westerners” (Darling-Wolf 2003), is a major embodiment of the transformation of national self in the multiple contexts of play. Japanese women talk about their own desires vis-à-vis the West while accentuating what they do not have in common— whether a mere admiration for Western bodies (“longer legs”), symbolic consumption of racial otherness (“dying hair blond”) or a full expression of self (“live my own life”). The imagination of transgressing national cultural boundaries can lead to a subjective sense of empowerment and mobility in their own imagined cosmopolitanism. An orientalist juxtaposition of Western-Japanese difference usually projects Western men as egalitarian and sensitive and Japanese men as oppressive and insensitive (Kelsky 2001); marrying white men is imagined by Japanese women to be a form of upward international social mobility and alternative lifestyle, a part of their personal, gender-equal, career plan to “move up” (Kawakami 2009).

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Such openness to global cultural diversity is to imagine alternative lifestyles and a process of emancipation from the constraints of the nation’s gendered construction of identity politics, corporate work and family structures. While Japanese men stay at home, Japanese women are increasingly travelling the world, physically and imaginatively, becoming aware of their own positions in relation to global counterparts. Trying to be mobile transnationals (“in the world out there”) is intimately linked to the experiential tensions rooted in the home, tradition and patriarchal meanings of life that are often negotiated through media cultural consumption—resources for alternative knowledge, as well as struggles for self-expression through the consumption of the self. Knowledge is itself an object of consumption, as is apparent from the way Japanese women regard education as a commodity to be consumed (also see Chapter 3; Delanty 2003). New forms of non-local, mediated knowledge and imagined cosmopolitanism are creating greater motivations to stand outside of the national location and enter a broader sphere of cultural experience, albeit with an unexpected consequence. (British) people ask, “Are you from Japan?,” so I say, “Yes, I am from Tokyo.” Then they really like it! They ask lots of questions. . . . They want to know about the Japanese hair style and kimono, temples, how to use traditional wrapping cloth that we don’t even use now. . . . They worship us. In their fantasy, they want to believe we wear kimono usually and serve tea nicely. They (British) seem to know Japanese culture through the media. . . geisha in kimono, Pokémon, advanced technologies. . . . I came here to become modern and independent, not a traditional Japanese woman. But Western men like traditional images of Japanese women, and they expect traditional Japanese women when meeting us. “They worship us.” The overall interest in, or fascination with, the appeal of uniquely Japanese culture in touch with tradition signifies the modern West’s desire to be cosmopolitan by intermixing with Japanese otherness in their capacity and willingness to take pleasure from the transnational cultural exchange. The representation of Japan in the Western popular imagination is paradoxical and complex; the Western fear for Japanese corporations, economic power and powerful masculine nationalism by which Japan is seen as a site of potential threat, but on the other hand, the Western attraction to an orientalist fantasy and subservient object of desire (“geisha in kimono”), which is constructed through the West’s sexualization and feminization of Japanese culture. The body of the Japanese woman has become a metonymic representation of Japanese particularism, or traditional Japan itself, in the Western popular imagination and broadly in the racist foundations of Western modernity. Japanese women in this study ambivalently interact with, and

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also struggle with, the mainstream Western culture’s racial and sexual otherness, politics of representation and exotica, particularly the mirroring of white male needs that has shaped, to some extent, self-affi rming Western discourse of difference, the quintessential image of subservient and erotic Japanese women, or the hierarchically imagined cultural classification and its categorical distinction of Asian women, in general, as docile subjects. “Gendering Japan as female” (Yamamoto 1999) is the primary mechanism through which Western discourse controls and shapes the ideological image of Japan in the Western imagination shifting between the powerful masculine and the romantic feminine. The dialogue between Japan and the West is not one between equals within the Western political and cultural unconscious and ambivalent tensions (Morley and Robins 1995). Beyond national borders, Japanese media culture has increasingly invented an identity of “cool Japan” as a form of cultural nationalism through technologically advanced, utopian and futuristic entertainment including animated movies, comics and video games, while establishing distinctively Japanese styles and particularism that are differentiated not only by Japan but also by the West (Iwabuchi 1994). If multicultural diversity is celebrated in a cosmopolitan vision of the world, Japan could stand for a distinctive, albeit ambiguous, positioning within the reciprocal recognition. Cosmopolitanism, as a relational and dialogic term, operates within the contexts of encounters, favorable or unfavorable, inclusive or exclusive, thereby a cosmopolitan possibility may emerge or not. Such interplay may generate a situated, but characteristically thin cosmopolitanism; even while Japanese women denounced and repudiated Japan’s traditional masculine culture, they become more attached to the place called home with its cultural particularities yet simultaneously embracing pleasure from the interactions with the modern West, however in contradictory and implicitly forced ways (“they want to believe we wear kimono usually”) with struggles in the language of paradox (“they expect traditional Japanese women”). They (British) are interested in traditional Japanese culture I don’t even know about. This is a surprising discovery. I have to learn to explain to them. In Japan, I was not Japanese. I was liberal, against old traditions. I preferred the Western world and imagined changing my self through the media. . . . I just imagine through the media but cannot act. I am becoming more Japanese while living abroad. . . . There is no reason to change or become like them. Being distinctively Japanese is an advantage. While living in London, I realize difference between us and them, and surprisingly, they are interested in distinctive Japanese culture. The Western worship of traditional Japanese otherness, often seen as accidental knowledge (“surprising discovery”) to many Japanese women on

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the move, can impact upon and interplay with how Japanese women come to redefi ne a new subject position; “just imagine through the media but cannot act.” The fluidity of conceptions of identity and change were once powerfully imagined through the Western media and occidental longings in their homeland in a cultural form of imagined cosmopolitanism, while mobilizing the scope of act beyond the localized contexts. But the actual interactions, discursive and communicative encounters with the West recontextualize such imagined cosmopolitan identification and precariously expose, or impose to some extent, a fi xed categorical distinction of Japanese-ness. Why be a woman of the world? The motivational reasons, which would allow for the possibility of cosmopolitan subjectivity and the determination to act on it, depend on what distinction and gain to be made, to what end. Far from a robust cosmopolitan projection, a self-determined reaction to how best to act from the learning of cosmopolitan knowledge rather foregrounds a national self in the distinctiveness of cultural difference, representing Japanese-ness even more strongly than before (“becoming more Japanese”) in the relational experience of the transnational field. I thought global cities like London would be so modern and advanced, but they seem to expect traditions from elsewhere, from others like us. . . . I don’t know what cosmopolitan means, but becoming a global person doesn’t mean anything. Japan is better. I come to learn more about our unique culture and realize fundamental difference between us and them. I feel more Japanese. . . . I cannot become like them. I imagined change through the media but realize more and more difference while living here. The consequence of the seemingly transgressive act of migration presents a reinvigoration and vitality of ethnic national identity marked by a feeling of its distinctiveness, desirability, even superiority (“Japan is better”) and self-affi rming discourse that may serve to contest and call into question the supposed centrality of the West. Far from integrating into mainstream Britain, many Asian migrants tend to view their own ethnic, indigenous national cultures as superior, while the mainstream British approaches to multiculturalism or cosmopolitanism remain deeply unsatisfactory due to the dominance of modernist and Eurocentric assumptions about the innate superiority of everything that is not sufficiently well prepared for the resulting challenges and tensions today (Menski 2002). To be cosmopolitan in Britain is to recognize and deal with these current challenges and tensions, rather than promulgating and imposing common universal cultural values and calling, explicitly or implicitly, for subordination and subjugation. Japanese women’s shifting experience of displacement in a proximate and discursive relationship with Others constructs the new socio-cultural imaginings of the self and Others from a highly particularistic and more

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differentiated perspective that is in part informed by dominant Western discourse. This relational and lived experience in diasporic contexts presents a newly engaged, somehow empowered and heightened form of ethnic self-consciousness, while simultaneously leading to the emergence of ethnic nationalism and the enduring appeal of national identity marked by the distinctiveness and positional superiority of Japan, as well as ambivalence and creative tensions to be recognized in the hegemonic transnational field of otherness and representation. Nationalism is not about to diminish or disappear, but re-articulates its potency and relevance in diasporic contexts and thus sustains its vital and positional significance, not necessarily by denying or being antithetical to today’s seemingly transnationalizing tendencies and to the ambiguity of meanings and ideologies of cosmopolitanism. Rather, diasporic nationalism is becoming re-discovered and reinforced precisely by these new transnationalizing social conditions, operating powerfully and converting ambiguous and sometimes repressive diasporic experiences into the more familiar structure of feeling, reasoning and subjective empowerment to a necessary degree, if not overly utopian (also see Chapter 5). Like cosmopolitanism, this form of nationalism in diaspora should be understood as a relational term, as a response to a living relationship with the West to differ from and interplay with—wherein the working of ethnic self-identification becomes more conscious, more potent and the articulation of difference becomes more crystallized (“realize fundamental difference between us and them”). The heightened differentiation and the more differentiated perspective in the transnational intermixing do not easily install a set of common cultures or universal principles to identify with. Ironically, the so-called cosmopolitan city may be confronted with the dynamics of nationalisms of mobile transnationals, who conceive themselves primarily as national, orient themselves toward a sense of distinct identity and differentiation, and sustain its potency and relevance, while dealing with the ambivalent tensions of the working of identity in response to the hegemonic worship of otherness as well as to what is perceived as common problems.

