Negotiating Work-Family Transitions: Reverse Family Migration among Second-Generation Hong Kong Mothers

ABSTRACT

Gendered and generational understandings of circular migration are scant in studies of Chinese family migration. Filling this gap, this paper draws on in-depth interviews with twenty-six returnee families to examine the work–family transitions of previously employed, overseas-educated mothers who have re-migrated from Hong Kong to Canada, Australia, the United States, or the United Kingdom. These overseas-educated returnee mothers possess transnational backgrounds that differentiate them from most first-generation immigrant mothers. This paper shows that, despite this distinction, reverse migration leads to compromised careers and domestication for these women, although they accept, and in some cases embrace, such compromises. This study elucidates how both husbands and wives in these families justify women’s post-migration changes in their work and caregiving roles. It argues that beyond economic rationalization, interrelated gender, cultural, transnational, and family lifestyle dimensions distinctively impact how second-generation returnee mothers negotiate work–family transitions. This paper offers new insights involving generational and gendered dimensions into the study of Chinese family migration. It also widens the discussion of the impact of family migration on skilled immigrant women in transnational circuits beyond its focus on the lives of first-generation skilled immigrant women.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese mothers
• domestication
• transnational background
• circular migration
• family lifestyle

Introduction

An expanding literature on international migration from East Asia has demonstrated what migrating as wives and mothers means for women, especially those who are middle class and possess high human capital. The literature on migration by ethnic Chinese women (hereafter, Chinese) shows a pattern of both substantial long-term decline in labor force participation and significant immersion in the domestic sphere for skilled women following family migration. In order to advance their family’s economic and social well-being, Chinese women, unlike their husbands, often bear the brunt of anxieties, social isolation, family responsibilities, and personal sacrifices as they endure domestication and compromised careers after moving abroad.¹ While these studies provide valuable insights into the dual impact of migration on the work and family lives of skilled Chinese women, most scholars have focused on immigrants relocating for the first time to foreign countries. Attention to overseas-educated mothers moving abroad for a second time has been absent despite the fact that circular migration is a key feature of middle- and upper-middle-class Chinese migrant families.²

Understandably, many earlier studies focused on the return journeys of immigrants to their countries of origin as the trend of reverse journeys had not emerged yet. However, in Hong Kong, recent news reports and studies suggest that a younger generation of returnees who have relocated back to Hong Kong largely for work opportunities, family reunions, and to follow the trend among their peers after completing their education overseas, are now engaging in reverse migration. This involves moving back abroad in search of improved lifestyles and better opportunities for their children's development.³ These “second-generation returnees,” who are the offspring of middle-class migrant families that had moved abroad during Hong Kong’s emigration wave in the 1980s and 1990s, are a part of the estimated 500,000 holders of passports from Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom currently living in Hong Kong.⁴ Early studies of Chinese transnational migration indicate that immigrant youth are distinct from first-generation adult immigrants in their possession of various forms of social and cultural capital, including fluency in English, overseas education credentials, cosmopolitan cultural traits, and transnational social and family networks.⁵ Scholars have noted that women and men who have been educated in contexts in which liberal social values and family policies are emphasized are more likely to support gender equality in the division of family labor.⁶ Highly-educated mothers who have transnational backgrounds are therefore arguably among the best placed women to withstand the negative impacts of migration experienced by many Chinese emigrant women. It is precisely because of this assumption that women who have been educated overseas are a privileged lot whose migration journeys are unlikely to be challenging is the reason why they have been neglected in the literature on Chinese transnational migration.

This paper examines work-to-family transition dynamics among second-generation returnee mothers with young children who are planning to migrate or have recently migrated as a family from Hong Kong back to Canada, Australia, the United States, or the United Kingdom, a circular movement akin to the migration pattern observed in the literature on Chinese transnational migration. I show that despite these mothers’ secondary and tertiary education experiences abroad and their distinctive transnational backgrounds, reverse migration has had a damaging impact on their careers.⁷ In addition, they face an escalation of domestic workloads in their destination countries, a pattern akin to that found among first-generation skilled Chinese immigrant women. Yet, these mothers accept (and for some, even embrace) these transitions. In this paper I go beyond economic rationalization arguments to throw light on the interrelated transnational, lifestyle, gender, and cultural dimensions that frame how these second-generation returnee mothers negotiate their post-migration work–family transitions. In elucidating the way these mothers negotiate their work and care challenges, the paper contributes not only to a generational and gendered understanding of Chinese family migration but also to a wider discussion of the impact of circular migration on skilled immigrant mothers.

In the following sections, I first discuss the main approaches that seek to explain how women’s work–family transitions are negotiated in the migration process. I then draw attention to the sociocultural and migration contexts of Hong Kong that affect the family migration practices of second-generation immigrant women. After outlining my research methodology and informants’ backgrounds, I analyze my findings then conclude by reflecting on my findings and their implications.

