Abstract
Searching for Sweetness is readable, enjoyable and well-structured. Hanisch compares the mobile lives of women from Fuqing, a Chinese coastal city, between China and Lesotho. She argues that Fuqingese women wisely integrate their personal or family project into the Chinese national modernity project, even if many of them feel it is hard to catch up with the development pace of their home country or feel they can only live in the “space of abjection” (p. 106) in Lesotho. A muti-sited ethnography approach facilitates to understand the complexity of their transnational experiences from both historical and local contexts.
Within scholarship on international migration, recent studies witness rising attention to Chinese migration in Africa, especially economic activities and China–Africa geopolitical relations (Lampert et al. 2014; Lee 2017; Anshan 2022). Searching for Sweetness builds on these studies while also making unique contributions. First, Hanisch's book shows that Fuqingese women's mobile lives between China and Lesotho open both “gendered” and “multigenerational” perspectives in understanding Chinese migration in Africa. She compares and contrasts the aspirations of three cohorts of Fuqingese women who were born “in the late Mao era, in the first reform decade, and in the second reform decade” (p. 4), that is, over the 1973–1995 period. Unlike Fuqingese male pioneer migrants, known as “Big Brothers” (p. 90), pioneer women's stories are overshadowed by their male counterparts’ success. Hanisch's focus on Fuqingese women's engagement in Lesotho's economy shifts our attention to the female's role in the connection between China and Africa. Fuqingese women in Lesotho also differ from Chinese entrepreneurial migrants in general because of their lives’ inflexibility and immobility in Lesotho. Furthermore, Fuqingese women's migration choices are not driven by state-sponsored projects but are more often “a result of private initiative” (p. 13).
Second, Hanisch connects the “global” and the “local” by incorporating significant local histories and contexts in China and Lesotho. She demonstrates that Fuqingese women's transborder movement is embedded in specific social structures and unchecked contingencies in both countries. Local history and context are not only important at the nation-state level. For instance, in Fuqing, a county-level city, the process of post-Mao urbanization and modernization shaped the social framework within which Fuqingese women made their life choices. Likewise, in Lesotho, the 1998 riots changed the “meaning of ideal migrant” (p. 15), establishing the social settings of Fuqingese women's experience in Lesotho.
Hanisch's third contribution is raising awareness of the connections between internal and international migration. In the decades following China's 1978 reform and opening up, internal migration was a major “social” movement in China. Although most studies focus on “floating populations” in metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, Hanisch emphasizes the importance of studying county-level cities. Because of geographical proximity, migrants in these county-level cities do not sever connections with their hometowns, that is, their individual projects usually intertwine with family projects. Compared to rural migrants’ feelings of difficulty, isolation, and discrimination in metropolises, migrants from county-level cities struggle less in adopting new “urban” culture codes. This influences their self-identities and interpretations of “urban” and “rural.” This further shapes how different generations determine whether to “stay in Fuqing” or “go to Lesotho.” Specifically, the older-cohort Fuqingese women still believe that “eating bitterness” (p. 26) in Lesotho is better than tirelessly struggling in their hometown, while the younger-cohort women do not see the promising development in Lesotho, thus they either left Lesotho for other places or returned to Fuqing for better opportunities.
Last but not the least, Hanisch also demonstrates how macrosociology can dialogue with microsociology. She does this by putting rich Chinese concepts center-stage in her analysis, such as “bitterness (ku),” “sweetness (tian),” “struggle (fendou),” and “working tirelessly (pinming).” In similar ways, the three cohorts of Fuqingese women use these concepts in daily life to challenge China's nation-state metanarrative assuming that experiences of temporary bitterness are beneficial for achieving material or social sweetness in the future. Particularly, Hanisch shows how the disbelief of the positive association between “struggle” and “sweetness” among the younger cohort is constructed by macro-level social changes in both countries, including China's rising position, Fuqing's changing dynamics within post-Mao modernity, Lesotho's marginalized positions in the global economy, or the reconstruction of wholesale and retail sectors caused by Lesotho's “post-independence state's development strategy” (p. 8). Ultimately, however, the stories of women who struggle to build successful lives reinforce the notion that many migrants may be akin to “surplus populations” (Li 2017) in each country's development agenda.
Despite these important contributions to the study of Chinese–African migration, the book has at least two limitations. First, the translation of the main concept—“struggle (fendou)” should be reconsidered. Hanisch argues that translating individuals’ fendou as “striving” (p. 51) depoliticizes its meaning. I disagree. Fendou has two different meanings for native speakers born in various generations, which can be translated into English as either “struggle” or “striving.” Since Hanisch has already recognized that younger Fuqingese women understand “struggle” differently, I suggest differentiating between the cultural meaning of “struggle” and “striving” among the three cohorts by listening to their own voices. Second, nuanced differences among the third cohort—those born in the second reform decade—were overlooked. Youths born around 1990 have different worldviews from youths born after 1994, due to internet and technology. In this case, the author could have traced more nuanced variations among the younger Fuqingese women by including more cases. Nonetheless, Hanisch's anthropological sensitivity to her positionality vis-à-vis Fuqingese women's changing status in both countries is impressive. As such, Searching for Sweetness can contribute to discussion on international migration in various disciplines, including Sociology, Anthropology, Human Geography, Women's and Gender Studies, Chinese Studies, Southern African Regional Studies, and Social Work.