Children, Family & Migration in East Asia 7-8 July 2016 Asia Research Institute, NUS

Transcription

1 Children, Family & Migration in East Asia 7-8 July 2016 Asia Research Institute, NUS A group of Thai children, whose parents are migrants, watching television. Image CHAMPSEA-Thailand Field Team

2 This international conference is jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and supported by Faculty of Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Under conditions of economic globalization, migration across borders whether international or internal has become part of childhood experiences of many children in East Asia. While children are heavily involved in a wide range of migration streams in the region, they (with a few exceptions) continue to remain in the background of migration scholarship that is dominated by a focus on adult-centric labour migration concerns and processes. In this context, this conference sets out to examine the complex and multi-faceted ways in which East Asian children s lives as they unfold in familial contexts are intersected by migration processes and pressures. Children in migratory contexts are complex social actors who eschew easy classification into the binary states of agent or victim. They embody agency and resilience in situated practices, shape and are shaped by normative structures of familial and intergenerational relationships, and are deeply implicated in the negotiation of subjectivities folded into processes of development and change throughout the region. In East Asia, the well-being of children (defined here broadly as those aged below 18) is often closely associated with family contexts and migration in at least four ways. First, in the developing economies in the region, when parents migrate to more affluent destinations in search of better work opportunities, children may be left behind and taken care of by other family members or substitute carers. For left-behind children, parents migration may have multiple and sometimes contradictory effects, improving their well-being through remittances sent home, or affecting their lives adversely as a result of the absence of primary carers. Second, children may move and migrate with their family members. The well-being of migrant children in post-migration situations is often uncertain because they may lack access to needed education, health and other services due to their migration status. Third, some migrant workers bear children during their migration stints. This often creates a challenge for both parents and children, because migrant workers may face discrimination and marginalization in the host society. Children born of female migrant workers often do not have citizenship or residency rights in their birth place given their mothers transient often precarious labour migrant status. Children born out of place in host societies may also encounter stigmatization in returning to their parents origin communities. Fourth, in more affluent societies in the region, middle class parents have increasingly used migration as a strategy to improve their children s future prospects. For example, in order to help their children obtain citizenship rights in more developed societies, pregnant women may migrate to give birth. In other instances, mothers from middle class families may migrate to accompany their children who pursue educational pathways overseas. The above four strands linking children, family and migration illustrate the critical impact that family circumstances and migration contexts have on children s lives, regardless of whether the children move or stay. We are particularly interested in the way these strands develop in the context of intra-regional migrations in East Asia, primarily because the East Asian arena has been given less attention compared to the larger vein of work exploring issues related to children of Asian migrants in the global North. This conference takes children, family and migration in East Asia as its focus, and addresses the following key issues: How do children shape family migration decisions? How does migration impact the well-being, identity and subjectivity of children who move and children who stay? How do structural factors such as gender and class intersect with migration to shape children s lives? What strategies are mobilized to cope with the challenges stemming from migration that affect children s wellbeing? How do these strategies converge and diverge across different cultural and social contexts and among different groups of children bearing different gender, class and citizenship status? 2

3 CONVENORS Professor Susanne Choi Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong E choiyp@cuhk.edu.hk Professor Brenda S.A. Yeoh Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore E geoysa@nus.edu.sg Ms Theodora Lam Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore E theodoralam@nus.edu.sg SECRETARIAT Ms Valerie Yeo Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore E valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg 3

4 7 JULY 2016 (THURSDAY) 09:45 10:00 REGISTRATION 10:00 10:30 WELCOME & OPENING REMARKS Brenda S.A. Yeoh Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore Susanne Choi Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong 10:30 11:30 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 1 Chairperson Jonathan Rigg National University of Singapore 10:30 Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of Southern California, USA Children and Migration to the U.S. from Latin America: The Invisible, the Unaccompanied Minors, the Undocumented Dreamers and the New Second Generation 11:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 11:30 12:00 TEA BREAK 12:00 13:00 PANEL 1 IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON MIGRANT CHILDREN S EDUCATION Chairperson Cheng Yi En National University of Singapore 12:00 Yinni Peng Hong Kong Baptist University 12:20 Charlotte Goodburn King's College London, UK Migrant Parenting and Children s Education Incorporation: Rural-To-Urban Migrant Parents and their Migrant Children in South China Family Contexts and Migrant Children's Differential Access to Education and Health Services in China and India 12:40 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 13:00 14:15 LUNCH 14:15 15:45 PANEL 2 IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON YOUTHS Chairperson Anjeline de Dios National University of Singapore 14:15 Nicole W. T. Cheung 14:35 Roy Huijsmans The Chinese University of Hong Kong Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands 15:55 Khoo Choon Yen Brenda S.A. Yeoh National University of Singapore Gender, Victimization and Psychological Health of Rural-to-Urban Migrant Adolescents in South China Lao Village Youth, Borderland Mobilities and Family Relations Responsible Adults-In-The-Making: Intergenerational Impact of Parental Migration on Indonesian Young Women s Aspirational Capacity 15:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 15:45 16:15 TEA BREAK 4

