Asia Pacific Viewpoint 2020
ISSN 1360-7456
In-between: Re-migration, orbital mobilities and
emotional circulations of women from China to
Taiwan and back to China
Beatrice Zani
Lyon 2 University, Triangle UMR 5206, Lyon, France.
Email: beatrice.zani92@gmail.com, beatrice.zani@univ-lyon2.fr.
Abstract: After a first labour migration from the countryside to the city in China, some Chinese migrant working
women are engaged in marriage migration to Taiwan. There, they face social, gendered and economic subalternity.
Therefore, some women divorce and re-migrate to China, to the city they had been previously working in, where
they remobilise social, economic and emotional resources, as well as the new competences and knowledge
capitalised during mobility experiences in China and Taiwan. They oscillate between new local and global scales,
and generate creative social, economic and emotional connections among spaces, places and people. Mobilities take
the shape of physical and virtual, material and emotional ‘orbits’, connecting diverse spatialities, temporalities and
affections. Drawing on a multi-situated global ethnographic work tracking women’s migrations from China to Taiwan
and from Taiwan to China, this article contributes to the study of physical and virtual, material and emotional mobilities of migrants in a globalised social world of interconnection and hypermobility. It provides insights to apprehend,
theoretically, methodologically and empirically, the link between mobilities, emotions the digitalisation of social and
economic practices. Navigating through spatialities, temporalities and emotions, Chinese women produce ‘inbetween’ cosmopolitan biographies inside mutating and fluid local and global, physical and virtual, spaces. Mobilities
take an orbital shape, embedded in social and affectional relations, economic practices, and emotions.
Keywords: China–Taiwan, cosmopolitan biographies, digital platforms, divorce, emotions, local
and global mobilities
Introductory considerations
On the move
One morning in February 2017, I received a
phone call from Xiao Mei,1 a Chinese migrant
woman living in Hukou 糊口 village, Xinzhu
新竹 County, in Taiwan. She asked me to join
her in Hukou. Her voice was broken and her
words were muddled. Xiao Mei is 29 years old
and she originally comes from the rural village
of Xingning 興寧, Guangdong 廣東 province,
Mainland China. At the age of 15, she left the
countryside and migrated to Shenzhen, where
she worked in the local factories for several
years. Through marriage with a Taiwanese
native when she was 21, she re-migrated to
Taiwan, where she had been living for seven
years when I met her. She obtained Taiwanese
citizenship and she had a child. Xiao Mei was
waiting with her luggage at the train station. As
soon as I arrived, she cried and distinctly stated:
I want to leave Taiwan as soon as possible,
I want to go back to China, my homeland.
Taiwan is not my home. I cannot live here any
more, I cannot stand this life any more; I want
to divorce immediately and get on the first
flight tomorrow in the morning.
After reflection, she signed the divorce documents.
She quickly sent a message on the digital application WeChat (微信) to some friends in Shenzhen,
and left Taiwan for China the following day.
Xiao Mei is on the move. Women are on the
move. Over the last several decades, China and
Taiwan have offered stimulating cases for observing
women’s internal, international and transnational
migrations (Li, 2013; Hsia, 2015; Roulleau-Berger,
2017). The issue of women’s mobility from China
to Taiwan has attracted international scholarship’s
attention: in China, women migrate from rural areas
to work in the city and re-migrate through marriage
from China to Taiwan. However, it has been
interpreted under the prism of a unilateral
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
doi:10.1111/apv.12254
B. Zani
movement from China to Taiwan, without conceiving the potential for further mobilities and for remigration (Coutin, 2015; Ho, 2019). In a globalised
context of interconnection, of pluralisation of
mobilities, movement has become a constant,
rather than a variable, in the contemporary social
landscape (Schultermandl and Toplu, 2010).
Globalisation, hypermobility and re-migration
International migration scholarship has so far revealed the complexity and the ramification of
migrants’ mobility paths (Ong, 1999; Tarrius,
2000; Roulleau-Berger, 2017). Grounded studies
on transnationalism have probed the permanent
links established by migrants between society of
departure and of settlement (Glick-Schiller et al.,
1994). Within a globalised context of interconnection, instantaneous movements and hypermobility (Burawoy, 2001; Zani, 2018), migrants
become trans-migrants (Tarrius, 2000) since they
carry on transnational experiences and lifestyles.
They position themselves in between societies,
creating new connections and new bridges
between the spaces they crossed during their
multiple, bifurcated, and labyrinthine paths.
Mobilities connect, on different levels, migrants’
experiences, economic practices, social ties and
emotional attachments. Following social, economic, familiar and emotional opportunity and
constraint structure, migratory paths become
multi-directional and the careers’ orientations can
be inversed, reversed and rerouted. For example,
in some cases, Chinese migrant women leave
Taiwan and re-migrate to China after divorce.
Re-migration represents a possibility for
migrants after a stay in the country of arrival.
The notion of re-migration (Ho 2019) is helpful
when describing this movement. As claimed by
Xiang et al. (2013) the notion of return establishes the directionality of mobility in ethical
terms instead of only in physical terms. In the
frame of a pluralised and permanent ‘temporary
mobility regime’ (Ley and Kobayashi, 2005), it
is a matter of conceiving the possibility of multiple migrations over an individual’s life-course
(Ho, 2019). Against an economic understanding
of return in terms of success/failure dichotomy
(Massey et al., 1993; Cassarino, 2004), migrations and re-migrations are integrated in a wider
process of transnational biographical, social
and economic career-making (Becker, 1963),
2
where movement is a constant. Circulations
characterise migrants’ biographical, social and
labour experiences (Triandafyllidou, 2013).
