Abstract
Caroline Plüss’s Transnational Lives in Global Cities offers a timely and much-needed multi-sited analysis of the lived experience of transnational migrants in global cities. Drawing on the retrospective and subjective experiences of Chinese Singaporean migrants in four global cities, Plüss sets up a fine-grained and insightful discussion around the questions if, why, and how living in different global cities affects migrants’ transnational lives in distinct and geographically specific manners. To that end, the book places significant attention on the lives of Chinese Singaporean migrants in Hong Kong (Chapter Three), London (Chapter Four), New York (Chapter Five), and Singapore (Chapter Six) around, and in the intersection of, several transnational contexts and socialities, especially education, work, family, and friendships/lifestyle.
Plüss draws from an impressive number of in-depth qualitative interviews (109), conducted between 2008 and 2010, to produce an empirically rich account of the Chinese Singaporeans’ transnational biographies. These transnational migration pathways, which are generously peppered throughout the book, serve not only to outline the complex mobilities of Chinese Singaporean migrants living in one of the four global cities but also to provide readers with a window into how one’s present circumstances are co-constituted by past living experiences in societies elsewhere. In addition, the relatively large sample size is to be appreciated insofar as patterns of similarities and differences of Chinese Singaporeans’ (dis)embeddedness in their different transnational contexts across the four global cities could be reliably discerned. The book engages with current conceptual debates on transnational migration, transnationalization, repeat migration (or circular migration), and global cities. Of note is also its strategic mobilization of entire transnational migration trajectories, which will unquestionably be of interest to international migration scholars, inasmuch as such empirical data are globally sparse.
The book’s main contribution lies in its well-substantiated explication of the complexity surrounding Chinese Singaporeans’ transnational embeddedness in the four global cities. In particular, Plüss builds on the argument that different global cities are understood by transnational migrants in characteristically different ways. This difference, according to Plüss, is a function of transnational migrants, with past experiences, relating to dominant and required definitions of appropriate social practices in their different transnational contexts and in the interstices of these contexts. Across four empirical chapters, the book demonstrates that “although variation in perceived transnationalization was high, there were city and context-specific influences on how the 109 Chinese Singaporeans experienced their transnational lives when they lived in one of the four global cities, and interacted in and felt (dis)embedded in their different transnational contexts” (p. 276). On one level, Plüss’s arguments unsettle the assumption in the global cities literature that such cities are uniform, impinging upon transnational migrants’ lives in similar ways, especially if these migrants share the same social status. On another level, this work contributes directly to research on transnationalism by increasing the number of transnational contexts explored—four from the usual one or two—and, in so doing, provides a fuller picture of transnational migrants’ lives.
While the book carefully avoids methodological nationalism by emphasizing the relational aspect of transnationality as it plays out across global cities, less care is given when discussing the role and constitution of global cities. More specifically, at various points in the book, the cities of Hong Kong, London, New York, and Singapore are presented as autonomous actors, thus overlooking how the state and other global, regional, and local influences contribute to the lived experience of Chinese Singaporean transnational migrants in these cities. Not only would such a perspective be useful for thinking about the differences between global cities and their impacts on transnational migrants’ lives, it would also align well with the book’s use of structure-agency theory.
Furthermore, although Plüss acknowledges the importance of subjectivities in understanding how “different people and collectivities can have different understandings of similar events or circumstances” (p. 239) and includes an important section on the relationship between gender and transnational migration, more could have been done to critically evaluate the politics underpinning such relations. At times, the book comes across as “adding gender into the mix,” rather than seriously considering gender as a constitutive and constituted part of the social world and of the experience of transnational migration. Moreover, on the topic of the heterogeneity of identities among the Chinese Singaporean migrants, the book could have benefitted from a broader discussion of the relationship between practices of sociality and other lines of self-identification such as religion and sexuality. Attending to these dimensions could better account for “the Chinese Singaporeans’ proclivities to have experienced (dis)embeddeness in their respective transnational contexts, in intersections of these contexts, and to think of self, others, places, and societies in certain ways” (p. 14).
With transnational migrants disproportionately moving to global cities and contributing to these cities’ globality, the knowledge produced in this book will undoubtedly be relevant for scholars within, and well beyond, migration, transnationalism, and urban studies.