Abstract
Youna Kim’s third book, Transnational Migration, Media and Identity of Asian Women: Diasporic Daughters, explores how young Korean, Japanese, and Chinese female sojourners in the UK/London make sense of transnational lives and the paradoxical consequences for their identities in relation to the increasingly recognized phenomenon of the feminization of migration. Kim’s work challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitan identity formation and highlights the role of the media in triggering transnational movements. Based on analyses of diaries and personal interviews with 60 women from relatively privileged classes – 20 each of the aforementioned nationalities – the author explores the unstudied nature of the provisional diaspora of Asian women living or studying in the West.
By simply asking ‘Why do women move?’ in Chapter 1, she draws attention to the emergence of diasporic daughters to critically reflect upon the growing tendency for women in parts of Asia to look abroad for what they perceive as a more individualized lifestyle, as portrayed in the media. While much of the theory on cosmopolitanism celebrates the act of crossing borders as a means to becoming enlightened citizens and achieving empowered lifestyles, Kim questions whether transnational groups become true ‘cosmopolitans’ solely by virtue of their mobility, and, if so, how exactly they are cosmopolitan subjects. Before exploring these key questions, Kim documents (in the second chapter) each of the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese diasporas from a global-historical perspective and discusses recent trends in what she calls ‘provisional diaspora’, in which women are ‘willing to go anywhere for a while’ (p. 38), and the seduction of global cities such as London, the site of her ethnographic research. In Chapter 3, she discusses the ways in which the proliferation of globalized media and the act of consuming glamorous images of the West by her participants in search of an exit from highly gendered socio-economic and cultural conditions in their home countries, feed into their longing for membership of an imagined Western community to pursue individualized lifestyles. Such rosy perspectives, however, face paradoxical consequences in relation to global Others in a broader transnational field, which is marked by racialization and globally structured inequalities, as argued in Chapter 4. By challenging the tendency to celebrate transnational mobility as a site of progressiveness, Chapter 4 seeks to capture the actual conditions of the transnational lives lived by the participants, who frequently experience both covert and overt forms of discrimination and exclusion, and yet helplessly claim personal responsibility for their own choices and even the devaluation that they experience in the racialized global labour market.
Chapter 5 of this book describes how the female participants, displaced from the homeland and marginalized from the host society, turn once again to their homelands in an attempt to find a sense of belonging and redefine their precarious and hybrid identities. The media, which originally seduced them into crossing borders to pursue a more individuated personal biography, paradoxically pull them back to their roots. Put simply, they turn from accessing local English media, to media produced in their countries of origin readily available on the Internet in reaction to globally structured discrimination, and become more ‘Korean, Japanese, and Chinese’. Chapter 6 calls into question utopian assumptions of cosmopolitanism, female cosmopolitanism more precisely, by considering the lived reality of the diasporic daughters. Whereas cosmopolitanism has generally celebrated transnational mobility as a mode of engaging with the world, giving rise to the so-called ‘citizens of the world’, many of the women in the study come to accept that they cannot afford a cosmopolitan identity in a social playing field that is not level. The book concludes that the women on the move are currently stuck in diaspora; they are in effect ‘nowhere women’ (p. 138) as they are neither keen to return to their home countries to conform to a normative life nor stay in a current destination marked by unequal power relations. They thus no longer feel completely at home anywhere. After all, the utopian notion of cosmopolitanism, fuelled by the increasing globalization of capitalist media industries, is an imagined cultural form for the women who crossed borders with a desire to transcend gendered national systems.
Apart from its critical reflections on the unambiguously optimistic promises of cosmopolitanism, I believe that this book makes an important contribution to the field of international migration research. Much research to date has considered women as mere dependents of male migrants, and Kim’s work convincingly demonstrates that the lives of women on the move in today’s globalized era are socially constructed, as opposed to a popular belief that these women pursue lives of their own choice independent of the reality of any particular society. By investigating the lived realities of transnational women, motivated to escape their constraining realities to be part of a more egalitarian and equal society as promised by the proliferating global media and who ended up reverting to nationalism, this book fills a gap in our understanding of the micro-level realities of transnational migration. In a field where research often focuses on broader trends and patterns at the level of community and society, the personal journeys explored in Kim’s book are a salient reminder of the human face of contemporary transnational movement.
Diasporic Daughters also has the potential to inform debate in the area of migration policy formulation. As Kim’s work highlights, many contemporary transnational female migrants are willing to ‘go anywhere for a while’ (p. 38), and these sojourns can lead to permanent settlement. With an increasing population of global nomads among women from Asia, more attention should be given to this new form of transnational movement and its provisional nature for policy-making in the area of international education and migration. As the book concludes, the diasporic daughters are not sure where exactly they are headed and indicate that they might continue their journey to find a place that they can comfortably call home. This current trend of provisional female diaspora should be reflected in ongoing migration policy debate, which has to date paid little attention to this group of transnational migrants.
Personally, I hope that the diasporic daughters in the book were able to escape from ‘the nowhere women status’ to find ‘somewhere’ to settle down. Just like the diasporic daughters, Kim’s research is also on the move and it would be interesting to find out where this journey of hope eventually ends up.