Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
well-educated workers. London has been defined as the core of an escalator
region where young adults can also move up the economic ladder as they
too serve long hours of apprenticeship as financial, legal or advertising pro-
fessionals and extol leisure opportunities they never quite have enough time
or money to appropriate as they would wish (Hamnett 2003). But is this a
life-long commitment to life in the fast lane? Is return truly the end of their
migration history? And what of more mature residents in Hong Kong who
have also returned? What of the astronauts and re-united families who have
made the trip back across the Pacific?
The Mid-Career Returnee
By the early 1990s it was evident to Eliza Chan, head of the Hong Kong-
Canada Business Association and a former tax lawyer in Vancouver, that
there were two principal groups of returnees to the colony: first, those aged
25-35 who were looking for faster career development in Hong Kong, and,
second, those like herself who were somewhat older (and wealthier) and
were returning, either permanently or as astronauts, to take up an existing
family business or partnership (
World Journal
1994a). The Hong Kong focus
groups also included these more mature and wealthier returnees with more
complex transnational migration biographies. Only for a few was astronaut
status a long-term calling, and for many families long-distance separation
followed by reunion might be a serial process, as the anxieties of separation led
to reunion, but then perhaps a new phase of separation in response to chang-
ing economic opportunities. The basic motivations for movement across the
transnational social field were unchanged for these more mature households.
The outward trip to Canada continued to be dominated by children's edu-
cation, quality of life, and geopolitical desires for a foreign passport, while
economic or employment motives were scarcely mentioned. The return trip
was precipitated by economic underachievement in Canada, or else had
been pre-planned to continue running an ongoing business in East Asia. In
the words of one focus group participant:
Talking about the advantages of Canada, life there is more comfortable. There's
more fresh air, better outdoor opportunities. I think all of these cannot beat one
thing: that is business and employment opportunities in Hong Kong. Many
people returning to Hong Kong had to be tolerant of smaller houses and dirty
air, because there is more opportunity in making money and doing business.
These more mature migrants were commonly peripatetic, engaged in
repeated trans-Pacific movement in response to distinct phases in the life
cycle, where the calculation of benefits and losses for a Canadian or an East
