 I appreciate the screen. OK, so welcome everyone to today's SOA Centre of Taiwan Studies seminar. Today the seminar will be the book launch of women migrants in South China and Taiwan. And today's talk is the first of four talks that we're running this week. We've got this online talk. Tomorrow we have two in-person talks and we have another one on Friday. In fact, we've got two speakers from Canada this week because we have a speaker from University of Toronto on Friday. But I'll give you the details of those talks at the end of today's session. So today we're delighted to welcome Dr Beatrice Zani, who's giving her first ever SOAS talk. We always kind of, in these kind of situations, we want to apologize for taking so long to bring Beatrice to SOAS. Beatrice is currently a postdoc at McGill University in Montreal at the Department of East Asian Studies. And before that she did her PhD in Lyon. And she also had a research associate position at University of Tübingen's European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan. So in fact, I think it was about last April or May, our roles were reversed. And Beatrice was hosting my book talk at Tübingen. So it's really nice to kind of change things around. Before we started, my colleague said about how nice it was to actually invite Beatrice. And it's also really nice in terms of the timing of this week's talk. Because in my North East Asia politics class, we're actually looking at migration in East Asia next week. So it's a great way for us to kind of get into the mood of next week's discussions. Beatrice, even though she is still quite a junior scholar as a postdoc, but she has a really impressive CV with this new book, The Jewel in the Crown of this CV. She's also been very active in the field of international Taiwan studies. For example, she's an IT board member, as well as her previous role at Tübingen's Taiwan Centre. And the other thing that I have to mention is that we do have Beatrice's book at the SOAS Library. We've got the e-book. So if you enjoy today's talk, and there's things that you want to learn more, please go ahead, for those of you that are SOAS students, and take out the e-book. And if you're not SOAS students, just make sure that your own university library has a copy as well. Beatrice is going to talk for about 40, 45 minutes, and then we'll have lots of time for discussion. And my colleague will make an announcement once the chat is open to you can either type questions or if you, in the Q&A, if you raise your hand using the hand raise function, you should be able to directly ask your questions. Okay, so welcome Beatrice to SOAS and we look forward to hearing more about your research. Over to you. Thank you very much, David, for inviting me, for arranging this book launch for this lovely presentation. And yes, it's fun to see that we inverted our roles and last year you were connected with Tübingen and this year I'm connected with SOAS. So thank you very much. I feel very grateful. I'm very happy to be with you all to give you a little, you know, overview and presentation on my book. I hope you will enjoy this. So Women, Migrants in Southern China and in Taiwan, Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions. To start with, actually, this book is taken from my PhD dissertation. It was kind of, you know, an ordeal to turn my dissertation into a book. I also asked, I remember the feedback of that. I bothered many people. So I'm really grateful that I got some kind of advice and support in this, yes, in this process, which is far from being easy, but it's also very, it's also very challenging. So to get you into my book, actually, this book is the story of the journey of an orange fluorescent bra that you can see here. And actually it's very interesting because this is a Made in China bra, a bra which is made in a Chinese, a Southern Chinese textile factory by the little hands of the factory of the word female migrant workers in China who moved from the countryside to the city to sell their labor inside the urban apparatus. But later, this bra will change a little bit its biography and its social life because from China, from Southern China, it will take new roads and it will travel together with its producers, those migrant women, to Taiwan. It will arrive in Taiwan and, you know, from a plastic and silicon made artifact, it will become a real commodity, an emotional commodity showing the processes of empowerment and of agency that those women can put into practice to cope with the situations of vulnerability and discrimination that they do face during migration, both in internal China from the countryside to the city and from China to Taiwan during this re-migratory process. And eventually at the very end, this bra will move back to China together with some women who after migrating to Taiwan through marriage, settling down, living there for a few years, will divorce and re-migrate back to China and they will bring the bra back with them. So I think you got it. We are talking about an orange fluorescent bra, but we are talking about migration. We are talking about migrant women and their complex and I would say bifurcated migratory paths, which are constructed along three steps, right? So from the countryside to the city in China, from China to Taiwan and eventually from Taiwan back to China. The origin of the story of this bra and the interest actually in these migratory processes comes from my long-term curiosity and perhaps intellectual interest for migration specifically in China and later from China to Taiwan. When I was a bachelor student at the Institute of Political Studies of Lyon, I got the chance actually to spend an entire year abroad at the University of Nanjing, 2013. And I was actually sharing a little apartment close to university with two Chinese flatmates, were not students at all. They were migrant women who moved from the rural province of Anhui to Nanjing and they were working as nurses in the hospital. However, they came from the countryside and especially with one of them, we really became very close. We developed strong ties of friendship, right? And she brought me back to her countryside, to her village of origin. She introduced me to her grandparents, to her family members. She also brought me to the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang province where a brother and her sister had settled and were working in the local factories. So I started to get very interested in those rural to urban labor migration stories in China of the so-called non-mingong, the migrant workers. That was in 2013. And then totally by chance in 2015, I got a grant by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan and I traveled to Taipei. I arrived in Taipei, you know, that time I didn't know much about China and Taiwan. I arrived to Taiwan and I was like, well, what am I going to do here for a couple of months? It was a research and professional training program in Taiwan for foreigners. So my master actually supervisor by that time told me, well, you are working on migrant women in China. You could look for some migrant working women in Taiwan. So I arrived in Taipei and very naively, you know, I started working around and asking people, first of all, my landlord in Taipei, I was living in. Sorry, where can I find some Chinese factory girls here? People were looking at me like, are you mad? What's wrong with you? You did not quite understand how things go on. I was like, okay, well, what's the point? What's the problem? Why there are no Chinese factory girls? Because actually what I assumed actually was absolutely wrong. Women cannot smoothly migrate from China to Taiwan as they would do from the countryside to the city. They have to go through a little very important process, a contract, which is marriage, which is the only legal condition for those Chinese migrant women to settle to enter the Taiwanese territory and to settle down there. So I did not quite think about this marital tie necessary for migration. And then from that point on, I just got a very different view on this mobility process from China to Taiwan. And I could, you know, build up new research hypothesis on which I later developed my PhD research. So from that moment on, I started looking for marriage migrants who were coming from Taiwan and not from for factory girls anymore. And July 2015, very hot July, I was sweating. I remember it was like 40 degrees in Taipei. I think you know the feeling. 