Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
(Cernetig 2007). An earlier survey conducted in the ethnoburb of Richmond
by the immigrant agency, SUCCESS, reported that 40 percent of Hong
Kong Chinese lived in transnational family arrangements (Man 2007).
It became evident from my first interviews that the astronaut household
was both common and also rife with personal and social tensions: women
are alone and often stressed in Canada, men may be drawn into extra-marital
affairs in Asia, children are at risk from predators and subject to behaviour
problems.
4
As a result the fragmented family is a structure that is entered
reluctantly and for economic reasons only; families hope it will be temporary
and it ends when social and emotional needs override economic objectives.
Early in my research I met the Yuen family who had migrated to take up a
managerial position in Los Angeles with a Hong Kong based corporation.
However the social environment in southern California, particularly crime,
disturbed the young family and they re-located to Vancouver, with Mr. Yuen
arranging a transfer back to head office in Hong Kong. But the fragmenta-
tion of astronaut status was intolerable and he resigned from his position to
be with his family in Vancouver. When I met them in 1997, living in a new
house bought for $650,000 on Vancouver's Westside, he had been out of
work for three years. Mr.Yuen's only economic activity was the several hours
a week he spent on his computer managing his property portfolio.
Not much different was the condition of the Huang's from Taiwan also
living in a new house in the same neighbourhood. Mr. Huang had with-
drawn from his business partnership in Taipei to rejoin his wife and two
young children. Like many Taiwanese, his English is poor and he has delayed
looking for work or starting a business until his language skills improve. But
he is listless, time weighs heavily, and the family savings will last only for
another three years, long enough to gain citizenship, but then what? He is
much too young and ambitious to retire, but economic prospects are bleak
in Vancouver. Both theYuens and the Huangs are torn apart emotionally by
the spatial impossibility of their existence. There is a better life they see for
their children in Canada, they are anxious about Chinese geopolitical ambi-
tions in East Asia, but their savings are slipping away and how can they
make a living on this side of their trans-Pacific social field? Both men are
around the house most of the time. 'We fight a lot more than we used to,'
says Mrs. Yuen. This is the hard to tolerate condition of 'immigration jail'
endured by some business immigrants.
The Understimulated Male
Existential conditions like these seem fairly common among business-class
immigrants from East Asia. Economic under-performance in Canada estab-
lishes a spatial gradient, tugging men back to business activity across the