WHY BE A COSMOPOLITAN?: “WE ARE SEEN AS A PROBLEM” Because I have studied in New York and London, people say I am “cosmopolitan.” I Googled the word, but didn’t understand. . . . My British boyfriend once visited my hometown (in China). Everybody looked at him. It’s that strange. I experienced Western culture through the media (in China). My life in London is very simple—study, work, home. Back in China, I had a broad social life with friends. We knew all famous restaurants,

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Western movies and fashion. Freely expressing self and emotion was appealing. British accent sounded high-class. . . . We felt, must see the world outside. Self-sacrifice is an old value. Unlike the mother’s generation (in China), I want to care about my self and create my own life. Since the 1990s China has undergone rapid transition from a centralplanned socialist economy to a market-driven economy, and a new economically privileged figure called the “rice bowl of youth” (Zhen 2000) has gained wide currency, symbolizing the rise of a consumer society. The Chinese government in the 1990s declared that there is no longer an escape from globalization, no choice but to reform, restructure and open up stateowned enterprises (Kim 2000). The social imaginary of modernity has been marked by tensions between competing claims of globalization and nationalism that are increasingly present in everyday cultural practices (Lozada 2006). Feminine youth, as consumers and subjects of desire, is the trope and implement of a global modernity with Chinese characteristics. Urban young women temporarily delay, not repudiate, marriage and childbearing in order to embrace their newfound post-socialist freedom and self-expression through consumption practices, increasingly want rather than sacrifice the self (“unlike the mother’s generation”), desire to be autonomous and fi nancially independent (“create my own life”), which indicates a shift from a collective socialist body to a performing one with a subjectivity previously unimaginable. Modernity is gendered and embodied, often performed by female bodies in transit of consumer culture and individualism in contemporary China. The desire to transcend locality and domesticate cosmopolitanism within China rests in the bodies of young women (Rofel 2007). Middle-class and upper-class young women’s bodily practices capture a paradoxical desire to embody Chinese-ness, both reproductively and as objects of desire, but also to newly produce and represent a class-inflected potential to transcend Chinese-ness in capitalist urban consumerism. The highly educated, privileged middle-class and upper-class, would-be cosmopolitan Chinese women represent an increasingly visible, new social class, a marker of identity as differentiated consumers of global media culture. In the absence of a shared content with Others, cosmopolitanism is imagined through neoliberal capitalist media culture—including fashion as a signification of change in a bodily practice that is intimate and individualizing (Johansson 2001); English as a commodified economic capital creating a new professional identity in globalized urban space (Zhang 2007); upscale foreign appeals pervasive in advertising (Zhou and Belk 2004); construction of new class subjectivity and cultural capital in consumeroriented television programs (Xu 2007); aspiration for self-fulfillment and Western lifestyles in consumer magazines (Wei and Pan 1999). This

128 Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women proliferation of consumerism is seen to provide “potentials for liberation from hegemonic nationalism” (Yang 2001) by the emergence of new forms of “media populism” (Latham 2000). The media are the central constitutive force for imagining a mobile transnational identity inhabiting trans-spatial and trans-temporal space that dissolves the fi xity of historical nationhood and state territorial imperatives. Chinese women of the relatively affluent middle and upper classes, who have economic resources to consume the power of capitalist cultural cosmopolitanism, continually look outward and engage with new modes of compulsion (“must see the world outside”), a post-socialist generation’s experiential turn. I see how Western people think about Chinese through the media. . . we are uncivilized, even dangerous immigrants, pollute the world. . . we are seen as a problem. They (British) have negative images about us (Chinese). I explain history but give up! They are the top of the mountain. The superior vs. inferior judgment is fi xed. Even if I so wish to be cosmopolitan, I alone cannot be cosmopolitan. We are treated differently inside the so-called multicultural university and the outside world. . . while others can travel freely, we cannot. Queuing outside embassy buildings in London to travel Europe, we realize we are really different! Despite weak English I tried to talk to Western students at school parties. . . . They leave us alone. They think they know about everything. There is no common subject to talk about. We become mixed with people like us. . . . I know Chinese women married to British men. What do they talk about? Crucially, much of the cosmopolitan possibility, willingness and motivation is predicated upon the context of encountering otherness and the way its cultural identity is projected; “we are seen as a problem.” China’s constitutive cultural difference appears to be perceived as bearers of potential problems, or lacks, hardly desirable sources of cosmopolitan unity. Social distance and tensions are expressed by the excluded Chinese women who fi nd the seemingly inescapable orientalist projections (“uncivilized, even dangerous”) in the West-dominated discourses that tend to “create a threatening Other in order to construct a universalized self” (Pan 2004), a Western normality that may secure the West’s self-imagination and selfaffi rmation (“top of the mountain,” “know about everything”). World cities like London deploy and celebrate cosmopolitan signifiers, cultural diversity and multiculturalism, yet these values are celebrated highly selectively. China does not qualify in the Western imagination

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(Furedi 2008). Contemporary Western culture fi nds it difficult to engage constructively with China’s unusual role, the perceived threat of the nation’s considerable economic and material growth and rising international position as well as its ecological implications. The Western media generally evoke warnings that “China has destroyed as much as it has created” (Macfarlane and Yan 2004). Western discourse on the shifting positioning of China today is defi ned by both heightened interests and heightened ambivalences. Britain’s white majority may feel invaded by the global flows of other peoples and the British popular media foster a culture of fear, anxiety and prejudice; hence, the society is profoundly caught up with the questions as to who belongs and who is respected, how to deal with fear and anxiety while promoting a cosmopolitan culture of respect and tolerance (Stevenson 2003). Cosmopolitanism proves not a free-floating, but situated and relational term operating from a degree of dialogic experience and a mode of interaction in a global system of differences. Cosmopolitan identity, if any, is not in itself a matter of choice. Although one may choose to be a cosmopolitan (“I so wish to be”), one cannot automatically be cosmopolitan by herself. One’s willing agency is not a sufficient condition, since the cosmopolitan possibility or what seems like free individual choice is highly contingent upon, and regulated by, mutual understanding and validation, recognition of otherness as equally worthy of respect, if not always necessarily desirable. Why be a cosmopolitan? Perhaps most significantly, what does it mean to be a cosmopolitan for these Chinese women, when their cultural difference tends to appear or be perceived as a potential problem, and thus, as a more inferior type of status by a superior moral judgment? Cosmopolitanism entails a motivational problem and ineluctable tension on the part of the voluntaristic agency of Others, albeit being in a state of willingness and readiness to be a cosmopolitan, if otherness is often figured and represented as a problem in a mode of interaction, or as a symbolic signifier of lack that is marked out in a hierarchically imagined and defi ned world of the West, of its inequality and stratification. Cosmopolitanism can re-inscribe another form of social hierarchies in the uneven transnational field, entailing therein the engendering of a sense of fragility, non-acceptance and non-belonging, hidden contestation and painful struggles among particular ethnic groups of people. The symbolic notion of “borderless” cosmopolitan world is felt inadequate and fragile to Chinese women, for whom the control of entry visas and passports has a profound meaning of exclusion (“while others can travel freely, we cannot”), a pronounced marker of difference and subaltern status to be realized (“we are really different!”), thereby creating national boundaries and consolidating national identities among the marginalized travellers who do not share those formalized rights to travel and enjoy. It should be importantly recognized that cosmopolitanism is not a matter

