The Resilient Self

Chien-Juh Gu

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813586076
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Asiatisch-Amerikanische Studien

The Resilient Self explores how international migration re-shapes women’s senses of themselves. Chien-Juh Gu uses life-history interviews and ethnographic observations to illustrate how immigration creates gendered work and family contexts for middle-class Taiwanese American women, who, in turn, negotiate and resist the social and psychological effects of the processes of immigration and settlement.  Most of the women immigrated as dependents when their U.S.-educated husbands found professional jobs upon graduation. Constrained by their dependent visas, these women could not work outside of the home during the initial phase of their settlement. The significant contrast of their lives before and after immigration—changing from successful professionals to foreign housewives—generated feelings of boredom, loneliness, and depression. Mourning their lost careers and lacking fulfillment in homemaking, these highly educated immigrant women were forced to redefine the meaning of work and housework, which in time shaped their perceptions of themselves and others in the family, at work, and in the larger community.  
 

1

Introduction

It was a sunny afternoon in Chicago when I interviewed Jen, an immigrant woman from Taiwan who owns a computer company that handles millions of dollars in revenue each year. Confident, assertive, and passionate, Jen shared many of her experiences conducting business in mainstream U.S. society, including competing with White-owned companies and overcoming stereotypes of Asian women. I quietly admired the wisdom, strength, and sophisticated social skills revealed in her stories, but I was puzzled by her gloomy face when she spoke about her family life, especially her relationship with her in-laws. I will never forget the sadness, emptiness, and helplessness on her face as she said, “At work, I make all the decisions and I am in control, but at home, I have to be submissive. I feel so powerless and miserable. . . .”

The enormous contrast between Jen’s sense of self in the work and family domains is not an isolated case. Since beginning my research on Taiwanese Americans a decade ago, I have heard similar stories from women repeatedly during interviews. Countless questions and puzzles occupied my mind during those sleepless nights while in the field collecting data. Why are these professional women so assertive at work but so passive at home? Why do they feel content with work regardless of their gender and race disadvantages, but remain powerless and suffer in their family lives where most immigrants’ senses of security and satisfaction are rooted? Why do Taiwanese gender norms have such a persistent influence on their behaviors when interacting with in-laws even among those who have been acculturated into middle-class America for more than two decades?

Moreover, many professional women become housewives after immigration. For someone who is highly educated and who once had a prominent career, what does it mean to be a housewife in a foreign country? How do these women perceive themselves, their loss of career and an independent income, and their new status as a visible racial minority? What do immigrant women’s experiences of adaptation and suffering tell us about the interplay of gender and immigration and its effects on individuals’ lives? This book answers these questions.

International Migration as a Gendered Process and Experience

Immigration is fundamentally a gender issue.1 Gendered labor markets and social networks contribute to varying immigration patterns, settlement processes, and adaptation experiences of both women and men.2 International migration also often leads to the reconfiguration of gender relations and family power structures. For instance, immigrant women laborers have better employment opportunities than their male counterparts in many labor-intensive industries that desire female immigrant workers, such as the service, microelectronics, health care, and garment sectors.3 Women’s greater financial contributions to the family consequently enhance their status at home. Research has shown that Dominican immigrant women in New York’s garment industry, Vietnamese immigrant women in Philadelphia, Mexican immigrant women in Iowa’s meatpacking industry, and Korean immigrant women in urban Texas all gain greater bargaining power over their family budgets, and they are able to negotiate more sharing of household labor from their husbands because of the economic resources they brought to the family from employment.4

The increasing employment rate among Western women since the 1980s has also created the need for domestic labor. As a result, many working women hire female laborers from Latin America and Southeast Asia to serve as nannies or maids in their private homes.5 Many of these domestic workers migrate alone, leaving their families behind. As a result, their husbands assume more childcare and household responsibilities, which reverses traditional gender roles. As the primary breadwinners, these immigrant maids and nannies contribute to their families’ financial advancement, but they are also forced to entrust their children to others (i.e., husbands and extended families) while they care for other women’s children and homes.