200% humidity. I was walking around. I don't know why I ended up there. I was in Nanxuziao in the suburbs of Taipei. I was walking around looking for a place to cool off. Nothing. Desert. And then I saw a sort of lingerie shop, which was very colorful. There were a lot of bras and underwear showed in the shop's window. So I decided to enter thinking that there would be DAC there. And then I was looking for a place to cool off. And then I entered this shop, which was absolutely messy. All the bras and the underwear were on the floor. It was absolutely empty of clients. And I was inside alone trying to, you know, cool off. And I heard someone speaking with a very strong Sichuanese accent. And this person was Fujin, the owner of the shop, a Chinese migrant woman who came from Sichuan and was living and working in Taipei and who indeed got married with the Taiwanese national to settle down there. And I saw Fujin approaching and, you know, she was not talking to me. She was talking to her phone. She was sending some vocal messages to her phone. So I interrupted her. I said, hello. We started, you know, she greeted me. We started talking. And she shared with me her story. So actually she came from China. She came from the countryside. She had been working in, in Shenzhen and in Guangzhou, in Canton, in southern China, in Guangdong province. She worked as a factory girl. And it was there that she met the Taiwanese men who would become her husband and later remigrated to Taiwan. And in Taiwan, after a few years where she was at home taking care of her children, taking care of her parents in law, taking care of her husband and of the, you know, housewife, she decided to become an entrepreneur and to invest some money to open a lingerie shop and to import some broth and underwear from China. So this is the, this is the beginning of, this is the beginning of the story, the orange bra owned by Fujin and sold by Fujin. So I don't want to tell you too much about this book. I still hope that you will, you will read it at some point. If I had to briefly describe the structure of my book, I should say that, well, it is organized around the, around the story, the life, the biography, the social life of this orange fluorescent bra and this social life, object social life is a good chance for me to discuss about, well, the biographical, the migratory, the professional, the familiar experiences of the women who produced and later recommercialized this bra during their migratory processes. What you will discover in this book is that behind the bra are hidden broader processes of migration and mobility, but also the emotional fabrics of migration, mobility and entrepreneurship and the way migration, emotion and women's experiences are constructed through and across the digital platforms. This book tracks and follows the bra to narrate actually those Chinese women, three-step mobility, rural to urban labor migration in China, marriage remigration to Taiwan and then eventual post-reverse remigration to China and that it shows how labor, marriage and migration cannot be really separated into, you know, different phenomena, but those are highly interconnected and implicated through women's ambitions and aspirations and processes of biographical, migratory, professional and familiar transformation. This book follows women's free migratory paths and it is therefore organized around three parts. Part one on the move, which deals with rural to urban labor migration, part two connected nets, which deals with women marriage migration from China to Taiwan and part three in between us, which looks at women's third, women's third step of mobility, so from Taiwan back to China. And it is organized around, I wrote eight, I have no idea why, but nine chapters, so three chapters per part, which follow, as I said, women's migratory biographies and the commercial geographies of the objects that they do produce and later commercialize. Methodologically speaking, I follow the bride, follow the women, I developed a kind of itinerant ethnography, what I call the itinerant ethnography, which includes indeed 17 months of multi-sided ethnographic work, both in China and in Taiwan, that I carried out when I was a young and inexperienced PhD student between 2016 and 2018. So I was in Taiwan and I re-traveled back to China. I did not immediately move to the cities, the factories where the bra was manufactured were implanted, but I actually traveled beforehand to the rural areas of Anhui, of Sichuan and of Guangdong provinces, Chinese migrant women come from. And later I moved to the big coastal cities of Zhongshan, of Dongguan, of Senzhen, and partially also of Canton, where these women migrate too from the countryside and where they spend a few years actually before marrying and remigrating to Taiwan, by working in the factories and living in the local dorms. And later I re-followed women from China to Taiwan, so I spent almost eight months in Taiwan between Taipei, who calls into Zhu Dong and Zhu Bei. I was by that time a junior visiting fellow at the Academia Seneca, the Institute of Sociology, and that was also very helpful because I was based in Taipei and I could smoothly travel around to spend time with my informants actually. I was carrying out observation, participant observations of women's daily life and familial life. I was babysitting their children, I was cooking with them, I was spending time both individually and collectively with them and their social networks of friends and of Chinese fellow migrants, but I was also helping them during their entrepreneurial activities, whether in the physical reality on or online. To open and to negotiate my field sites, I've actually been teaching English at the second floor of this lingerie shop in Nanxia Jiao, with Fujin we made an agreement since I was looking for Chinese marriage migrants, said I can give you something, I can teach you some English every Tuesday afternoon, actually evening, and so we arranged the second floor of the shop which I will show you some pictures later, which became kind of a little English teaching room and we were spending time together. And then in 2017 I moved back to France, but I kept in touch with my informants and in 2018 I had the chance to re-follow some women back to China after their new migratory experience, post-divorce remigration back to China. So from Europe I re-traveled to Guangdong province where about 30 of my informants had been re-migrated to and settled down in and I was living with Meili and Tialin in their apartment in in Shenzhen actually and I could you know carry out some more interviews and some more observation with some divorced women living in China. And afterwards always in 2018 I re-followed Meili to Taiwan during their journey to visit her child and to visit her friends in Taipei and so I was also following women during their back and forth movements between China and Taiwan which are part of the actually the making of cosmopolitan transnational lives and experiences of in-betweenness between the two countries, between the two territories at least. Beyond this itinerant ethnography which also included I think I did not mention this part of virtual ethnographic work I carried out inside the WeChat groups, the groups of this WeChat application which is a Chinese online application very similar to our WhatsApp or to the Taiwanese line rights. I was part of women's chat groups I think I also do have some pictures to show to you and I was observing actually the way they were performing actually online commerce and e-entrepreneurship within the virtual the virtual world. So itinerant was not only multi-sided amongst multiple places and temporalities but also itinerant switching between online and offline sites for interaction, sociality, practice and indeed economic economic and commercial activities. The last point I would like to develop here in terms of methodological choices and approach was the way I used affections and emotions not only as a tool for my analysis of well the social phenomenon I was observing and trying to understand but also as part of my methodological method. I was a Western kind of white privileged woman a student by that time on East Asian field sites and I kind of came to terms with the fact that I was working with a vulnerable population of migrant workers in China of marriage migrants in Taiwan who also have to cope with well situations of discrimination of social contempt of familiar disqualification and economic marginalization in Taiwan and that's well the experiences I was looking at and the interactions I was having with my informants had a very strong emotional