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Vancouver’s newest Chinese diaspora: settlers or “immigrant prisoners”?

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Abstract

This study seeks to reground concepts of “diaspora” and “transnationalism” in the realities of everyday life through examining the lived experiences of immigrants. Based on in-depth household interviews and focus groups, it examines the newest Chinese diaspora in Vancouver—skilled immigrants from the People’s Republic of China. It explores the challenges that they face in an unfamiliar city, including employment and language barriers as well as domestic anxieties surrounding childcare, education and marital difficulties. The strategies that they adopt to counter these problems are at times transnational—in the form of astronaut families or transnational childcare—but almost always familial. Ultimately, the settlement challenges that they face, coupled with the available transnational possibilities, raise the question of whether they are settlers or “immigrant prisoners”, temporarily serving their time in Vancouver before a further relocation.

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Notes

  1. Thereafter, all references to “PRC” or “China” exclude the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong.

  2. See, for example, Paul Gilroy’s book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993).

  3. Note bell hooks’ observation that international or postcolonial issues are frequently more comfortably dealt with by US academics than those differences of race and class that are closer to home (hooks 1989, 1990).

  4. It was particularly difficult to recruit earlier immigrants who arrived in 1996 or 1997.

  5. Note China’s One-Child policy since 1978.

  6. Two as translators/interpreters and one as a social worker.

  7. This suggests that the PRC immigrants had less precise expectations (Teo 2003b).

  8. Two of the husbands were businessmen who could better afford this arrangement.

  9. According to respondents, the term originated from Hong Kong and Taiwanese immigrants who arrived in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the aim of securing Canadian citizenship as a way to bypass the Hong Kong handover to China and the geopolitical tensions that exist between China and Taiwan. In an ironic turn of events, immigrants from the PRC have now appropriated the discourse.

  10. For the remaining respondents, 11 intended to stay between 1 and 5 years, and three between 6 and 10 years.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank David Ley, Diana Lary, Wei Li, Carlos Teixeira and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am grateful to the Vancouver Metropolis Centre (RIIM) for funding this research and to S.U.C.C.E.S.S.—especially its former Executive Director, the late Lilian To—for help in recruiting some of the contacts. My deepest thanks go to my respondents for their trust in me.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z2

    Sin Yih Teo

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Correspondence to Sin Yih Teo.

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Teo, S.Y. Vancouver’s newest Chinese diaspora: settlers or “immigrant prisoners”?. GeoJournal 68, 211–222 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-007-9071-2

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