Negotiating family migration and work-to-family transitions

Two recurrent themes in the literature on migration by highly educated Chinese mothers with advanced careers is the negative impact of migration on their labor market participation and the intensification of their domestic responsibilities as they attempt to rebuild their careers in unfamiliar destinations.⁸ They encounter language difficulties, a devaluing of their qualifications and work experiences, job limitations owing to their dependent visa status, prejudice and hiring discrimination, and a loss of family support.⁹ As a point of contrast, skilled British immigrant women in Australia have been shown to experience fulfilling career paths and to occupy privileged work spaces as their Whiteness and Britishness within White Anglo-dominant working spaces creates the conditions for favorable career paths.¹⁰ For Chinese women who find employment after migrating overseas, their careers are much more constrained by domestic responsibilities than was the case before they migrated, and the jobs they find in their destination countries often have few prospects for career advancement.¹¹ Such work–family transitions experienced by new immigrant women have been variously theorized as compromised careers,¹² re-domestication,¹³ feminization,¹⁴ and “housewifelization.”¹⁵ In Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK, this pattern occurs in a context where ethnic Chinese migrants often have a higher level of education compared to the local-born population.¹⁶ Specifically, in Australia and Canada, the proportion of Chinese female migrants who have earned university degrees surpasses that of the overall female population in these countries.¹⁷

Some couples in these situations may use cost-benefit calculations to justify unequal work–family transitions. A neoclassical economic view of migration assumes that each spouse’s potential gain or loss from migration is weighted equally in the calculation of family well-being, and both spouses place family well-being ahead of personal well-being.¹⁸ Thus, when family adjustments are made to suit the husband’s employment, both spouses, it is assumed, rationalize this through cost-benefit calculations such as earnings capacity or potential. Particularly for Chinese couples, a Confucian prioritization on collective goals over individual interests affects the way well-educated Chinese immigrant mothers negotiate away their personal aspirations to advance the economic and social well-being of their families as a whole.¹⁹ Therefore, when examining the domestication of highly educated, professional Chinese immigrant women, scholars need to pay attention to family and/or children’s interests in the way mothers negotiate changes.

This tendency for couples to negotiate away women’s work interests upon migration is also affected by deeply held beliefs about gender roles related to wifehood and motherhood. Traditional gender ideology views women’s responsibilities in the home as more important than their employment outside, whereas the reverse is true for men.²⁰ In the context of post-migration work–family adjustments, scholars have shown that between married couples there are often biases toward sustaining the husband’s career development, which is given precedence in decision-making.²¹ Moreover, the negative effects of family migration on labor force participation and employment have been shown to be greater and to endure for many more years for married women with children than for married women without children because couples are more likely, upon becoming parents, to adopt traditional beliefs surrounding gender roles.²²

Scholars who have studied middle-class and upper-class Chinese female migrants have found that these women feel obligated as wives and mothers to organize their work in ways that support their husbands’ study or work, manage their household and children’s education arrangements, and establish social networks and support family members in their adjustment to a new environment.²³ These obligations frequently result in an escalation of these women’s roles as wives and mothers, a decrease in their roles as income-earners, and a greater sense of dependence on their husbands.²⁴ The adoption of more traditional gender roles and family arrangements that skilled Chinese immigrant women encounter after migration necessarily implies some degree of relational transformation between couples in the process of migration, which scholars should draw attention to.

Studies have shown that despite usually being the ones to bear the brunt of the burden of adapting to life in a new country, some skilled Chinese women construe such work-to-family transitions as personally meaningful, promising new opportunities and freedoms for them.²⁵ For example, in their research on Mainland Chinese immigrant women professionals in Canada. Guida Man and Elena Chou found that while migration led to shifts in care work demands and employment difficulties, these women perceived these shifts as opportunities to fulfill their desires for new “adventures.” enrich their lives, and secure better educational prospects for their children.²⁶ Studies such as this highlight processes by which new immigrant women rationalize how they manage conflict and maintain their mental well-being.

Circular migration among Hong Kong’s second-generation returnees

Scholars of Chinese transnational migration have documented the prevalence in the 1990s of a tendency among Hong Kong’s middle- and upper-classes to educate their children abroad, mainly in Canada, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The development of knowledge-based economies in East Asia, including Hong Kong, in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the growth of a middle-class population that possessed wealth and technical expertise.²⁷ This carefully orchestrated migration project enabled the children of these parents to “escape” the notoriously competitive and stressful education system in Hong Kong that made the attainment of a university degree—perceived to be a key driver of upward social mobility—tremendously difficult.²⁸ The difficulty was compounded by the shortage of places for local students at prestigious local universities at the time.²⁹ Another key reason for emigration was the political uncertainties associated with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong by the United Kingdom to China; some families saw emigration and the acquisition of foreign citizenship via transnational family strategies as a “safety net.”³⁰