and affectional dimension. So I decided to be affected by affections and to use affections as part of my methodological tools and I understood that this sort of affectional proximity and emotional closeness that I developed with my informants with the women I was working and spending time on the daily basis with could become actually a resource for the construction or perhaps the co-construction together with those women of social sociological knowledge itself. The fact of being affected the fact of using affections, emotions, feelings, sentiments as part of my methodology helped me to kind of overstep the separation between the research subject well me and the research object Chinese marriage migrant women. It was fun actually almost entertaining to see that when I was in Taiwan and I was when I was interacting with Fujin for the very first time you know it was it was the first time I was in Taiwan and well the accent from China and the Taiwanese accents are actually quite different by that time I had been living in Nanjing I had been living in Anhui province my Chinese was you know kind of characterized by a very strong mainland China accent. I was talking like that that is what people were making fun of me but this mainland Chinese accent also became a kind of vector of mutual understanding with those women who helped me to gain actually this proximity and I understood that well as a sociologist as a social scientist as a researcher I was actually performing multiple roles on my field side I was a friend I was a confident I was an attentive listener I was a DMA I was a sister for them but sometimes I was also a weird bizarre alien coming from an undefined western country them in the countryside and it was you know this sort of overlap between multiple roles that was helping me to construct a more realistic and pragmatic knowledge. Yes I have a few pictures here from taken in Anhui province so one of the provinces the rural provinces those women came from you can see here well pictures of rural daily life we have a few pictures of the factories those women were actually employed before moving to moving to Taiwan so you can see what a factory at least from the outside looks like on the right side you can see the dorms you know with the with the clothes hanged outside some workers who are actually Duanlian senti they are playing some sport at 6.30 in the morning before starting the factory the factory work and then you have the workers queuing to enter to enter the the factory actually we are in Zhongshan in Guangdong province and you can also see the sign which welcomes the workers I think you can translate it by yourself this sort of honor working respect at life and great happiness around the assembly line of of the factory you can see inside a few Chinese factory girls inside this textile factory the bra comes from assembling pieces of plastic silicon cotton to well to manufacture the famous made in China made in China clothes and then you have some bras on the floor of land of Fujian's lingerie shop this is the English class I was teaching at the second floor and this the first one is actually a picture we took when Meili and Dai re-traveled back to to Taipei in 2018 Fujian closed the shop that day as she organized the kind of little reunion party amongst the sisters who were attending my English class the year before to welcome Meili and to welcome well partially also me back so we were gathering together after not seeing each other for for a year so this is just a quick overview of what I was I was doing there and before giving you a quick overview on the chapters the main ideas of this book are perhaps five as I was saying that before very quickly I criticized I moved beyond the traditional dichotomy we find in scholarship and literature between labor and marriage migration I show how labor and marriage overlap and intervene across women's migratory experiences but also throughout their ambitions and aspirations and the way they try to construct upward social economic and moral mobility all along their well kind of complicated and complex migratory migratory paths women develop transnational mobilities which are constructed within a sort of aspirational infrastructure they will leave China they will leave the factory not only seeking you know upward social mobility but they will seek modernity they will seek consumerism they will seek urbanity they will come to Taiwan eventually they will find this or not and in case they do not well feel happy and satisfied with the modern cosmopolitan consumerist urban frame of life and work they will divorce and re migrate back to China migratory paths whether in China in Taiwan or in between are constructed by women oscillating between civil eternity vulnerability right and strategies of contestation of resistance against vulnerability precarity and social and social content so I look at actually you know the the strategies and the practices those women put into practice both individually and collectively to cope with vulnerability and precarity and I do specifically focus on the economic dimension of precarity and so I look at their entrepreneurial and commercial strategies another major idea I try to develop in this book is the link between migration and the motion and the way to do mutually inform and construct each other migratory paths are constructed through emotional experiences support the making of new positive and negative emotions positive and negative emotions which are constructed at experiences competencies and resources not only within the physical reality but also inside digital platforms and online words which is also a major contribution of this of this work as I said to show the link between migration emotions and digital words by looking at this case study of Chinese migrants in China and in Taiwan and all in all I think that this book gave me the chance to discuss about the new shapes of globalization at least the new you know digital commercial and emotional geographies of globalization which emerge from women's transnational experiences of movement between China and Taiwan and transnational digital entrepreneurial practices between the two between the two countries right so as I said this book is organized around three parts part one on the move in chapter one I look at the the way actually this orange fluorescent bra comes to life but I look at this before it's actually you know material fabrics I look at the emotional fabrics of this bra this bra is made of imagination aspiration and ambitions which emerge very quickly since the childhood and the teenage food experiences of this rural girls in the countryside so I dig into their experiences of rural life and also the social gendered and moral constraints that they do face in the rural communities they come from and they grew up in I quickly draw a genealogy of the rural to urban migration in China by showing how the third generation the young generation of migrant workers and specifically women and migratory experiences from the countryside to the city are constructed not only seeking professional opportunity and economic mobility but especially seeking modernity consumerism and urbanity so those are the major features which characterize women's rural to urban migration today they do not want to get they do not necessarily want to earn money as their parents or their grandparents could have done you know in the in the 80s or in the 90s they want to become a modern urban and consumerist women in the city so they take the road and they move to the large coastal cities by by hoping actually to fulfill such such dream in chapter two I look at the not only the emotional but the material fabrics of this orange bra so I try to dig again there is a mistake I think I was I was sleepy when I prepared my PowerPoint the geographies of migration and the globalized labor regimes in southern China I look at those the way those women arrive to the city which is constructed as a promised land where they can fulfill those urban and modern ambitions I also show how they however face processes of discrimination and marginalization inside the factory and inside the Chinese city and the art ship and and and and yes the the very tiring dimension of the labor regime inside inside the factory where they are employed and where they actually materially manufacture the bra I however also look at the role of gendered social networks to produce solidarity which help women to kind of cope with this you know daily experiences of discrimination in in the factory in chapter three