Multiple mobilities and entrepreneurial modalities among Chinese marriage migrants in Malaysia

Introduction

Efforts in theorizing migration pathways of feminized migration and marriage migration in particular have so far focused on the commodification of intimate labour, and the regulation, meanings and practices of commercial brokerages (Constable, 2009; Yeoh et al., 2014). Existing studies pay attention to marriage migrants’ strategies and claims of citizenship rights in the process of ‘integration’ into racialized and gendered national membership regimes (Chee et al., 2014; De Hart, 2006; Friedman, 2010; Turner, 2008). Recent scholarship has, however, begun to critique and deconstruct the categorization of migrants based on legality, ethnicity, migrants’ origins and perceived productive and reproductive functions (Schrover and Moloney, 2013). They document the ways female migrants manoeuvre between the categories and roles of ‘dependent wife’ and ‘worker’ (Chee et al., 2012; Piper and Roces, 2003).

Our study on mainland Chinese women’s migratory motivations and pathways reveal a new, or formerly overlooked, mobility pattern. They are able to bypass brokers and do not rely heavily on mediation by kinship-based networks. They demonstrate a strong entrepreneurial sensibility as they navigate through various visa, pass, migrant and citizenship categories despite an increasingly bureaucratized migration regime in Malaysia which is restrictive for marriage migration yet permissive for various other migratory channels. They take advantage of various working and trading opportunities in the informal economy while contending with ‘protection’ mechanisms particularly for female migrants, such as anti-trafficking endeavours and intensified raids on sex workers. We argue that the state’s attempts to grow its regulatory capacity, the increasing cost of legality and the multiplying of illegal-but-licit spaces through which migrants can navigate produce particular forms of mobile subjectivities which we broadly term ‘entrepreneurial’.

Existing literature on entrepreneurship deals with highly skilled migrants and petty traders. In both cases, they largely deal with male entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship as a masculine endeavour, which places female migrants in a secondary position (Kothari, 2008; Nonini, 1997; Ong, 1999). Few studies have investigated entrepreneurial modalities in which migrants with few resources exercise agency and develop multiple migration pathways. Lyttleton et al. (2011), for example, have written about ethnic Dai women’s cross-border mobility, and showed how the productive is merged with the reproductive as Dai women blend intimate relations with monetary gain. Through Dai women’s risk-taking and self-enterprising pursuits, their mobility enables new trajectories of voluntary entrepreneurialism. Our aim in this article is to expand on this nascent scholarship on entrepreneurialism and feminized migration through an ethnographic study of the entrepreneurial strategies and sensibilities of mainland Chinese marriage migrants in Malaysia. Our study centres on female entrepreneurialism as a particular mode of neoliberal ‘self-authoring’ (Ong, 2006) that entails a gendered practice of risk-taking and strategizing. It thus departs from current studies on female entrepreneurship, where women seek to conceal femininity and conform to masculine norms of practice (Essers and Benschop, 2007; Lewis, 2006), and turns to examine how women capitalize on their femininity, and even sexuality, as bankable assets in their migration. We call these women migrants’ practices ‘entrepreneurial’ to suggest that their risk-taking is central to their sense of being as it characterizes their mode of conduct. Being entrepreneurial gives meaning and significance to these women’s mobile practices and productive self-making. We use ‘modalities’ to refer to forms of mobilities and strategies which reflect particular kinds of migrant subjectivity and motivations.

We propose two interlinked terms in Chinese used by our interviewees – ‘out’ (chu出) and ‘through’ (zuan钻) – as a pair of lenses to examine the marriage migrants’ variable motivations, their non-linear paths to upward and outward mobility and their careful negotiations and manoeuvring across and within state boundaries and in the gender politics of intimate relations. By using these terms, we present a more nuanced way of framing migrants’ mobile subjectivities as produced by a contextualized understanding of human agency operating within the particular conditions of migration regimes in Asia.

Multiple mobilities, transnational regimes of permissiveness and entrepreneurial modalities

In their discussion of ‘mobile practices and regimes of permissiveness’, Kalir et al. (2012: 12) argue that there are limits to ‘the regulatory capacity of states that seek to control the mobility of people and goods within and across their national borders’. These limits arise in part as a result of the creative tensions between ‘realms of state authority (legal vs. illegal behaviour) and social regulation (licit vs. illicit behaviour)’ (drawing on Van Schendel and Abraham, 2005). ¹ In the toss-up between state authority and social regulation, states have often moved to enhance their power via an increased elaboration of bureaucratic measures and a rolling forward of the formalization and commercialization of migration management, as observed in the increasing use of advanced technologies for border control, the expanded need for brokerage and the creation of finely calibrated categories of control often directed at stopping ‘illegal’ migration (Lindquist et al., 2012: 11–12). In the context of Asia where the prevailing migration regimes accord few rights and minimal protection to low-skilled migrants – even those who opt for legal pathways – the increasing bureaucratization of migration has the ironic effect of rendering legality a ‘liability’ (Kalir et al., 2012: 15), hence setting up unintended incentives for these migrants to take a gamble on other pathways outside the ‘confine of legality’ (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2010: 86).

