A Family Affair: Migration, Dispersal, and the Emergent Identity of the Chinese Cosmopolitan

Abstract

This essay puts forward two main claims. First, it argues that dispersing the patrilineal Chinese family is, paradoxically, often a rational family decision to preserve the family, a resourceful and resilient way of strengthening it: families split in order to be together translocally. The “astronaut families” of Hong Kong are a model of such dispersion for our time. Second, the essay argues that these spatially dispersed families constitute strategic nodes and linkages of an ever-expanding transnational field within which a new type of Chinese identity is emerging—that of the Chinese cosmopolitan.