should I stay or should I go I look at the ways the bra takes the road and moves to Taiwan after staying in the city for a longer or shorter time these women come to terms with the fact that well these upward social mobility urban aspiration and modernity are kind of unachievable in China at the same time they face very strong injunction to marriage their parents are calling them saying okay now you are old enough you have to come back to the countryside and you have to get married but they do not want to they won't become modern and they want to achieve this European status I also so that show that very differently from the previous generation rich migrants from China to Taiwan the way they meet their future Taiwanese husbands and they you know arrange their marriage are very different from the from the different generation it's not more it's no more a matter of brokerage is no more a matter of matchmaking made by the families but you know those women work in global factories inside the Chinese global cities where most of the factories they are employed in are owned by the so-called the tai san or where the tai gan are employed we are talking about Taiwanese managers or Taiwanese ice-killed workers who are living and working in China within those delocalized multinational Taiwanese factories which become sites of new transnational encounters between these Chinese factory girls and these Taiwanese managers or ice-killed workers and it is there that well Taiwan is perhaps foreseen as a new land for for departure so women take the road and move to Taiwan and the bra indeed packed inside a sweetcase moves together with them so part two connectedness and the bra finally arrives in in Taiwan and in chapter four women settle down in the new taiwanese land of arrival however they feel trapped in migration why well because you do understand that well nothing new in my research here I draw on previous scholarship to show how restrictive actually the migratory and marital regime which frames women's movement from China to Taiwan is it is a gendered and kind of restrictive mobility regime where marriage is the necessary condition to legally enter and settle down in Taiwan and which brings about a new role performance women are no no more workers women are not on the migrants women are first of all spouses wife and the fact of being wives brings about well new responsibilities and new roles they are daughters in law they are mothers and they have to take care of their family you know providing a sort of reproductive labor which frames and constraints their daily life inside the walls of their houses and of their family at the very same time until 2009 those chinese migrant wives could not work they could not illegally work during the first years of their of their during their first years the two first years in in taiwan in from 2009 on after the reform they will be able to work as soon as they arrive in taiwan however i would say that nowadays the strongest constraint that those women facing taiwan is related to situations of marginalization in the job market what even when they go and look for a job they often are refused unemployment because they are chinese because they are lowly qualified because they are not provided with good you know professional skills and credentials because they have a strong accent and because of this standoff and political antagonism between china and taiwan which i don't think would be arranged very soon given the ongoing situation they face situations of social content and when these people look down on them and in chapter five so i try to look a little bit at the biographical transformations of the bra to to dig into the strategies the first strategies and and the solidarity practices that those women put into practice to cope with this marginalization in the job market and broad social content they face in taiwan so i show how their culture of migration associated to a culture of solidarity that they learned in the chinese factory beforehand when they were young factory girls is kind of re-actualized as a resource and as a competency once they are in taiwan so the way they develop gender social ties and new solidarity practices which are constructed and performed not only inside the physical words but also and specifically inside the virtual reality throughout this we chat and we chat groups i show that from solidarity and and proximity women develop online emotional communities of chinese fellow migrants who address each others in terms of sisters because they do share a similar is related to well their origin their gender their similar migratory but also marital experience right and those sort of you know daily practices of mutual help support proximity and closeness become tools to cope with vulnerability vulnerability in chapter six i look at the ways those tools for to cope with vulnerability performed online help women not only to develop practices of social solidarity but also to cope with the marginalization in the job market and specifically the economic precarities right so i look at the way the price re-commercialized inside this digital platforms through the new practices of online electronic and emotional commerce and entrepreneurship that those women those women produce and perform i show that the objects that they do commercialize through processes of import and experts between china and taiwan from china to taiwan from taiwan to china and between the two countries are actually cross the commodities that they do trade actually and they do sell through which at and online have our emotional commodities they have a very strong emotional dimension which helps women to call upon their social networks based both in china and in taiwan to develop new clients and commercial partners to succeed in succeeding their business i also saw how those emotional commodities right the bra chicken feet milk powder infant formula dry meat such one is pepper are not only emotional commodities but they are also contested commodities which in some cases transgress important export restrictions and vans between china and taiwan and therefore they do transgress borders while online and more or less invisibly moving between the two countries and from this i try to to draw actually a broader landscape to show how uh those emotional and online commercial practices produced by women draw the contours of a new form of emotional petty or petite capitalism produced and performed across new transnational spaces china and taiwan which illuminates actually on the multiple digital emotional and commercial shapes that globalization can take today produced and performed by migrants as actors their emotional and economic activities which build bridges between the places the spaces and the people they cross during their migration so i will be quick part three in between us the bra remigrates to china in chapter seven i i show how metaphorically the bra becomes unaffordable in taiwan and so it remigrates to china together with women if women are not successful in their business is women still feel frustrated disappointed disillusioned by the situations of discrimination vulnerability and precarity in taiwan after a few years they can decide to divorce and remigrate back to china their society of origin very interestingly um women as soon you understood that marriage and migration are linked together so indeed if marriage is the only condition for women to legally enter and settle down in taiwan as soon as the marital tide vanishes they are deported and they should leave the country and go back to china right however most of the informants i found we are talking about 30 women i could interview divorced and remigrated back to china after becoming taiwanese so after they obtained taiwanese citizenship they decided to divorce and move back why well because they are aware of the um of the difficulties to settle down to find a job of the structure of inequalities in china and they want to some extent to take advantages of the benefits this tai baozang so this taiwanese citizenship can bring about for taiwanese people in in china so they initially moved back to the their countryside of origin they seek the support of their families and friends there but they quickly come to terms with the fact that the countryside they do not belong anymore to rural areas and so they removed back to the cities they had been previously living and working in our teenage time as factory as factory girls so the bra refollows women to the city and it would be resold actually in most cases to the city