These practices and ventures in extra-legal spaces are entrepreneurial because they entail a particular logic of seizing opportunities, strategizing and capitalizing on whatever asset that becomes available (be it sexuality or feminine appeal). It entails risk-taking and motivated pursuits of personal gains (both financial and psychological). In the literature on high-skilled migration, transnational entrepreneurialism is often associated with men, who in their gendered roles as exemplary fighters, breadwinners and adventurers, exhibit a risk-taking spirit in taking up the challenge of pioneering and building transnational business networks and empires, and are equipped with ‘the agility to grapple with newly fluid and somewhat erratic forms of transnational capital’ (Yeoh and Willis, 2004: 150). Entrepreneurial mobility becomes a crucial plank in the construction and sustenance of men’s view of the masculine self while women – as exemplified by the figures of either the ‘trailing spouse’ or the ‘left-behind wife’ – play supportive roles, either in the domestic sphere, or as men’s companions whose presence symbolizes men’s virility or economic status (Piper and Roces, 2003; Yeoh and Willis, 2004).

In the non-migration context, much has been written on the rise of an ‘entrepreneur class’ in post-reform China and how the policies and public discourse shifted from condemning to sanctioning and then to celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit or risk-taking attitudes and behaviours since the early 1980s (Bian, 2002; Osburg, 2013; Tsai, 2002). Central to Chinese entrepreneurialism are the ways business, government officials and individuals cultivate business and social networks. In his ethnographic study on China’s new rich, Osburg (2013) argues that the networking practices among Chinese entrepreneurs and government officials are highly masculine, such as banqueting, entertaining and gambling. Women entrepreneurs are often left out or marginalized. As these practices of building business networks through masculinized entertainment become increasingly prevalent in China (and elsewhere), virile consumption and networking practices fashion an elite masculinity that is gradually institutionalized and codified by the state and the market, and amplified by the mass media. In China today, this has become a normative form of masculinity with influences far beyond the entrepreneurial class.

Coupled with the rise of the virile entrepreneurial spirit is the development of the ‘beauty economy’ (meinü jingji) in which sexuality and beauty (and youth) are presumed to be the primary forms of capital for women to succeed and gain social mobility in the market economy. While women entrepreneurs are marginalized, the above-mentioned virile banqueting and entertainment requires young women to mediate relationship -building between elite men (Osburg, 2013; Otis, 2011). Zheng (2009) argues that hostessing in the karaoke bars where male entrepreneurs conduct businesses is a way for rural young women to bid for equal status with urbanites, a ‘weapon of the weak’ against rural–urban and gender inequalities. As in the case of elite masculinity, the beauty economy constitutes a form of normative femininity in which women’s sexualities, bodies and affect are commodified. Although the conspicuous consumption and transgressing of legal boundaries are at times criticized, the risk-taking, aggressive elite masculinity is more often than not celebrated. Yet the use of sexuality and body for social mobility through seeking patronage from powerful men is morally condemned. Chinese women entrepreneurs complain that not only are they left out of the banqueting and socializing, they are also being questioned and suspected of ‘selling their bodies’ in exchange for political or business favours if they are successful in their businesses (Osburg, 2013).

A second strand of migration literature that discusses migrants as entrepreneurs focuses on small migrant traders who occupy specific ethnicized niches in the marketplace. Esser and Benschop’s (2007: 49) work on female entrepreneurs of Moroccan or Turkish origin in the Netherlands argues that being female, of minority ethnicity and entrepreneur at the same time requires one of three strategies: conformity to ‘conventional images of femininity’, the denunciation of ‘femininity and/or ethnicity situationally’, or resisting ‘the masculine connotation of entrepreneurship by disconnecting it from masculinity’. In a different context, Kothari (2008: 505) shows that Bangladeshi and Senegalese street traders (mostly men) in Barcelona are in fact called ‘expert migrants who accumulate knowledge about other cultures and places through their travels’. Research on migrant entrepreneurialism that goes beyond the sphere of petty traders is represented by Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2009: 70) work on Mexican immigrant gardeners in the United States where they found that occupational mobility is dependent on the gardeners’ ability to combine ‘ethnic entrepreneurship with subjugated service work’.

