Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
all too partial sense of the complex identities of millionaire migrants, we
have to engage other conceptual categories. Inevitably in the broad canvas
of this narrative, such conceptual fields as the global city, cosmopolitanism,
citizenship and multiculturalism appear, but other than summary state-
ments I resist the temptation to move down the alluring view corridors
to engage them fully; in part I have done so elsewhere, and do not want to
pursue undue diversions from the principal narrative. Other fields cannot
be sidelined. Family embeddedness is an additional key quality of identity,
and it is important to disentangle the differential status of husband, wife
and child in transnational space (Waters 2002). Geographic separation
introduces strains on the family unit as the astronaut husband in East Asia
and the 'left behind' family members in Canada are significantly uncou-
pled, with their occasional meetings bearing the weight of lives lived in dif-
ferent places. Moreover, even when the family remains intact in a single
place, de-skilled males feel the dislocation accompanying migration differ-
entially, and more painfully.
Nor do immigrant families ever arrive in an empty land. Canada is still
widely regarded as a European settler society even if that description is less
quantitatively accurate with each passing census. Migrants from Asia
encounter not only a geography but also a history, and up to the 1940s
Canada's history was that of a colonial plural society with a racialized hier-
archy and separation between its constituent units. The Chinese in particu-
lar suffered virulent racist marginalization, containment and exclusion
(Anderson 1991). Some authors fail to see significant breaks between past
and present, and the dimension of race and the literature of critical race
studies is an important area of theoretical engagement in the discussion that
follows, particularly in Chapter 6.
So insights from theories of the globalising neo-liberal state and its exem-
plary actor, homo economicus , gender and family studies, and critical race
studies are each part of the scaffolding upon which this interpretation of
transnational relations across an expansive geography will unfold. Perhaps
framing is a better metaphor, for while scaffolding is removed from a com-
pleted building, the frame remains though it is concealed beneath the final
construction. So too in this narrative the theoretical and conceptual arma-
ture, while shaping the account, will serve as backdrop, guiding the discus-
sion but not dominating it.
China Moves
If the twenty-first century is indeed to be the Chinese century, 13 then the
awakening of the ancient empire is emblematized by the dynamic of people
on the move, people remaking the human geography of the national territory
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