so they resettled down in one in guandong province mostly in senzhen in dongguan in guanzhou i was living with two of them in senzhen for three months actually and they well they they they will be taiwanese they will have acquired this taiwanese citizenship they will not go back to the factory they had been working beforehand they know how to become entrepreneurs they know how to make business themselves and they will do this in the city so they will take advantage of the social networks they left in taiwan to trade new products between china and taiwan in some cases they will set a physical shop like a beauty center or a food shop food stand in in in the chinese city and they will also keep on trading through their online social networks some other products online like the bra but also other other commodities so they they they make good use both of the networks of chinese sisters still living in taiwan and also of the networks of chinese sisters who like them divorced and resettled in in taiwan so we see how actually the taiwanese citizenship becomes a resource for re-migration to china and the resource for entrepreneurship most of the women told me uh and I can you know perform my citizenship I can open a taiwanese style a new romean restaurant I can open a beauty center in san jen where I do you know cosmetic treatments in a taiwanese style and indeed chinese people will find this of high quality they will be fascinated and they will increase the number of of their clients and we conclude chapter nine the transnationalization of the brass biography while you understood these women resettled down in china but they are on the road again again and over again right in taiwan they're left their sisters in most cases they're left their children together with their previous husbands and so actually re-migration into china is just the prelude for further movements they keep on moving back and forth both physically by taking the plane right and virtually by keeping in touch online between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait the bra metaphorically or even physically travels together with them they take advantage of their multiple belonging beings their multiple identities their transnational affinities and affections to develop cosmopolitan biographies the sort of paulai pauchu they often said back and forth lives and in between existences between the two sides of the strait I will actually discover the conclusion in the book I will stop here and I thank you very much for your attention yes I got too passionate and I talked too long but thank you for being patient and patient that for listening to me yeah fantastic that was really really fascinating to kind of hear the kind of the the whole process how it developed from the initial kind of first trips to china and then to to taiwan and I guess as fieldwork seemed such a distant thing it was really enjoyable hearing that that that kind of process and there were kind of so many kind of anecdotes in the story that I found really fascinating such as the way that taiwanese would kind of make fun of us researchers because of our mainland chinese accents I've got loads of questions but let me just start with a couple of more kind of methodological questions I mean the first one that I was curious about was to what extent was this project a planned one or did the design kind of evolve over time because I mean to me it felt hard to imagine this project being one that was you had a kind of a big plan at the outset so that was one question and the other question that I was also thinking about was the the way that you changed the the phd to the the the book we'd be talking about this in a lot of sessions and and I know that in some countries let's say in the u.s or and my guess from what I know in France often the the pieces can be quite a lot longer than in the uk and that can actually make that that transition quite complicated so just a couple of things to start off with and I could see we've already got some questions coming in thank you very much the feed for your questions well yes you are very right this was absolutely not planned it was I had to keep on constructing and reconstructing you know my research object as as it is by following what I was seeing and what I was observing it was really you know it was really a matter of developing a fully empirical approach to research and to my research object and to keep on you know negotiating and negotiating my field sites according to what well I was brought about to discover I think I was happy because I could really I was really seeking serendipity at some point you know I was really surprised but what I saw and that's why I had to keep on you know reorienting my journey as well and I was discovering new things I was taking the flight together with women to team man and I ended up in hidden garages you will find this in the book I removed back to China I did not expect to go back to Taiwan with mainly in 2018 I did not expect to go back to China and rejoin her in 2018 after she divorced it was really you know it was really ethnography by trick and thing I'd say step by step by trial and error but especially you know following the rhythm and the tempos of my field sites and of what I I had under under my nose and this was very challenging so it was long it was in the end very long ethnographic work because I had to stop I think I could have carried on for a while more but two is more than two years actually between all the back and forth movements it was two years of field work which is kind of long and but it was worthy I really enjoyed doing this and as for your second question yes turning my PhD dissertation into a book was kind of an ordeal to the struggle shorter than expected in the end but the price that well first of all my PhD dissertation was in English which is very different from most of the of the French students in France where they I mean they write their dissertation in French but my co-supervisor was Xiaoxin Huang in Taipei so well he had to read through that at some point so I had to write it in English but it was still 700 pages which is absolutely ridiculous and pathetic because I kept on repeating and repeating over and again the same thing perhaps and at the same time I remember that when I was writing my PhD dissertation I had I had a chat with a with a scholar with a professor in Geneva and he told me Beatrice one thing that you have to think about is that you have to turn this into a book as soon as possible so just imagine when you write your PhD dissertation imagine a book you will have a very long you know I had a very long theoretical framework of 120 pages very sociological absolutely unreadable then I had another absolute part which was the methodological framework 140 pages again unreadable but then I had the three parts arranged as they are in the book and the conclusion which has absolutely changed and so what he told me he said well your theoretical framework and methodological framework you will just select and do control seat you will you will delete it and then it would be the book and well it was it was not that smooth but that was a good start so I arrived which something which had already kind of a book format and then I tried to I tried to cut to cut over and again all the repetitions to change this very sociological jargon into a comprehensible language and to cut all the redundancies and and the repetitions that took kind of four months more or less so it was kind of fast in the end but it was self lockdown it was COVID we were not going outside I was taking advantage of this of this pandemic to to do so and and then something I would I did and I would recommend everyone to do is to start working not on the introduction and the conclusion but really on the of the book so the real content of the book and then to write the introduction in the very end where you will give the reader a kind of an overview of the content of the book and you will put you know your main ideas together to write a nice introduction a sexy introduction you have to you have to make promotion of the book you know someone opens your book they are not very long a thousand a hundred thousand words still but from the first lines the reader has to has to find it sexy otherwise they will not go on and then to write the conclusion in the very end at least this is what what I did the introduction was really the last thing I wrote and it was the thing that took me the longest because I totally changed it from my PhD dissertation it had nothing to do it's