Date : 2024-02-18

Time : 2024-02-29

Venue : Room 422, Sino Building, CUHK

Abstract: 

While the second-generation literature has largely focused on North America and Western Europe, this talk examines the emerging formation of second-generation identity in East Asia. Although the region is known for its self-perceived racial and ethnic homogeneity, an influx of marital immigrants and their children has transformed the demographic landscape and softened ethnic boundaries. Through in-depth interviews with fifty-seven adult children from cross-border marriages in Taiwan, I demonstrate their strategies for identity management under the typologies of majority identity, biculturalism, rescaling, and differentiation. In the current context of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy, a bicultural identity has increasingly become a likely option for children of Southeast Asian mothers. Children of mainland Chinese immigrants, however, do not have similar access to ethnic dividends and encounter geopolitical stigmas. I highlight the key factors that enable and constrain the second generation’s identity work, including family socioeconomic status, children’s educational capital, mothers’ national and ethnic origins, and children’s transnational connections.

Speaker:

Prof. Lan Pei-Chia, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, National Taiwan University

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly
Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).