5 16:15 17:45 PANEL 3 CHILDREN S AGENCY AND CARE ARRANGEMENTS Chairperson Silvia Mila Arlini National University of Singapore 16:15 Tuen Yi Chiu, Jenny The Chinese University of Hong Kong 16:35 Theodora Lam Brenda S.A. Yeoh National University of Singapore 16:55 Jocelyn O. Celero Waseda University, Japan Parenting in Diverse Cross-border Migration Contexts Left-Behind Children Matters: Perspectives on and Reactions to the Everyday Ruptures of Migration in Southeast Asia Living a Normal Family, Raising a Normal Child : Mapping Japanese-Filipinos Patterns of Care and Mobile Childhood 17:15 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 17:45 END OF DAY 1 18:30 20:30 CONFERENCE DINNER (For Speakers, Chairpersons & Invited Guests) 5

6 8 JULY 2016 (FRIDAY) 09:45 10:00 REGISTRATION 10:00 11:00 KEYNOTE ADDRESS 2 Chairperson Susanne Choi The Chinese University of Hong Kong 10:00 Nicole Constable University of Pittsburgh, USA & Yale-NUS College, Singapore Assemblages and Affect: Migrant Mothers and the Varieties of Absent Children 10:45 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 11:00 11:30 TEA BREAK 11:30 13:00 PANEL 4 IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN IN CHINA Chairperson Elaine Ho National University of Singapore 11:30 Qiao Bing Wu The Chinese University of Hong Kong 11:50 Xiaorong Gu National University of Singapore 12:10 Shu Hu National University of Singapore Migration, Family Contexts and Children s Well-being in China For The Future : Migration and Childrearing in Chinese Rural Families A Tale of Two Migrations: Parental Migration, Family Migration, and the Wellbeing of Rural and Urban Children in China 12:30 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 13:00 14:00 LUNCH 14:00 15:00 PANEL 5 IMPACT OF MIGRATION ON MIGRANT CHILDREN S CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITIES Chairperson Bernardo Brown National University of Singapore 14:00 Susanne Choi The Chinese University of Hong Kong 14:20 Leslie Butt Jessica Ball University of Victoria, Canada Double Not in Hong Kong: Children in Family at the Forefront of Migration Strategy and Discontent Birth Registration and Blurred Citizenship among Children of Transnational Migrant Families in Lombok, Indonesia 14:20 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 15:00 15:30 TEA BREAK 6

7 15:30 17:00 PANEL 6 MIGRATION AND CHILDREN AT RISK Chairperson Giuseppe Bolotta National University of Singapore 15:30 Anderson V. Villa 15:50 Monira Ahsan Ateneo de Davao University, Philippines Jerry Lewis Ong 16:10 Jennifer Rowe Save the Children Asia Regional Office, Singapore University of Queensland, Australia Impact of Immigration Control to Filipino Families and their Children with Irregular Status In Japan Protecting Children on the Move in Southeast Asia: Refugee, Asylum Seeking and Undocumented Children in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia The Children are the Seeds of Future Tibet: Exploring Tibetan Narratives of Childhood in Exile 16:30 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS 17:00 17:30 CLOSING REMARKS Susanne Choi Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong 17:30 END OF CONFERENCE 7