In this article, we build on this literature by expanding on the meanings of ‘entrepreneurial’ when applied to migrants’ mobilities, migration strategies, subjectivities, sensibilities and practices. We employ two terms: chu and zuan to illustrate the myriad ways in which female migrants seek self-betterment and personal and familial gains in strategic ways. Chu, a word often used by the Chinese migrant women we interviewed, conveys a wide range of meanings, which include to exit, to leave, to depart, to produce, to excel, to outclass. We use chu to capture these nuanced meanings embedded in Chinese marriage migrants’ motivations and actions. In contemporary China, many choose to go out of the country because they do not have another ‘way out’ or ‘way forward’ (chulu) in their pursuit of a good life. This has to be understood in the context of China’s increasingly ossified social stratification, growing gender inequality and limits to social mobility since the mid-1990s (Bian, 2002). With chu as main motivation, the actual practices and pathways of migration are highly variable as would-be migrants seek out available channels within the context of a migration regime characterized by multiple barriers and considerable brokerage activity. International marriage provides just one possible chu pathway.

We use zuan to illustrate the ways in which Chinese marriage migrants manoeuvre between and within migration regimes, state policies, work and family, business and intimacy. Zuan is another versatile term used by the local citizens and among mainland Chinese women’s social circles, and by those who have intimate relations with mainland Chinese women. Zuan carries an array of meanings such as to dig into, to probe, to break through, to explore, to exploit, to penetrate and to be cunning. It showcases migrants’ strong drive, entrepreneurial spirit, knowledge, as well as libidinal energy to strive and move through various layers of boundaries and constraints, and to explore pockets of opportunities presented to them. We argue that zuan mentalities and strategies are made apparent in the context of Malaysia where the labour migration regime is rigid, but where there are interstitial spaces (or holes) that can be exploited to further migratory pathways. Through zuan, Chinese marriage migrants trespass state boundaries by obscuring notions of legality and illegality. Zuan is also the source of their sexualized image and stigma, as it implies a masculine display of aggressive drive, which challenges traditional gender roles.

Study methods

The empirical material for this article is drawn from a larger research project on state boundaries, cultural politics and gender negotiations in international marriages in Singapore and Malaysia. The larger project was motivated by trends of increasing international marriages and the attention given to commercially brokered marriages in the two countries from the mid- to late 2000s, and was designed to focus primarily on commercially brokered marriages, although it includes other types of international marriages.

In the research fieldwork, we had planned to collect recorded interviews from couples who married in or since 1990, and where one of the spouses was a foreigner and the other a citizen at the time when they started the process of getting married, including all couples who said that they were married without questioning their definition of marriage. For the commercially brokered marriages, we had preconceived ideas (gleaned largely from reading newspapers) that they would be Vietnamese and Chinese women marrying local men, and had planned to focus on these two national groups of marriage migrants. Although the existence of Vietnamese marriage migrants who entered the country through commercial matchmaking agencies was never in question, the Chinese commercially brokered marriage migrants proved more elusive to identify.

In Malaysia particularly, we found ourselves questioning whether in fact women from China ever came into the country through commercial marriage brokerages. Instead, many of the Chinese marriage migrants whom we found had entered the country in a variety of ways and had met their spouses in just as many ways. We decided to include all these Chinese marriage migrants and their spouses from whom we managed to obtain interviews in a separate analytical category. During fieldwork, we had begun to discern a ‘pattern’ among the myriad cases that had not fitted into our initial classificatory scheme; a pattern that we are now beginning to view as a form of ‘entrepreneurial marriage migration’.

We identified our interviewees in many ways. We met a few through friends and friends of friends, and snowballed from these. We spent time in eating outlets – food courts and coffee shops – where there were stalls run by mainland Chinese women, to observe and make friends with the stall-holders. The research team also spent time hanging out in the Immigration Department where foreign spouses had to go to renew their social visit passes, and managed to follow up with two couples whom they met there. The fieldwork stretched from 2010 to 2011 and was carried out primarily in Kuala Lumpur, but we also met people in the outskirts of the city, as well as in other towns such as Ipoh and Melaka.

Using an ethnographic approach, we made extensive notes from our encounters and conversations with informants, and most times we were also able to obtain their consent for recorded interviews, which usually lasted for about an hour. As a guide for the interviews, we used a set of aide memoires covering biographical details, experiences prior to entering into marriage, meeting and choice of spouse, decision for marriage, experience with the process of marriage and current marriage experiences. At times, we followed a life history type of format. We tried as much as possible to carry out the interviews in private and not in the presence of others, especially the spouse; and were successful in most but not all cases.

There were challenges involved in establishing trust in our relationships with our informants, but once the initial hurdle of trust was overcome, most of the interviews went ahead smoothly. In Malaysian society where ethnicity plays a dominant role in people’s perceptions and interactions, our co-ethnic Chinese status, the ability to speak Mandarin and the first author’s status as foreigner (Taiwanese) were factors that aided our positioning as non-threatening persons in relation to our interviewees.