These produce hypermobility patterns among a
multiplicity of localities where migrants are
physically or virtually, materially or emotionally, positioned. In this respect, re-migration to
the society of departure does not correspond to
the end of a migratory cycle (King, 2012), since
migrant women move around the cities they
had previously worked in or they may even
return to Taiwan. They develop in-between
existences, lives lived on both sides of the borders. Alain Tarrius (2000) has shown that the
overlocking relation between time and space
has brought about novel combinations between
spatial continuities and temporal contiguities
within migrants’ displacements. He forged the
expression of ‘circulatory territory’ to define a
space which is delimited by migrants’ networks
and circulatory competences. On a similar vein,
Triandafylliou’s analysis of Moroccan migrants
in Spain and Italy suggested to conceive mobility in terms of ‘circulatory migration’ when
migrants engage in a set of activities in a certain
locality, but have their base in their country of
origin (2013).
The mobility regime (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013) which framed women’s migration to
and installation in Taiwan established a necessary relation between marital status and rights’
attribution, which shapes the dialectic between
mobility and immobility. Marriage is the legal
requirement to enter the territory and settle
down, and it anchors migrants’ mobility right to
a precise marital regime (Friedman, 2010). A
change in terms of marital status which derives
from divorce can jeopardise migrants’ rights to
stay in the territory, engendering expulsion and
deportation (Hwang, 2014). However, as Xiao
Mei’s case suggests, several Chinese migrants
divorce and re-migrate after the obtaining Taiwanese citizenship. This generates a puzzle,
since the obtention of citizenship does not
engender for these women the obligation to
leave the territory after divorce. In this sense, remigrations are mutable and malleable processes,
forged by diverse social, economic and emotional experiences. Chinese migrants mobilise a
plurality of social, economic and emotional
resources to redesign and reconstruct their
life patterns, as well as reflexive competences
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
(Roulleau-Berger, 2010) in framing the future
shape of their mobility practices. This requires
further investigation.
Emotions, attachments and anchorages
A large body of research on return migration
has highlighted that return or re-migration is an
essential component of transnational movement
(Carling and Erdal, 2014) and of endless circulations (Triandafyllidou, 2010), which increase
connections between home and host countries;
thus re-migration paths show how movement is
continuous rather than concluded (Urry, 2007).
Migrants’ biographical careers, social experiences and economic practices cross and challenge a plurality of social and moral spaces, on
a physical but also virtual level (Castells, 2006;
Berry and Hamilton, 2010). They are engaged
into trans-border and trans-local interactions
and activities, during which they produce formal (Carling and Vatne Pettersen, 2014) and
informal (Hidalgo and Hernandez, 2001) place
attachment. A sociological approach to emotions might be helpful in this analysis. Feelings
and sentiments are socially (Illouz, 2006;
Svašek, 2014) constructed in this situation. They
are generated from, and in turn support, experiences and practices. Thereby, they are liable,
temporary and mutable. Emotions vary
according to the social, economic and moral
circumstances of their production. They emerge
in inter-action (Lutz and Abu-Lughod, 1990)
and can generate intersubjective experiences
and socialisation processes. They are vectors of
attachments, anchorages, senses of belonging,
but also of distance and separation. When
summed to social resources and affectional
bonds, emotions can become resources for
practice. In this sense, the spaces, the temporalities and the identities (Tarrius, 2000) of mobilities are sustained by and, concurrently,
produce heterogeneous repertories of positive
and negative emotions (Svašek, 2014). Being
resources and competences, emotions can be
learnt and mobilised together with social capital
represented by networks (Portes, 2003), which,
in the frame of a gendered marriage-migratory
regime, are composed of women. Therefore,
migrants’ translocal activities might be inscribed
in the frame of ‘multiple embedness’ (Glick
Schiller and Ça
glar, 2013), that is the processes
through which individual migrants in their
everyday entrepreneurial practices form translocal networks of social relations and plural
social fields within the ‘emplacements’ of their
mobilities. This leads to the emergence of a
multiplicity of heterogeneous forms of attachments to places, spaces, people and practices.
Carling and Erdal (2014) defined formal attachment in terms of citizenship, social rights, and
kinship ties. Informal attachment is the ensemble
of emotions associated with places and people.
Oscillating between several social worlds, mobility regimes, affective bonds, attachments and
identities, and developing a plurality of different
trans-local activities ‘here and there at the same
time’ (Tarrius, 2000), the variety of mobility patterns encountered among trans-migrants often
makes it difficult to establish where they predominantly live (King, 2012; Triandafyllidou, 2013).
Furthermore, engaging with the debate about
the new mobility paradigms, scholars have shown
the central role played by ‘imaginative mobility’
(Bauman, 2000; Urry, 2007): a new dimension of
travelling, which derives from the use of new
communication technologies and which gives rise
to instantaneity and hypermobility (Castells,
2006). Within migratory processes, the use of the
internet and of online applications fabricates virtual and imaginative journeys, tracks and transits.
Virtuality induces a dense, sui generis and innovative set of dematerialising connections which cannot be ignored in the analysis of migrations: it is a
matter of original time and space frames transcending human consciousness (McHugh, 2000).
Women are certainly on the move, but communication is on the move as well: instantaneous conversations and simultaneous correspondences
also drive contemporary migrations’ dynamics,
producing multiple and intersecting mobilities
(Sheller and Urry, 2006).
Based on these considerations, analysing remigration seems to be even more challenging.
Given the increasing fluidity of migrants’ movements, how are we to understand women’s remigration from Taiwan to China? When focusing
on returnees’ experiences, instead of merely
questioning the multiple and possible motives
which influence re-migration, would it not be
more pertinent to concentrate on the individual
biographies and creative mobility paths developed by women when leaving the country of settlement, and thereby gain insight into the social,
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
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B. Zani
economic and emotional resources migrants
need to mobilise to forge re-migration and circulation patterns. Thus, in a globalised context of
transnational migrations and perpetual, expanding mobilities between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, pluri-mobilities and circulations are
revealed as an essential component of women’s
trans-border movements that deserves further
investigation. Along these lines, I explore the following research questions: 1. How are Chinese
women’s re-migration careers constructed back
to their country of origin, and how are their biographical and professional patterns reshaped?
2. What are the opportunities, the strategies and
the affectional ties for maintaining and improving
connections to the destination after return?