Industries that favor male laborers, such as construction and farming, attract many male immigrants who leave their families behind to seek employment opportunities overseas. For example, many Mexican immigrant men migrate alone to work as janitors, gardeners, and construction workers in the United States, primarily in California and Texas. Their connections with other Mexican men who have migrated north enable them to find employment through these male networks. Meanwhile, their wives stay in Mexico to care for their children and families. These women shoulder greater responsibilities around the house and act with autonomy and assertion. Over time, they also establish networks with Mexican immigrant women and are eventually able to mobilize their ethnic networks to persuade their husbands to relocate the entire family to the United States.6

Employment also reconfigures gender relations in middle-class immigrant families. In Korean, Chicano, Taiwanese, Indian, and Filipino immigrant families in which wives are professionals, husbands undertake more housework and childcare responsibilities compared to their lower-class counterparts. Scholars have provided several explanations for this phenomenon, including the high demands of these women’s careers, the smaller earning gaps between the couple, women’s abilities to negotiate more sharing, and husbands’ added free time. These factors also result in more egalitarian gender ideologies among middle-class men compared to their laborer counterparts. Regardless, women continue to perform more housework duties compared to their husbands across ethnicity and country of origin.7

Immigrant entrepreneurs’ lives are somewhat different. Many small immigrant businesses rely on unpaid wives and underpaid coethnic employees for their successes and profits.8 In Pyong Gap Min’s study of Korean immigrant businesses in New York City, wives play a critical role in operating family-owned stores. They work long hours and consider their labor an extension of their domestic obligations. However, their husbands are registered as the legal owners and dominate the decision-making power for both their stores and families. In immigrant-owned stores, the distinction between work and family is blurred as couples work side by side for long hours, and many do not hire additional workers. Tension sometimes arises in this work-is-also-family context.9 Working and living in such an isolated environment also increases married women’s financial and social dependence on their husbands.10

Miliann Kang’s study of Korean-women-owned nail salons tells a different story. Nail salons give immigrant women a place to work separately from their husbands. They provide an independent source of income and greater economic opportunities for the family’s upward mobility. Nevertheless, these salon owners often feel guilty about not devoting enough time to their roles as wives and mothers. They struggle to balance work, homemaking, and childcare responsibilities regardless of the autonomy and financial independence they gain through entrepreneurship.11 In the United States, immigrant-women-owned businesses vary to a great extent, including law firms, architecture companies, travel agencies, childcare centers, and gift shops. Similar to the Korean immigrant women in Kang’s study, these business owners also face common challenges in balancing work and family demands as well as in battling racial inequality and racism in the larger society.12

In all of these studies, scholars highlight the role of gender in constructing immigration patterns and settlement experiences. Analyses of gender are often situated in work-family contexts without explicitly stating the importance of gender-work-family connections.13 More prevalently, many scholars examine immigrant women’s and men’s experiences in only the family or only the workplace. Few researchers have fully integrated gender and work-family contexts to examine the multifaceted connections of immigrant adaptation. In fact, immigration is not only a gendered process but also a work-family issue in its essence.14 Work and family as major components of the social structure construct two interconnected institutions through which gender inequality is socially constituted.15 Therefore, in immigration research, it is important to focus not only on gender but also on its association with the interplay of work, family, and other structural factors, an objective that this book aims to achieve.

Gendered Immigration in the Work-Family Context

Since the 1980s, a consistent theme has emerged from numerous studies of gender and immigration: immigrant women’s labor force participation in the host society and their exposure to Western culture constitute two main factors that enhance their status and bargaining power at home.16 In other words, scholars have suggested repeatedly that immigration somewhat emancipates women from patriarchal societies through their employment in the host society, although their gains and losses are uneven in different arenas.17

The case of Taiwanese American women has in many ways challenged this thesis and how we understand the effects of immigration and gender on women’s family and work lives. For instance, Taiwanese immigrant husbands dominate decisions to settle their families in the United States, usually for their own job opportunities and career advancement. In the context in which husbands secure professional jobs in a Western society, married women are presented with limited choices. Out of concern for their family’s well-being, many women give up high-paying, high-status jobs in Taiwan to accompany their husbands to the United States. Their motives for settlement are overwhelmingly driven by social and family factors, including their children’s education, living environment, and factors other than their own job opportunities.18

Migrating as dependents, many professional women retreat from prominent careers to become homemakers. Their employment is restricted not only by their visa status but also by their cumulative disadvantage, in Bandana Purkayastha’s term.19 Unable to work outside the home, immigrant housewives’ sense of self-worth increasingly relies on their children’s achievements, rather than their own; they are overwhelmed by the overload of domestic work, but consider housework their sole responsibility. In other words, immigration ties Taiwanese women closer to the domestic sphere and intensifies the work-family division, a phenomenon I call housewifelization (see chapter 3). Although many women manage to enter the U.S. labor force later, most choose fields that differ from their original training for practical reasons. The meaning of work changes for them, and having a career is no longer their ambition. The new meaning of employment also partly influences how professional women handle mistreatment and racial inequality in the workplace (see chapter 6).