Unlike members of their parents’ generations, who generally did not possess tertiary or overseas education credentials and often would return to Hong Kong after obtaining foreign citizenship, young members of this 1990s diaspora earned valuable foreign university degrees which presumably would give them better work prospects in Hong Kong.³¹ Many returned to Hong Kong due to economic opportunities, reunion of fragmented transnational families, or to follow the migration pathway of their peers. However, there has been minimal research on the continued transnational migration among this younger generation of returnees.³² Scholars who have examined this issue have found that reverse migration among second-generation returnees has been driven largely by their aspirations for a better family life and education opportunities for their children,³³ although media reports have also linked recent migration to the political uncertainty caused by Hong Kong’s Anti–Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement and the Chinese government’s enactment of a national security law in Hong Kong.³⁴ These new migrants’ focus on life quality stands in contrast with that of their first-generation immigrant parents, most of whom focused on accumulating capital.³⁵

This cross-generational change is related to the younger generation’s transnational backgrounds. While residing abroad, these offspring of middle-class Chinese migrant couples acquired distinctive forms of social capital such as international educational credentials and English language skills that allow them to be more globally competitive in their careers than their peers in Hong Kong.³⁶ Moreover, their years abroad while young transformed their views on life quality.³⁷ Some scholars contend that these experiences and values play significant roles in their migration decisions when they become parents.³⁸ New values and imaginaries have led to new migration motivations in which aspirations for a different sort of family life that allows parents more quality time with their children and their all-round development are prioritized. At the same time, these new motivations ameliorate the uncertainties and emotional challenges of the migration process.³⁹

Research methodology and informants’ backgrounds

Data for this paper was collected between 2019 and 2021 from in-depth interviews with twenty-one Hong Kong Chinese mothers and fourteen Hong Kong Chinese fathers from twenty-six families (Table 1). This was part of a larger project that explored onward migration among second-generation returnee families.

Table 1. Profile of mothers in second-generation returnee families

Educational qualifications
At least undergraduate degree	25
Postgraduate degree	8
Foreign citizenship/residency
Australia	6
Canada	13
UK	1
USA	3
Resided abroad 4–8 years as students but had not obtained foreign citizenship or residency rights	3
Destination country
Australia	8
Canada	15
UK	1
USA	2
(Re)Migration status at time of interview
Relocated between 1 month and 5 years before interview	11
Expected to relocate within 5 years	14
Expected to relocate in 5 years’ time or later	1
Work–family transition after reverse migration
Expected to work, or remained working, full-time	8
Expected to work part-time or changed from full-time work to part-time	2
Expected to change, or changed from full-time work, to homemaking	16

I selected interviewees through snowball sampling drawn from social media platforms, church groups, recreational clubs, and personal contacts, with limits placed on the number of informants from any one source to ensure diversity in the sample. Each interview lasted about one and a half hours and was conducted mainly in Cantonese. I recorded these with the interviewees’ consent and then transcribed and translated them into English for systematic analysis. For reasons of anonymity, I have used pseudonyms and altered all potentially identifying personal particulars.

For the purposes of this paper, I define second-generation returnee families as families with at least one parent who is a dual citizen of Hong Kong and either Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, or the United States, and who had returned to Hong Kong, their place of origin, after having emigrated during their youth and resided in one of these destinations for at least four years. Of these twenty-six families, in twenty of them both spouses hold foreign citizenship, in three only wives have foreign citizenship, and in three husbands hold foreign citizenship.⁴⁰

Twenty-three women were in their thirties and forties at the time of my interviews, and twenty-one families had children under the age of twelve. In terms of marital diversity, only one family was interracial. While I did not specifically select interviewees based on their socioeconomic backgrounds, most of the mothers are from middle- and upper-middle-income families. Twenty-one out of twenty-six families’ household income are in the top twenty-second percentile, and fourteen families are in the top thirteenth percentile of Hong Kong society.⁴¹

All of these mothers had previously resided abroad, with the majority having left Hong Kong in the 1980s or 1990s. Most had lived abroad for between six and ten years and then returned to Hong Kong after finishing their tertiary education.⁴²

For their reverse journey, twenty-one families relocated to a country where both the parents had resided previously, and five relocated to a country where only the fathers had lived previously.

Negotiating compromised careers

The major motivation for second-generation returnee families to leave Hong Kong and move back abroad was a desire by both parents for a family-centered lifestyle that would involve more bonding time with their children, a relaxed educational environment, and living in a place that parents considered better suited to family life. However, for mothers, achieving this desire entailed significant compromises for their careers and financial independence, as well as more domestic duties.

All of these mothers had been employed in professional or managerial jobs in Hong Kong. They included a marketing manager, financial manager, and sales manager, along with an accountant, a pharmacist, and a university professor. After moving abroad again, they all either experienced increased domestic labor or expected to do so, and consequent downward career paths. Most of them left the workforce altogether after resettlement, at least initially.

Although these women possessed university credentials they had earned in English-speaking countries and most were returning to where they previously had lived, they were adamant that because they had spent most of their working lives in Hong Kong, their lack of work experience and social networks in their destination countries made them less competitive in the labor market and less able to command the kind of salaries they drew in Hong Kong. Kate, a marketing manager with a four-year-old child who planned to return to Canada, where she had resided during her high school and university years, explained:

I don’t expect to work in the same position or earn an income similar to what I did in Hong Kong. Companies in Canada value local rather than overseas experiences … . In Hong Kong, I have never worried about finding a job. Headhunters would approach me because of my established network and reputation.