3. Given the formal and emotional attachments
to the plurality of places, spaces, and temporalities crossed during migrations and the amplification of physical and virtual connections across
the Strait, how should women’s mobility patterns
be defined?
To address these issues, I trace a space–time
cartography of Chinese migrant women’s postreturn transnational everyday life practices. The
concept of career (Becker, 1963; Roulleau-Berger, 2010) helps to apprehend migration as a
process which is constructed across space and
time (McHugh, 2000). Thus, it is imperative to
include the simultaneous and transnational
dimensions of displacement in the study of individual biographical experiences. Adopting an
approach in terms of translocal opportunity
structure and constraints (Aldrich and
Waldinger, 1990) to examine the construction
of migratory careers facilitates the synthesis
among three different levels in the analysis: the
structures (the economic and spatial regimes,
the disqualifications and hierarchies), the networks (social, economic and emotional capital,
resources and support) and individual resources
and competences (skills and knowledge capacity of action, imaginaries and affections).
By considering the increasing convergence
between changes in physical movement and
electronic communications (Baumann, 2000;
Sheller and Urry, 2006) as well as the accelerating polymorphism of spatial and mobility patterns, I propose the following research
hypothesis: after divorce, some Chinese migrant
women engage in re-migration to China, to the
city where they had previously been working. By
4
re-mobilising skills and competences acquired
during their migratory paths and by exploiting
their gendered social networks in China and in
Taiwan on physical and virtual levels, they generate physical and virtual orbital mobilities
between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. Thus,
re-migration does not correspond to the closing
of the migratory cycle. On the contrary, postreturn experiences, economic activities, new
physical travels and imaginative mobilities lead
to the emergence of in-between cosmopolitan
biographies, which challenge, transcend and
transgress national borders, on physical and virtual, material and emotional levels.
By concretely following Xiao Mei’s material
and digital displacements, this paper is
organised into three sections. First, I show the
construction of re-migration patterns after
divorce, which corresponds to a strategy of
resistance against sub-alternity in Taiwan, generated from and sustaining emotions of ambition, of fulfilment and of aspiration. Second, I
analyse the creative initiatives women individually and collectively develop to re-integrate
within Chinese society, where they remobilise
and rekindle economic, social and emotional
resources acquired during their pluri-migrations.
Finally, I demonstrate the link between remigration, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, by investigating the new physical and virtual movements generated by women’s
circulations between the two sides of the strait. I
advance a conceptualisation in terms of orbital
mobilities to simultaneously apprehend the
physical and virtual, material and emotional
interconnections of biographical patterns constructed across the times, spaces, the identities
and the emotions of migration.
Field sites and methodology
Materials are based on multi-sited ethnographic
evidence (Marcus, 1995) in Taiwan (2016/2017)
and in China (2018). Tracing a cartography of the
circular migratory experiences of women requires
apprehending the existing interconnection among
the geographical, social and emotional spaces
they have gone through during their pluri-mobility
patterns. Fieldwork was thus conducted in multiple sites (the Chinese countryside, Chinese cities
and Taiwanese cities), following women’s paths
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
through the conjunction and the juxtaposition of
locations and individual biographies (Marcus,
1995; Burawoy, 2001). Multi-sited technography
was thus revealed to be a helpful methodological
tool to apprehend the complexity of physical and
virtual, material and emotional mobilities, migration and re-migration processes within diverse
spaces and places, where heterogeneous sets of
connections, social ties, emotional attachments,
virtual communication and digital exchanges are
produced and performed all at once. As recommended by Marcus (1995), when investigating
movement, migration and re-migration in a
globalised, hypermobile and instantaneous frame,
I decided to examine ‘the connections of sites by
following people’. Therefore, this article is constructed on a specific case study, tracking one
individual life and pluri-migration pattern (Xiao
Mei’s), from Taiwan to China, and then from
China back to Taiwan. I wanted to observe in situ
the sequences of a circulations and mobilities,
through its bifurcations, ordeals, ruptures and
reorientations in terms of biographical, migratory,
and professional paths. Conscious of both the
‘instability of the epistemological frontiers of the
research object’ (Schwartz, 2011: 368), and of the
‘situational dimension’ (Glaser and Strauss, 1967)
of the ethnographic material assembled, I take the
example of Xiao Mei’s career as I consider it to
be a significant monography for a heuristic2 of
Chinese women’s mobilities. In this respect,
multi-sited and multi-temporal ethnography is
suitable for a grounded understanding of ‘the multiple scales of social action and the reconfiguring
of relationships among the multiple scales within
which places are embedded with’ (Burawoy,
2001: 19). Meanwhile, concurrent to Xiao Mei’s
migratory career study, in 2018, data were collected in China through qualitative techniques,
associating in situ observation of everyday life
and professional activities to biographical interviews with 30 low-skilled divorced Chinese
migrant women. Aged 28–37 years, all the informants underwent internal migration from Chinese
countryside to Chinese city; they all experienced
temporary work (dagong 打工) in the city,
migrated to Taiwan through marriage and then
returned to China after divorcing. Twenty-seven
of 30 informants did obtain Taiwanese citizenship. As with Xiao Mei, I could carry on multisited and multi-temporal interviews with 12
of 30 informants: I met and interviewed them in
Taiwan in 2016–17, before they re-migrated to
China, where reached them a second time in
2018. Through snowball sampling, the other
18 informants were identified in China’s Guangdong province, in the cities of Shenzhen (districts
of Baoan 寶安 and Longan 隆安, where migrant
workers live), Dongguan (districts of Liaobu 寮步,
Changan 長安, Humen 虎門) and Zhongshan 中
山 in 2018. Returnees were currently living and
working in these cities as well as in the rural
hakka village of Xingning 興寧 (Meizhou 梅州
city), following Xiao Mei and two of her covillagers, who were also engaged in post-divorce
return migration, during the celebration of the
Chinese New Year 2018.