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of choice, but a matter of having that choice—not to mention having the right passports in lived reality, not just in wishful thinking. Not all passports are equal; not all people are equal with equal power and control over their lives. Cosmopolitanism is a matter of the institutions and hierarchical structures regulating people’s lives and setting the parameters within which they are able to make their choices (Calhoun 2008). The current discourse around cosmopolitan places, choices and identities in an era of transnational mobility and electronic interconnectedness, as well as the shift towards easier transcendence of time and space enabled by modern media technologies, so often obscures the issues of differential power and representation, persistent exclusion and even growing inequality that it can evoke ambiguity, contestation and possible resistance, indifference or evident disdain, if not necessarily pronounced rage. The dominant, European, strands of cosmopolitan theorizing tend to propose a cosmopolitan perspective as the “common terminological denominator” of the densely connected world today, and the term’s relatively recent re-vitalization suggests the “erosion of distinct boundaries” dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and all the lifeworlds of different peoples (Beck 2006), and can further suggest thicker cultural conditions for a “possible post-national citizenship” (Urry 2003). These almost unambiguously positive views, theoretical propositions and assumptions, albeit progressive and liberating, seem incomplete and questionable. Whose cosmopolitanism? To what extent is a transcendental cosmopolitan mode of experience being made available to more people of various groups, not merely as a privileged ethnic ethos and sentiment? Who benefits? Theoretical concepts of cosmopolitanism suggest new forms of societal and political organization in Europe, yet these notions are overwhelmingly normative and hardly specify the ways in which cosmopolitanism is constructed from below; to what extent people in Europe are cosmopolitan and who they are (Pichler 2008). Substantive yet socially stratified European cosmopolitanism may exist, but forms of reluctant cosmopolitanism, attenuated thin textures of cosmopolitanism, non-cosmopolitanism, or even anti-cosmopolitanism as intersected with ethnic-national difference, should not be underestimated in the current debate of cosmopolitanism. Today, it has become common to observe that many universities in world cities, including those in London, increasingly deploy cosmopolitan images emphasizing the growing numbers of, and thus the diversity of, international student demographics. This tendency signals and further advocates institutionalized cosmopolitanism in the academy through conspicuous marketing slogans, whether “multicultural,” “global” or “cosmopolitan,” in an effort to attract more international students and generate more revenues for economic survival. In recent years, the number of Chinese students (53,000) has constituted the largest group of international students in UK institutions of higher education (HESA 2006). Therefore, in terms of student revenue and fi nancial significance, a question has been surged:

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Are mainland Chinese students saving Britain’s universities? (Nania and Green 2004). However, in the internationalized academy, the mere mixture and copresence may not give rise to new forms of global subjectivity and crosscultural dialogues. The lived reality is quite segregated (“mixed with people like us”) without the depth of encounters across national boundaries. Is there enough in common between all human beings, which enables one to be a citizen of the world yet at the same time preserve what makes one different from each other? (Appiah 2006). The cosmopolitan ideal, such a consciousness and a fi nding of a unity of mankind, may come into actualization with enough motivation for conversation and interaction across differences and through an actual practice of diversity, not simply through the co-existence or the visible co-presence. Even the Chinese elitist women, highly educated world travellers, are not well placed and disposed to have the experience of cosmopolitan interactions in a hierarchically defi ned world that operates on intrinsically moral judgment (“superior vs. inferior”) and failing capacities for mutual understanding and conversation (“no common subject to talk about”). The resulting consequence is paradoxical. I am becoming more Chinese. . . . Shopping here (in London) is easier, more choices. Through the Internet we easily connect to users who know where to buy brands at affordable prices. . . . I have a collection of Western perfumes. A Western roommate said, “You are not a Chinese any more.” When (British) people criticize China, it feels like they criticize my mother. I defend like an ambassador, determined to be more Chinese, more unique. . . . My (British) ex-boyfriend told me to go out for window shopping and learn a taste of British styles. I bought a Chinese history book and told him to learn about China, profound Chinese culture. If (British) people ask, “Where are you from?” I say, “I am Chinese” instead of saying, “I am from China.” Being Chinese is the unchangeable truth. The resulting consequence can be described as a more rigidly inscribed national body (“becoming more Chinese”) yet wrapped in a more conspicuous cosmopolitan consumer culture to the extent of its misunderstanding and negation to the eyes of encounters (“not a Chinese anymore”). The key to an understanding of cosmopolitanism lies with the realm of consumption and the realistic possibility for the transformation of excluded ethnic groups into interchangeable global consumers, if not citizens, enabled by global capital and the media transcending time

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and space in different world cultures. For many Chinese women, cosmopolitanism may be limited to a world that is an object of consumption, a wider range of options available to be consumed for pleasure and gratifi cation in constrained lives. Beneath that apparent cosmopolitan consumption practice, a profound process of nationalism is at work, deemed as one of the central forces for identifi cation and belonging in displacement, which involves a painful struggle for dialogue, understanding and reciprocal respect for each other’s constitutive cultures constructed differently in historical embeddedness. This form of situated nationalism, often evoked in particular diasporic contexts and discursive encounters, can represent in some respects an antithesis to the cosmopolitan or Western universal ideal, as a self-consciously politicizing discourse and a strategic way to negotiate their marginal and fragile status transnationally in the dialectic of domination and resistance. Belonging tends to be naturalized, yet becomes articulated and politicized only when it is threatened in some way. Belonging to the national home, whether repressive or liberating for Chinese women who moved away, is not being undermined but rather reaffi rmed in their transnational experience and continual struggle. The celebrated mobility of the upper and the middle classes might suggest a playful hybrid space where one can try on different identities; however, it has to consider some of the tensions and pains, the power differentials and the female body as a site of social struggle (e.g., Valdivia 2004). Chinese women’s struggle implicitly carries a denial and repudiation of an exclusionary form of cosmopolitanism that is not so acceptable and accessible to them. Simultaneously, it defends a self-decisive nationalism that penetrates deep into their thoughts and emotions with an unwittingly called-upon, new obligation to undertake (“like an ambassador”) when the dignity and respect of the homeland is undermined in their hidden contestation of identity politics. The increasing influx of transnational migrants today in an expansion of an interconnected and networked transnational world is often thought to engender a new potential for an open and post-nationalist identification and cosmopolitan formation. Yet, paradoxically, it can also lead to just the opposite; the stronger ethnicization of the nation, the salience and persistence of the vernacular language of nationalism in great historical depth, and the renewed relevance of thickly textured affects towards the nation and the affective loyalties and affi liations as an overarching feature of, and a normative force of, diasporic identity, defending a self-determined and self-conscious right to exist while dealing with difference and such existence that makes them continually different from dominant groups. A distinct national identity manifests itself in diasporic tensions and orients towards its very different-ness to the extent of representing a self-orientalistic discourse (“more Chinese, more unique”), an ethnic essentialist claim of Chineseness (“unchangeable truth”), while re-imagining belonging away from a

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perceived imperial cosmopolitanism and never losing a sense of who or where they belong.

BEYOND GLOBAL CONSUMER COSMOPOLITANISM?: A CONCLUSION While the term cosmopolitanism has moved from academic political discourses to everyday languages in some parts of the West/Europe, it is largely foreign in Korea, Japan and China where this word has no indigenous translation in their languages. Yet, imagined cosmopolitanism is intrinsically bound up with the intensification of media globalization in Asia and its effects on young women, as it provides a rare condition for everyday reflexivity and possible transformation in the light of revised self-understandings. It expands the framework of meaning of identity and newly engages with a self-development project by imagining the world through the home, while attempting individualization and liberation of desire from established structures. Women are more engaged in global consumption than face-toface cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism as an experienced locality may not actually exist, but imagined cosmopolitanism prevails within the realm of global consumer culture, with the media as symbolic resources likely to play a key role in the work of imagination. Globalization, as a mediated cultural force, routinely presents an imaginary of consumer cosmopolitanism that can be commonly shared in the images of something better, seemingly progressive and emancipatory lifestyles. Imagined cosmopolitanism is a part of the process of imagining about, and reflecting on, social transformation and other structures of identity. It can be a very natural or ineluctable consequence for women living in marginal conditions and yearning for inhabiting beyond the confi nes of national cultures. Often, young women talk about their sense of identity in relation to popular culture consumption practices while resisting systems of inequality and simultaneously generating imaginations of alternative lifestyles and work; therefore, transnational subjectivities are possibly constituted in and through their “imagination” and “talk” about popular media culture (also see Chapter 3; Kim 2005; Vargas 2009). Women’s everyday experience becomes increasingly mediated as the transnational dimensions of the media have an extraordinary capacity to convey non-local knowledge about the wider world, heighten an awareness of cultural difference, and trigger openness to global Others. Women’s mediated experience as a global consumer in everyday life is locally situated but globally connected by imagined cosmopolitanism. Its inner transformation, such openness and imaginative engagement with a possibility of dialogue with distant Others, compels anticipatory move towards a Western destination. However, transnational mobility itself is not a sign of the decline of the nation and national identity in shaping and directing transnational lives.

