Abstract
While most of the marriage migrants opted for domesticity and most of the professional migrants retained their professional careers after marriage and migration, some families beat the odds and opted for domestic and social arrangements atypical to their distinctive immigration pathways. This chapter focuses on the subset of ‘off-tracker’ families composed of homemaking professional migrant wives and working marriage-migrant wives who redirected their gender-role orientations throughout marriage and migration. It reveals the difficulties encountered by and reasons for Chinese-British inter-ethnic couples to re-orientate their family and social arrangements. The chapter also explores the strategies adopted by the ‘off-tracker’ families to overcome the confines of their baseline immigration pathways and change their life-course orientations at individual, familial and social levels.
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Notes
- 1.
The divorcées were interviewed on their own. As their ex-husbands were not interviewed, I took into consideration the potential bias in the interviewees’ representations of divorce. Nevertheless, as the decision to divorce was determined by the respondents’ feelings about their marriage, these retrospective accounts may still provide valid information on how and why negotiation failed and led to divorce.
- 2.
Notably, the six families belong to different generations and are at different stages of life. For details, see Appendix B.
- 3.
According to Swidler (1986), cultural codifications do not directly prescribe what people should or should not do. Instead, they provide a comprehensive, though rather ambivalent, set of rules within whose boundaries human agents can devise their own life strategies.
- 4.
Six of the 29 Chinese-British families involved in this research are categorised as ‘off-tracker’ families, as defined by deviation from their immigration categories and trajectories.
- 5.
Fang mainly undertakes unpaid voluntary work; Yiyi occasionally works from home and takes on short-term and flexible paid jobs; Emma is planning either to work more flexibly or to leave her job once she has a child. In contrast, Rita, Xiu and Cora shoulder a large share of the familial and domestic responsibilities.
- 6.
The phrase means that a wife should support her husband’s career and follow him in his walk of life.
- 7.
This expression describes a female with a high-status academic degree and a large income, who is relatively ‘old’ and has therefore been overlooked (‘left’) in the marriage market.
- 8.
For example, see http://news.sina.com.cn/cul/2004-12-15/2058.html, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21320560, date accessed 10 October 2014.
- 9.
The figures for China are available at http://edu.ifeng.com/news/detail_2010_12/07/3377574_0.shtml and the figures for the UK are available at http://www.hesa.ac.uk/content/view/2705/278/#gen, date accessed 10 October 2014.
- 10.
See Chap. 2 for details of traditional Chinese attitudes to the issue of age differences within couples. John’s parents did not express similar opinions on the age difference between Yiyi and John.
- 11.
This is also consistent with the finding, reported in Chap. 5, that the professional Chinese wives tend to use literal, explicit and direct expressions when communicating with their British husbands in English (that is, a low-context strategy), as they are not proficient in the high-context use of English.
- 12.
Emma is not averse to making Chinese friends. Since her arrival in the UK, however, she has lived in areas with mainly White-British populations, which offer only limited opportunities to make Chinese friends. This situation was meticulously arranged by her parents, who hoped that living in White-British neighbourhoods would help Emma to integrate with mainstream British society.
- 13.
English has been a compulsory part of education in China since the 1990s. As both Rita and Cora received high school and higher education after the 1990s, they were required to pass English exams to gain their degrees.
- 14.
A popular Chinese instant-messaging platform with more than 100 million users in 2010. It is often used by family and friends to keep in touch with each other.
- 15.
China has no welfare or medical system similar to that of the UK. Individuals and their families are responsible for providing care for the elderly, including medical care. Xiu explained clearly that as she did not have a child, she needed to make preparations to look after herself in her later life.
- 16.
Data drawn from the 2006 China General Social Survey. The respondents were asked to indicate the extent of their agreement with the statement ‘it is acceptable for a married couple not to have a child’ on a 1 to 7 scale, where ‘1’ signified ‘strongly agree’ and ‘7’ signified ‘strongly disagree’. 28.21 % of the respondents gave answers of 1, 2 or 3, indicating their agreement with the statement; 21.23 % expressed neutrality (4); and 50.06 % disagreed with the statement (5, 6 and 7).
- 17.
Like Xiu, Dan cited the favourable exchange rate between Chinese yen and British pound sterling to explain that he was able to earn enough in the UK to enjoy a decent life after early retirement.
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Hu, Y. (2016). The Road Less Travelled—Negotiating ‘Change’. 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_6
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