Going back, looking ahead
Within the frame of complexity, instantaneity and
hypermobility, when conceiving return migration
as a sequence of a biographical career (Becker,
1963), it is necessary to apprehend the return
experience as one stage in the migration process
(Al-Ali and Koser, 2002; King, 2012). The fact of
leaving the country of settlement, Taiwan, and
re-moving to the country of origin, China, represents for women a turning point, thus a transition,
a bifurcation in their life trajectory. It interrupts
the regular configuration of a woman’s life pattern and reorients a process by establishing a
new reality (Roulleau-Berger, 2017). If Xiao Mei’s
decision to go back can at first sight appear
abrupt and chaotic, her return aspirations were
constructed over time. I first met her in
November 2016, when she invited me for lunch
at her lodgings in Hukou, where she lived with
her husband’s family and her son. While cutting
onions in the kitchen for lunch, she explained:
This is not the life I dreamt of before arriving in
Taiwan. When I decided to marry my husband
and move here, I was happy, I had high expectations towards Taiwan. I was tired of factory
life in Guangzhou and I wanted a better life. I
thought that here in Taiwan I could have found
a good job and improved myself, but what
happened is exactly the contrary […] I have
been looking for a job for months and months
without succeeding. Every time the same problem: where do you come from? they ask. We
do not want people from the Mainland to work
here. It’s exhausting, and this makes me feel
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
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B. Zani
very sad […] Then, I come back home and
cook dinner for my mother in law and my husband. They criticize me; they say the food I
cook is bad, that I cannot clean and that I am
not a good wife. I am 28 years old and I am so
tired of being treated like a slave.
Since 2011, when she first arrived in Taiwan, she
had been experiencing a condition of sub-alternity:
gender domination within her husband’s family,
social contempt and misrecognition within Taiwanese society because of her Chinese origin, and
economic marginalisation in the labour market.
Before marriage-migration to Taiwan, as a young
female migrant worker (dagong mei 打工妹) she
nourished high expectations for her new life in Taiwan; however, she became progressively disillusioned during her stay. The circumstances of
everyday vulnerability that Xiao Mei mentioned,
which vary from conflictual relations with her
mother-in-law to precarious and unstable jobs in
Taiwan have certainly strengthened her decision
to re-migrate to her country of origin. Engaging in
further mobility, Xiao Mei proves reflexivity and a
capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 1999): the ability to
project her existence towards a future of possibilities, fighting again a condition of present subalternity. Xiao Mei’s resolution to divorce and to
re-migrate back to the country of origin cannot be
reduced to a ‘return of failure’ (Constant and Massey, 2002; Cassarino, 2004). Despite the subaltern
position she faced during her seven-year stay in
Taiwan, Xiao Mei collected a strong repertoire of
social, economic (Roulleau-Berger, 2010) and
emotional (Illouz, 2006) resources, which somehow supported her choice to engage in further
mobility and unknown, uncertain future life
patterns:
Indeed, I am heartbroken to leave, I have my
child here. But it is not a failure, but an opportunity for my future development. I am too
young to remain segregated (geli 隔離) here,
my sisters (jiemei 姐妹) keep on repeating to
me that I must go where I feel free and liberated (jiefang 解放), where I can fulfil myself. I
do have contacts (guanxi 關係), kinship ties
(xiongdijiemei 兄弟姐妹) and friends, who will
help me. I have two hands, I can work, and I
can earn my living.
The complexification of migratory paths,
through bifurcations and ordeals, indirectly
6
provide women with a new repertoire of
resources, capacities and emotional resources
(Illouz, 2006). Xiao Mei – like 25 of the other
30 informants – associated divorce and return
migration with opportunity rather than defeat. In
this respect, I exploit the interpretative model
proposed by Carling and Erdal (2014), who
explain return migration according to two
parameters: (i) the level of integration within
the society of arrival; and (ii) the strength of
(transnational) social relations, which represent
important social capital (Portes, 2003). What
Xiao Mei calls her ‘sisters’ (jiemei) refers to a
dense network of social connections ( guanxi
關係) and emotional ties that she could potentially build during her different migratory experiences, in China before and in Taiwan later. At
the same time, divorce is the pivot around
which the idea of return is constructed. As a
life-course transition and relocation, this event
is embedded with sentiments which need to be
integrated in the analysis of migratory paths.
When Chinese women depart from their country of settlement, Taiwan, they leave their children3 and social networks of ‘sisters’ there.
Social and emotional relations, in terms of
familiar bonds and friendship, represent a vector of attachment to the place (Hidalgo and
Hernandez, 2001) and influence their future
and their movements. So, what are the implications of such affectional ties built and left in Taiwan in shaping women’s future life patterns and
movements? Undoubtedly, the trans-mobility
patterns of the 30 women I interviewed, like
Xiao Mei, show that the gradual broadening of
the return migration spectrum has entailed not
only the diversity of return motivations, which
vary from familiar or marital conflicts, social
exclusion, and/or economic marginalisation,
but also the plurality of the resource
mobilisation patterns and capacity of action.
The interpretative difficulty lies in the fact that
re-migration biographical patterns are unique,
reflective of individual biographical patterns,
subjectivities, interactions, and situations. At the
same time, they are all responsive to specific
institutional, social, economic and moral conditions both in the country of origin and of arrival
(King, 2012) and prove women’s competences
for survival, adaptation and resistance. Therefore, in the analytical frame of the opportunity
structure and constraints, it is crucial to question
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
not only the reasons, but especially the individual and collective strategies of action through
which return is imagined, organised and
articulated.
In February 2017, Xiao Mei was back on the
move. She initially (physically) left Taiwan and remigrated to China, but the future steps of her career,
developed both on physical and digital levels,
show that movement and attachment are not linear
sequences: quite the contrary. Migrant women are
capable of roaming, going back and forth, and
changing direction over time (McHugh, 2000).