Such expectations are at variance with studies suggesting that the transnational cultural and social capital acquired by second-generation Hong Kong immigrant children gives them an advantage in the job market in both Hong Kong and abroad, particularly in their previous places of settlement.⁴³

Carmen, a senior graphic designer with two children, aged one and four, expressed a distinct sense of worry faced by housewives-to-be like her about the anticipated loss of the financial freedom that their careers in Hong Kong had given them:

I will be sacrificing my time and my financial independence. These are actually very important to me. I don’t like to be totally financially dependent on my husband, but this is what is going to happen.

For others with more advanced careers like Sandra, an investment relations manager with two children aged six and eight, becoming a housewife following migration came at the expense of her professional live, in which she took much pride:

My company has given me many opportunities to develop my career with them. I have been promoted and there is a pretty good career path … but because we have decided to leave, I will have to sacrifice my work. Godfrey [husband] also knows about my feelings, but I think once you have decided on your move, you can’t hold back and consider too much.

The actual struggles experienced by mothers who have relocated substantiate the pre-migration concerns that many had. Those who became housewives lost their financial independence. For example, Alice had worked as a mid-level officer in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) in Hong Kong. With two children aged five and four to take care of without the support of a foreign domestic helper (FDH), she decided to leave the workforce upon returning to Canada, where she had resided during her university years. With no earnings, she felt constrained about spending money freely, as she had used to in Hong Kong:

In Hong Kong I had my own income, I could buy whatever I liked. If there were some cute children’s clothing or just cosmetics, I could buy them whenever I liked. After moving here, as I have no income, I feel like I am not as free to buy non-essential things.

Husbands acknowledged the compromised careers faced by their wives, particularly those who became housewives after migration. After his family returned to Canada, Brandon worked as an engineer but his wife Alice, who had been working for an NGO in Hong Kong, became a housewife:

Moving back has had much less impact on me. I just go to work in the morning and go back home after work. She is the one who deals with everything at home. To be honest, she would be more comfortable in Hong Kong. Here, she has no work and needs to stay home alone to deal with or two children; that’s exhausting for her!

Since both husbands and wives expected that the former would earn more than the latter after they returned abroad, and because of the high cost of childcare in their destination countries, wives often would have to leave the workforce and become stay-at-home mothers for financial reasons. Yet, underlying these economic- and family-centered negotiations were traditional gender norms which closely link women to domesticity and nurturing, as well as Confucian values that encourage cooperation among couples and prioritizing collective goals over individual interests. Carmen planned to become a housewife after she, her husband, and their children moved back to Canada, where she previously had resided for fourteen years, to enable her husband to re-establish his career in the financial industry:

The first thing is that childcare in Canada is expensive. Some of my friends over there told me, if we both work, it will be very difficult as we need to deal with childcare arrangements for two kids around our work schedules, plus we will have little savings left. On top of that, since we won’t have a helper to deal with housework, we will need to do our own laundry, grocery shopping and cooking, which will make our lives very hectic. So, in the first few years, I will manage the family, kids, and housework. This will allow my husband to focus on his career. If we both worked, he would need to wake up early. After work, he would need to help out with the housework, even if he is tired. So why not I become the housewife and he becomes the breadwinner for a while? Then later, if we need more income and can manage things at home, I may work.

These mothers also emphasized the Chinese cultural notion of “face” as they negotiated work–family transitions after relocation. Referring to a person’s honor, respect, and social standing, face is a Confucian concept that places high value on hierarchy, social roles, and interpersonal relationships, enabling men to perform their masculine roles as leaders in Chinese families.⁴⁴ The importance of face was illustrated by Ivana, a human resources manager with a four-year-old who planned to work full-time after she and her husband returned to Canada, where she had lived for ten years. In our interview she highlighted the greater difficulty that men have in dealing with downward career paths following migration:

I can even accept working as a nanny in a day-care center in Canada. But I am pretty sure that my husband or other men will find it hard to change to a lower position, lower status job, or to start from scratch. Plus, I don’t think many men can handle being financially dependent. It is just harder for men, especially for Chinese men! Chinese men have high self-esteem! They need face!

Because of their identities as mothers and wives, these women accepted that compromising their careers to facilitate what they perceived as a better life for their families after migration was proper conduct for wives. Such traditional gender role beliefs enabled them to play down the emotional impact of this transition. Sarah, a former accountant in Hong Kong who became a housewife after returning to Canada, where she had previously resided for ten years, explained:

Especially for men, they are not willing to work in a lower position because it would hurt their self-esteem. Women are more okay to work in a lower-ranking job for the sake of the family. When I relocated to Canada, I expected that I would become more family-oriented and prioritize family over career.