not very long it's kind of 20 something pages 25 pages but it took a month to write just the introduction and and then the advice I would give everyone is not don't be shy first when you write you know the synopsis of your book your book proposal get someone else book proposal take a look see how they are structured do not hesitate to us to your previous PhD supervisor or just friends or colleagues or senior scholars to give you advice before you send it to the publisher and then the second advice when I say do not be shy is do not hesitate to us to people to read through your chapters before you send them the publisher I was cutting my my dissertation and I kept on sending the chapters to my colleagues and friends some of them were sociologists some of them they were China and Taiwan experts some of them they were just scholars in social sciences I mean you will not ask someone who works in physics right but do not only ask people who are in your direct field because this book is not written only for specialists it's a book for an audience in social sciences and so you have to make sure that the reader understands and I remember that even after I spent crazy time cutting my my book there were still some weird concepts and some weird sentences my friends and colleagues were advising to cut so do not hesitate don't be shy there is no shame in asking for help and to seek advice and ask people to read through that because you do not write for yourself you write for the others right and this is very very important and for the introduction I asked my previous PhD supervisor and the sociologist to read through that because for me it was I think that the introduction is perhaps one of the most important part of the book actually more than the conclusion and and so you want to make sure that that is not only readable but also sexy interesting catchy appealing and it gets the attention of someone fantastic that's really useful practical guidance there Cheng Yu did you want to come in with your question? Yes, hi Dr. Zanyi. Please Dr. Zanyu calls me doctor nobody calls me doctor even my students call me be as if yes it's fine yeah my name is Cheng Yu from MA Taiwan Studies thank you so much for your lecture that's quite fascinating when especially when you talk about the social life of things and use this orange bra as a kind of sort of like a metaphor or intro or framework upon your book because in my understanding that the origin of why social life of things is comes about like exploring the agencies of the object in relation with the people's like social lives and really reminds me of this Japanese mushrooms book written from Anatsingh yes so but in my point of view if I see it rightly that Anatsingh in her book is quite use the commodity of mushroom as a kind of like material entity instead of so metaphor so my question for you is quite related on this you know the material properties of this much of this material object aka the bra so for example in your chapter two you're trying to say the fabric fabrics of the bra so could you elaborate more for example how such like fabric of bra the materiality of the bra could could relate it to those women's social life and what's the relations between you know the subject and object in your research thank you thank you very much this is a fascinating question and I can really see that you master anthropological literature quite quite well yes the fact of using objects and artifacts draws on this tradition by a padurai and copied off and then later on we had multiple authors from different traditions who actually took advantage of materiality material culture daniel miller did so you can check stuff his book does and that many people did so however what what I what I try to show through the material fabrics of the bra and then we answer to your question is the way this material fabrics are at the very same time simultaneously also social and emotional and that the three levels cannot really really be separated you know the bra emerges in women imagination before in women's imagination and ambitious before they actually produce it it is because they have this in their imaginary and what this symbolizes and means to them that they migrate to the city and they do manufacture it materially you know physically around the assembly line so let's assume that for them in the countryside before migrating the bra embodies modernity consumerism independence autonomy they know that they know this exists in the city both from the taste that their fellow migrants have been telling them while coming back to the countryside for example to celebrate the new year but also from the images they could see on the internet through their smartphones on the television about you know the urban the urban lifestyle so they migrate to the city they enter the factory and they hope that by the fact of you know suing plastic and silicone together assembling the pieces together to make the bra they will achieve this modernity and consumerism however and here you could argue well but this is commodity fetishism and yes it is partially said so they put the pieces off of plastic and cotton together they assemble the bra but this this this work around the assembly line this assembling the pieces together labor and experience is painful it's painful and the more the more they do this the more they come to terms with the fact that yes they are producing the bra they will be unable never and ever they will never able to buy because they cannot afford it because they do not earn enough money because they do not have enough free time since they work 17 hours per day in the factory right so at the very they are closer to the bra they they manufacture its material but they materially but they get more and more emotionally distant from them so from it so they gradually come to terms with the fact that it is precisely by materially manufacturing it they come to terms with the fact that this bra embodies something that we never achieve great fantastic let me can i move on to our second question answering so stewart would you like to come in hi i'm Beatrice great talk very interesting um i think it's very appropriate that you and daffod have arranged the talk for today being International Women's Day um it seems to me there's two points i wanted to make in particular uh one is you have a focus on emotional closeness now one way of reading marjorie wolf a long time ago might be that women might or girls might set off being filial daughters and then they become um interested in their peers so their jma sororities then perhaps interested in in marriage and that a close relationship with the husband and then finally interested in setting up their yukesora local family the relationship with their children it seems from what you said that the closest that perhaps the ambition for close emotional relationships varies through their lifetime according to uh their different situations and it might well be that their closest relationships that are ongoing are the virtual relationships with their jma second thing i wanted to say is that you had a very interesting typo on chapter six i read it as being not e entrepreneurs but e etrapreneurs and it seems to me that for as you described it for the women their raison d'etre uh becomes being successful entrepreneurs that's what their ambition is not close emotional relationships at all and that there is potentially quite a lot of instrumentalism um being used uh including perhaps marrying and then divorcing a taiwan husband in order to achieve that goal so i wondered what your your thoughts were on that thank you very much for your question well indeed emotions are as you pointed it out constructed emotions do not exist but say emotions are constructed within a situation a social frame a practice a context which indeed varies over time and space and the four emotions do vary according to well the situations they do deal with during the migratory experiences the spaces they cross the people they meet so this emotional closeness also varies in terms of degree and extension according well it is constructed in situ it is constructed through experiences and practices so i i do fully agree on this uh as for this um you know instrumental dimension i'm not quite sure because what i've been observing and perhaps i was not clear enough or i was vague enough to give you the curiosity to dig into my chapters is the way um ties of trust of closeness of proximity and of friendship of enmity are fundamental in settling this business which in some cases is illegal