8 Children and Migration to the U.S. from Latin America: The Invisible, the Unaccompanied Minors, the Undocumented Dreamers and the New Second Generation Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Department of Sociology & Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration, University of Southern California, USA This lecture will summarize and categorize the now substantial research literature on Latino immigrant children and youth, and on the children of Latino immigrants. This research has been predominantly produced in the United States and in the sending nation states of Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. This scholarship may provide points of contrast and similarities with the research agenda on children and migration in Asia. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where she also serves as Associate Director at the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Her research examines how Latino immigrants negotiate challenges with informal sector work, varied legal status, and changing gender, family and community relations. She has authored or edited nine books, and held research and writing fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation for the Humanities, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, UCSD s Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, and the Getty Research Institute. At USC, she enjoys helping undergraduate and graduate students construct their own research projects, and her teaching and mentorship have been recognized with the 2006 Mellon Excellence in Mentoring Award (for mentorship of graduate students), the 2000 General Education Teaching Award, and most recently with the 2015 Feminist Mentor Award from the Sociologists for Women in Society, in recognition of her mentorship of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows. In 2015, she received the Distinguished Career Award from the American Sociological Association, International Migration Section. She is regularly invited to lecture at other academic institutions, including universities in Latin America, Asia and Europe. 8

9 Migrant Parenting and Children s Education Incorporation: Rural-To-Urban Migrant Parents and their Migrant Children in South China Yinni Peng Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University ynpeng@hkbu.edu.hk China s rural-to-urban migration has given rise to the issue of internal migrant families. After 2000, when the Chinese government has been gradually relaxing its household-registration (hukou) control and some urban areas have offered basic social welfare to migrant workers, more and more migrant workers bring their children to their city destinations. The number of migrant children in urban China increased from million in 2000 to million in Although the left-behind children of migrant workers have attracted great attention from both the public and the academia, the issue of migration children in urban China is understudied. Nascent studies on China s migrant children focus on their institutional incorporation in urban destinations, especially their segmented incorporation in the urban education system. Although migrant children can be examined as independent research subjects, most of them are dependents of their migrant parents, who play a significant role in their migration process and have great influences on their post-migration lives. However, in the existing literature of China s migrant children, the voices of their migrant parents are unheard. Rich studies in North America and Europe have examined immigrant parenting acculturation and explored how immigrant parents understand their parenting roles in a new environment, how they overcome new challenges and develop new strengths to empower their immigrant children, and how they acculturate their children into the receiving society. Although immigrant parenting acculturation has been well examined in international migration, the focus has mainly been on the parent-child interaction, and specifically on how immigrant parents help their children to have language and cultural assimilation. Relatively less attention has been paid to how immigrant parents directly interact with the education system in the receiving society and overcome the problems or obstacles derived from structural barriers. To fill the gaps identified above, the research, drawing on qualitative data obtained from 41 migrant parents in South China, explores how migrant parents help their migrant children to be incorporated into the urban education system and how they deal with the structural obstacles in this process. Yinni Peng is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include migration, gender, family, labor politics and social media. She is the coauthor of Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China, published by the University of California Press in Her work on transnational families and migrant workers has been published in Gender & Society, The China Quarterly, Human Relations and the Journal of Family Issues. Currently, she is working a project which investigates the trans-local parenting of rural-urban migrant workers in South China. 9

10 Family Contexts and Migrant Children's Differential Access to Education and Health Services in China and India Charlotte Goodburn Lau China Institute, King s College London, UK charlotte.goodburn@kcl.ac.uk This comparative paper examines the access to education and healthcare of rural-urban migrant children aged 6-12 years in China and India. In particular, it focuses on gender-specific factors which shape differential access - including the sex of the child and the gendered division of labour within the household after migration. Based on original fieldwork in Shenzhen and Mumbai in and , this paper provides important data on migrant girls in particular. It also touches on several broader questions about gendered impacts of the institutions that structure internal migration in the two countries and how these may be changing in the light of recent reforms. Previous scholarship on China has focused heavily on unmarried women migrants, but there has been much less research on child migrants, and no attempt to distinguish migration s effects on children by gender. In the Indian context, work on the internal migration of women has been limited, while migrant children have been researched primarily in the broader context of the urban poor, overlooking the importance of their status as migrants for shaping their experiences in the cities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with migrant families, this paper finds important differences in educational outcomes and access to healthcare for girls and for boys after migration in both countries. These differences relate both to differential treatment within the family, which varies depending on household decisions about productive and reproductive work, and access to and control over household resources, and to institutional factors, such as family planning policies and the household registration system in China, and the urban labour market and public distribution system in India. Charlotte Goodburn is Lecturer in Chinese Politics and Development, and Deputy Director of the Lau China Institute, at King s College London. Before joining King's in 2012, she was a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she also did her PhD. Charlotte s research centres on rural-urban migration in both China and India, and focuses on impacts for migrant families, children, gender and household dynamics, as well as the institutional factors which shape migration processes and access to urban state services in the two countries. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in China and in India, and is currently writing a book about the long-term impacts of rural-urban migration on Chinese and Indian children. 10

