1st Edition
Migration and Marriage in Asian Contexts
This book analyses how Asian migrants adapt and assimilate into their host societies, and how this assimilation differs across their sociodemographic backgrounds, ethnic profiles, and political contexts. The diversities in Asian migrants’ assimilation trajectories challenge the assumption that given time, migrants will eventually integrate holistically into their host societies.
This book captures the diverse patterns and trajectories of assimilation by going beyond marriage migration to look at how family formation processes are shaped by migration driven by reasons other than marriage. Using quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method analyses, not only does this book uncover the nuances of the link between marriage and migration, but it also widens methodological repertoires in research on marriage and migration. It also captures various social outcomes that may have been influenced by migration, including migrants’ economic well-being, cultural assimilation, subjective well-being, and gender inequality vis-à-vis marriages. This book further embeds the studies in the Asian contexts by drawing on individual countries’ unique policies relevant to cross-cultural marriages, the persistent impacts of extended families, the patriarchal traditions, and systems of religion and caste.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
1. Introduction
Wei- Jun Jean Yeung and Zheng Mu
2. Generation, education, and intermarriage of Asian Americans
Zhenchao Qian and Yue Qian
3. Love in the melting pot: ethnic intermarriage in Jakarta
Ariane J. Utomo
4. Internal migration, marriage timing and assortative mating: a mixed- method study in China
Zheng Mu and Wei- Jun Jean Yeung
5. Do gender systems in the origin and destination societies affect immigrant integration? Vietnamese marriage migrants in Taiwan and South Korea
Hsin- Chieh Chang
6. Happiness of female immigrants in cross- border marriages in Taiwan
Chun- Hao Li and Wenshan Yang
7. Physical versus imagined communities: migration and women’s autonomy in India
Esha Chatterjee and Sonalde Desai
8. The decoupling of legal and spatial migration of female marriage migrants
Tuen Yi Chiu and Susanne Y. P. Choi
9. Marital dissolution of transnational couples in South Korea
Yool Choi, Doo- Sub Kim and Jungkyun Ryu
10. Transnational divorces in Singapore: experiences of low- income divorced marriage migrant women
Sharon Ee Ling Quah
11. Remarriages and transnational marriages in Hong Kong: implications and challenges
Mengni Chen and Paul Yip
Biography
Zheng Mu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include trends, social determinants, and consequences of marriage and family behaviors, with focus on how marriage and family serve as major inequality-generating mechanisms.
Wei-Jun Jean Yeung is Provost-Chair Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She is the founding Director of the Centre for Family and Population Research and the Cluster Leader of the Changing Family in Asia research cluster in the Asia Research Institute at NUS.