At the same time, these women’s attitudes and behavior were shaped by their husbands. Scholars have shown that while professional middle-class men in Hong Kong who were educated in English speaking countries such as Canada and Australia are more progressive and involved in parenting than fathers of previous generations, breadwinning remain central to the identity of the men who assert leadership at home and competitiveness at work.⁴⁵ Even though families in this study were dual- income prior to migration, this pattern was also noticeable among these fathers. Particularly since husbands had higher incomes than their wives, this further exacerbated men’s emphasis on their wives’ innate feminine characteristics as caring mothers, enabling them to downplay the significance of their wives’ employment. Comments along the lines of “she takes family as her priority” or “my wife is better than me in taking care of the children” were typical of these men when discussing the negative changes to their wives’ careers after migration. For example, even though his wife had a well-established career as a manager in a pharmaceutical company in Hong Kong, Glen dismissed the impact that becoming a housewife would have on her:

She is not career minded. She is a person who just wants to finish work and take care of the family. It will probably be a bit hard for her to find a job in the same field. She might take lower paid jobs, but that’s fine; we are not depending on her income.

Wesley, who ran his own company and was the main income-earner while his wife worked as a translator in Hong Kong, typified men who perceived their wives’ work (rather than their careers) as largely a means for fulfilling their personal interests. In his words:

My income is enough to support the family. She likes to work for her interest, so I support her. If she wants to be a full-time housewife, that’s fine as well. I am willing to support her financially too.

A few husbands also perceived their wives’ work as only a means for them to socialize, as expressed by Brandon about his wife Alice, the mid-level NGO officer I introduced earlier:

I have always told her, if she finds a job after we go back it won’t really be only for making money, but it will be also for herself. From my perspective, if she continues to work, she won’t be adding much contribution toward the family finances anyway. However, she would be able to enlarge her social network.

The ideal of a masculine provider and feminine nurturer was still espoused by both partners.

Negotiating the intensification of domestic work

The mothers I interviewed commonly pointed to the high cost of childcare and domestic services in their destination countries as the main reasons for their domestication. When living in Hong Kong, twenty-one of the twenty-six families in this study had hired foreign domestic helpers to assist them with childcare and daily household chores, while the rest had had regular part-time assistance and some family support. After re-migrating abroad, none of these families could afford domestic help.

As of 2021, around seventy percent of Hong Kong married women in their thirties and forties, and approximately seventy-five percent of women with post-secondary degrees, were active in the labor force.⁴⁶ High levels of employment among married and educated women are facilitated by the common practice of employing live-in full-time foreign domestic helpers (FDH) among middle-class dual-income families in Hong Kong. FDHs do household chores and provide childcare, often for sixty to seventy per week, at a minimum wage of HK$ 4,860 (US$ 622) per month.⁴⁷ Since hiring part-time local helpers and paying for childcare services are much more expensive than employing a live-in FDH, hiring the latter is a more common practice among these families.⁴⁸As of 2016, forty-four percent of Hong Kong households that included children and working mothers employed domestic helpers.⁴⁹ This common practice has been fostered by the government’s policy of recruiting domestic helpers from overseas, mainly from the Philippines, since the 1970s. This policy is aimed at increasing the female labor pool by reducing women’s share of housework in a context in which government support for childcare is scarce.

For comparison purposes, in Canada, a destination to which over half the families in this study expected to relocate or had already relocated, the average salary of a live-in home support worker is about $ 3,000 (US$ 2,218) per month.⁵⁰ This figure is nearly four times higher than the minimum wage for domestic helpers in Hong Kong. Despite a national early learning and childcare system that aims to bring down the cost of childcare to ten dollars a day by 2026, the cost of childcare in Canada has continued to rise and there is a severe shortage of licensed childcare providers, with waitlists at record numbers.⁵¹

Unlike the common experience of new Chinese immigrant families in Canada and Australia,⁵² twenty of the twenty-six couples in this study could count on family support networks involving parents or parents-in-laws in their destination countries. However, the mothers in this study still worried about taking up daily household chores and childcare without the assistance of a domestic helper. This concern stemmed from an ongoing imbalance in the division of domestic labor among working couples in Hong Kong, which was often masked by the presence of a live-in full-time FDH. Previous studies conducted in Hong Kong and the UK highlight that although hiring domestic helpers or nannies can challenge traditional gender roles and enable mothers to pursue careers while balancing employment and childcare, tasks still tend to be shared between the helper and the mother. Research in Hong Kong also indicates that overseas educated professional fathers, despite more involved in their children's lives than previous generations, still have more freedom in choosing parenting tasks and spend less time on childcare than do mothers. Additionally, working mothers rely on FDHs to resolve tensions between their paid work and family responsibilities. Therefore, for mothers in this study, beyond practical help, domestic support was intricately linked to their emotional well-being, as it was associated with a balance between work, marriage, family, and personal lives, which they anticipated would undergo substantial challenges after migration.