Translocal, transversal, transgressive
No place back home: imaginative modernity
and new ambitions
In January 2018, I met Xiao Mei again in China,
in Shenzhen, the city in which she is currently
living and working. Shenzhen is not an unfamiliar, unknown city for her: it is the place in
which she had been working before migrating
to Taiwan. Xiao Mei’s migratory career began
when she, young and inexperienced, left her
home village in Xingning for Shenzhen. She
went on to work in both local factories and in
the sector of small urban production, especially
as a waitress in her uncle’s restaurant. After
divorcing in Taiwan, Xiao Mei went back to
China in February 2017 and returned to her
rural village hometown of Xingning, as she had
initially wanted to start her new life from there.
She wished to generate her own economic
activity: a little street restaurant to sell Taiwanese style biandang 便當 (boxed-meal), which
are ‘quick to eat at noon when people do not
have much time for lunch as they have to go
back to work’, as she contended. In Taiwan,
Xiao Mei’s changes of employers often led her
to work as a waitress in small restaurants or in
the night markets where she sold food. Despite
economic marginalisation, Xiao Mei admitted
having capitalised savoir-faire in the field of catering and having attained certain entrepreneurial skills. In this respect, such valuable
knowledge and new approaches to work
(Portes, 2003) facilitate the creation of business
upon return home (Potter and Phillips, 2006).
That is why, startlingly, once back to the village,
she opened a restaurant, but after few months,
she had to give it up as she had no clients:
My business did not work well. In the countryside, there is nothing. No opportunities of personal and entrepreneurial development; people
do not have the same mentality of us, people
from the city. They are very different, they are
lazy, and they do not understand what making
money means […] after few months, I could
not stand the life in the village anymore. I spent
too much time in Shenzhen and in Taiwan and
I could not live longer in the countryside. I
do not know what to talk about with rural people. That kind of lifestyle does not suit me
anymore.
Xiao Mei’s narrative and considerations embody
the complexity and the paradoxes of the shape
that women’s life-courses take after return, and
the process of re-subjectivation they undergo
during pluri-mobilities. Mobility and marital
experiences both in China and in Taiwan provide women with a new awareness of their subjectivity, and with a renewed self-esteem, which
sustain novel imaginaries and bring about fresh
entrepreneurial practices (Potter and Phillips,
2006; King, 2012). Xiao Mei’s desire for social
ascension, economic mobility and business formation is emblematic of the ways women’s life
perspectives, ambitions and aspirations can be
constructed through migratory bifurcations and
biographical ordeals. However, the failure of
Xiao Mei’s business in the countryside demonstrates the tenor of reintegration difficulties and
risks for returnees within their community of origin, metaphorically designated by Davison
(1968) as ‘no place back home’. Return and reintegration may be rife with obstacles. Hence,
each individual biography is constructed oscillating between adaptation and readjustment.
Social hierarchies, economic inequalities and
moral constraints frame returnees’ careers. Xiao
Mei’s case vividly illustrates how both the rural
labour market structure and local social practices
can constitute barriers to upward occupational
trajectories. At the same time, it elucidates the
new ‘imaginative modernity’ (Baumann, 2000)
women produce, which entail new reflexivity
towards individual status relocation and social
re-positioning (Roulleau-Berger, 2017). In this
respect, returnees cross, challenge and transgress
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
7
B. Zani
social
and
moral
(Cresswell, 2010).
boundaries
too
‘I am a boss!’: Gendered social networks and
entrepreneurship
After few months in the village, Xiao Mei
desisted from her economic activity. She understood the limits, risks and lack of opportunities
in the rural environment. She decided to remigrate to Shenzhen, the city in which she had
been living and working before her marriagemigration to Taiwan. Disillusionment supports
re-migration (Cerase, 1974) and shows how
return can be the prelude to further episodes of
spatial mobility (Ley and Kobayashi, 2005).
Therefore, Xiao Mei is currently living and
working in Baoan, a migrant workers’ district of
Shenzhen. She shares a little apartment with Jia
Lin, a 28-year-old Hainan native woman, who,
after labour migration from Hainan to
Shenzhen, has also experienced marriagemigration to Taiwan and post-divorce remigration to China. Xiao Mei and Jia Lin collectively constructed their re-migration careers.
After spending seven years in Taipei and being
subjected to strong economic marginalisation
and social exclusion, Jia Lin divorced first, and
re-migrated to Shenzhen in 2016. Similarly to
Xiao Mei and to 25 of 30 interviewees, she had
also waited for the obtention of Taiwanese citizenship before re-moving. Initially deprived of
economic resources and facing strong pressure
to pay the rent and to survive, Jia Lin went back
to her previous dagong work in an electronic
factory. After few months, however, she realised
that this was no longer sustainable
I grew up, and I am not a dagong mei anymore, I cannot stand factory life anymore. I am
not as young as before. I left China to escape
the factory and honestly coming back to the
assembly line makes me feel frustrated. I came
back to Shenzhen with no money. China has
changed a lot during the last years, everything
got so incredibly expensive, and finding a
decent job seems even harder than before!
Luckily, now I share daily fees with Xiao Mei,
and I found a way to start a new business here,
let’s hope it is going to be fruitful in the future
and that I can earn more money. I am not a
young girl anymore; I do have new life
8
standards and cannot content myself as easily
as I did in the past.
Xiao Mei and Jia Lin consider themselves ‘sisters’ (jiemei 姐妹), as part of a ‘collective destiny’ (Tarrius, 2000), characterised by similar
rural origin, gender, migratory experiences and
life ordeal, such as cross-border marriage,
divorce and re-migration. They met virtually in
a WeChat group of Chinese marriage-migrant
women living in Taiwan, called ‘the Group of
Mutual Help among the Chinese Sisters in
Xinzhu county’ (新竹姐妹互相群): at that time
Xiao Mei was still in Taiwan, while Jia Lin had
already returned to Shenzhen. Spatially distant,
but affectively close, the two women engaged
in a highly emotional cross-border, digital interaction about their ordeals of sufferings, the
pains and the difficulties they faced in Taiwan,
as well as their desire to re-migrate back to
China. Emotional practices and affectional ties
follow women’s mobilities. Hence, when
women re-migrate back to the other side of the
strait, emotions move with women. On
WeChat, the two women became emotionally
and affectionally very closed. Emotions as
resources and competences which had been
learned during previous migratory experiences in
Taiwan are re-kindled, and re-performed when
women re-migrate back to China. Hence, these
processes of territorialisation, de-territorialisation
and re-territorialisation (Urry, 2007) are not only
social and spatial, but also emotional and
affectional.
