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Diaspora 6:2 1997 A Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal, and the Emergent Identity of the Chinese Cosmopolitan1 Chan Kwok Bun National University of Singapore 1. Introduction This essay puts forward two main claims. First, it argues that dispersing the patrilineal Chinese family is, paradoxically, often a rational family decision to preserve the family, a resourceful and resilient way of strengthening it: families split in order to be together translocally. The “astronaut families” of Hong Kong are a model of such dispersion for our time. Second, the essay argues that these spatially dispersed families constitute strategic nodes and linkages of an ever-expanding transnational field within which a new type of Chinese identity is emerging—that of the Chinese cosmopolitan. Migration often disperses family members, thus massively “manufacturing” a familial form often viewed by family specialists as pathological. This view is especially common among those who take it for granted that the family as a cohesive unit must be based on family members being physically together, in order to articulate their family life in one geographic place, under the same roof (see Cheal; Bernardes). To the sociologist-theorist, to the practitioner in marital counseling, family therapy, social work, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, as well as to those providing pastoral care through various religious institutions or the mass media, family dispersal is usually evidence of family disorganization, and needs to be corrected. Yet, when one looks beyond these narrow concerns and scrutinizes the classical and contemporary migration literature with special reference to the actual processual workings of the family, one notices that family dispersal often, if not always, successfully coexists with migration; there is evidence of family dispersal having been anticipated, accepted, and seized upon as a rational strategy to optimize the benefits of migration while minimizing its risks and costs. Stark’s (101–6) portfolio investment theory is among several recent attempts (see Fawcett; DeJong, Root, and Abad; Perez) to place the family at the heart of the migration decision—to place analyses of migration within the context of the family. xxxxxxxxxxxx 195 Diaspora 6:2 1997 Stark argues that when family members migrate from a rural to an urban sector, usually as the result of a collective decision, the family is “simultaneously sampling from a number of separate markets (that is, investing in one without completely liquidating and shifting holdings from another), and sharing both costs (e.g. financing the move) and rewards (e.g. through remittances), and so forth.” (103). Families disperse their labor resources over geographically scattered and qualitatively different markets in order to both reduce risks and pool and share their incomes. Support, in the form of remittances, flows to that sector of the family that stays home and deals with, say, crop failure; but remittances can also go to the urban migrant during times of economic recession. All this, of course, is contingent upon the migrant (the son or daughter)2 and his family (represented by the father) entering into a co-insurance contract, a form of diversified portfolio investment, in which the command of the family over the migrant is secure, if not guaranteed . As such, family dispersal is not simply a “consequence” of migration; on the contrary, the anticipation, acceptance, and adoption of family dispersal as strategy releases, sets in motion, and necessarily precedes the very act of migration in the first place. Of course, family dispersal as migration strategy is not without its costs, strains, and stresses; the family sociologist is thus by necessity as interested in its problematic character as in its attendant coping strategies (Chan, “Ethnicity” 308–24). Yet, as this essay argues, the scattering of family in a duality or, increasingly, a plurality of geographic places within a new, enabling global environment provides one crucial context within which a Chinese cosmopolitan identity emerges and is articulated. Other relevant contexts include the development of a system of intimately intertwined world economies with multidirectional flows of trade and investment; the emergence of a Chinese diasporic economy with its ethnically structured networks of nodes and poles (see Lever-Tracy and Ip); modern technological advances in communications and transport that facilitate the transmission of popular culture (Cohen 20–1). Together, these conflicts and conditions further...

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