‘A Woman to Warm My Heart’: Low-Wage Mainland Chinese Migrant Men, Thrift and Desires for Intimacy in Singapore

ABSTRACT

While work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been discussed largely in relation to migration to the West. Discussions of low-wage Chinese masculinities have similarly been limited, with a focus on rural-urban migration within China. Empirically, this paper aims to contribute by investigating Chinese masculinities outside of China but in a non-Western setting. The arrival of low-wage migrants from China into Singapore’s majority-‘Chinese’ population not only enables an investigation of the hierarchies of Chinese masculinities but also unsettles the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category. I consider low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men’s raced, gendered and classed subjectivities and show that low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore encounter dilemmas in their desires to seek intimacies beyond paid sex. I show that their dilemmas are informed by the discourse of respectable manhood and thrift, a discourse that is extended through a juxtaposition against Singaporean men.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• labour migration
• mobility
• gender
• masculinity
• Chinese masculinity
• heterosexuality
• intimacy
• thrift
• co-Ethnicity
• Singapore

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Sylvia Ang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asian Migration Cluster, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Gender, Place and Culture, Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies Review. Her research interests include transnational labour migrants, racism, co-ethnicity, intersectionality, ethnography and digital ethnography. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a multi-sited grant project: Transnational Relations, Ageing & Care Ethics (TRACE) where she investigates how older Singaporean migrants age in China. Second, she is developing her PhD dissertation into a book preliminarily titled ‘Beyond colour: new Chinese migrants, ethnicity, class and gender in Singapore.

ORCID

Sylvia Ang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1379-8499

Notes

1. Registering with a picture-less profile rendered no response when I initiated conversations.

2. There is generally no minimum wage in Singapore. The only available minimum wage is for a cleaner which is at SGD 1000 per month. See Tan (2014) “Singapore sets basic wage of S$1,000 for cleaners”, Retrieved 5 February 2016 from sg.news.yahoo.com.