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Rather, its actual process and experience is inevitably caught up within the uneven transnational field and its relational context with the hierarchical emphasis on difference and diversity, which generates a growing ethnic consciousness and a contradictory force for the reinforcing of nationalism. While women were eager to transcend the limits of their national, gendered boundaries and they may be perceived as libratory icons of change in the act of border crossing that denies boundedness of the national place, a paradoxical project of self developing through such movement is one of continuity, of national self, rather than one free or loosened from national rootedness and forms of national feeling. Moving beyond national boundaries and moving freely into other cultures and societies can reveal a sense of contradictions. The nation comes to be conjured up as a counter-space, as a higher categorical identity with its capacity to supersede gender. Faced with the global structure of power and difference, estrangement and alienation, women come to speak from within the nation, even while recognizing that women as subordinate citizens are not represented by the nation and the national space as home is not connected to women’s emancipatory identity in their ongoing struggle for equality. Ironically, women had to leave the space called home to move beyond gendered boundaries, yet they need to return there. The link between gender and nationalism can be reconfigured in a diasporic context where the constitutive significance of gender identity becomes subsumed under national identity and rather connected with a positive redefi nition of the homeland. Diaspora can produce an attachment to the mythical ideal of, not necessarily the actual reality of, the homeland, even without invoking the nation as a substantial entity. Banal nationalism, which is routinely expressed, articulated and marked through transnational experience of the everyday, comes to defi ne affectively what it means to belong to the given nation as a gravitational force of identification, of thinking and feeling at home in displacement (for details, see Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). By emphasizing what is so unique and even traditional about the nation that represents a new type of consciousness in transnational frameworks, women articulate the appeal of national identity as a willing retainer and positional attachment in grasping their relationship to the world. Therefore, a paradox of transnational mobility is evident in this intensively connected world today. One does not necessarily need to travel extensively around the world in order to be a cosmopolitan, to adopt a willingness to recognize the value of cultural diversity and to represent a heightened cosmopolitanism. Contemporary cosmopolitanism, primarily as a global consumerist cultural discourse, was readily identifiable and sometimes pleasurable among the highly networked generations of women while inhabiting their homeland, recognizing and embracing the world at a reflexive distance in domesticity. This form of mundane cosmopolitanism has been enabled and marked out by the ubiquitous globalized media

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cultures and media talk as an imagined cultural space in everyday life. The current interest in cosmopolitanism as an abstract and de-contextualized cultural ideal has occurred along with the expansion in the global flows of media images, new concepts and lifestyles, commodities, capital, labor and people in today’s age. But does the abstract and de-contextualized form of global consumer cosmopolitanism move beyond? It is substantially confi ned to and limited within the cosmopolitan world of consumption, particularly the space of global media culture and hyper-connectivity, that has nevertheless generated a new and inclusive consciousness, an emergent style and culture of consumerist cosmopolitanism, a robust motivation and eager exploration of cultural diversity and of divergent global Others, and the current phenomenon of intensely mobile individuals and widely travelled lives—physical, symbolical and virtual. Women in particular, especially those in subordinate and marginalized positions, discontent with the gendered socioeconomic and cultural conditions of society and persisting constraints of life politics within the established dominant order, are likely to imagine alternative lifestyles and desire to move corporeally out of the national and local forms of life and to seek a more open, more inclusive, gender-equal, alternative life experience elsewhere. As a lived experience, however, the possibility of becoming cosmopolitan subjects is contingent upon discursive dialogic encounters with global Others, context-sensitive relational experience and exclusionary practices. Multifaceted and subtle forms of social exclusion and marginality in this new relational experience continue to generate and perhaps perpetuate motivational problems; creating as a consequence a situation of no cosmopolitan yearning, or possibly only a situated but characteristically thin cosmopolitanism. It is empirically significant to recognize that a potentiality of lived cosmopolitanism can turn out to be in question with its complexities and even contradictions, or in much confusion with its unintended consequences, if one moves beyond the aesthetic and normative or often uncritically celebrated understandings of the cultural cosmopolitan as mediated by global consumption practices; however, instead, if one critically engages with its situated nature and actual lives, the very human predicaments, tensions and struggles arising necessarily from the embedded conditions and experiences in the proximate groundings of everyday diasporic life. An empirically grounded analysis of cosmopolitanism, as an embodied and lived phenomenon for transnational migrants, can reveal and specify a sense of how difficult and complex it is for them to construct new forms of cosmopolitan identity, empirically identifiable values and outlooks transcending across ethnic, national and gendered cultural boundaries, and to arrive at a position of cosmopolitanism through a lived experience rather than through a theorizing or intellectual understanding. Various migrant groups, despite their flexible and transcendental intentions, encounter hierarchical relationships, different levels of interactions

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and the very real difficulties of conversation and belonging within the differential global spaces structured and marked by the unequal power and uneven representation they have over the conditions of their transnational lives. The notion of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999), fluid and improvised forms of transnational belonging and association to multiple homes in different countries beyond any one particular nation, is not always and necessarily adequate to describe, capture and understand the real conditions of, and the actual experiences of, contemporary transnational migrants. Quite the opposite cultural logics of belonging and subjectivity are also evident, as women in this study attest, in the manifestly contesting and ambivalent feelings among even the highly educated and skilled, privileged upperclass and middle-class, mobile and networked women of today’s younger generations, who are often assumed to be the bearers of de-territorialized, would-be cosmopolitan subjects with an outward-looking, transgressive, flexible and nomadic sensibility. This does not mean that the women themselves in this study do not want to engage in cosmopolitanism; more precisely, many of them come to feel and accept that they cannot afford a cosmopolitan identity as a lived and dialogic formation in an uneven and highly contested transnational social field—going beyond the conspicuous, relatively happy and troublefree consumer agency and consumer subjectivity, or cosmopolitan choice as an economically privileged sign of multicultural eclecticism and imagined empowerment confi ned within the global cultural marketplace. Although the dominant strands of cosmopolitan theorizing today draw heavily on the experience of economically privileged and frequent global travellers moving freely across national borders and cultures, cosmopolitanism should not be simply a free-floating cultural taste, an aesthetic style, personal attitude or ethical choice (Calhoun 2008). Free mobility in itself, or the extent of individual choice to be a cosmopolitan and a self-expression of agency to choose to be a cosmopolitan, is not a sufficient and viable condition for the dialogic formation and development of sustainable and grounded, lived and felt, cosmopolitanism as both an actually existing reality and an enabling device in a transnational world. Cosmopolitan identity and cosmopolitan self-transformations cannot be freely chosen and freely mixed through the largely individualized, transcendental, voluntaristic or moral agency of individuals and migrants. More crucially, it is a matter of uneven transnational social conditions, global structures of differential power and hierarchical relations that govern, allow or constrain, the significance and operation of the normative cosmopolitan ideal, the so-called “citizen of the world” or “feeling at home in the world,” across national borders and cultural boundaries. It is a matter of such power and hierarchy that further regulates the encompassing modalities of interaction, with or without a possibility of conversation with discourses of global cultural Others, as well as situational openness that denies closure in continually learning differences.

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If the idea of cosmopolitanism generally means “learning from each other’s differences through conversation and taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance” (Appiah 2006), the vital question that remains is how. Such conversation across boundaries and across identities, albeit a commendable ideal, is limited, unequal and partial in a hierarchical order of knowledge and interest. It does not make space, seriously enough, for a dialogic relationship, exchange and reciprocal respect in a style of thought. How can the ideal and challenge of cosmopolitanism be achieved, when the moral standing and power of all human beings is not equal? What are the ways of mediating cultural difference, while preserving what makes one different from each other, without attempting to universalize a hegemonic dominant culture and impose its vision of a Western center on others? It is in these social tensions, that will never of themselves resolve, that women in this study struggle to improve their status and defend their ethnic rootedness and constitutive difference, while demanding respect for its legitimate difference in the uneven and competing forces of recognition. The unconditional inclusiveness of the cosmopolitan theoretical formulation, its theoretically claimed openness and recognition of difference, can consign particular nations or ethnic groups to peripheral status, nonacceptance and subordination. While such a celebratory manifestation of cosmopolitan inclusiveness may occur to, and motivate some people, others may fi nd this way of life not so progressive or emancipatory. In the facing of persistent ethnic inequalities and universalistic forces, there emerges a consciously de-centralizing move, the presence and salience of the ideas of nationalism held by transnational women on the move that are far from desiring any association with cosmopolitanism that is not of their invention, dealing with the seemingly perpetual tensions entailed therein.