We eventually interviewed a total of 28 Chinese women migrants married to Malaysian men and 12 Malaysian spouses of Chinese women. All the Malaysian men were of Chinese ethnicity. We also met and interviewed one Chinese male migrant married to a Chinese Malaysian woman. Among these 41 persons, there were 10 couples, 18 wives (whose husbands were not interviewed) and 3 husbands (whose wives were not interviewed). The mainland Chinese women in our study are engaged in active and diverse economic activities either independently or with their spouses: among 28 female respondents, 14 are self-employed, 12 are housewives and 2 have (illegal) employment. ² Considering that their legal residential status as dependent wives does not allow them to work, these diverse economic activities manifest their entrepreneurial spirit.

In this article, we supplement our fieldwork material with a review of the printed media (the English and Chinese press in Malaysia), and an understanding of the policy framework based on secondary literature, published government reports, as well as interviews with NGO workers and government officials carried out in 2010. Pseudonyms have been used in this article and locations identified at a general level in order to protect the identities of interviewees.

Malaysia’s migration regime and migration routes from China

As one of the largest migrant labour importing countries in Asia, Malaysia’s labour migration regime has attracted much scholarly and policy attention. ³ Most of the scholarship and policy discussions focus on the labour recruitment system (Wong, 2003), the state’s capacity to manage migration, management strategies for curtailing one of the highest percentages of irregular migration in the world via privatized control mechanisms (Chin, 2008), and on how the recruitment and regulatory regime indirectly provides incentives for migrants to take illegal routes, thereby producing illegality (Garcés-Mascareñas, 2010). Focusing on the more vulnerable migrant groups and a single aspect of the migration regime, current scholarship tends to neglect the existence of a variety of legal migration routes to Malaysia, with pathways showing fluidity and intersectionality. ⁴

Mainland Chinese migration routes to Malaysia are extremely variable. From the outset, postcolonial Malaysia has not allowed any labour migration from China. Instead, the country, following Singapore, became a popular destination for foreign students enrolling in short-term English courses in the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, Malaysia liberalized the tourist visa (14-day social pass) for mainland Chinese, first for tourists in group tours (on the typical Singapore–Malaysia–Thailand tour route) and later extended to individuals with hukou ⁵ from some major cities. Mainland Chinese marriage migrants started to arrive in the late 1990s. While many foreign spouses who arrived in the 2000s could not obtain permanent residency and were generally not allowed to work, mainland Chinese women are subjected to more stringent immigration procedures, having to acquire short-term social passes for years, with no possibility of applying for permanent residency (Chee et al., 2014).

From the mid-1980s, the migration regime was increasingly liberalized to attract foreign investors and expatriates of multinational companies. Some small-scale traders and entrepreneurs (such as restaurateurs) entered the country with investment visas. Under the investment scheme the investors have to demonstrate solid assets with large sums of money deposited in Malaysian banks, ostensibly to develop joint-venture businesses with Malaysian citizens. We were told that many ‘investors’ who managed to migrate into the country did not necessarily possess the financial capital required, but they employed migration brokers who facilitated the financial transactions and dealt with legal documents.

The investor scheme was soon replaced by the Malaysia My Second Home (MM2H) programme as the easiest and most popular migration route for mainland Chinese migrants. Revamped in 2002, the MM2H programme provided retirees with five-year multiple-entry residential passes but required them to purchase properties and make substantial deposits in a Malaysian bank (Toyota and Xiang, 2012). Both the foreign investor scheme and the MM2H are processed with efficiency and allow pass-holders and their family members to conduct businesses, and undertake educational activities, but not employment. Since the late 2000s, mainland Chinese ‘talents’ started to come to Malaysia with accompanying investments, as well as increasing Chinese expatriates employed by multinational companies.

As an overriding principle, Malaysia’s migration regime is class and nationality selective in that as far as temporary migration goes, it welcomes ‘talents’, including students, expatriates, investors, tourists and pensioners, while restricting low-skilled labour and refugees to particular origin countries. Permanent settlement and citizenship follow a different logic that is informed by the ethnic framework and racial politics of the nation. ⁶

The complex and variable migration routes from China to Malaysia blur these class and racial demarcations. On the one hand, with the rise of China’s economic power, mainland Chinese migrants have moved from a non-category (China was not an approved origin country for migrant labour, therefore the presence of migrants from China was largely deemed illegal) to the category of welcomed investors and ‘talents’; on the other hand, mainland Chinese marriage migrants are not able to gain legal permanent residency and settlement. These disjunctures in the regulatory regime, coupled with a weak capacity of enforcing migration control, create conditions for a ‘regime of permissiveness’ (Kalir et al., 2012) that provides opportunities and incentives for Chinese migrants to manoeuvre in-between.