invisible hidden so the fact that their networks are not only social but do have this sort of trust affectional dimension supports the making of this sort of activities at the very same time when i talked about this emotional dimension of commerce and entrepreneurship right very true that it is performed and um you know supported by the use of digital technologies and the performance inside the virtual world however i really show how the commodities women do commercialize are very at very low value you know a plant made in china dry i mean who would buy it costs nothing who would buy uh such one is powder who would buy dried meat who would trade chinese cosmetics between the taiwan's trades only those chinese women why why would they import this la raw this dried meat made by their grandma in such one countryside to taiwan who would buy that not the taiwanese people and perhaps not myself either but their chinese sisters they would buy that so it's a matter of knowing indeed in an instrumental if you know way the structure of the offer and the demand uh related to the chinese and taiwanese market but also the emotional dimension of the commodities that they do trade so that's why i qualified this commerce of emotional i don't know if you understand and you could for example also look at a certain literature i think about manuel orotko for example in the u.s who wrote about the nostalgic trade in a different way that i do but it shows how actually the fact of consuming some products and of trading some products by migrants and the diasporas it draws on the case of um salvadorian and mexican in the u.s right it could be the same and it shows actually how this commodity is the fact of consuming and producing those ever high emotional dimension which is relating to feelings of nostalgia melancholia on sickness and this is kind of the same when women develop business so i i would not call it instrumental actually i i i i really take a lot of distance from this almost economic suspicion of migration and this you know kind of behaviouralist or instrumental attitude of of migrants there are multiple things which play a role into the game and which overlap okay fantastic um so we have a a question in the chat from one of our alumni raymond right and he was asking about restrictions and asking whether in the future if tensions are severe between china and taiwan whether your field could become extinct and i guess i was also one of the things that came through in your talk was the way that changes in cross-strait relations impacts this kind of migration such as you mentioned okay with mind you're coming to power then work rights were were changed and i think the period of time it takes to get citizenship also was reduced yeah so i was wondering if you wanted to add anything on on this element about the the kind of almost a geopolitical side to marriage migration thank you very much it's also an interesting point which deserves attention in the future years the answer is yes perhaps i have no idea i we keep on looking at this right um to some extent your question and what the feed was pointing out shows that well marriage and migratory policies the mobility regimes these migratory experiences are constructed within a specific frame which is also political geopolitical social cultural which again arrives over time and space and that we cannot kind of predict or forecast the future orientation of of movement of migration and of practices right and it's always a matter of well keeping on doing new research and new fieldwork to be as close as possible to what to what we study and this is perhaps the only reflection at this point i can i can have indeed the political context as i said the political standoff between the two countries that has been playing a major role in the making of well the first uh migratory policies the revision and the amendments of the migratory the migratory acts and uh well the future is uncertain and we will see what what will happen just just to kind of like a follow-up question um to what extent is this kind of return migration something quite recent uh or has it been going on um um for a while no return migration is something pretty recent i would say i i most of the return needs i could find in china were young very young we're in there i mean they were about 34 to 35 which meant that yeah they migrated to taiwan in their early 20s but still we are talking about a kind of recent phenomenon i think also because uh what women were telling me to some extent is that yes we are living in taiwan now but we are also curious to know what's going on in china because china well the despite the fact that is again and still an i-line egalitarian society and it will remain this for a while and there is nothing to do uh however women are kind of fascinated by the so-called opportunities they they see in china the personal development as they say the personal development opportunities brought about well the transformation of the european labor market this e-commercial uh potential uh provided by well new technologies alibaba how about whatever platforms right and so they are also curious to move back according to this well new opportunities structure that they do they do see there um okay so we've we've now got a question okay um from uh zhrinka and she's asked a couple of things about the kind of organization of both the internal china labor migration but also and this is a question i'd also been thinking about um in terms of the marriage migration to taiwan so she was asking to what extent is this uh brokered organized by agencies or to what extent is it more to do with uh the taiwanese that they might meet in these kind of factories yeah thank you thank you very much it's also an interesting question i think that i deal with this in chapter three and i show how well the rule to urban migration in china has been changing in terms of aspirations and ambitions over the three generations of migrant workers so those who migrated in the 80s in the 90s and in in the 2000s right and they show how those changes in terms of well generational practices ambitions and experiences from within the frame of rule to urban migration also mirror the changes in terms of marriages negotiated with taiwanese people so if at the very beginning let's say in the 80s or in the 90s and the works i i don't know by uh melodicia one who by isabel chang by lara mo mess so by uh sarah freedman there are there are many people dealt with this really show that um the first two generations of women's uh marriage was brokered was a matter of matchmaking of having some taiwanese people traveling directly in most cases to the rural villages they were coming to i also show that the complexification of migratory parts and the transformation of the chinese city and its labor market into a global city where a lot of taiwanese enterprises settled down and foreign enterprises settled down changes this pattern of marriage and and migration to taiwan so it is really what i show um the most cases i found actually are a matter of individual negotiation of marriage and migration women met their husbands in the city they work in their husbands were taiwanese they were high skilled workers who were working there and they had been living in china for several years and i mean they they they fell in love eventually or eventually not and they met and they decided to get married so it's really it's really a matter of individual choice and brokerage and matchmaking is less and less common and i also interviewed actually in taiwan a matchmaker a chinese one showed me you know the catalogs with the spouses and um and the brides right and the way you know the door really and things were arranged and the money paid and it was like they it was in taoyuan close to in link close to taoyuan actually she was telling me now all the foreign brides we have on catalogs are from vietnam and from the philippines and well chinese people come here by themselves okay let me hand over to uh to be you thank you very much um it's fascinating talk and fascinating topic especially um i can see when you said um keeping my always keeping sexy and we should all learn from that and with the first picture of the bra i think you've definitely achieved that thank you very much and we we really need to uh um be more wary about this i think you're right um not necessarily sexy but maybe more uh less boring okay so i just want to make a new promotion because out of this book there will be a comic a sociological comic the journey of the orange bra which will