7

The Nowhere Women Feeling Stuck in Diaspora I might go back to Korea when my student visa expires, but might come out again. The employment situation in Korea is not good. I read news, search job information on Internet. I feel more motivated knowing that Internet is available on the go, easy to keep in touch with family and friends. I am willing to go anywhere for a good job opportunity. . . . Life in London is lonely. Sometimes I am totally alone and feel that nobody knows and understands me. . . . Going home is not the same. I do not feel comfortable there. I do not fit there, do not fit here. . . . There is no going back. I don’t know where I stand, feeling stuck somewhere in the middle, though I now feel strongly Korean. This way of life is more confusing. Will life get certain if I have a stable job, marry and settle in one place? Finally I’ve got a job, even though it is for a short period. It is not a suitable position for my degree, but I will work at a trading company overseas for a two-year project. . . . After that, just have to move for another job whether that is in Japan or elsewhere. . . . I am very alone, very free in London; commitment to myself with no responsibility for anybody else, which was never like this in Japan. It’s not real life. I feel more comfortable being back home. . . . But I do not feel completely comfortable anywhere. There is no comfortable home. Don’t know when I will go back home completely. After five years of study overseas I feel I cannot go back, but don’t know where to go forward. . . . Many Japanese men say work is life. I might look like a careerist travelling with a laptop Internet but I want to marry, defi nitely. My priority is to fi nd a job after this study. I am shocked to realize that I will not be afraid wherever I go to live. . . . I talk with family in China via online video calls. It gives me strength to stay here longer as I can regularly see my parents on my screen. . . . Though my parents want me to marry, marriage is not the solution. I cannot make home here, cannot make home there. . . feeling stuck, I am a bit too Western in China and too Chinese in Western culture. I often have the feeling that I don’t belong here. Everything seems temporary, not real to me. Don’t care anymore whether this society accepts me or not, even though I have a British boyfriend and might marry. Deep inside, I am becoming more Chinese. . . . My life is simple here, but might miss London’s clean air and beautiful green parks, unlike Shanghai, if I move out.

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IMPERFECT BELONGING: GOING HOME AGAIN? Women in this study are the new emblems of transnational mobility—nomadic, transient, individualistic and networked—with seductive and indeterminate possibilities, not necessarily without normative constraints. Such mobility has come to be a normal and taken-for-granted part of the life course among the educated, relatively privileged upper-middle-class, highly mobile new generations of women, definable as diasporic daughters, who now live with increased freedom as well as unprecedented uncertainty and insecurity. International education today can be viewed as a new contact zone, a transnational social space in which women reflect on their desire and performative agency to create a life of their own, encountering and contesting with disparate discourses through broader cultural contacts. At the heart of this movement is an emerging, precarious process of female individualization that is limited in the gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions of homelands (see Chapter 3). An imagined future of individualization is commonly seen to be a decisive shift from a traditional gender role-oriented, collective biography to a labor market-steered, do-it-yourself biography, or an extended, Others-related, reflexive project of self (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992; Bauman 2001; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002), which is, however, simultaneously organized around the modalities of marriage and family. This is evident in the varying degrees in which women remain both autonomous from, and dependent upon, concrete familial relations in their diasporic existence and do not necessarily desire individual autonomy or freedom from the notions of marriage and family, even while continually transgressing national borders and producing new narratives of individual freedom. Transnational women appear to have the opportunity or are forced to create their life histories through individual performances and a seemingly wider range of choices, however with tensions and contradictions, invoking feelings of greater fragility. Recognizing the lack of possibilities for the development of an occupational identity in their homeland, women migrate in order to pursue an emancipatory and respected positioning, yet encounter the force of an unequal, often racialized, global labor market where the racialization of minorities leads to their devaluation. Social marginality can be reproduced through transnational inequality, exclusion and precarious forms of work, and thus possibly “downward” mobility for migrant women. Gender relations too are often assumed to be transformed progressively through the transnational move to a presumably gender-equal West, yet the effects for these Asian women are rather contradictory and complex, becoming a dilemma of daily concern in transnational engagements (see Chapter 4). Nevertheless, this mode of migration embraced by educated women is predicated on the untenable assumption of secure, or better, employment, and in that sense, an occupational and experiential trajectory that is increasingly shaping transnational ways of being. Identity itself is predicated on mobility, not necessarily holding a privileging logic of self-invention,

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but involving an openness to risk and a discursive space that is uncertain, highly contingent and unguaranteed. It is important to recognize the potential meaning of this nomadic phenomenon (“willing to go anywhere for a while”), a new global orientation which involves multiple cross-border activities prompted by specific conditions of education and work. These direct, sometimes twice or thrice migrant women in global cities such as London do not fit into the conventional categories or linear understanding of diasporas grafting themselves more permanently onto the societies of destination, but rather take a sojourner mentality to its logical extreme across national borders, entailing possibly an “unending sojourn and settlement” (Yang 2000). Shifting movements arise within the global migration circuit today, whereby migrants may not stay in one particular locale as their forebears did, but attempt to enter a circulatory flow if they are not contented with a single destination (Kuah-Pearce 2006). Contemporary transnational migrants, women in this study, may sojourn at any given time and place, continuing their existence somewhere between home and host countries whenever possible as a student, a worker or a tourist, and may take sojourning as an experimental prelude to settlement, thereby blurring the boundaries of sojourning and settlement. While the feminization of migration is now an increasingly acknowledged trend, this new form of transnational movement, a prolonged temporary status, a new mode of sojourning and its provisional nature should be recognized in research as well as in policy making. Women may construct multiply displaced diasporic subjects, or become historical drifters, who are constantly on the move, both mentally and physically, yet without knowing in which direction, and to which place, they can turn. The question of where exactly they are going can be an existential dilemma for mobile transnationals who can end up anywhere in travelling worlds. It now appears uncertain that these women will ever simply go home, as there is no yearning or envisioning for an immediate return. When to go home? Many of them are not particularly keen to remain in the current destination, nor able to make any long-term plans here, yet this does not mean either that they have any clear ideas of when they will go home. Even if they go home, typically occurring for visa and economic reasons, the meaning of return migration can be thought of as open-ended and possibly continuous, since going home does not necessarily imply the same sense of closure as the conventional modes of ultimate return by previous generations. The duration and nature of transnational migration can be understood in more fluid and provisional ways recognizing the salience of this provisionality as a striking feature of going home. Going home again? Most significantly, women come to feel that they are not any longer completely at home anywhere. For many women who are acutely aware of the reality of foreignness, how much they differ from the majority, their transnational lives do not easily result in emancipation. A paradox evident is that the more physically close, the more they try to remain different, distinct (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). Although some

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aspect of lifestyle change can make women feel incompatible with lives back home, there is a strong denial of association or influence from the West host society, fi nding themselves located neither quite here nor quite there; indeed, neither place is desirable any longer. They do not feel at home anywhere. They cannot go backwards and cannot go forwards (“feeling stuck in diaspora”). The nowhere women. This dilemma reflects the women’s situation of never quite belonging anywhere, crossing national borders without becoming part of them. Far from being emancipatory, transnational lives are often lived in an ambiguous and difficult state of limbo where migrants can neither feel comfortable going back home and fulfi ll a full return, nor belong to the mainstream host culture and have much real sense of connection to where they are now. They are not able, and sometimes not willing, to adapt to the host society, remaining largely as a perpetual foreigner (“always a foreigner”) and creating a defensive position of non-belonging typically at a distance from the established centers of the host society. This unresolved tension within the larger relations and structures of transnational inequality, racial hierarchy, exclusion and marginalization remains unarticulated in the dominant language of English, and its potential influence does not always have a progressive dimension. Even if the problems of social exclusion and secondary status persist in diaspora, women are not likely to return home immediately nor can they possibly adapt in an unproblematic sense, as being caught in the complex relation of familiarity and new strangeness to their home culture (“a bit too Western in China and too Chinese in Western culture”). With a pick and mix of the cultural mélange and a high expectation about what going home should feel like, it becomes more difficult for women to feel comfortable with the familiar structure of the old ways of home life, to re-identify with sometimes conflicting subjectivity and remain committed to its maintenance, while simultaneously learning to critique both Western culture and the assumed idea of home-as-familiarity. Women do not look back to maintain their old identity but look forward in an effort of constructing new notions of who they are, albeit this looking-forwardness is caught up in uncertain limbo rendering themselves ontologically homeless. Therefore, a resulting consequence of transnational migration is imperfect belonging, both the limits of integrating “here” and the limits of going home “there,” belonging nowhere “neither here nor there” in a certain sense that is not felt to be a form of liberation or empowerment. Returning home can be recognized not essentially as a diasporic option but more as a predicament; in that sense, there is no going home again. It is an irony of the present time that some minorities have to accept the predicament that there is “no other home than the diaspora” (Eriksen 2006). No one actually ever can have a full sense of belonging anywhere; no longer any ontological stability in the points of origin, no necessary attachment to the points of destination. One may form a sense of living in a current place while simultaneously creating new maps of desire for another place, or may become curious and does not