Chu: Entrepreneurial modalities in motivation, subjectivity

Using chu to illustrate the mutually reinforcing mobile and entrepreneurial subjectivity of mainland Chinese women, we point to an entrepreneurial subjectivity that sees the migration process as an open-ended journey or adventure without a clear long-term vision of settlement destination and the steps required to achieve it. With chu as main motivation, the actual and immediate practices and migratory pathways are highly variable as would-be migrants seek out available channels. We argue that the chu mentality both shapes and is shaped by the rise of entrepreneurial subjectivity in the context of Malaysia, which is seen as an attractive destination because its migration regime described above offers variable routes and opportunities, as illustrated by the story of Zhuang Lin: ⁷

Zhuang Lin was born into a middle-class family in Shanghai in the early 1970s. Her parents were working in the army and for a state-owned bank while running a restaurant. After having completed vocational college, she helped in the family business for several years. As a Shanghai urbanite, Zhuang Lin should have been the envy of many Chinese women. Yet she was not happy with her life. She felt that her English standard was not good enough in cosmopolitan Shanghai. Driven by the desire to ‘see the world’ [in her own words], she decided to go overseas to study English. She did not apply for schools in more popular destinations such as Australia or the USA because she was not confident of her English and believed that she would not pass TOEFL and would be denied entry at the border. In the late 1990s it was not as easy compared to the present to acquire travel documents and visas even for Shanghainese. When she went to apply for a passport, she ‘coincidentally’ met a Malaysian man who helped mainland Chinese persons to apply for student visas to Malaysia. Together with a friend, Zhuang Lin was persuaded by this man ⁸ and soon came to Malaysia in 1999 as a language student. When she was about to finish her studies, at the age of 28 years, she met and married Mr Lien, a 37-year-old [at the time of their marriage] divorced man who ran a small kopitiam [eatery] in a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

Like Zhuang Lin, most of the younger mainland Chinese women we interviewed identified ‘to go out and see the world’ (chuqukankan) as their main motivation for migration. They perceive the migration process as a open-ended journey, not necessarily ending at a specified destination for settlement, or the acquisition of foreign citizenship. They are driven by a broad cosmopolitan aspiration to leave China, but have no strong preferences about where to go, nor any idea of what they want to do after migration. Although their cosmopolitan desire is informed by the global spatial hierarchy with the USA and Australia, and possibly Japan at the top, they understand that they do not fit into the category of skilled or talent migration and do not possess sufficient economic and human capital to migrate to these more desired destinations. As they do not have a fixed destination in mind, they take up any opportunity of going abroad that presents itself, through migration brokers of various kinds (education, labour, marriage, etc.), via social networks, or as chance would have it. Singapore and Malaysia are popular destinations as they offer affordable language courses and relatively lower thresholds of eligibility. With the liberalization of tourism both from China and to Southeast Asia, many mainland Chinese would-be wives visited Southeast Asia first by joining a package tour and later as individual tourists without going through migration brokers, as exemplified by Peng Li’s story:

Peng Li, a woman from rural Hunan province, came to Malaysia when she was 30 years old. She had worked in Shenzhen before. She had two stable relationships which unfortunately ended before the prospective weddings due to tragic circumstances. Peng Li felt that bad luck would happen to her again and decided to travel to Southeast Asia to relax and forget her troubles (sansanxin). Initially she wanted to go to Singapore, but by then (2007) it had become difficult for mainland Chinese single women to apply for a social pass (tourist visa) to Singapore. She then decided to go to Genting (a casino resort in Malaysia) with her cousin. They arrived at Kuala Lumpur (KL) airport on their own, only to panic when they found that they were unable to read signage or communicate with anyone as they did not speak a word of English. Feeling lost and helpless, they met Nicolas, an English-educated divorced Chinese Malaysian who took time and effort to help them to find their way to the city. Nicolas suffered from a skin disease (psoriasis), and Peng Li stayed on in KL for a month to take care of Nicolas until her social pass expired. A transnational courtship was initiated from these beginnings, despite the fact that both of them claimed that they were not looking for a long-term relationship at that time. Over 30 years of age, Peng Li was pressured by her family to get married. Despite some initial hesitation, Peng Li married Nicolas within a few months.

Even as early as the 1990s, Shanghai and Shenzhen were transforming into cosmopolitan centres. Both Zhuang Lin and Peng Li had relatively respectable economic and social statuses in China’s context, yet they felt left out by China’s rapid development. Dissatisfied with their life prospects, they left China to find a ‘way out’ to embark on an unknown and open-ended journey. By taking risks in small steps, they believe that they will get to a better place or position by their own efforts and smart moves. This is in tune with the rise of entrepreneurial subjectivity in tandem with decreasing opportunities for social mobility since the mid-1990s in China (Yan, 2006). Romance or marriage with a foreign man in a more developed country or of perceived superior background was not their main intent when they left China.