11 Gender, Victimization and Psychological Health of Rural-to-Urban Migrant Adolescents in South China Nicole W.T. Cheung Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Despite a mounting pool of literature on the wellbeing of rural migrant children in urban China and the ongoing contention of the relevance of the healthy migrant hypothesis to China s phenomenal rural-to-urban migration, research looking into gender differences in migrant children s health is sparse. By comparing rural migrant and urban native adolescents in Guangzhou, the largest and migrant-receiving city in South China, this study examined gender differences in psychological health and how far such differences might be informed by victimization stressors and stress-moderation mechanisms related to the social relationships that link migrants to their host cities (local ties) and home villages (trans-local ties). Victimization, as a form of social stress, is particularly worth considering because migrant youth are at a greater risk of being victimized as revealed in the international migration literature. Participants were 482 migrant students and 838 urban native students in the eighth grade of 32 schools in Guangzhou who completed a survey in spring We found that girls were more likely to be psychologically distressed than boys, and that victimization was more strongly correlated with suboptimal psychological health in girls versus boys, across the migrant and urban native samples. Both local and trans-local ties directly enhanced psychological health and buffered the deleterious effect of victimization among migrant girls, yet the effects of these ties were far less notable in migrant boys. This result, however, was not observed in the urban native sample. Migrant girls might be more concerned with interpersonal relationships than migrant boys. The maintenance of mental wellbeing in rural migrant children warrants closer attention to gender-related victimization stress and perception of social ties as coping resources. Nicole W.T. Cheung is an Associate Professor at the Sociology Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests lie in the sociology of deviance and the sociology of youth and addiction. In recent years, Cheung has extended her research focus on substance abuse to gambling disorder. With the goal of bridging the literatures on gambling and the sociology of deviance, she has conducted two large-scale studies of adolescent gambling (with a student sample across 83 high schools) and gender disparities in gambling among married couples (with a community sample of 1,620 couples) in Hong Kong. Both studies yield significant contributions to the very limited body of gambling research in the sociology field. She also published papers on migration and adolescent victimization/health in the context of China s young rural to-urban migrants. Currently she is conducting a study on the victimization behaviors among left-behind children of rural-to-urban migrants in Hunan and Guangdong provinces, China. 11

12 Lao Village Youth, Borderland Mobilities and Family Relations Roy Huijsmans International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague, The Netherlands In this contribution I aim to make the following two points. First, I will argue the relevance of studying young people s mundane and everyday cross-border migratory mobilities for understanding the interplay between being young and becoming mobile. Second, I suggest expanding a well-being perspective that links young lives to their families with the idea of well-becoming which relates being young and growing up to the changing context in which young lives are embedded. Within the rapidly growing body of research on children and young people s migration much attention has gone out to the spectacular (i.e. independent child migrants) and the dramatic (i.e. human trafficking). This effectively reinforces the problematic agency vs. victimhood dichotomy. Young people s everyday, mundane migratory mobilities offer scope for developing a more grounded and relational understanding of young people s agency in being young and becoming mobile. For this I employ the vantage point of cross-border economies, drawing on ethnographic research with ethnic Lao youth and their families in a village on the Laotian side of the Lao-Thai border. This cross-border approach differs from a migration streams perspective as it illuminates how migration as a networked phenomenon is (re)produced generationally through everyday, multi-purpose and often mundane migratory mobilities. Young people s wellbeing and their differential involvement in migration and cross-border mobility is evidently related to their family background and contrained and negotiated by relations of interdependencies comprising the household. Yet, I argue that their work related cross-border migratory mobilities, and the new opportunities and inequalities it produces, must also be seen in connection to aspirations of well-becoming that young people pursue within unequal transborder landscapes that are characterised by an intensifying penetration of market relations. Roy Huijsmans is Senior Lecturer Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), which is located in The Hague and part of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include the generational dynamics of development, with a focus on children and young people. His work on migration by young people in the context of rural and politico-economic change in mainland Southeast Asia has been published in Childhood, Development and Change, Geoforum, the International Journal of Social Quality, and New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development. He is now moving to examine young people s virtual mobilities through a focus on the interplay between digital capitalism, young people s appropriation of mobile technologies and the reconfiguration of relations of belonging in rural Southeast Asia. Roy co-edits the Palgrave series on Children and Development. 12