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know anymore where is home. A new sense of a paradoxical compulsion may emerge in contemporary transnational lives as the imaginary maps of desire continually cross the borders of multiple yet imperfect places and possibilities that were unknown and unimaginable before. Unintended, if not necessarily undesirable, change in aspects of diasporic consciousness is this growing knowledge of the impossibility of return and of belonging in a full and meaningful sense, thus further heightening the sense of displacement and the ambiguity of identity as a “project of creating and moving towards the trajectory of hoped for future” (Giddens 1991) in the much more complex light of past and present constraints. It is in this partial, diasporic space of imperfect belonging that constitutes a restless, endless interrogation of identity as a potent, enriching but highly ambiguous formation, as a process of the uncertain becoming and a site of contestation with unpredictable consequences. This mode of experience and the consequence differs from a general tendency to valorize transnational forms of life, the changing and choosing of place, “being both here and there,” or “globalization of biography” (Beck 2000) occurring in the centers of people’s lives, in international marriages and families, at work, in circles of friends, at school. An important dimension of transnational experience is recognizing its complexity; daily struggles of living in seemingly seductive spaces of world city, socially isolated, often alone and lonely, not easily drawing allegiances from many different cultural sources from here, there and everywhere, but rather, highly selectively in uneven, discursive transnational spaces. Indeed, a general indifference towards Others, disengagement or lack of dialogue are some of the unintended consequences of border-crossing activities and cultural displacement, which may pose ineluctable questions within the bordercrossers themselves. Is there any basis for substantial multicultural relationships? Under what conditions can an agency of empowerment be located? In terms of thinking and feeling about transnational forms of life, migrants existing in this fragile state of displacement cannot construct or feel the world city lifestyle as “real life,” contingent upon the conditions of being foreign and different, a variety of social exclusion and unresolved tensions. Nor is it clear any longer what, and indeed where, that real life will be in this unstable situation that is unlikely to end soon. A nomadic sensibility may continue, simultaneously desiring for the very “real” meanings of home for stability and security of identity in the middle of all the movement and intense cultural alienation, when paradoxically a place called home is nowhere.

THE MEDIA AND MYTHICAL HOME The media, mostly taken for granted, go along with diasporic subjects. Part of the principal means of forming and sustaining this provisional mobility, a certain type of order and a new mode of thinking and feeling about move

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and return, is through the transnational sphere of media communication networks, one defi ning characteristic of the transformation of a contemporary diasporic world. It is the mediated connection, its instantaneity, regularity and intensity that makes a difference in sustaining the possibly long-term viability of diasporic subjects always to be able to remain on the move. The enabling capacity of the mediated transnational networks, to be connected continuously, is of considerable significance in the current context of the increasing mobility across borders and the changing nature of migrant experience and social organization. The media create new conditions for the rise of mobility and the desire to be mobile, to imagine lives that are different from the constraining situations of both home and present dwelling, to change life trajectories that are made seemingly possible through international education increasing an awareness of the possibility of mobility. Global flows of the proliferating media today from the periphery to the center, via the Internet’s time-space compression, have provided an increased level of cultural resources for the construction of diasporic experience, the cause and consequence, whether progressive or regressive, in making sense of mobile lives and carving out new channels of communications and often highly selective styles of social interaction among themselves and other ethnic minorities than their own, who may share common experiences of becoming minor, of displacement and social marginality in the present. The ethnic media from countries of origin are likely to be employed by mobile transnationals as mundane strategies for the management of everyday life, particularly of a dialectical sense of exclusion and inclusion, relations of power and domination (see Chapter 5). This often self-determined and highly emotional engagement with the ethnic media can be seen as a strategic way to order and negotiate one’s own life on one’s own terms in a struggle for regulating the tensions of belonging and respect, which is intrinsically linked with the ways in which the processes of social exclusion operate and become the experienced realities of everyday life in a uneven and contested transnational social field. The heightened awareness of the precarious situation may prompt viable social actors of digital diasporas to actively engage with the ethnic media space, sometimes in a self-disclosing defiant voice against the macro-social structures and durable inequality affecting diasporic lives. Whether purposefully or not, such mediated engagement can tellingly construct ethnic enclaves, the symbolic construction of internal and external boundaries, seeking imagining of belonging in the continuity of a displaced yet situated identity, and of cultural specificity and differentiation that, in turn, makes it ever more difficult to connect and share minority experiences with the mainstream culture of the host society. Thus, the degree of its closure and disconnection may attenuate, rather than expand, the self in the transnational. The precarious mode of diasporic existence is managed through cultural mediations, ideologically constructed spatial practices

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and new exclusive socialities to be imagined, performed and sustained in the familiar and ritualized activities of daily life. Crucial in such processes of ritualistic cultural practices, with the Internet as a key resource, is the development of forms of self-expression, engaged self-narration and representation in a native language, while turning the abstraction of a diasporic feeling of ambivalence into the micro-politics of articulation that accentuates an astute self-consciousness of the negotiation processes of being and belonging in an imaginary sense of internal coherence. Appropriation of ethnic media rituals helps develop transnational spaces of existence and control to some extent, habits of mind and life marked by a different type of ontological security. It comes to be habitable somehow on the porous borderland, simultaneously rootless and rooted, separated and connected, powerless and powerful at times, meanwhile both going home again and belonging to the momentary place of dwelling would be difficult to achieve fully. Therefore, the paradox of the ethnic media use lies in its double capacity to produce and organize new space of one’s own that enables quotidian dwelling “here” and hyper connecting “there.” These mediated, habitual practices have become attached with new meanings of home as the taken-for-granted texture of daily existence in diaspora. Home is a mythical space of desire that is not located simply in abstract nostalgia or through evocations of the past and historical inheritance, but that has to be imagined constantly by a sense of distinctiveness as an experiential construction to the extent of becoming relevant to the present constitution of subjectivity and internal coherence. It is not the old notions of home in memory but a new, desired home in the making that gains new meanings and salience in diaspora in order to render pleasure and meaningfulness momentarily, as going home again is impossibility. This home in the making, which is different from the lived experience back home, can be imagined and experienced, or to a large extent reified with a difference outside its national space, in very immediate and quotidian, or idealized ways. A partly mythical homeland is being created, becoming perhaps even more distinct, potent and more deeply territorial than ever in the transnational space. Diasporic women in this study move simultaneously away from the homeland and with the mythical homeland in the diasporic imagination, adopting their strategy of going global while forming unending, partial relationships with home. Long-distance identification with the mythical homeland, rather than the homeland as such a physical place, could become stronger rather than weaker over time by means of virtual and ritualistic re-creation and idealization of home. Diasporas’ home-making potentiality, and to what extent they incorporate it into everyday life, is contingent upon the ways in which diasporic conditions and disturbing social relations are actually experienced in specific contexts of locality. It is also shaped by how forms of imagined belonging amidst the sense of alienation are expressed, performed or concretized over time through habitual practices drawing on the ethnic media and

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cultural resources. The national home left behind, or sometimes escaped from by women in this study, is being revisited and reproduced through the embodied habits of the displaced, as embodied pleasure by a certain degree of creativity, and paradoxically as a defi ning feature of travelling narratives as a predominant marker of subjectivity, allowing the validation of socio-cultural distinction and status in renewed national terms in a distant transnational world of mobility.

