Abstract
This chapter examines Chinese-British inter-ethnic families with working professional migrant Chinese wives. It underlines the role of women as professional migrants, rather than low-skilled workers and ‘trailing wives’, in initiating migration and intermarriage. It reveals the professional Chinese women’s struggle to reject the ideal of ‘womanly Chinese woman’ at home and their dilemma to endorse the same ideal as a professional strength at work. This chapter explores how professional Chinese-British couples develop a strategy of ‘line drawing’ to separate mainstream society from Chinese ethnic enclave, home from work, the nuclear family from extended families to order their lives and make sense of love, symbolic status and individualism. Yet at the same time the exercise of ‘line drawing’ poses new challenges for the professional couples.
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Notes
- 1.
Pseudonym applied here.
- 2.
As described in detail later in this section, the professional Chinese wives had little actual engagement with the Chinese community.
- 3.
Eight of the twelve first meetings with the professional families were conducted at the couples’ workplaces, and the other four were held in public places such as cafés and restaurants. None of the first meetings were conducted at the respondents’ homes.
- 4.
Most of the individual interviews with the Chinese wives were conducted in Chinese, as this is the respondents’ preferred language. The interviews with the couples were conducted in English.
- 5.
China’s left-wing socialist movement, which resulted in a nationwide famine.
- 6.
Compared with the Chinese housewives, who engaged their extended families closely in their homes in Britain, and visited China regularly, the professional couples showed a low degree of attachment to their Chinese families.
- 7.
The effort was mainly made to establish credibility and trust, and to persuade the professional families that I had no intention of prying into their privacy, because they were at first highly aware of the potentially negative implications of my participation in their family lives. The same process was markedly different with the Chinese housewives (see Chap. 4).
- 8.
The couples all agreed that ethnicity itself does not carry any status distinction, but that the relative position of an ethnic minority in relation to mainstream labour, cultural activities and so on does define one’s social status; hence the importance of integration.
- 9.
From one year to five years.
- 10.
Quotation from the Analects of Confucius. The phrase suggests that when one is capable of doing something, one should continue to do so. It is based on the philosophy that the world is in constant movement and progression, so if one does not go with the flow, one will be left behind.
- 11.
Shakespeare described the relationship of Romeo and Juliet as ‘fortune’s child’, implying that the relationship was largely shaped by external and socio-structural forces.
- 12.
I asked all of the couples what they think of Chinese woman/British men; as this was revealed to be a point of tension, I pursued the topic in the individual interviews.
- 13.
The traditional Taoist belief that people should go with the flow and seek to be part of the crowd. According to the principle of the golden mean, one is not supposed to stand out from the crowd. Based on this tradition, people are educated to be ‘mediocre’, as the ‘singing bird would always be killed first’ (Fleming, 2008).
- 14.
The four great classical novels: four famous novels of the Qing dynasty (644 to 1922), China’s last imperial dynasty before the modern revolutions.
- 15.
A Dream of Red Chambers: one of the four great classical novels, depicting love stories within a large feudalist Chinese family. Ling Daiyu is the leading female figure, famous for her vulnerability and delicacy.
- 16.
A famous modern-day female writer renowned for her characterisation of Chinese women.
- 17.
The new British Immigration Bill implemented in 2013 also requires spousal immigrants to have a minimal annual income of £18,600. Over time, there has been an increasing emphasis on professionalisation in British immigration policies.
- 18.
Siyu and others had seen the film on the Internet.
- 19.
This is fundamentally different from the ethnic profiles perceived by the Chinese housewives and their British husbands, for whom the perceived higher status of British ethnicity is based on the ‘development thesis’ (see Chap. 4).
- 20.
Most of the 12 couples registered their marriages in the UK.
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Hu, Y. (2016). The Anatomy of the ‘Superwoman’. In: Chinese-British Intermarriage. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29281-6_5
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