13 Responsible Adults-in-the-making: Intergenerational Impact of Parental Migration on Indonesian Young Women s Aspirational Capacity Khoo Choon Yen Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore khoo.choonyen@nus.edu.sg Brenda S.A. Yeoh Asia Research Institute & Department of geography, National University of Singapore geoysa@nus.edu.sg In the developing economies in Southeast Asia, labour migration is increasingly seen not simply to earn more money in the short-term but to secure the family s future by investing in children s education. While much work has been done studying the impact of parents remittances on children s wellbeing including education access, the impact of parental migration on children s educational aspirations has received less attention. Viewing youth as social actors, this paper interrogates how they make meaning of their parents migration, and how this consequently influences their decisions to activate, delay or reshape their hopes for their own education, and work (including accessing labour migration). In the context of the feminisation of migration in Southeast Asia where gendered regimes in care and domestic work makes it easier for women to migrate overseas for work, this paper focuses attention on young women at the cusp of adulthood from a migrant-sending area in East Java, Indonesia. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted with 29 young women aged between 15 and 24 years old, we discuss the intergenerational dynamics of parental migration surrounding young women who aspire to attend university yet choose not to enrol themselves in order to migrate for work. These young women s navigational capacity (Appadurai 2004) the roadmap of norms leading to success is altered both by tangible obstacles such as the lack of sufficient resources, as well as discursive measures of selfresponsibilisation in the making of dutiful daughters. Despite parents long-term labour migration, young women shared that university education remains financially inaccessible, or could put tremendous pressure on their migrant parent(s). Fashioning themselves as responsible adults-in-the-making, young women are challenging the norms of linear education-work transitions by expressing their desire to replace their parents in accessing labour migration as a livelihood option. Khoo Choon Yen is a Research Assistant in the Asian Migration Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). At ARI, she conducts field and library research for projects commissioned under the Migrating out of Poverty Research Programme Consortium, focusing on Indonesian migrant workers. Her areas of research include labour migration, gender and migration, youth aspirations and returned migration. She received her Bachelors of Social Sciences (Hons) in Sociology from the National University of Singapore. During her undergraduate years, she worked as a research assistant in the Department of Sociology on a comparative study on children s perceptions of health, food and activity. She is currently enrolled as a part-time student in the Master of Social Sciences research programme in NUS Geography Department. Her thesis focuses on Indonesian young women s aspirations and negotiation of adulthood within Indonesia s educational context and feminised migration phenomenon. 13

14 Parenting in Diverse Cross-border Migration Contexts Tuen Yi Chiu, Jenny Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Previous studies largely examined how parental role taking of migrant parents is disrupted by long-distance geographical separation. This paper adds nuances to the literature by examining the heterogeneous parenting experiences of female marriage migrants in diverse short-distance cross-border contexts. Findings of this research revealed that, while diverse cross-border contexts presented specific challenges to the parenting of female marriage migrants, the migrant background of the marriage migrants is more protruding factor in influencing their perceived and actual parental competency. In contrast to general assumptions, our data underscored that acculturation might begin even before actual spatial immigration. When Acculturative stress interacts with parenting stress, the physical, mental, and social wellbeing of the migrant mother is tremendously hampered. Parenting stress heightened when both the migrant mother and their children experience acculturation difficulties, hinting the inter-relationship between children wellbeing and parental wellbeing. Tuen Yi Chiu is currently a PhD Candidate in Sociology at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Her research interests include gender, family, migration, violence against women, and intergenerational relations. Her PhD thesis aims to examine cross-border marriages in South China, with particular focus on the roles of gender, family and the state. Based on her undergraduate honors project on Chinese new immigrant families in Hong Kong, she was awarded third prize in the 11th National Challenge Cup Contest in Beijing in Her M.Phil. thesis on domestic violence against immigrant women was awarded the Scholarship for Sociological Studies of Family and Gender Issues, CUHK, in

