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Taiwanese American Transnational Families: Women and Kin Work. Maria W. L. Chee. New York: Routledge, 2005. 272 pp.
This timely book examines non-working class transnational families. While the existing literature has primarily focused on working-class transnational families (p. 9), Maria Chee writes about affluent Taiwanese transnational families in southern California and pays special attention to women who did not migrate to the U.S. for reasons of economic survival. Drawing on five generations of her own transnational family history, Chee narrates compelling personal stories about how her family split, united, and spread out across different parts of the world, which serves to highlight her theoretical position regarding transnational migration informed by a global political economy.
A transnational family here is conceived of as a "split household," typified by an arrangement by which the wife lives with the children in the United States and the husband lives alone in Taiwan, with a few exceptions. Transnational migration practices, as the book conveys, are shaped by classed social networks. The 35 women and 12 men who participated in this project shared kinship networks as a large number of them were sponsored by their siblings in the United States. This...