Zuan: Entrepreneuring migratory pathways

Entrepreneurialism entails utilizing resources and capital in creative ways to accumulate wealth and gain opportunities. Mainland Chinese women’s entrepreneurial spirit is exhibited in the way they manoeuvre between different migration categories under Malaysia’s fragmented migration regime, creating their own pathways that are responsive to the changing regulations, the labour and marriage markets, and business opportunities. These pathways are extremely contingent and as open-ended as with the chu motivation. Zuan, the analytical construct we use to describe these pathways, points to the migrant women’s strong drive to explore, exploit and penetrate state and societal interstices and move between legality and illegality.

Among our informants, the routes of mobility undertaken by middle-aged women from northeast China exemplify zuan, among whom Wang Xing’s experience is quite representative.

Wang Xing used to work as a semi-skilled worker in state-owned enterprises in Shenyang, but was laid off in the 1990s. She has urban hukou status and is able to enjoy relatively good welfare benefits as compared to Chinese women of younger age and from rural areas. After the layoff, Wang Xing took a massage training course and later worked in a watch manufacturing factory, which was closed down when counterfeit watches became too ubiquitous and easy to detect.

When Wang Xing divorced in 2000, she was in her late 30s and had a 12-year-old son. When she decided to migrate to Malaysia to look for work, her son was 18 years old and about to go to college. Her migration decision was partly made in view of the fact that her son was leaving home and she needed to pay for his education. Through a broker, she first entered with a short-term social pass, which was later extended to a two-year ‘work permit’. Official rules do not allow mainland Chinese to be recruited as migrant workers in Malaysia, and Wang Xing herself was not sure whether her ‘work permit’ was legitimate. Even if it was, she reasoned, the work permit should specify a particular employer. She reckoned that the broker must have ‘a good connection with the officers’ to secure her a ‘work permit’ untied to any employer. The same broker also helped her rent a food stall in a local food court selling bak kut teh, a herbal meat soup invented by early southern Chinese immigrants in Singapore and Malaysia. As a northern Chinese she had never tasted it before she set foot in Malaysia and had to learn the recipe from a fellow mainland Chinese immigrant. One year later, after she had become familiar with the local food scene, she decided that she might better cook northern Chinese food, particularly dumplings. She operated food stalls in various places, with rents as low as RM35 (US$11) per day. When her income began to stabilize, she immediately applied for her son to study in Malaysia.

After working for a few years in Malaysia, Wang Xing met a taxi driver, Pang, who frequented her food stall. Pang had divorced in 2008 and moved out from his marital home to a rented apartment in the vicinity of the food court where Wang Xing worked. After coming to know about the time and money she had to spend on daily transportation to get to work, Pang suggested that she and her son sub-let a room in his apartment to share the rent. At that time, Wang Xing had already enrolled her son in a private college in Kuala Lumpur majoring in international finance.

According to both Wang Xing and Pang, their relationship was strictly that of a landlord and a tenant in the beginning. In mid-2009, when Wang Xing’s work permit was about to expire, her son suggested that she propose to Pang. Wang Xing felt that Pang was a decent person who cared about her and decided to heed her son’s advice. Pang took a few months to consider this proposal, as he was quite aware of the dominant image of mainland Chinese women as ‘husband-hunters’. In fact, he himself shared the same view towards mainland Chinese women: ‘All Chinese women are prostitutes! What do you think they came here for?’ ⁹ Eventually, however, Pang agreed to the proposal and they registered their marriage in 2009.

Wang Xing and many mainland Chinese women actively seek potential good husbands and in doing so manage to change their legal status from temporary migrants (students, investors, illegal workers) to wives. They do not necessarily do so to secure Malaysian citizenship. In fact, the social pass for foreign spouses offered shorter terms (ranging from one month to one year initially) and was more expensive than the illegitimate ‘work permit’. They were aware that marriage to a local man did not offer any possibility for legal settlement (permanent residency or citizenship) for mainland Chinese, neither did it confer the right to bring their children (from previous marriages) from China (Wang Xing’s son came as a student). However, for Wang Xing, it offered a degree of protection from raids on illegal migrants and sex workers, which Wang Xing experienced several times at her working place when the raids were intensified in the early 2010s. This protection allows her to continue running her business, stay mobile and support her son’s educational (and eventually economic) mobility as well.

Both Pang and Wang Xing were ambiguous about whether the initial marriage proposal was meant to be a ‘bogus marriage’ and whether it involved financial and/or sexual exchanges. Regardless of the initial agreement, mutual affection grew between Wang Xing and Pang and soon they felt that they had found the right life companion in each other. At the interviews, they spoke about each other with shy smiles like teenagers in the first flush of romance.