15 Left-Behind Children Matters: Perspectives on and Reactions to the Everyday Ruptures of Migration in Southeast Asia Theodora Lam Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore Brenda S.A. Yeoh Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers has led to both heightened anxieties about the care deficit experienced by left-behind children and also, hopeful anticipations that this phenomenon will lead to a renegotiation of the patriarchal bargain and more egalitarian gender division of household labour and carework. While work on long-distance mothering has reinserted migrant mothers roles in building care relationships with their children and reminded us of the durability of mothering identities, what remains overlooked are the perspectives of the left-behind children themselves. Using quantitative and qualitative data collected from both left-behind carers and their young charges in the Philippines and Indonesia, this paper attempts to address this lacunae by giving attention to how left-behind children from two Southeast Asian countries understand, engage and react to the various disruptions in everyday life brought about by their parent s migration. It also examines how care relationships develop between the child and different carers through the course of migration. The paper considers the extent to which migration may have interrupted the nature of childhood for the many left-behind children in this study. Pivotal to these explorations is the attempt to highlight and understand children s agency, resilience and creativity in navigating migration matters and caregiving. Theodora Lam is a Research Associate in the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis, and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Her research interests cover transnational migration, children's geographies and gender studies. She has co-edited several special journal issues in Global Networks (with Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang) and International Migration (with Shirlena Huang and Brenda Yeoh) and published in various journals and edited books including Children s Geographies, Environment and Planning A, and Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost s Chair), Department of Geography, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also the Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, and coordinates the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis.Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely in these fields. Her latest book titles include The Cultural Politics of Talent Migration in East Asia (Routledge, 2012, with Shirlena Huang); and Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts (ISEAS press, 2012, with Lai Ah Eng and Francis Collins); Return: Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia (Duke University Press, 2013, with Xiang Biao and Mika Toyota); as well as a paperback reprint of her book Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (originally published in 1996 by Oxford University Press; reprinted by NUS Press in 2003 and 2013). 15

16 Living a Normal Family, Raising a Normal Child : Mapping Japanese-Filipinos Patterns of Care and Mobile Childhood Jocelyn O. Celero Waseda University-Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies joyous_ph@yahoo.com Migration literature theorizes migration as a strategy for attaining social mobility of migrants (Massey et.al. 1998, Arango 2004, Vertovec 2005, Levitt and Jaworsky 2007). Existing studies on Filipino migration to Japan, for instance, highlight the instrumental value of Japan migration in the lives of first-generation Filipinos (Suzuki 2000, 2005; Piquero-Ballescas 2005). Whether the second and 1.5 generation of Japanese-Filipino children s migration continues to be a tool of social mobility, or an outcome of the first generation s social mobility, can be explored through addressing issues surrounding care inequality and the tendency to view care migration as mainly towards developed societies such as Japan. Born to Japanese and Filipino parents, Japanese-Filipinos are reared in a family where transnational migration functions in their socialization and family life, an impact of feminized Filipino migration to Japan in the 1980s. Japanese-Filipinos are a generation of immigrant-citizens whose needs and well-being are at the core of care and kinship ties linking them to Japanese and Filipino parents and extended families. The current study focuses on the transnational caregiving practices to map their circuits of care and intimacy in Japan and the Philippines. It analyzes how care inequality that exists between Japan and the Philippines because of ideational and structural differences which condition care migration experiences of Japanese-Filipinos. This ethnographic research mainly utilizes data from life narratives of (70) Japanese-Filipinos who are living in Manila and Tokyo. This study identifies Japanese-Filipinos as having left-behind, transported and circulated childhoods. These mobile children have experienced caring strategies for dealing with their families simultaneous experience of inclusion and exclusion in Japan and the Philippines based on status, class, generation and citizenship. Japanese-Filipino children s movement to the Philippines is their family s strategy to cope with the socio-economic and cultural challenges. Being transported to Japan indicates an improvement in the circumstances of the family and its re-acquired capacity to sustain care. Whereas most Japanese-Filipinos have had left-behind and transported childhood, which proves utilizing migration to deal with vulnerabilities in the Japanese society, circulated childhood is an outcome of Japanese-Filipino families social mobility. A few Japanese-Filipinos grew up benefitting from the economic and cultural investments of their families. They have attained belonging to nuclear and extended kin networks, and affirmed the complimentary functions of care and family bonds in both societies. Jocelyn O. Celero is a student at the PhD program in International Studies at Waseda University-Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies. She earned her Master s Degree in Global Studies at Sophia University for her thesis on Filipino mothers transnational, bicultural, and global-local patterns of rearing Japanese-Filipino children in Japan. The paper she will present on this conference is a portion of her thesis and on-going research work on Japanese-Filipino families in Japan and the Philippines. She is a recipient of Monbukagakusho scholarship, a grant given by Japan s Ministry of Education. Prior to pursuing graduate studies in Japan, she has earned a Master s Degree in Asian Studies, major in Southeast Asia at the University of the Philippines-Asian Center in Her thesis was a comparative study on Muslim education in the Philippines and Malaysia. Her research interests include migration, ethnicity, identity, gender, and globalization. 16

