Chinese-Singaporean Repeat Migrant Women: Transnational Positions and Social Inequalities

Chinese migrants in New York: Explaining inequalities with transnational positions and capital conversions in transnational spaces

“…This triangulation aimed at minimizing network similarities. However, the respondents located were nearly all middle-class and highly skilled, like those in other studies of Singaporeans abroad (Ho, 2008(Ho, , 2011Kong, 1999;Plüss, 2012;Yeoh and Willis, 2005). The respondents were aged between their mid-twenties and mid-forties, with the exception of one 63-year-old.…”

“…The 25-year-old single, female, Singaporean media executive -who had lived in Singapore before she moved to the USA to study economics, and who had worked for two years in NY -explained that upon starting work in NY, she realized that she did not need to make efforts to 'fit in,' because 'being Asian' was positive cultural capital. Her co-workers, mainly Americans, perceived 'Asians' as 'hard-working,' 'disciplined,' and 'smart,' a perception several other respondents reported about their work contexts in NY and university studies in the USA (see also Ho, 2011;Plüss, 2012). The media executive said that she had become 'more Chinese than ever' in NY, also because her Asian-American friends were proud of their cultural heritage: I definitely became a lot more proud of my culture.…”

“…That the three forms of capital have intersecting natures -because they can be converted into each other (Bourdieu, 1986;Southerton, 2004) -in local, national, and transnational contexts -is, for example, evident in the case of migrants who possess economic capital. This can liberate their time and provide the means to access new cultural, social, and economic capital in a new country of residence, including educational qualifications, professional accreditation, friendships, employment, or citizenship (Bauder, 2008;Plüss, 2012). An example of how migrants' transnational positions can be deconstructed and analyzed using the ideas of capital conversion to explain the migrants' perceptions about their access to resources in their transnational spaces is the following: many respondents of this research positively identified with their higher education in English-speaking countries outside Singapore, with non-Singaporeans in NY, with the education system in Singapore, and with their 'Asian' cultures.…”

Migrants’ social positioning and inequalities: The intersections of capital, locations, and aspirations

“…Bhabha (1997: 1-9), also referring to the power relations informing the construction of cultural hybridity, however, views cultural hybridity as a way to undermine dominant power relations, namely by 'presencing' one's claims (vis-a-vis the agencies that attempt to devaluate these people's characteristics [my emphasis]), with such hybrid 'cross-cultural initiations,' which he calls 'Third Cultures.' Non-access to resources can lead to non-integration in a place, and also to an increasing essentialization of one's culture in one's social positioning (Plüss, 2012). The migrants' social positioning in local and/or transnational spaces consists of their strategies of collaboration and contestation, resulting from the outcomes of their attempts to convert capital, and also from their intentions about which networks they attempt to align themselves with, and to what extent they do so (Onwumechili et al, 2003: 57), in order to access resources.…”

“…Transnational migration embeds the migrants' different projects and characteristics in an increasing number of location-specific and/or transnational discourses of exclusion and inclusion, which all have different evaluations of the migrants' capital, and which all ask for different appropriate identities of the migrants before granting them access to their resources. Becoming embedded in new or transnational contexts can lead to multiple belongings in the migrants' social positioning (Hannerz, 1996;Pieterse, 2004;Plüss, 2012;Rouse, 1992), or it can lead to disidentifications from a location and/or transnational context in this positioning (Held and McGrew, 2005;Yuval-Davis, 2006b). Both scenarios are explained in this themed section.…”