Sandra, an investor relations manager in Hong Kong who planned to return to Australia with her husband and two young children, expressed such concerns despite her parents and parents-in-law residing there. As a dual-income family in Hong Kong and without parental support, Sandra and her husband, a banker, always hired domestic helpers to assist them with childcare and household chores. After returning to Australia, she, like most mothers in this study, planned to become a housewife while her husband would become the sole breadwinner:

There is going to be a huge difference in my life, particularly in terms of housework! One of the most difficult things for me about leaving Hong Kong is that I will not have a domestic helper! … I have three boys at home [two sons and husband] and, typical of men, they leave things everywhere. This is going to burn me out! This is what makes me worried! … My husband is spoiled now, as we have always had domestic helpers and he does not do any chores. So, now I am giving him the heads-up that after relocation he needs to help during weekends.

The sentiments expressed by Sandra highlight a common theme of reduced personal time in the post-migration experience for all mothers. For Candy, who managed to find a lower-level position as a bank teller in Canada than her mid-level banking position in Hong Kong, having personal time was important for her mental and physical well-being: “When I want to give myself a break, I like going out for a massage or chill by myself but I don’t have the time to do these things here [in Canada],” she explained.

Some informants linked less personal time with reduced social life, as expressed by Wendy, who became a housewife after she and her husband moved back to the United Kingdom, saying, “I miss being able to spare the time to hang out with my girlfriends.” Yet she dismissed the importance of having a personal social life, instead prioritizing her children in their current stage of life:

Even though I have some friends here, we all have children, so it is hard to catch up all the time. There is no time. We mostly just have family gatherings rather than me catching up with my friends.

Childcare challenges were alleviated to a certain extent by established family support networks in the destination country. For Sandra, knowing that her mother, who was living in Sydney, would assist her after her family returned to Australia relieved some of the anxiety she experienced prior to her departure:

I have given lots of heads-ups to my mum. I told her I will be miserable if I cannot have a date with my husband. Then she told me that it will be fine, “I can take care of your kids.” My mum is willing to help me out!

However, it was generally accepted by both mothers and fathers that the help they would receive from their parents would be ad hoc and largely be limited to childcare. Therefore, they would still have to manage daily domestic chores and cope with reduced personal time. Nevertheless, among those who relocated, irregular help from parents or in-laws, especially in critical situations, enabled mothers, particularly working mothers, to cope with some of their childcare challenges. Sean and his wife both continued to work full-time, albeit in lower positions, after re-migrating to Australia with their two children, aged five and three years:

Having my parents here is important, but they don’t help all the time, only in an emergency. One time my kids had a fever and couldn’t attend school, but I couldn’t take the day off straight away. My wife also couldn’t but she would have had to if my parents didn’t come over and look after the kids.

Childcare support from parents and in-laws was often framed as “grandparenting” by these mothers. Similar to findings regarding grandparenting in East Asian families, these mothers perceived grandparenting as a means for better bonding across the generations, benefiting both the grandparents and children.⁵³ This dual support network between the generations was negotiated by mothers as part of their desired family lifestyles, as illustrated by Ivana, introduced earlier. Her plan was for her parents, who were already living in Canada, to look after her four-year-old son after she and her husband moved back from Hong Kong so she could continue working and they could enjoy grandparenting—all generations benefiting from the arrangement:

My family cannot afford me not working. He [son] will go to primary school so my parents will only look after him for a couple of hours. They are really looking forward to it, especially my dad.

Moreover, the pre- and post-migration emotional and domestic challenges envisioned and encountered by second-generation returnee mothers certainly correspond with the mainstream narratives in migration literature.⁵⁴ However, unlike new immigrant mothers, returnee mothers found that the added support from the older generation—although irregular compared with hired domestic help in Hong Kong—helped to alleviate some of the emotional stress and challenges of intensified childcare after migration.

Trading off challenges for a desired family lifestyle

For returnee mothers, the trade-off for a family-centered life was greater compromises (in comparison with their husbands) in their careers, limited financial independence, and responsibility for domestic duties. However, many also exuded optimism about a better quality of family life after relocation. Thus, by rationalizing these compromises as a means of achieving their desired family lifestyles, women were able to emotionally and practically deal with these challenges. For example, many mothers regretted that their careers in Hong Kong had not allowed them to achieve a satisfied family life. Candy, a mother of a five-year-old who returned to Canada several years ago, exemplified this sentiment. In Hong Kong, she had worked six days a week at the middle-management level of a financial institution with the support of a foreign domestic helper. After returning to Canada, where she had previously resided for thirteen years, she worked in a lower-ranked position with less pay, but with shorter working hours. Rather than lamenting her economic and career losses and increased childcare and domestic chores, she embraced this change as an opportunity for a more balanced work–family life:

There are of course a lot more chores now! We all know that we don’t have a domestic helper now, so we need to share the work at home. We teach our son to mop the floor and things like that to reduce my workload. Actually, I have more time with him now, as I don’t need to work overtime like in Hong Kong. On the weekends, I don’t need to work and I can take him out for fun. In Hong Kong, working six days in a week was tiring, so on Sundays I wanted to stay at home and take a break. I didn’t want to go out, so I didn’t really spend quality time with him. So even though having to do household chores is a bit exhausting, I am fine as I have my family to share the work and I have more time to be around them.