Women migrate and re-migrate. The repertories of emotions migrate and re-migrate with
them, following the tempo of their movements.
Together with the mobilisation of translocal
social resources, they contribute to define and
re-define spaces, places and temporalities; they
shape and frame the opportunities and the obstacles, the possibilities and the constraints migrants
encounter on the paths they walk. Women are
involved in multiple translocal social networks,
emotional experiences, and affections, as well as
local and global, physical and virtual practices,
all of which sustain entrepreneurship after return
(Glick Schiller and Çaglar, 2013).
At the very same time, Xiao Mei’s and Jia
Lin’s cases suggest that women’s re-migration
careers are not constructed in the countryside,
but within the city where they had formerly
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
been working. They both went back to China
to improve their status which, after migration
to Taiwan, became unfavourable. In Shenzhen,
Xiao Mei succeeded in opening a little stand
of biandang, following the same logic of
the one she antecedently developed in the
countryside:
Now, my business is running well in Shenzhen.
My way of thinking (sixiang 思想) is very different from rural people’s one: there everything
goes on slowly, and there are no perspectives
of development. But I want to improve myself!
When I told my mother that I wanted to go to
Shenzhen to develop my business, she strongly
opposed. She said it would be better to go
back to the factory or to work for someone else
(dagong). But I did not want. I wanted to be a
boss (laobanniang 老闆娘)! I spent so much
time selling my labor, in China first and in Taiwan later, that now, I want to be the boss of
myself. I want to be free. That’s why I went to
Taiwan, and that’s why I am living in
Shenzhen now. In the countryside people do
not want to be successful (chenggong 成功),
they are persuaded that the only way to survive
is dagong work.
Through her words, Xiao Mei presents herself as
a ‘carrier of change’ (Cerase, 1974): for her, remigration signifies the possibility of a greater
satisfaction of one’s needs and aspirations,
which could not be fulfilled within the previous
spatialities and temporalities of her social, economic and emotional positioning in Taiwan:
Another road is possible! You just need to find
it! In the village, I opened my biandang stand,
like the ones you have in Taiwan, but I had no
clients. It is very convenient to eat a biandang
at noon, but people do not have this mentality
of work and speed in the countryside. They do
not understand this culture […] Moreover, I do
not have social connections there anymore.
The fact is that I spent too long time far from
the village and I do not know the people anymore. To have your business running well you
need guanxi, friends who bring other people
and make advertisement. Here I still knew
some people, so I had potential clients. That’s
why it works.
Xiao Mei’s example is emblematic of what
Cerase called ‘return of innovation’ (1974):
back to China, in the countryside before and in
Shenzhen later, Xiao Mei was able to ‘make use
of all the means and new skills she has acquired
during her plural migratory experiences’
(Cerase, 1974: 251). On her side, despite some
initial difficulties of integration, Jia Lin also represents a ‘carrier of change’. Unable to enter the
local labour market in Taiwan, Jia Lin enrolled
in some professional make-up and aesthetics
classes organised by the Taiwanese government
for migrant women. Committed and determined, she obtained a Certificate of Professional
Make-Up Artist. Back in China, refusing to keep
on with dagong industrial work, she borrowed
money from two ‘sisters’ living in Shenzhen and
in Taipei and invested in a ‘Taiwanese style’
beauty salon in Baoan. The certificate obtained
in Taiwan, together with the obtention of Taiwanese citizenship, legitimise Both Xiao Mei’s
Taiwanese style biandang stand and Jia Lin’s
beauty salon and are emblematic of returnees
capacity to aspire (Appadurai, 1999) and their
creativity to reconstruct, rekindle and reimagine
their life course after return.
A certain degree of preparedness (Waldinger
and Fitzgerald, 2004) emerges both in Xiao
Mei’s and Jia Lin’s activities. Hence, two elements can be noticed. First, as pointed by Phillips and Potters (2006), returnees strongly desire
to distinguish themselves from local job seekers
in the labour market at home. Clearly, in the
development of their businesses, Xiao Mei and
Jia Lin emphasise both the symbolic and statutory attributes stemming from their stay in Taiwan and the citizenship they obtained. The
biandang stand and the beauty salon are both
Taiwanese style: ‘We became Taiwanese, so
now we can be bosses’ (我們變了台灣人，現在
可以當老闆娘), affirmed that the two women
had achieved this status. The products they sell
are imported from Taiwan, and they both introduce themselves as Taiwanese laobanniang
(bosses) to their clients, persuaded that this can
raise their individual status as well as prove the
quality of their business. Hence, strategically,
women have considered the market conditions
which might favour business development. The
city of Shenzhen is a familiar place. They are
aware of the structure, the opportunities and the
components of the segments of the labour market where they can integrate; they discern
where and how to set up their economic
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
9
B. Zani
activities, and they know how to easily seek old
and new clients. Indeed, the repertoire of social
relations with migrants they established before,
during and after migration is crucial for the
development of post-return professional careers
and entrepreneurial activities. Social networks
represent intangible resources (Waldinger and
Fitzgerald, 2004), which do not emerge spontaneously, but which are responsive to specific
pre- and post- return conditions. Networks of
‘sisters’ ( jiemei) generate an emotional continuum in migrants’ experiences, the temporalities
and the spaces crossed during their mobility:
the rural countryside of origin, the cities where
they have been living during internal migration
in China, Taiwan, and the new places of postreturn settlement. In this regard, Chinese
migrant women create, maintain and cultivate
plural social networks of ‘sisters’, which are
multi-situated inside different spaces. These
reflect women’s biographical, migratory and
professional sequences. Partially digitalized networks are therefore developed through WeChat,
they are a vector of interchange and interaction
among times and spaces and through a virtual
platform too. Indirectly, social networks and
emotional bonds that women mobilise build
new bridges and innovative points of junction
among societies. They determine the possibility
for social, economic and emotional resource
mobilisation. The first network is in China, in
the cities in which women had been working
before marriage-migration to Taiwan. It is composed of migrant workers (previous colleagues
and co-villagers installed in the city) with whom
they kept in contact while living in Taiwan. In
both Xiao Mei’s and Jia Lin’s cases, networks of
migrant workers and co-villagers are crucial in
the development of entrepreneurial activities:
not only do they provide economic resources
(Portes, 2003), for instance capital and potential
clients, but they are also central in terms of
emotional and affective support (Illouz, 2006)
during the reintegration process. The second
type consists of new networks of returnees who
‘share a common national background, familiar
and migratory experiences’ (Aldrich and
Waldinger, 1990: 33). It comprises divorced
migrant women, affiliated both by similar marriage and migratory ordeals, but also by common ambitions and aspirations. The third
network is represented by Chinese migrant
10
women still living and working in Taiwan, with
whom returnees can constantly and easily communicate and cooperate through the application
WeChat.
