“Leftover Women” and “Kings of the Candy Shop”: Gendering Chinese American Ancestral Homeland Migration to China

Abstract

A growing body of research examines the experiences of highly skilled individuals who “return” to work in their ancestral homeland, but has tended to overlook the gendered dynamics that shape their decisions. This article fills this gap by analyzing how the gendered local context of China affects the experiences of American-Born Chinese (ABC) migrants. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with 52 second-generation ABC professionals in Beijing and Shanghai, I found that both women and men enjoyed comparable career growth and opportunities. Socially, however, men’s foreign citizenship, education, and higher wages transformed them into highly eligible dating and marriage partners, while ABC women were stigmatized as “leftover women” (a social category ascribed to urban, educated single women in China). Thus, ABC women must prioritize either their professional or personal lives, while their male counterparts can enjoy both. By highlighting the personal realm, this case reveals how the trajectories of first-world ancestral homeland migrants are uniquely gendered.

Organisation und Institution in der Sozialen Arbeit

“…Besides that, the commercialization and objectification of women's bodies in the media has led many feminist scholars to conclude that the economic reform has set back efforts toward women's liberation: 'the reform era has witnessed a puzzling stagnation, if not decline, in women's status in China' (Sun & Chen, 2015, p. 1091. Wang concludes: 'A resurgence of gender inequality in urban workplaces reinforces the notion that women belong in the home' (Wang, 2017(Wang, , p. 1176. Sun and Chen (2015, pp.…”

No place like home? Self‐initiated expatriates in their ancestral homeland

“…However, many of the more recent studies are based predominantly on the experiences of expatriates who have gone in a decidedly East‐West‐East direction, as it were. Though there is commendable variation in host‐country settings – incorporating such locations as Vietnam (Nguyen‐Akbar 2016, 2017), India (Jain 2013), Mainland China (Wang 2016, 2017), and Hong Kong (Yan, Lam and Lauer 2014) – these studies have drawn almost exclusively on ethnically Asian respondents who have experienced a Western upbringing and who find themselves working ‘back’ in Asia. This is certainly understandable given the large numbers of such diasporas in North America, Europe, and Australia and the findings have undoubtedly contributed much to our understanding of the phenomenon.…”

“…In our study, we investigate whether and how a shared cultural ancestry between expatriates and host‐country nationals (HCNs) affects the expatriate experience. More precisely, we explore the occurrence of expatriates working in what might be termed their ‘parental’ or ‘ancestral homeland’ (Jain 2013; Wang 2017), examining in particular their motivation for doing so and their experience in adjusting to life in and outside work in their host country. Motivation and adjustment are frequently explored in conjunction with each other (see, e.g., Froese 2012; Richardson and Wong 2018; Selmer and Lauring 2013) because they represent two key phases in the expatriate experience: the pre‐expatriation stage and expatriation itself.…”

“…The context of our investigation is Malaysian self‐initiated expatriates (SIEs) of Chinese descent working in the People's Republic of China (PRC). In this regard, our study represents a departure from those studies focusing on expatriates from Western countries returning to their ancestral homeland, which usually happens to be either a different Western country (Bešić and Ortlieb 2019) or an emerging Asian economy (Jain 2013; Nguyen‐Akbar 2017; Wang 2016, 2017). At the same time, our study differs from many of the ‘intra‐Asian’ studies undertaken by Selmer and associates, which have either focused on PRC‐based expatriates from Hong Kong (Selmer and Shiu 1999) (or vice versa – Selmer, Ebrahimi and Mingtao 2000a,b) or have adopted a broader perspective by analysing ‘overseas Chinese’ expatriates generally (Selmer 2002).…”