Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
move and the decision to return, sacrificing her own interests for those of
'the family' (Chee 2005). Aihwa Ong (1999: 128) notes that in California
astronaut wives sarcastically identify themselves as 'widows', evoking their
precarious status and identity, while in a trans-Pacific symmetry of experi-
ence as well as terminology, districts in Sydney with concentrations of such
families have been informally labelled 'widow streets' (Mak 1991). Well-
educated Chinese women, used to the welcome services of a housekeeper or
nanny to take care of household and child care tasks in East Asia, can find
themselves heavily over-committed in Canada (Man 1997, 2007).Yet inter-
views with immigrant women from Hong Kong and Taiwan who had been
in Vancouver for several years also suggested a level of resourcefulness.
A number were managing a family business in the absence of their husband
overseas; a few had entered the real estate industry, a sector in which ethnic
Chinese women have excelled in Vancouver as in San Francisco (Ong 1999).
Like their Bay-Area sisters, too, women are often involved in a life filled
with activities and social rounds; one of my interviews was conducted with
a woman, tennis racket in hand, who had just left the courts. Living alone,
she was not working but drawing an income from family investments.
Clearly there are varied life-paths associated with the diversity of these
experiences. How does one reconcile Ong's view of 'astronaut widows' with
Mr. Leung's opinion that '95 percent of female immigrants like here very
much'? Some reconciliation of apparent contrasts appears by giving more
attention to change through time in the evolving settlement process. Waters
(2002) has integrated some of these apparent contradictions from a set of
interviews in Vancouver conducted with the wives of economic migrants
working in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The move to Canada did lead to the
loss of employment status and seniority built up in East Asia for these
women, and very few were working at all in Vancouver. Some had sought
jobs and run into the usual range of barriers (credentials not recognized, no
Canadian experience, etc.), but most had left the labour market well alone.
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The cash flow from their husbands met the family's economic needs and
the women turned to the domestic duties of child care and home mainte-
nance, tasks usually taken care of in Asia by their nanny, housekeeper or
extended family. To be stripped of this support network, and in the absence
of their husband overseas, the women were often stretched to the limit,
sustaining the image of the stressed and vulnerable astronaut wife. While
telephone calls across the Pacific were frequent, even daily, and often
included use of MSN, web cameras and video clips,
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electronic contact was
an imperfect substitute for physical presence, and for some women the
combination of boredom, stress and loneliness was toxic, leading to a need
for personal counselling. In this condition of distress, the image of the
robust overseas Chinese family was a poor match with daily experience.
Some distancing of marital partners could easily occur. Lawrence Lam