17 Assemblages and Affect: Migrant Mothers and the Varieties of Absent Children Nicole Constable University of Pittsburgh, USA and Yale-NUS College, Singapore This talk asks how one s biological children, perhaps the most familial of kin, can become (un)familiar strangers through contemporary processes, technologies, and practices of migration and separation, and how, in the process of migration, conventional and unconventional sorts of families are made and unmade. Taking a twopronged approach, I explore the link between an on-the-ground ethnographic and affective approach to people with a more mid-range and distanced approach to the institutions and expert knowledge, the global assemblages, that promote and shape the practices and forms of migratory separation of biological mothers and their children. Based primarily on stories told by migrant women in Hong Kong about a spectrum of sorts of absent children, I build on studies of left-behind children, and call for more attention to the spectrum of absent children, and to queer (less normative) forms of migratory families. Nicole Constable is JY Pillay Global-Asia Professor of Social Sciences, Anthropology, at Yale-NUS College and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on migration and mobilities; the commodification of intimacy; gender, sexuality and reproductive labor. She is author of Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers and Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and Mail- Order Marriages. Her latest book, Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor, is about Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers who become mothers in Hong Kong, and the legal and personal struggles they face regarding migrant work, intimate relationships, and parenthood. 17

18 Migration, Family Contexts and Children s Well-being in China Qiaobing Wu Department of Social Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong qbwu@swk.cuhk.edu.hk Migration has long been considered a family decision to maximize the well-being of the family and the children. It is associated with multifaceted changes of a family, including the family structure, family socioeconomic status, family relationships, etc. Children, although without much involvement in the decision process, have to bear the consequences of parental migration, no matter they move with parents or stay behind. In the context of rural-urban migration in China, given that not all families migrate as a whole, it has created more complex situations in the family structure and dynamics which all contribute to the well-being of children living in these families. However, given the limitation of available data, very few researches have ever compared the wellbeing of children with various experiences of moving or being left behind, let alone examining the factors in the family sphere that might explain the differences in well-being. Using data from a large-scale multi-site study in mainland China, the current research investigates how family structure, family socioeconomic status, family social capital, and extra-familial resources in the neighborhood influence the psychological well-being of children with different experiences of parental migration. Participants of the study include 5,735 children from three metropolitan cities where most migrants concentrate, as well as three provinces where most migrants originate. According to their residential status and migration related experiences, six major types of living arrangement are identified to indicate family structure as a consequence of migration: Urban non-migrant family, urban migrant family with one parent, urban migrant family with both parents, rural non-migrant family, rural left-behind family with one parent, and rural left-behind family with neither parent. The study results contribute to the literature by revealing how children s experience of parental migration, as reflected by various types of family structure, influences their psychological well-being through the effects of family socioeconomic status, family social capital, and extra-familial resources. Qiaobing Wu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Work, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Social Work and Master of Public Health from the University of Southern California. Her primary area of research centers on the health and well-being of children and adolescents, particularly in the context of migration. Dr Wu s current research focuses on the education and psychological well-being of migrant and left-behind children in mainland China as a consequence of the large-scale rural-urban migration, healthrelated outcomes of children and youth resulting from the cross-border migration between Hong Kong and mainland China, and the resilience of migrant youth across difference countries in both the Eastern and Western contexts. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation of the United States, the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. 18

19 For the Future : Migration and Childrearing in Chinese Rural Families Xiaorong Gu Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore A @u.nus.edu.sg Children are found to be increasingly involved in China s massive waves of rural-to-urban migration in postreform era. The dominant narrative among scholarly communities, particularly research in the Chinese language, seems to portray these children in pessimistic light, who were found to be underachievers, emotionally scarred and prone to problem behaviors. This dominant narrative, however, rests on questionable methodological and theoretical foundations. Methodologically, researchers tend to study isolated groups of left-behind children or migrant children without valid reference groups, thus leading to impressionistic conclusions. Theoretically, the bulk of the literature falls under a resource-deficit paradigm, which emphasizes the lack of economic, cultural and social resources that translates to negative child outcomes. The current project moves away from such a deterministic perspective in the above-mentioned literature by rigorously interrogating both national representative survey data (China Education Panel Studies 2014, the baseline wave) and qualitative interview data of 38 rural-hukou families in Guangdong and Hunan (in my fieldwork during September 2014 to February 2015) to invite insights to both the structural constraints migrant families are confronted with and the adults and children s voices, experiences and agency. I demonstrate that negotiating migration and childrearing is a process, in which the rural families adopt a wide spectrum of migration strategies, such as parental migration, return migration, circular migration, nuclear family migration and extended family migration, to cope with institutional constraints, labor market opportunities and the family life cycles. The resultant organization of family life follows a division of labor between genders and across generations. Moreover, amidst the transitions of family living arrangements and realignment of family roles, the migrant parents and their children have forged an implicit cultural contract among themselves, in which cultural ideas of filial piety and sacrifice are reconstituted in a future-oriented project through advancing children s education. Xiaorong Gu is formerly trained in English literature with a four-year lectureship experience in Sun Yat-sen University, China. She is a half-way sociologist who shows great passions in understanding social consequences of China s economic reform through the lens of family changes. Her current research via mixed methods focuses on teenagers lives and intergenerational relationships in urban and rural families in the context of mass internal migration. A paper published in 2015 in Journal of Marriage and Family Review, is titled Left behind by Parents in China: Internal Migration and Adolescents' Well-being (co-author: Professor Jean Yeung). 19