While some mothers worried about not having domestic support after migration, they were able to cope by seeing housework as a trade-off for the chance it gave their husbands, children, and themselves to have a sense of ownership in their families, something not possible in a home environment with live-in domestic helpers. This sense of ownership was cultivated through shared domestic duties with children and husbands, as explained by Melinda, who worked as an accountant (albeit in a lower position) after relocating back to Canada, where she previously had lived for six years:

There are more household chores, but I think dividing those chores and working together is what I define as family life. We have a different family life now; we have more ownership of the family. Back then, we all just left the chores to the domestic helper, whereas here you have no choice. Everyone, even my son, needs to do the vacuuming. Actually, it is not a matter of whether you have a choice or not, but you need the kids to have that feeling of ownership, being responsible about their own home. Yes, we have less time to chill on the sofa but at the same time, we are actually working together, no matter if it is cleaning the house or doing the laundry, or whatever. To me this is real family time.

The anticipation of being able to create a new family life, orchestrated solely by themselves, without the assistance of a FDH, is clearly captured in the words of Sandra who will become a housewife, “We all will need to do chores ourselves, but it will be a new kind of family life that we will make happen together!” In the making of this new family life, there is considerable expectation by the wives for their husbands to perform more domestic chores, regardless of either spouse’ employment status.

It was not just mothers who created this notion of a new family life; their husbands’ desire for a better work–life balance also was an important aspect in this. While a process of domestication for women was clearly evident, to a certain degree, most fathers, whether they worked full-time or expected to do so, did or expected to increase their involvement in family life after reverse migration.

Kate’s husband, Phil, who worked in Hong Kong as a high-salaried IT consultant at an international bank, was looking forward to more meaningful and less stressful work as a teacher of kung fu and spiritual learning after the family’s return to Canada:

Basically, after relocation my working time as a teacher will be much more flexible. I have worked many years in a bank for very long hours only to help people make or lose money. I am looking forward to doing something that can really help people, at my own time. If I need to drive my child to school or pick him up, it won’t be difficult. After we go back to Canada, our son will learn to be more independent.

Moreover, frequent idealization of foreign countries such as the United States and Australia enabled mothers to mentally prepare for an expected increase in daily household chores. This point is illustrated by the views of Kate, who drew on her idealization of Canada when she explained that that less cleaning is needed in Canada because it is less polluted than Hong Kong:

When I was young, I was always too lazy to clean up. But it was okay! The air is much cleaner over there [in Canada], not like in Hong Kong where it gets dirty easily.

Others, like Bella, were ready to drop their domestic standards after relocation, just as they had done when they were adolescents living in the United States: “As long as I don’t expect everything to be clean, drop the standard, because he [husband] is really not that neat, it should be fine. I have lived there before.” For Zara, who grew up in Australia, it was “just clean the bathroom once or twice a week. Something like that. Don’t be so uptight! I didn’t have a helper when I grew up over there.”

Underlying returnee mothers’ negotiation of a family-centered lifestyle was a great deal of comparison between Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK as offering a better quality of life than Hong Kong’s busy and hectic life and dirty environment. This comparison corresponds with the views of Hong Kong immigrants who have framed Hong Kong as a place to work and Canada as a place for a better quality of life as they chart their transnational sojourning.⁵⁵

Conclusion

Researchers have noted that the process of family migration often restricts skilled Chinese women’s ability to achieve a desire that traverses the work–family divide; that is, having the totality of a meaningful family life, personal satisfaction, professional success, and financial independence. This is because family migration often leads to downward career paths and a concomitant escalation in domestic responsibilities for these mothers.⁵⁶ Echoing the existing literature, this study confirms a pattern of work-to-family transition among overseas-educated second-generation returnee working mothers who were motivated to embark on journeys from Hong Kong back to Canada, Australia, the United States, or the United Kingdom for a better quality of family life and for their children’s development. However, while this reverse migration process limited returnee women’s abilities to break free from the work–family divide, there was a clear acceptance of work-to-family transition after migration.

To rationalize their domestication and downward career paths or complete exit from the workplace after returning overseas, the mothers in this study, who were working or had worked in Hong Kong, often simply cited economic factors related to the cost of childcare, relative wages, and limited occupational mobility, common justifications in the narratives of new immigrant mothers. Yet, a closer examination of the narratives of these women highlights a much more complex reality in which internalized gender and cultural notions of wifehood and motherhood, relational processes between spouses, cost-benefit calculations of family well-being (rather than personal well-being), and pre-existing transnational backgrounds played important roles in their justification of work–family transition after migration.

These justifications were intricately entwined with the significant changes in work and family contexts that led to the transformation of domestic labor divisions between couples. In Hong Kong, both spouses in these couples had full-time employment owing to assistance from live-in FDHs whose work was perceived by both husbands and wives to largely support mothers. In contrast, in their destination countries, these mothers experienced or expected to experience a significant reduction in domestic assistance in spite of greater assistance from their husbands and extended family members, and therefore increased household and childcare responsibilities. Their increased domestic responsibilities in turn affected or were expected to affect their occupational mobility in spite of their overseas education, work experiences, and family support networks. Even though their husbands’ participation in family life increased after migration (including sharing housework and care duties and spending more time with their children and spouses), women’s lives were much more heavily structured around domestic responsibilities. Nevertheless, these women were more willing than their husbands to sacrifice their careers for the sake of their family unit. The reverse migration experienced by these women can be seen as a shift from a previously balanced lifestyle, where employment, family, and personal life were managed with the help of a live-in helper, to a more apparent display of traditional and unequal gender roles and domestic arrangements, despite increased domestic support by husbands and family members after migration. Therefore, this study reveals that the process of reverse migration for mothers entailed the feminization of roles involving challenging readjustments in care and work expectations.

