Clara Law's Floating Life and Hong Kong-Australian 'flexible citizenship'

Abstract

Clara Law's film Floating Life was the first Australian film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and the first Australian film to deal with migrant Hong Kong Chinese identities 'from inside'. From perspectives of transnational Chinese migration and flexible citizenship, this article looks at Floating Life as a Hong Kong Chinese migrant reading of Australia, which defamiliarizes and recontextualizes familiar Australian localities and geopolitical formations, contrasting them with the film's other principal loci of Hong Kong and Germany. It also interprets the film as a neo-Confucian study of family disintegration in a migrant context, and an exploration of notions of home and identity.

Middle-class Asian immigrants and welfare multiculturalism: A case study of a Japanese community organisation in Sydney

“…1 In the field of Australian immigration studies, research has been conducted on immigrants from countries and regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and Japan, many of whom are middle-class immigrants. Previous studies have depicted middle-class immigrants as people who have diasporic and hybrid identities between their homelands and Australia (Inglis and Wu, 1992;Mitchell, 2003;Mar, 1998;Ip, Wu and Inglis, 1998;Helweg, 1985;Shiobara, 2004). However, these studies have not adequately examined the relationship between Asian 2 middleclass immigrants and multicultural welfare policies; in particular, the need for welfare support for these immigrants in their everyday lives in Australia has been neglected.…”

Veiled entrapment: a study of social isolation of older Chinese migrants in Brisbane, Queensland

“…This is probably for two reasons: first of all, the predominant middle-class background of many of the Chinese migrants who have entered Australia over the past 20 years has stimulated research interest in the ' trans-national configurations ' of the new generation (Ong and Nonini 1997;Yeoh, Huang and Lam 2005;Ip, Hibbins and Chui 2006). A spate of studies has examined how these ' cosmopolitan capitalists' or 'flexible citizens ' take tactical and strategic advantage of immigration policies in Western countries to further their personal or family interests (Hui 1993;Man 1993;Chan 1997;Pe-Pua et al 1998;Zhou 1998;Hamilton 1999;Irving and Tsang 1999;Ong 1999;Ho 2002;Waters 2002Waters , 2003Waters , 2005Mitchell 2003;Tsang et al 2003;Landolt and Da 2005). The unprecedented zeal of the new mobility, connectivity and flexible familial practices of Chinese transmigrants' across the globe has been enthusiastically described, and has drawn the attention of researchers away from more traditional concerns, such as settlement adjustment problems and the barriers to integration and inclusion faced by older immigrants.…”

Foreign places, hybrid spaces

“…Here, 'where you're at' (Ang 2001) is intimately connected to 'where you worship'. Religion helps assuage the pain of disassociation in immigrant communities while combating the stressful feeling of loss and a confused sense of identity, a common side effect of the relocation process (see Mitchell 2003). There is certainly a strong sense of community established around ethno-specific temples and churches, which are vested as much with social importance as with religious significance.…”