Wang Xing’s friend Chen Jing did not have the same luck:

Chen Jing came to Malaysia on a tourist visa, which allowed her to stay one month. A fellow mainland Chinese wife recommended that she look for a local husband and matched her with some men. She rejected several of these matches as ‘the main thing for me was to earn money, not to find men’. ¹⁰ However, when she was introduced to Hung, she thought that she should give him a chance. She lived with Hung for some time and they eventually registered their marriage. Initially their relationship went well, but after some time she discovered that Hung had serious gambling problems and they quarrelled constantly. Eventually she moved out of his place and ran a food stall independently. She decided not to divorce him because by then her son from her previous marriage in China was enrolled in a vocational school in Singapore and she needed the income in Malaysia to support his education.

For Wang Xing and Chen Jing, engaging in intimate relations with local men is not part of the motivation for migration; instead, intimate relationships are part of the larger set of risks, enterprise and zuan mentality that are inextricably entwined in forging migratory pathways that take them into the interstices of Malaysian society. Realistic about the risks involved, they are selective and try to find men with relatively stable incomes and caring and trustworthy characters. This increases (but does not guarantee) the chances of the relationship turning into romance and companionship, and gaining for the women a more secure foothold in Malaysian society; if the gamble does not pay off, the women may find themselves slipping into the categories of ‘bogus marriage’ and ‘irregular migration’ in the eyes of the immigration authority, as the legal status of foreign spouses is tied to continuing legitimate intimate and sexual relations. These mainland Chinese women’s perceptions and actions of using the legality of marriage migration to create migratory pathways while adopting a utilitarian attitude in their intimate relationships trespass state boundaries as well as normative societal morality.

The most important aspect of the entrepreneurial subjectivity we call zuan is upward social mobility, rather than wealth accumulation. While Wang Xing and Chen Jing migrated to accumulate economic capital in order to invest in their sons’ human capital through education, some younger mainland Chinese women have been able to employ strategies in their multiple migratory trajectories to further their own social mobility, reinventing themselves with every step of their physical and social mobility. Femininity, sexuality, intimate and/or care labour and affective practices are primary capital at their disposal in pursuing entrepreneurial zuan endeavours both in terms of spatial and social mobility. Kelly’s story below represents what may be seen as the female version of the ‘Chinese dream’: ¹¹

Kelly was born in a rural area in Hunan. At a young age, she went to Shenzhen to work in a beauty parlour. Within a short period of time she was able to save enough money to open her own parlour and later a clothes shop, with the help of some investors whom she met in Shenzhen. She was a bit bored with the business there as she considered the shop she opened too small in scale. To run a big business in China would require a large capital investment which she was not able to find. Kelly heard about the MM2H scheme in Malaysia and considered it a good entrepreneurial opportunity. Later she came to know about the Foreign Investment Scheme which was even easier in procedure. She found a mainland Chinese woman and a female Malaysian as business partners. The three women decided to develop a joint venture and opened a hotpot restaurant in Pudu, Kuala Lumpur. None of them had experience running a restaurant but Kelly considered this venture a small risk, as ‘even if we fail it would just cost me a few ten-thousands [Chinese Yuan]!’ Eventually Kelly came to Malaysia via an investment visa.

Kelly met her husband, a widower 20 years her senior who was a frequent customer at her restaurant. They got married within a month after they first met. After a few months, the restaurant partnership fell apart. Kelly’s husband bought up the restaurant for Kelly to ‘run at her own leisure’, so that she can entertain her friends and clients and not have to stay at home feeling bored.

Romance and marriage may not be the primary migratory motivation, although they can feature as part of a package signifying a ‘better life’. When opportunities of romance or marriage crop up in the course of undirected travel or migration journeys, interview respondents embrace them in the same way they would approach other entrepreneurial endeavours. Most of our interviewees take the initiative to pursue or sustain a romantic relationship when they come across a ‘good man’, and often seal a marriage deal within a relatively short period of time. These ‘good men’ typically have stable income, respectable social status and a loyal and dependable personality (i.e. not promiscuous); they should have a gentle temperament and always treat their wives with care and love, and at times pamper them with luxury gifts. Their age, physical looks and prior marital experiences do not matter much. As Kelly explains, ‘If you meet a good man, don’t waste your time. Otherwise he will soon be taken by others. I think he is a very good man, dependable, with a good temper, and has good economic status.’