be out in 2023 so we'll have time to make a promotion yeah i got funding so we are i got a drawer and a playwright so we are doing a sociological comic out of this fantastic thank you i actually got quite a few questions but i just i can see quite a lot of questions here already so may i ask um because you mentioned about this kind of need to have intimate relations especially with um quite a lot of the sisters jiemei right sisterhood is very important for foreign they were more or less alien foreign nurse in in taiwan i wonder how about sisterhood in taiwan and among top these people with taiwanese women is there any this kind of supporting group or a circles that you know of because you know like stewart said today is the women's day you know we can't divide them from the local that's one thing another thing i would really want to know because it struck me when you say when they re-migrate back to china they claim or they at least have a different kind of identity they self-proclaimed taiwanese-ness so what does it mean to be a chinese taiwanese in china okay the two questions thank you thank you we'll try to be as short as possible and so sisterhood and ties with taiwanese local women not that many the only i would say that the only ties of closeness they may develop are with the activists or the volunteers the taiwanese activists or volunteers who work for local associations NGOs or governmental institutions which supports foreign migrants and foreign migrant women whether they are from china or from southeast asia so we have a closer a closer closer ties in some cases actually what i saw because i also attended to you know this sort of vocational classes the taiwanese government organizes and sets for foreign for foreign migrants and for women were sometimes ties of closeness with other nationalities so women migrated from the vietnam from cambodia from the philippines and they were you know all in the same vocational class and indeed they had very good very good relations the second question what does this mean to be a chinese taiwanese taiwanese chinese or chinese taiwanese in china well not much i show how actually identity per se is uh it's a matter again of i mean not much for those women those women do not care much about being taiwanese or chinese itself they just care about the social status that that can provide them with i i try to explain myself in most cases they told me when i am in taiwan i am chinese when i am in china i am taiwanese but perhaps i'm just the two the fact is that because of the rural origin in most cases when they are in europe and china people will look down on them they will they will think that they they are not you know educated enough they are not provided with skills enough but the fact of being taiwanese all of a sudden make them more well interesting taiwanese people still have a good reputation those women before migrating already told me that before migrating for the very first time to taiwan they told me how taiwan was really pictures that they promised land because of the the photos and what they could see in their textbooks or on television it's really a matter of imagination and it is the same when they when they go back and they say we are taiwanese they're i i i show how mainly when she makes business she sells some buffalo expired meat to her Cantonese clients understand and she she just tells them to make fun of them that this is imported from taiwan and actually people are are arguing to buy that just because it is imported from taiwan it is taiwanese but in the end it's just expired buffalo meat that she bought from her cousin living nearby and same goes for the koza oil that she uses to cook she says that this is the online yaw that she got from the west through her context in taiwan for a very good price very differently from childhood just you know inexpensive koza oil that she could get at the local market there is still this state social status hidden behind taiwanese mess in the under the eyes of chinese people thank you okay so we've we're almost run out of time now i could i mean some people have asked him for a a follow-up question but i could see there's one audience member that hadn't asked a question yet so huang baoyi is asking a question about whether the women in this book are mostly economic migrants and how do they see their economic prospects in in taiwan as china has become blooming or booming in the past decade does taiwan still have this pull factor for young for these young chinese women i mean push pull factors and push pull theories in migration studies are old and are totally we forgot about that uh in the eighties so there are no more economic migrants scholarship literature has showed how there are multiple you know reasons supporting migration and pushing people to move it's not only earning money it's not only the attractiveness and this sort of development theories which say oh this is a rich country come here indeed there is this economic dimension but it's not the only one a poor social mobility economic mobility is also constructed and i i try to show this in the book within this aspirational infrastructure there are emotions there are networks there are multiple factors which play into the game when when imagining and constructing a migratory path and the effect of showing that labor migration from china in china from the countryside to the city and marriage migration from the city to taiwan cannot be thought in terms of two separated steps but they are highly connected and interwind throughout the ambitions and aspirations of these women tries to actually yeah go beyond this sort of of of conceptualization okay fantastic um let me just um young chung you you wanted to come back on the symbolic meaning of the orange bra why is it specifically orange oh there were blue green and uh and pink i was offered the orange bra i mean the one i showed to you it's a picture i took on my bed of the bright broad bag kind of a push-up i don't really wear it but you know it has this very strong emotional and affectional dimension for for me too it's orange because the one i was offered was orange but there were multiple colors but they were all fluorescent fantastic okay so we're gonna have to bring things to a close but this is just the start of a week of taiwan studies events so tomorrow afternoon we have two in-person events at three o'clock we're welcome back our former soas alumni philips brenda who's going to be who's going to be talking about transitional justice as identity building in in taiwan so philips was our undergraduate and postgraduate student so he'll be speaking at three o'clock in the bglt and then we'll follow that up with a another postdoc but this time a postdoc at cambridge uh chamboshi who's going to be giving a talk titled staging daoyutai overseas taiwanese students and the um spoken drama movement in 1970s united states and then um on friday we're going to be welcoming another canadian-based scholar uh joseph wong who'll be giving a book talk um on his new book from development to democracy the transformation of modern asia asia and that will be at 12 o'clock friday in the bglt so we've got a really exciting um uh week ahead and we will also be having another online talk next week on on marzo but we'll announce that closer to the time so i look forward to seeing many of you in person tomorrow and friday and hopefully we'll be seeing Beatrice in in europe again soon maybe in eats or when you're next over in in france if you can drop by as things are a lot easier now to uh to travel finally so um would people like to kind of turn on your cameras and um and we can give um Beatrice another big round of applause to thank her wow we're looking cold there in um in the office yes we are seeing minus 10 degrees here it's it's yes i need to catch the train that's all oh yes okay thank you could we get a few more cameras on and then we'll get a group picture and oh great great nice to see you jing fei good should we give her a round of applause yeah let's give her a round of applause to you guys you had so many wonderful questions thank you very much it was really interesting to talk with you and how you can you get the picture yeah yeah um three two one thank you okay fantastic thank you very much thank you and see everyone it's a fascinating week and multiple events go on and thank you very much again for having me i've been very happy it is great thank you very much bye bye good luck with all those job interviews as well yes bye guys bye bye have a nice evening bye bye bye