Orbital mobilities, cosmopolitan biographies,
pendular connections
Back on the move
In March 2018, Xiao Mei was back on the move:
she travelled to Taiwan for a few weeks and I
joined her. At the airport, she skipped the long
queue at customs, which Chinese people are subjected to, proudly holding her Taiwanese
ID. Citizenship as a performance (Ong, 1999)
enables women to reverse a mobility regime
which, during their first experience of marriagemigration to Taiwan, was inegalitarian and hierarchical. Xiao Mei can now freely navigate across
borders, without social or administrative restrictions. Back in Hukou – the village where she had
been living during her marriage-migration experience – she was hosted by a ‘sister’, another Chinese marriage-migrant. The objectives of her trip
were clear from the beginning: seeing her child
and checking the quality and prices of some Taiwanese products (milk powder, pineapple cakes,
chicken feet, meat and spices) she needed for her
biandang business in Shenzhen, which are sold
by Chinese women in Hukou and in Taipei. Likewise, according to similar arrangements, Jia Lin
and the other informants make frequent but short
visits to Taiwan. Drawing on the empirical evidence collected, the average of Chinese women’s
back-and-forth movements between China and
Taiwan is five times per year, as illustrated in
Figure 1.
These temporary displacements to Taiwan are
strategic regarding the opportunity structure:
they help women to improve their post-return
economic activities in China and, indirectly,
contribute to their social re-integration within
the society of departure. Transnational networks
can thus become a tool of professional
reinsertion (Glick Schiller and Çaglar, 2013). In
this respect, Black and King (2004: 80) observed
that ‘emigrants who have integrated abroad
may find that their reintegration at home is best
facilitated through a transnational lifestyle that
allows them to maintain their international and
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
professional social networks’. As a result, for
two weeks, Xiao Mei and I met daily with a
dense network of Chinese migrant women living in Taiwan, who provided her with the supplies she needed. Xiao Mei alternated time
spent with her child and with her ‘sisters’. Moreover, as far as some of them have developed
small businesses of cosmetics on site, she took
advantage of the situation to buy and set the
import price of some beauty products (facial
masks and make-up) for Jia Lin in Shenzhen,
who asked for assistance. Thus, Xiao Mei
explained:
My business in Shenzhen is working well
because it is a Taiwanese style biandang stand,
and I do use Taiwanese products, which are of
better quality than the Chinese ones. I introduce myself as Taiwanese because Chinese
people trust the Taiwanese more than the Chinese […] I try to come back to Taiwan for short
periods as often as I can, to see my son, and to
develop my business with my jiemei here. They
helped me a lot when I was living in Taiwan,
and I cannot forget them. We always keep in
touch. I daily send some messages on our
WeChat groups. Sometimes, Jia Lin comes
back with me, as she needs to see her daughter
who is living in Taipei with her father.
Clearly, like Xiao Mei and Jia Lin, returnees are
involved in a set of relational ramifications
which transcend national borders. They capitalise and expand social and emotional resources,
conserving and cultivating their transborder networks. As already indicated, this is valid both for
social relations in the country of origin during
translocal migration to Taiwan, and in the
country of destination after re-migration.
Returnees reveal to be transmigrants (Al-Ali and
Koser, 2002): thanks to their social connections,
they succeed being ‘here and there’ (Tarrius,
2000), in China, in Taiwan and in between the
two societies.
As defended by Giddens (1999), under the
conditions of globalisation, social relations are
disembodied from the local and can operate in
contexts where space and time no longer matter. Xiao Mei brilliantly explains her strategy to
daily keep in touch with her ‘sisters’ in Taiwan:
thanks to new technologies and online applications, such as WeChat, she gives life to everyday social and emotional interactions on the
virtual scale represented by the WeChat groups
of migrant women. Physical and virtual networks of ‘sisters’ are based on a principle of
complementarity and mutuality. Hence, such
social, economic and emotional exchanges are
produced daily and reproduced across the Taiwan Strait by women belonging to the same
‘collective destiny’ (Tarrius, 2000), based on a
common background and rural Chinese origin,
analogous migratory and marital experiences,
biographical ordeals and gender.
Round and around, here and there
Migrant women’s cross-strait physical displacements, virtual movements, social connections
and emotional practices are a vector of transnationalism, which must be understood on a double register. On the one hand, it derives from
the multivarious ways in which migrants feel
linked to one another by their common ethnic
origin, gender and group solidarity (Portes,
Figure 1. The frequency of women’s trips to Taiwan after re-migration experiences to China [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
11
B. Zani
2003). On the other hand, it is generated by the
cross-border and time-compressed everyday
activities of migrants. These two levels are
strictly interrelated thanks to a specific ‘imaginative mobility’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006) developed
by migrants: social networks are underpinned by
new technologies, which give life to hypermobility and simultaneity. The WeChat groups of
migrant women convey instantaneous information, services and contacts as well as time-andspace compressed emotional exchanges.