THICK NATIONALISM, THIN COSMOPOLITANISM The ethnic media use proliferating through the Internet resources is mobilized to sustain and consolidate diasporic nationalism in the trajectories of women’s nomadic voyaging as there is no yearning for a return and going home again is not a simple choice (see Chapter 5). Transnational media flows are situated at the center of these processes of diasporic nationalism, creating new conditions and new means of social organization that enable dwelling here and connection there. The media create the desire to be mobile and the imagination of cosmopolitan subjects, yet at the same time, changing the nature of diasporic experience and thinking. The experience of women abroad enhances rather than undermines national identity. Diasporic nationalism grows stronger in response to the predicaments and difficulties of inhabiting transnational spaces. An unintended consequence of the new connectivity and meaning of being in the world is a revitalization of national subjectivity, perhaps more than ever, in the midst of massive transnational flows and reconfigurations. The question of why and how nationalism remains significant, re-imagined and perhaps flourishing through such transnational mobility has resonance with the lived, relational experience of social exclusion, the central issue of racism, unequal power and representation, and symbolic social closure and tensions around that representation in the uneven relations of difference. The diasporic mobility of bodies, images and cultures, as well as cultural particularities and specificities of ethnic minorities, is represented often as stereotypical, alienating or markedly negative through the unequal power of discourses in the construction of otherness. This otherness and stereotypes in operation have become more sharpened rather than diminished by travel, as manifested in a style of thought and interaction within a hierarchically imagined world of differences (see Chapter 6). Paradoxically, as bodies are dis-embedded from one nation and move to another, physically confronting cultural difference and struggling for representational space, ideas of distinctiveness of a particular culture and ethnically distinct places become even more salient and important, or even strategic, with no less a powerful tendency towards cultural differentiation. What might unexpectedly be happening in such transnational encounters is a reactionary assertion of national identity via the development of

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ethnic particularism, or mythical essentialism underpinned by historically embodied difference and uniqueness with some degree of power to determine that difference to distinguish themselves from dominant ethnic groups and defend their own fragile boundaries. Ethnically defi ned nationalism is not merely a naturalized entity, nor a product of false consciousness. It is a relational and contingent construct that is subject to situational power in diasporic conditions and specific contexts of encounter, and which is ideologically invested with an incidentally enhanced, reified, thick texture of affect for a necessary degree of subjective empowerment, if not overly utopian. This thick affect of nationalism at an individual level is not necessarily evoked and expressed in homelands, but is often incidentally evoked by confrontation and inescapable tensions with global Others, while learning to negotiate and come to terms with formulating diasporic identities of legitimacy and respect. Such a consequence does not automatically follow that transnational migrant cultures are “inherently anti-essentialist and subversive of nation, national cultures and localism” (Bhabha 1994; Clifford 1994). The extent to which reactionary ethno-nationalism is specified and concretized through the construction of essentialized differences and boundaries depends largely on a growing diasporic consciousness of exclusion and marginality, and also on the cultural resources available for enunciation, a personal and micro-political articulation of resistance in logical opposition to the powerful of the world. Subjective internal boundaries have become territorial to the extent that the ideological salience of national boundaries and differences remains strong, giving rise to the ethnicization of the nation in an era of transnational movement and de-territorialization. Diasporas, as seemingly de-territorialized nations, do not easily transcend all the differences that continue to matter. But rather, diasporic identities are produced in the uneven relations of difference, in the articulation of difference and in a self-conscious attempt to sustain the difference often through ritualized cultural practices. The search for cultural specificity, its difference and recognition, rather than universality or uniformity, becomes more intense at the defi ning moments of identity in transnational interaction. Diasporic identities are defi ned by the “recognition of necessary heterogeneity and diversity” (Hall 1994), constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew and differently along itineraries of migrating. The ethnic media proliferating via the Internet can be appropriated and mobilized as identity resources for necessary heterogeneity and diversity in an effort to defi ne and claim one’s presence and identity in imaginings of alternative space. While the new connectivity and openness enabled by the de-territorialized character of the Internet technology may be seen to move beyond the agenda of national identity and render borders meaningless, some important questions should be recognized. To what extent, and specifically under what social conditions, can diasporas come to think beyond the nation and transcend existing boundaries? What do the new

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potentialities of the time-space compressing Internet actually mean for users in specific contexts? Just the opposite can happen as these new connections via the Internet’s dis-embedding capacity for spatially extended relations enable dispersed users to re-embed, maintain and consolidate their national identities. Emerging transnational movements facilitated by digital technologies and the Internet’s complex capacity in light of current defences of globalization and “trans” discourses demand a careful understanding of changing relationships to the place of nation and national identity in lived diasporic contexts. The Internet does not necessarily transgress boundaries and lead to a larger, pan-national framework, but can also operate to reinforce a strongly bounded, culturally differentiated and re-embedded form of cultural identity precisely drawing on lived experience from the very processes of transnational mobility that are often thought to undermine the nation, thus paradoxically nationalizing transnational spaces in a digital era. In today’s massively interconnected mobile world, a general tendency has been to argue that the nation-state is being undermined by transnational actors through the processes of globalization (Beck 2000), precisely in the joint force of the mass media and migration (Appadurai 1996), and that those with greater average economic resources and human capital should register higher levels of transnationalism because of their superior access to the infrastructure that makes these activities possible (Portes et al. 1999). This supposedly decreasing role of the nation has been an overarching feature of identity transformation. However, evidence also points out that the experience of an increased level of mobility, even among the economically privileged, educated and networked digital diasporas such as women in this study, does not inevitably reflect the decline or demise of the nation, nor does it necessarily lead to the replacement of the conceptions of national culture with the global to the extent of becoming irrelevant. The nation, national home as a mythical space of desire, remains a key, albeit partial, context for a diasporic consciousness and subjectivity, becoming not simply outdated but more important than transnational trends. It is possible to see the continuing power and vitality of nations and nationalisms (Smith 1995), or the growing significance of long-distance nationalism in a transnational context (Anderson 1992), continuing as a major ideological force in many little “banal” ways (Billig 1995) that are now so familiar, so continual, as routinely mediated by the Internet in everyday life. Certain transnational phenomena of mobility and connectivity can engage in the nationalization of the transnational operating in existing power structures and uneven relations of difference while seeking to establish a distinct space of one’s own. Nationalism for women and the gendered consequences of transnational migration can present a profound paradox. On one hand, women had to move away from home to transcend the gendered socio-economic and cultural constraints of their homeland, where women are often viewed as subordinate citizens in relation to men and discontented with the repressive,

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gendered national order. Thus, this transnational movement can be seen to some extent as a gender-liberating act of resistance to the nation seeking alternatives, more inclusive life politics and personal empowerment elsewhere. But on the other hand, the nation becomes a defi ning feature of diasporic identity, a central reference point from which a diasporic consciousness is constituted, even as more and more aspects of women’s lives continue to take place across national borders. Diasporic women live beyond the domain of national borders, yet with a clearly defined national identity of their own choice, not necessarily transformed by migration. They are neither de-nationalized nor post-national, without losing national home as a primary form of belonging or incorporating, to any significant extent, new transnational identity positions that appear no longer desirable or accessible. Various dimensions of women’s transnational experience do not easily transcend existing boundaries of nation, race or gender, which continues to frame the limits of their emancipation and socio-economic status (see Chapter 4 and Chapter 6). A supposedly gender-liberating act through transnational migration continues to confront, and sometimes reproduce, unequal gender relations at global levels, and these new hierarchies of gender formed by other intersecting factors of nation and race can be more rigid, more traditional and patriarchal than in the homeland. Re-enunciated gender roles indicate that women are twice marginalized as the transnational social field is an extension of existing gender inequality, differential power and the same normative constraints shaping gendered global subjects, although gendered constraints primarily were expected to be transcended by the move, and although many of the women in this study support international marriages and inclusive notions of flexible citizenship. The most personal locus of interaction, the domain of interracial intimacy and marriage choice as well as of work, operates in a gendered way, unwittingly mask and mystify the hidden and unspeakable forms of inequalities and ongoing complex negotiation of intersectional subjectivities Far from a progressive form of transformative subjects, the experience of these contradictory processes can have ambivalent consequences for identity, full of internal conflicts and predicaments, which women must somehow reconcile as conscious agents, depending upon the degree of choice and control they have over transnational conditions. Self may fi nd itself operating at times on the terrain of extremely contradictory space that is not so much fluid, flexible, wider and less constraining, but rather defensive and sometimes self-enclosing, constrictive or “feeling stuck” as many women express, in transcending existing boundaries of difference and in creating a meaningful sense of belonging and cosmopolitan openness. Such a consequence thus provides a counterpoint to the general assumption that this increased level of current transnational mobility and interconnectedness undermines the nation and gives rise to a post-national consciousness presenting an indication of the formation of cosmopolitanism.

