UI Press | Janet W. Salaff, Siu-lun Wong, and Arent Greve | Hong Kong Movers and Stayers: Narratives of Family Migration

Hong Kong Movers and Stayers

Narratives of Family Migration

An intimate account of what migration means to Hong Kong families

Half a million Hong Kong residents fled their homeland during the thirteen years before Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997--and nearly half of those returned within several years of leaving. Filled with detailed, first-hand stories of nine Hong Kong families over nearly two decades, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers is an exhaustive and intimate look at the forces behind Hong Kong families' successful and failed efforts at migration and settlement.

This multi-faceted study was begun in 1991, when migration was attributed primarily to the political anxieties of the time and the notion that Hong Kong residents were seeking a better life in the West. Defining migration as a process, not a single act of leaving, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers provides an antidote to ethnocentric and simplistic theories by uncovering migration stories as they relate to social structures and social capital.

With an approach that melds survey analysis, personal biography, and sociology, Hong Kong Movers and Stayers provides a depth of understanding by comparing multiple families and gives voice to the interplay of diverse family roles, gender, and age as motivating factors in migration.

"There is no other study like this in the China migration literature, nor in the literature on emigration from Hong Kong. The thoroughness of this longitudinal research provides a highly nuanced account of how changes in family life over a period of fifteen years have affected motivations and outcomes for migration."--Nicole Newendorp, author of Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong

Janet W. Salaff was a professor emerita of sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family? Siu-lun Wong is a professor of sociology and director of the Centre for Asian Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Arent Greve is a professor of organization theory at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration in Bergen, Norway.