“Paradise Redefined: Chinese Students, Transnational Migration, and the Quest for Citizenship in the Developed World”
Speaker: Vanessa Fong (Graduate School of Education, Harvard University)
Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 4-5:30 p.m.
Location: GSLIS 126 (501. E. Daniel St., Champaign, IL)
This event is sponsored by the initiative “The Internationalization of U of I Undergraduates: Conceptualizing a Transforming University” and the IPRH Collaborative Research Project.
This talk examines how young Chinese citizens perceived China and the developed world before, during, and after they studied abroad. Between 1997 and 2010, Vanessa Fong followed youth she first met at socioeconomically and academically average schools in Dalian, China to the developed countries where they attended language schools and college while working long hours at mostly low-wage jobs. Among 1,365 youth she first surveyed in Dalian in 1999 and then re-surveyed in 2008-2010, 20 percent ended up studying in Australia, Europe, Japan, North America, New Zealand, Singapore, or South Korea by 2010. Most were the first in their families to leave China. Born under China’s one-child policy into an era of globalization and neoliberalization, these youth were raised with heavily concentrated parental investment and extremely high expectations. Many who failed to get satisfactory education and careers in China saw study abroad as an alternative path to the elite status they were raised to expect. Study abroad became possible even for children of poor factory workers, due to the rapid increase in urban Chinese families’ incomes and home values and the willingness of parents, and in some cases aunts, uncles, and grandparents, to gamble their life savings on study abroad for their families’ only children, who felt obligated to stay abroad until they achieved enough to make their families’ sacrifices worthwhile, but also to eventually return to China to care for their parents in their old age. Fong draws on interviews, participant observation, and surveys to paint vivid portraits of transnational Chinese students’ journeys to the developed world. Paradise Redefined tells the story of how and why they chose to study abroad, won and lost various kinds of freedom abroad, decided to stay abroad or return to China, and came to redefine what they considered “paradise” and where they could find it.
Vanessa Fong is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Her book, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (2004), won the Francis Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology. She has published in a variety of journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, China Quarterly, City and Society, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, and Ethos. She is a recipient of a five-year National Science Foundation Career Award.
Co-sponsored by Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, East Asian and Pacific Studies, Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, Geography, Human and Community Development, Institute of Communications Research, Linguistics, SLATE, Media and Cinema Studies, and Writing Studies.
For more information about this event, please contact Tzu-kai Liu <tliu4@illinois.edu> or Lucinda Morgan <lmorgan4@illinois.edu>. |