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Women in this study are rarely seen as, and do not see themselves as, cosmopolitan in their own choice and control, not able to arrive at a position of cosmopolitanism through lived experience, nor desire to become cosmopolitan (see Chapter 6). Cosmopolitanism as a lived phenomenon can only present very weak forms, thin cosmopolitanism with motivational problems, non-cosmopolitanism or even anti-cosmopolitanism. This is not to suggest that human beings in an essentialist sense have stronger attachments toward cultures of their home nation, but to recognize that what it means to be cosmopolitan in lived experience is much more complicated and contradictory. It is crucial to recognize that increased mobility in itself is not a sufficient condition for the formation of cosmopolitanism since transnational identification is not freely chosen by agents or available to all migrants. The cosmopolitan formation cannot operate independently, but is contingent upon the social contexts of discursive encounter, interaction and situational openness. If identities are rarely freely chosen but always historically contingent, as well conceived by now in most theorization of identity, then cosmopolitanism, too, as a transnational site of new possibilities for self-making, should be understood as a fundamentally contingent, relational and dialogic concept. This involves recognizing the situated and indeterminate nature of cosmopolitan identity and its contextual meanings that are subject to the interplay of unequal power relations, uneven processes of representation, difference and exclusion governing one’s multiple and trans-nationalized sense of belonging, fit and non-fit. Cosmopolitanism, invoked as a moral and socio-political ideal, is about “conversation, imaginative engagement with the experience and ideas of Others” (Appiah 2006), “acknowledging difference and the dignity of difference” (Beck 2006). As an overwhelmingly normative ideal, cosmopolitanism is based upon utopian premises that different cultural elements can freely mix and engage in equal dignity, and that human subjects are equal in terms of power and thus can share equal status to become a citizen of the world. If a cosmopolitan model is to be a lived reality and to form a viable identity, it must confront tensions, ambiguities and confl icting features around differential power, differential status and dignity. Indeed, it becomes curious to ask how and why some groups and places are likely to be more transnational than others (Vertovec 1999). Under what social conditions and power relations are they likely to be cosmopolitan? The empirical sociological dimensions of cosmopolitanism are highly mediated, highly contested and differentiated, often widening the gaps in understanding different cultures. Nevertheless, cultural difference is continually celebrated through the sphere of media cultural consumerism that offers an endless choice of unambiguously positive, inclusive and free-floating identities and lifestyles from different nations, opening up possibilities for imagining one’s very existence in relation to global Others and the mobile diversity of being. For women, this mode of consumption is closely linked to cultural contestation

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in locality, the desire to transcend the gendered constraints of the established national systems, and therefore, imagined cosmopolitanism emerges through a reflexive distance in the homeland. Cosmopolitanism, mainly as an imagined cultural form, is limited within the domain of global consumption, of consumer subjectivity, of consumer choice and freedom, which has been fuelled by the increasing globalization of capitalist media industries. Cosmopolitan identity in this context refers to consumer identity, learning how to become global “cultural citizens” (Urry 1995) consuming other cultures and places from the local to the global, through mundane and imaginative engagement with popular media culture that is expressed as “pop cosmopolitanism” (Jenkins 2006) or “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Nava 2007). The world is so intensively consumed today through the global media, cultural practices and migration away from home and nation; however, is the increased mobility around the world bound to produce greater levels of cosmopolitanism? The consequences for such mobility, transnational experiences, narratives of displacement and the struggles at the heart of the subject, paradoxically point back to mythical notions of home and nationalism, while at the same time moving continually across national borders, feeling stuck in diaspora or engendering new confusion, if not despair, about cosmopolitanism, a Western concept that is not of desire to the women in this study. Where is cosmopolitan? What does it mean to be at home in the world? Challenging the utopian notion of cosmopolitanism, the identification with the unresolved questions of transnational mobility, dilemmas and indeterminacy may offer a provocative pointer to future research.

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Index

A agency, 35, 100, 116, 129 autonomous illusion, 66–67, 69

B banal globalism, 68 nationalism, 80, 107–113, 134 racism, 77–81, 87 belonging, 89, 110, 112–113, 118, 132 birth rate Japan, 27, 58 Korea, 25

C cash cows, 83 Chinese diaspora, 29–34 globalization, 31, 127 media, 127–128 middle-class, 31–33 new rich, 31–32 choice biography, 66, 130, 136 citizen of the world, 14, 136 comfort zone, 96 commodified lives, 83 Confucianism, 19, 78, 85 connectivity, 108–110 hyper, 46 contact zone, university, 29 conversation, 13, 118–119, 131, 137, 149 Cosmopolitan magazine, 115, 120 cosmopolitanism, 12–17, 117–119, 129–130, 136, 149–150 discrepant, 14 female, 114–137 from below, 14 imagined, 15–16, 115–116, 120–126, 133

pop, 15 pragmatic, 115 thin, 145–150 counter-narratives, 85 cultural competence, 103 cultural specificity, 102, 119, 145 Cyworld, 94

D Defeated Dog, 57, 81 democracy of consumption, 33 diaries, 17–19 diaspora, 9–10, 36–37, 77–92, 112 diasporic consciousness, 86, 111–112, 126, 132, 142–143 daughters, 2–4, 34–47 identity, 10 media space, 9–10 nationalism, 11–12, 93–113, 110, 125–126, 132, 134 yearning, 94 disembedded actors, 92 downward mobility, 88

E education China, 60–61 Japan, 57–59 Korea, 52–56 education fever, 24 educational migration, 22–23 emotional investment, 69–70 English language, 28, 83–84, 99, 116, 121, 127 essential self, 97, 132 estrangement, 99 ethnic enclave, 93–97

168

Index

ethnic media, 11–12, 97–103, 112, 146–147 everyday life, 8, 10, 47, 91–92

Korean globalization, 114–115 media, 23 Koreans, middle-class, 22–24, 54–55

F

L

female body, 64, 132 female individualization, 4–6, 37, 52–76 feminization of migration, 1, 34–38 unskilled, 35 skilled and educated, 35–36 flexible citizenship, 136, 148

labor market, 4–6, 39, 139 China, 60–62 Japan, 57–59 Korea, 52–56 language, 19 laughter, 98 leaving China, 30 lifestyle migrants, 41 limbo state, 141–142 liquid individualized society, 9, 89–90 London, 47–51, 130

G gender inequality, 74, 87, 90–92, 148 gendered global subject, 85–89, 148 global city, 47, 92 global consumer cosmopolitanism, 133–137, 149–150 global householding, 22–23 global woman, 2, 60 globalization of biography, 10, 89, 142 golden certificate, 63

H happiness, 54, 65–66 home, 16, 104 going, 39–40, 104, 139–142 mythical, 9, 134, 142–145 homelessness, ontological, 141–142 home-making, 104, 144–145

I identity, 10, 64, 106, 109, 139, 142 imperfect belonging, 139–142 individualization, 4–6, 139 integration, 106 internet, 11, 44–47, 94–97, 99–102, 104–107, 108–111 interviews, 17–20

J Japanese diaspora, 25–29 globalization, 26, 121 internationalist, 59, 82, 121 middle-class, 121

K knowledge, popular, 72 Knowledge consumption, 27 knowledge diaspora, 1, 3, 29, 32, 36, 112 Korean diaspora, 21–25

M media Asia, 6–7, 45, 75 Britain, 49, 103 habits, 94–95, 110 populism, 33, 127–128 space, 18–19 ritual, 96, 104–105, 111, 144 mediated disengagement, 93–97 mediated migration, 4, 6–8, 44–47 mediation, 44–47, 70–73 micro-political strategies, 105–106, 110 migration, middle-class, 37 migratory project, 7 migratory youth, 7 Mixi, 99 modernity, 65 multicoloured Britain, 49 myth of education, 40–41

N narrative of self, 72, 99 national identity, 10, 100–103, 120, 125–126 nationalism, reactionary, 105, 126, 146–147 nationalism, thick, 145–150 Naver, 94 neoliberal personhood, 23 no choice situation, 52–56 nomadic subject, 56, 102, 140 nomadic symptom, 11, 39, 46, 102, 140 nowhere women, 138–150

O Office Lady (OL), 4

Index P paradox of choice, 81–85 Parasite Singles, 57 perpetual foreigner, 80–81 personal confession, 99 place-making, 102 play, playfulness, 28, 121 pleasure, 70, 123 post-national, 12–13, 108 citizenship, 130 post-traditional order, 63 precarious self, 73–76 provisional diaspora, 38–41

R reciprocal dialogue, 18 reflexive biography, 3, 6, 66 reflexive distance, 116 reflexivity, 63–67 reflexivity losers, 53 representation of Japan, 123

S second-class status, 87, 141 security, ontological, 144–145 self-blame, 83–84, 87 self-exclusion, 96–97 self-identity, 97–103 self-reflexive imagination, 66–67 self-sacrifice, 54, 127 settlement, 41–44, 140

169

Sex and the City, 65, 68, 115 situated knowledge, 20 social exclusion, 10, 80–81, 89–92, 96, 128, 141 socio-emotional labor, 85 sojourner mentality, 2, 89 storytelling, 17–20 student diaspora, 3, 39 super-diversity, 48 Super Girl, 61

T television, 7, 9, 33, 45, 93–95, 98, 103 television, UK, 93–94, 98, 103 temporary sojourning, 41–44 transnational marriage, 87–88, 148 mobility, 8–9, 13 social space, 43–44 transnationalism, 12, 85, 110 two-step student migration, 42

U universal humanity, 13 utopian sensibility, 69–70

W Western-centric universalism, 15, 117 work-life balance, 54 work identity, 54, 86