Drawing on Tarrius’ conceptualisation of ‘circulatory territory’ (2000) and on Triandafyllidou’s
theorisation of ‘circular migration’ (2013), I qualify Chinese migrants translocal, physical and virtual, existences between China and Taiwan in
terms of orbital mobility careers.
To describe the shape of motion, I borrow from
physics the notion of orbit to visualise the innovative, plural and pluralising forms that movement
can potentially take. Metaphorically, the image of
the orbit seems helpful to identify the complexity
of the career-marking as a growing process of
accelerated interconnection between times and
spaces, showing how the diverse social, economic and emotional practices are rooted into
local daily experiences and practices, as well as
projected towards a translocal horizon. The orbit,
which is a gravitationally curved trajectory of an
object around a planet, suggests the repetition of
a course, but also its innovation, transformation
and change.
When movement becomes endless, the
mobility careers take an orbital shape, connecting, materially and emotionally, physically
and virtually, digitally and affectionally, the different spaces, places, temporalities and emotions of women’s migrations. Figuratively
speaking, the perimeter of the orbit touches several points, which correspond to the differently
located places invested by mobilities: the rural
villages of origin, the Chinese cities where
women have been working, Taiwan and the
locations of post-return temporary settlement.
These places can continuously multiply or
decrease according to the social affiliations and
disaffiliations, reflexive competences, emotional
anchorages, and economic practices of women.
The virtual and emotional dimensions of movement, of connections and interconnections,
closing to de-territorialised places and intertwined social worlds, produce complexity,
12
malleability, but also unpredictability. Movements can be planned online. They are projected into the immanence of present action whose
acceleration and instantaneity are very strong.
Drawing on Xiao Mei’s experiences of hypermobility and interconnection, I have graphically
drawn an example of orbital mobility career,
where the diverse spaces and locations of plurimigrations, in China and in Taiwan, are all at
once interconnected physically or virtually,
materially or emotionally (Figure 2).
Hyper-mobility is part of the ‘new flows and
new forms of movement unique to overconnected world’ (Cresswell, 2010). Being ‘here
and there at the same time’, women’s biographies show the emergence of new forms of
mobility, where bodies combine with information and produce diversified trails and innovative patterns of movement, of roaming, and of
wandering. Physical and virtual displacements
design women’s life cycles and influence their
future choices and patterns, which appear to be
uncertain. As Xiao Mei boasts: ‘I can remain in
Shenzhen, move back to Taiwan or keep on moving between the two sides (兩邊跑)’. New mobile
itineraries emerge: from China to Taiwan, from
Taiwan to China, then back to Taiwan or to
China. Such physical geographies are generated
from and, at their turn, support, virtual, emotional
and affectional patterns. Women’s physical and
virtual movements, biographical oscillations, pendular life patterns, and transnational existences
show the emergence of in between biographies:
mobilities must be apprehended under the ‘cosmopolitan condition’ (Beck, 2006; RoulleauBerger, 2017) of borders’ contestation, digital
communications and permanent movement.
Hypermobility is the characterising feature of
women’s life sequences and migratory paths. It
is also a perennial openness to further movement at distinctive passages in the life cycle. At
every stage of movement, each individual
career seems to be part of a web of interconnected experiences in travel, relocation,
migration, work and social relations (McHugh,
2000; Glick Schiller and Çaglar, 2013). Moreover, Xiao Mei and Jia Lin’s transnational existences and cosmopolitan biographies, which
situate women in between the plural spaces
crossed during migration, are imbued with emotions. Transnationalism and cosmopolitanism
must be conceived on an affectional level too:
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
Local, global, physical and virtual mobilities
Figure 2. Xiao Mei’s orbital mobility career, where the diverse locations and spatialities of her pluri-migrations are all at
once interconnected, physically and virtually, materially and emotionally [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
feelings of attachment to places and people
actively forge relocation and movements.
Concluding remarks: Rethinking cross-strait
movement(s)
Grounded on Chinese migrant women’s experiences of mobility from China to Taiwan and
from Taiwan to China, this paper elucidates the
transnational, circulatory and orbital dimension
of women’s return careers. The reflection on the
link between life cycles, physical and virtual
movements together with emotional attachment
to places and affectional ties shows the complex, instantaneous and cosmopolitan dimension of individual biographies, which are
articulated across temporalities and spaces and
designed through a plurality of trans-local
and trans-border activities. The analysis of
everyday cross-border life practices, transnational economic activities and emotional bonds
supports the hypothesis of a cosmopolitisation
(Beck, 2006; Roulleau-Berger, 2017) of
women’s biographies: it is a matter of lives
lived simultaneously in multiple locations. Formal and informal attachments to the places
require women to continually re-negotiate their
location, role, and status, metaphorically positioning themselves in between the two sides of
the Taiwan Strait. In this respect, the polyphormic, instantaneous and multipolar dimension of their biographies helps to redefine the
meaning of return migration: a movement
which is continuous rather than completed.
Being constantly on the move, on the physical
level of displacements and travels, but also on
the virtual level of WeChat communications,
tracks and connections, migrant women contest
boundaries and produce alternative, invisible
geographies which span boundaries and societies. These considerations must be inscribed
within a globalised context of hypermobility
and space–time interconnections (Cresswell,
2010), where migrants’ practices, physical and
imaginative (Baumann, 2000; Urry, 2007)
mobility call into question the definition of
national
borders
and
the
separation
among spaces (Beck, 2006). Thus, empirical
evidence from women’s physical and virtual circulations proves that, at each step of their
migratory and professional career, they can
arbitrate geographical and temporal scales
(Burawoy, 2001) and challenge, transcend and
transgress the boundaries of two countries,
China and Taiwan.
© 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd
13
B. Zani
Notes
1 All the names are pseudonyms.
2 See Schwartz (2011) concerning the debate about ‘irreducible empiricism’ and qualitative methods for
grounded research.
3 Customarily, because of both the patriarchal structure of
the family, and ethnic discrimination towards foreign
brides, children’s custody is given to the father (see
Hwang, 2014: 279).
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