Trans Pacific Mobilities

With the number of Chinese living outside of its borders expected to reach 52 million by 2030, China has one of the most mobile populations on earth, shaping economies, cultures, and politics around the globe. Trans-Pacific Mobilities charts how the cross-border movement of Chinese people, goods, and images affects notions of place, belonging, and identity, particularly in Canada. Drawing on the new mobilities paradigm, contributors explore this phenomenon through five lenses, mapping out historic, cultural and symbolic, highly skilled, family and gendered, and transnational mobilities. This volume offers fresh insights into historical and contemporary Chinese mobilities and issues of transnationalism.

This book argues that transpacific history cannot be comprehended without including “vertical” connections; namely, those between the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere. It explores such connections by uncovering small histories of ordinary people’s attempts at événements which they undertake by means of uneven, unlevel, and multidirectional mobilities. In this way, this book goes beyond the usual notion of transpacific history as a matter of Northern Hemisphere-centric connections between the United States and Asian countries, and enables us to imagine a transpacific space as a more dynamic and multi-faceted world of human mobilities and connections. In this book, both eminent and burgeoning historians uncover the stories of little-known, myriad encounters in various parts of the Asia-Pacific region. By exploring cases whose actors include soldiers, missionaries, colonial administrators, journalists, essayists, and artists, the book highlights the significance of "vertical" perspectives in understanding complex histories of the region.

Pacific Islanders have engaged in transnational practices since their first settlement of the many islands in the region. As they moved beyond the Pacific and settled in nations such as New Zealand, the U.S. and Australia these practices intensified and over time have profoundly shaped both home and diasporic communities. This edited volume begins with a detailed account of this history and the key issues in Pacific migration and transnationalism today. The papers that follow present a range of case studies that maintain this focus on both historical and contemporary perspectives. Each of the contributors goes beyond a narrowly economic focus to present the human face of migration and transnationalism; exploring questions of cultural values and identity, transformations in kinship, intergenerational change and the impact on home communities. Pacific migration and transnationalism are addressed in this volume in the context of increasing globalisation and growing concerns about the future social, political and economic security of the Pacific region. As the case studies presented here show, the future of the Pacific depends in many ways on the ties diasporic Islanders maintain with their homelands.

In recent decades, the term 'mobility' has emerged as a defining paradigm within the humanities. For scholars engaged in the multidisciplinary topics and perspectives now often embraced by the term Pacific Studies, it has been a much more longstanding and persistent concern. Even so, specific questions regarding 'mobilities of return'--that is, the movement of people 'back' to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as 'home'--have tended to take a back seat within more recent discussions of mobility, transnationalism and migration. This volume situates return mobility as a starting point for understanding the broader context and experience of human mobility, community and identity in the Pacific region and beyond. Through diverse case studies spanning the Pacific region, it demonstrates the extent to which the prospect and practice of returning home, or of navigating returns between multiple homes, is a central rather than peripheral component of contemporary Pacific Islander mobilities and identities everywhere.

The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War–era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. “Chineseness,” the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.

Based on extensive interviewing and access to a wide range of databases, this is an examination of the migration career of wealthy migrants who left East Asia and relocated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s. An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, with additional comparative visits and consultations in Sydney, Beijing, and Singapore Traces the histories of the migrants families over a 25 year period Offers a critical view of the spatial presuppositions of neo-liberal globalization, and an insertion of geography into transnational theory

Based on extensive interviewing and access to a wide range of databases, this is an examination of the migration career of wealthy migrants who left East Asia and relocated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s. An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, with additional comparative visits and consultations in Sydney, Beijing, and Singapore Traces the histories of the migrants families over a 25 year period Offers a critical view of the spatial presuppositions of neo-liberal globalization, and an insertion of geography into transnational theory

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.