The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration: A Study of Pre-1949 Chinese Immigrants in Thailand

Transnational immigration from China to Southeast Asia began centuries ago. Before the mid-nineteenth century, almost all immigrants were male Chinese merchants, their partners and employees who sojourned at overseas ports and cities, or miners and other workers organised as kongsi (ritual brotherhoods) to protect their industrial and business interests. (1) During that time, local Chinese lineage councils did not allow wives to leave the village for fear of losing the entire family. (2) Families often engineered marriages before men migrated abroad, relying upon pre-existing marital configurations such as 'arranged marriage' ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or the 'little daughter-in-law' (tongyangxi [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] as strategies to 'fasten the heart' [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of an immigrant son to his home in China. Such marriages recruited a new household labourer, the daughter-in-law, and ensured the family a more generous remittance fro m the overseas son. This gendered division of labour -- the son would accumulate capital abroad while the daughter-in-law took care of the family in China -- was calculated and arranged across national borders. But as restrictions preventing women's immigration eased, these same marital configurations produced unforeseen outcomes. Rather than pulling overseas husbands back to China as the senior kin had planned, by the beginning of the twentieth century many 'widows of living ones' ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) used their conjugal connection to migrate abroad. Newly acquired mobility increased a woman's capacity to circumvent family discipline, establish her own nuclear family and avoid being so closely monitored by her in-laws. However, this did not mean that these women challenged the patrilineal and patriarchal family structure. On the contrary, they often worked to reproduce an upwardly mobile patriarchal family, using their son(s) as players within patriarchal power relationships. Unlike the immigrant women, the men did not have to use their conjugal bond as an excuse to gain transnational mobility. Rather, they were encouraged to fulfil their breadwinner role, even to the point of risking their lives to accumulate economic capital for the family. The size of an immigrant man's remittance was often the measure of his moral and economic worth to his patriarchal kin. In addition to financial assistance, remittances served as a symbol of masculinity and a means of securing one's integration into the patrilineal family and kin network by sharing rewards. At the same time, as they accumulated more wealth, some immigrants created new marital configurations, for example, transnational polygyny or [CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] which literally means 'a family on both ends'. This article contends that immigration and marriage are best conceived of as interlocking analytical domains that are part of a dynamic transnational process involving individuals, families and socio-(bio)political structures in Thailand and China. We cannot understand Chinese immigration without carefully considering marriage as well. More important, gender-specific immigration patterns and male sexual privilege reveal the effects of the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity, which inscribes gender-specific 'worth' to citizens. Leo Suryadinata has noted that the existing literature on ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia tends to emphasise the political but neglect the cultural aspects of life for those in the diaspora. Building upon his insight, it can be further argued that the existing literature writes women out of the diasporic encounter and gender out of identity formation. (3) We know little about diasporic Chinese women except in the context of kinship or interethnic marriage. The latter has long been treated as a mechanism of assimilation, the Chinese 'minority' seen as being absorbed into the dominant 'majority' through intermarriage. …