Southeast Asia. China's left-behind wives: Families of migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s–1950s . By Huifen Shen, with a foreword by Wang Gungwu. Singapore: NUS Press and Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Pp. 259. Map, Tables, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

China's left-behind wives: Families of migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s-1950s By HUIFEN SHEN, with a foreword by WANG GUNGWU Singapore: NUS Press and Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Pp. 259. Map, Tables, Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000672 With China's left-behind wives: Families of migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s-1950s, Huifen Shen introduces a long-overlooked gendered perspective to the history of Chinese overseas migration by focusing on fankeshen, the wives left behind in China when their husbands travelled to Southeast Asia. With this perspective, Shen writes against a long history of male scholarship on the subject. Shen points out that prevailing scholarship has emphasised the utilitarian function of these transnational split-families, in which the division of labour was between a male breadwinner abroad, without whose sacrifice through migration the family would not have the economic means to survive, and a female at home in China whose main responsibilities included taking care of the family and keeping track of household finances. Over long years of separation, many emigrant husbands established dual married lives by taking a second wife abroad. Shen notes that the established view has explained these second marriages as easily accepted by the wives left behind in China, as fankeshen understood that having a second family abroad served their husbands' social and economic needs. Shen intervenes against these prevailing views. Drawing on oral history interviews with elderly fankeshen and on rich archival data (including letters sent between wives and their husbands abroad), Shen's historical account is both familiar and starkly different from previous works on the subject. Common themes, such as decades of separation between husbands and wives, have to be reevaluated as Shen describes these migrant marriages taking place during a historical period in which young Chinese women were becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities of companionate marriage. Despite this growing social awareness, Shen documents how many brides were pressured against their wishes to marry emigrants--with whom they often had only a few weeks' cohabitation throughout their lives. Shen's data, which includes narrative accounts from her interviews that are interspersed throughout the text, highlight the tensions that resulted as fankeshen found they had little power in a system stacked against them. Their marriages benefited the Chinese state--through the inflow of remittances from abroad--and also the families of male emigrants through continuation of the family line, care-giving for aged parents, and maintenance of family land and homes in China. Moreover, the financial and social capital accrued by migrants' families made them a model for social emulation; recognition by the Chinese state further led to preferential treatment for these families on a national level. …