20 A Tale of Two Migrations: Parental Migration, Family Migration, and the Wellbeing of Rural and Urban Children in China Shu Hu Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore Based on the 2010 census of China, 9.95 million middle-school-age rural children have been left behind by their migrant parents and 4.73 million have migrated with their parents. An unknown number of urban children have also been affected by China s internal labor migration. While a recently growing body of literature has been devoted to investigating the impact of parental migration on rural left-behind children s lives, not enough attention is paid to how the type of parental migration matters, or how parental migration and family migration might impact urban children differently. This paper intends to estimate the effects of parental migration and family migration on the wellbeing of both rural children and urban children. Building on the study of Xu and Xie (2015), I apply propensity score matching methods to a nationally representative sample of 7th and 9th graders from the baseline survey of China Education Panel Study (CEPS). One notable advantage of this dataset relative to other survey data is that it has a decent representation of both left-behind children and migrant children, in addition to their non-left-behind and non-migrant counterparts. The preliminary findings suggest that family migration benefits rural children in terms of educational wellbeing, but this is not the case among urban children. Not surprisingly, parental migration is found to significantly reduce the closeness of the child to the migrant parent among both rural and urban children. Moreover, while father-only migration or both-parents migration does not seem to matter, mother-only migration has negative effects on the educational wellbeing of rural children. Among urban children, however, only both-parents migration is negatively related to cognitive performance. These findings highlight the need to differentiate the type of parental migration and the broader socioeconomic context of parental migration, family migration, and child development. Shu Hu is a postdoctoral research fellow with the changing family in Asia research cluster at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She obtained her Ph.D. in sociology from National University of Singapore. Her doctoral dissertation examined the impact of parental migration on adolescent s transition from middle school to high school in rural China. Her other research interests include educational stratification, gender inequality, family, and marriage. 20

21 Double Not in Hong Kong: Children in Family at the Forefront of Migration Strategy and Discontent Susanne Choi Department of Sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong Past migration study and discourses have often taken an adult-centric perspective, marginalizing and undertheorizing children s voices and roles in migration processes. This approach overlooks children s increasing visibility and centrality in family migration decision and adaptation outcomes. Using the example of the so-called double not - mainland Chinese children who obtained Hong Kong citizenship because their mother had crossed the border to give birth to them this paper investigates the tension between children s agency, family strategy, and societal exclusionary discourse against migrants. It examines how children s future and wellbeing have featured centrally in mainland Chinese migrant families migration decision, and constituted a crucial part of their migration strategy. It also examines how the lives of children have been affected by being the only legal migrant of their family, and having to cope with a stigmatized identity as a secondary citizen. Susanne Choi Yuk Ping (D.Phil. in Sociology, Nuffield College, University of Oxford), is Professor at the Department of Sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She was a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University in Her current research interests include migration, gender, family, sexuality, and service work. She has written extensively on issues such as migrant labour, cross-border marriages, spousal violence, health issues and violence against female sex workers, and domestic division of labour in Chinese societies. Her book Masculine Compromise ( co-authored with Peng Yinni and published by University of California Press) explores how men's rural to urban migration shapes gender and family dynamics in post-socialist China. In addition to her research, as a leading expert on gender and family issues in Chinese societies, Susanne has given interviews to local and international media including Mingpao, South China Morning Post, RTHK Radio, China News Service, China Radio International, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the BBC. She has served as an appointed member of the HKSAR Equal Opportunities Commission since