Mainland Chinese women’s zuan practices embody a very different subjectivity and image from those of the expatriate spouse or left-behind wife who plays supporting and secondary roles in transnational mobility. Yeoh and Willis (2004) argue that entrepreneurial mobility is largely constructed as masculine, and ‘transgressing’ national boundaries to advance economic and social status is associated positively with men’s virility. When women, particularly wives, exhibit similar drive and mentality, they not only transgress the taxonomies of the migration regime that separates wives, workers and businessmen/investors, but also challenge the core of the normative gender roles and division of masculinity and femininity. On the one hand, as Wang Xing and Chen Jing’s stories show, their entrepreneurial strategies of taking the initiative to selectively ‘find’ husbands, venture into the informal economy, set up trading businesses, and move between legality and illegality, are more often than not perceived as displays of negative aggressive drive that contradict feminine passivity. On the other hand, as Kelly’s case reveals, lowly educated migrant women have few resources at their disposal other than utilizing their sexuality, femininity and reproductive labour as their entrepreneurial capital. When these prescribed female gender traits are tied with entrepreneurism, they produce sexualized images and stigma that are specifically associated with mainland Chinese women.

Conclusion

This article builds on the broad scholarship on gender, migration and transnationalism that analyses migrants’ agency and their positioning within multiple hierarchies of power. This literature employs the various analytical foci of the family, the state and global capital to illuminate intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality (Mahler and Pessar, 2001). Studies on women’s marriage and labour migration from Asia pay particular attention to gender norms and women’s position in the patriarchal family, and how migration opens up opportunities for them to access power, while they continue to contribute to the household economy to consolidate their position in the natal family (Bélanger and Tran, 2010). The scholarship on post-migration settlement in Asia argues that marriage immigrants are incorporated in the nation’s citizenship regimes based on their reproductive role in the family (Chee et al., 2014; Turner, 2008). Social and kinship ties and performing as good wives and mothers in order to acquire citizenship are undoubtedly central to many Asian migrant women’s migratory experiences, yet it is also inadequate to understand their agency solely in the context of family welfare. Our study unravels the meanings of ‘migrating for a better life’ – with the emphasis on self-bettering, not necessarily for the sake of ‘helping’ parents and other left-behind family members. The goal of self-betterment these women aim for goes beyond raising their socio-economic status by becoming a dependent in intimate and familial relationships. It has a specific focus on the self as an active agent who is constantly striving and self-motivating. It should be noted, however, that the project of self-betterment is not necessarily distinct and separate from familial concerns.

A substantive body of literature frames international marriages as part of the ‘global care chains’ in the global political economy (Lee, 2012) and posits economic security and onward geographical mobility as the primary migratory motivations. Constable develops further the concept of ‘global hypergamy’ that goes beyond the idea of economic gains and global hierarchy, arguing that marriage and migration are driven by the political economy of desire and the imaginary of the place, which has to be understood in the context of the historical China–US and the Philippines–US relations in her study (Constable, 2003). Our study departs from the ‘hypergamy’ outlook as our informants move not to marry foreign men of perceived privileged background, nor do they have clear imaginaries of the destination. We use the term chu to capture their desire to ‘go out’, not to ‘get there’. In the Malaysian context, transnational marriage does not translate into citizenship entitlement; it offers minimal protection from migration control (e.g. raids) that can be very costly and sometimes violent. In other words, marriage is not the endpoint of the migration journey; it is a pathway that enables Chinese female migrants to continue fashioning mobile and entrepreneurial endeavours of chu.

Yet, chu by itself does not provide a complete picture of the migratory and self-betterment project. The upward social mobility that is to be achieved by the chu requires the ability to navigate many twists and turns in new and foreign contexts, an ability that is best described by the analytical construct of zuan.

Zuan underscores how migrant women’s subjectivity is manifested in their strong drive to explore, exploit and penetrate legal interstices under Malaysia’s fragmented migration regime and to move between legality and illegality. In turn, the variable visa schemes and their respective barriers create illegal-but-licit spaces and fuel female migrants’ entrepreneurial subjectivities. Using marriage to create migratory pathways and social mobility, they trespass state boundaries, obscuring notions of legality and illegality in intimate and marital relations, and challenging societal normativity concerning gender practices and femininity.

Lower-skilled female migrants’ entrepreneurial modalities differ from those of the higher-skilled (male) migrants and transnational business class in that female migrants are consciously engaged in the process of reinventing themselves. Their mobile subjectivities entail a constant negotiation of multiple identities associated with femininity and sexuality. Moreover, they use reproductive and affective/intimate labour as entrepreneurial capital, which is invested in their mobile strategies and risk-taking. As entrepreneurialism is often associated with masculine drive, mainland Chinese women find themselves paradoxically and simultaneously challenging passive femininity, while perpetuating the sexualized and stigmatized images of women.

We argue that the mutually reinforcing ‘mobile’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ subjectivities of mainland Chinese women enable particular kinds of strategizing and risk-taking as they engage in a migration process that is seen as an open-ended journey or adventure, with few limits set on social mobility. Chu and zuan are novel ways to understand Chinese migrant women’s entrepreneurial drive and mobile practices. These two interlinked analytical constructs illustrate the dynamic relations between human agency, female subjectivities, state regulatory regimes, gender practice and intimate relations.