Previous studies have also considered immigrant women’s exposure to Western culture as a main factor that awakens their egalitarian desire to negotiate an equal share of housework with their husbands, even though such progressive behavior does not translate to their compliance in the workplace. Quite differently, most Taiwanese women in my study use practical reasoning when explaining their gender division of work at home (see chapter 4). For example, “Housewives are home all day long, so they should assume all housework” and “who is better at math should be in charge of family finances” are common rationalizations when subjects explained who did what around the house. In contrast, their cultural consciousness, whether Taiwanese/Asian or American/Western, is more evident in dealing with in-law (see chapter 5) and interracial relations (see chapter 6).

In other words, the interplay of immigration and gender, its interactive effects with work and family structures, and the consequent influences in individuals’ lives are much more complicated than what the existing literature of gender and immigration suggests. In this book, I provide a more complex picture of the multifaceted connections of immigration, gender, work, family, race and ethnicity, citizenship, and culture in women’s adaptation processes. I demonstrate how these intertwined structures reshape women’s senses of self, construct the meanings they give to their paid and unpaid work, and affect how they interpret their behaviors in different relational contexts.

Women’s Standpoint and Intersectionality

Women’s experiences of immigration were absent in sociology for most of the twentieth century, as it was not until the mid-1980s that scholars began to include women in their studies.20 The long absence of women’s stories in immigration research not only reflects a gender-blind perspective but also an unbalanced source of knowledge production.

As feminist standpoint theory argues, women’s unique standpoints in society offer a privileged vantage point on male supremacy. As Nancy Hartsock explains, the social structures that organize, shape, limit, and penetrate the everyday world vary for people in different social locations and shape different experiences of life. However, women’s voices are often suppressed in both society and social sciences. She argues that women’s experiences allow scholars to go beneath the surface of the social world and reveal concealed social relations. Thus, women’s perspectives and experiences should be central to knowledge, culture, and politics.21

Dorothy Smith followed this intellectual tradition and developed a sociological method from the standpoint of women. Criticizing how women’s lives are absent from the domain of sociology, she argues that sociology must be rooted in the life world of women’s standpoints, material realities, and local experiences that are always situated, relational, and engaged.22 Sandra Harding also contends that research should begin with women’s lives because it leads to socially constructed claims that are less false, less distorted, and less partial than those of men’s lives.23 Noting the importance of women’s voices, standpoint theorists have clarified that women do not occupy a single standpoint. Rather, women’s life experiences are diverse because of their different social locations that are shaped not only by gender but also by other social variables such as race, social class, and sexuality.

Patricia Hill Collins articulates a Black feminist standpoint that underlines the common experiences of Black women as differing from those of Whites and that recognizes the differences among Black women themselves.24 Collins’s work has greatly influenced the development of the concept of intersectionality in feminist thought since the 1990s. Central to contemporary gender scholarship, intersectionality examines the interlocking inequalities created by gender, race, class, sexuality, and other social positions and the multilayered oppression that individuals experience through power relations in varied ways and on different levels (macro, meso, and micro) of social life.25

Highlighting the heterogeneity of women’s experiences, however, does not mean that endless segmented stories exist in research. Susan Hekman explains that knowledge is situated, located, and shaped by individual perspectives. By making persuasive arguments based on subjects’ accounts of the world, standpoint theorists can achieve feminist objectivity and avoid absolute relativism.26 Donna Haraway further elaborates that feminist models of scientific knowledge, what she calls rational knowledge or situated knowledge, should be a power-sensitive conversation that provides a common ground for dialog, rationality, and objectivity. In her viewpoint, the production of situated knowledge is, by its nature, a process of ongoing critical interpretations of subjects’ accounts of their situated life worlds. Although subjects are the object of knowledge, they must be considered as agents.27

Feminist standpoint theory fra...