Accepting such transitions as necessary trade-offs in their quest for better family lifestyles enabled these women to support their husbands’ career prospects even in the face of personal and professional loss (including compromised careers, reduced personal and social time, and financial dependence). Just as studies have shown that overseas upbringing transforms Hong Kong immigrant youths’ lifestyle values,⁵⁷ central to second-generation returnee mothers’ family migration projects was their family lifestyle–centered motivation. This motivation stands in sharp contrast to first-generation Chinese immigrant mothers’ quest for accumulating various forms of capital for class reproduction.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, these narratives of returnee mothers illuminate a conflicting sense of the “sacrificial self” that is often associated with new Chinese immigrant women⁵⁹ as well as a conflicting sense of personal fulfillment as wives and mothers who were achieving their aspirations for a better quality of family life. This conflict suggests that complex intentions linked to family-centered lifestyles and emotions underscore reverse migration for second-generation Chinese returnee women, despite their privileged transnational backgrounds.

The transnational backgrounds of second-generation returnee mothers also facilitated their negotiation of work–family transitions in a way that was meaningful to them. These mothers had first-hand experiences of life in Australia, the US, Canada, and the UK, which mentally prepared them for what to expect after relocation. Memories of their lives abroad during their youth impacted their construction of Hong Kong and these four destination countries in binary opposition in terms of quality of life, with the latter as places for more meaningful family life compared with the former. Moreover, unlike first-generation immigrant families, for whom assistance from family members in the host country is often unavailable,⁶⁰ most returnee mothers in this study already had family support networks in their destination country. In their negotiation of trade-offs, not only did the mothers in this study see the privilege of family support from the older generations as a form of practical and important caregiving assistance (even if it was irregular) which allowed intergenerational bonding, such support also was a form of emotional capital that positively contributed to their acceptance of domestication before and following migration.

This study’s focus on overseas-educated second-generation returnees from Hong Kong who possess distinctive transnational backgrounds broadens the gender and migration literature on middle- and upper-middle-class Chinese families that has hitherto been centered on the lives of first-generation skilled immigrant women. By examining the complex ways in which returnee mothers negotiated changes in post-migration work–family arrangements, this paper demonstrates that beyond economic factors, the interrelated aspects of transnational backgrounds, family lifestyle aspirations, gender roles, cost-benefit calculations based on the well-being of the family unit, cultural beliefs, and their husbands’ willingness to adapt and assist with domestic work (despite it still being done mostly by women) enabled them to cope with emotional and practical struggles. In so doing, this paper brings new insights involving generational and gendered dimensions to the study of Chinese family migration and widens the discussion of the impact of family migration on skilled immigrant women in transnational circuits.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Ms Queenie Siu for her research assistance and the participants for sharing their experiences and insights with me.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grant Council, Hong Kong, under Grant UGC/FDS14/H06/18.

Notes on contributors

Lucille Lok Sun Ngan

Lucille Lok Sun Ngan is an Associate Professor in The Department of Social Science at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on migration and transnationalism, ethnic identities, family processes, gender, aging, and the Chinese diaspora. She has examined issues related to the migration trajectories of Hong Kong transnational families, perceptions of social tensions among migrant groups, fatherhood among second-generation returnees, cross-border students, social inequalities in East Asia, and multi-generational ethnicity among Australian-born Chinese. She is currently researching transnational aging and family processes of older adults from Hong Kong.

Notes

1 Cf. Cooke 2007; Gu 2017; Huang and Yeoh 2005; Man 2019; Wei 2013.

2 Ley 2010; Ley and Kobayashi 2005; Ong 1999; Waters 2006.

3 Cheng 2018; Westbrook 2021; Young 2019; Ngan and Chan 2024.

4 Ngan and Chan 2024.

5 Ley 2010; Ley and Kobayashi 2005; Waters 2006.

6 Van Hiel et al. 2018.

7 This process is similar to that of Hong Kong immigrant youth described by scholars such as Waters (2006).

8 Cooke 2007; Cooke, Zhang, and Wang 2013; Gu 2017; Ho 2006; Man and Chou 2020; Wei 2013.

9 Cooke 2007; Friedman 2016; Gu 2017; Ho 2006; Man 2019; Suto 2009.

10 Carangio 2021 et al.

11 Ho 2006.

12 Suto 2009.

13 Yeoh and Willis 2005.

14 Ho 2006.

15 Gu 2017.

16 Australian Bureau of Statistics 2022; Office of National Statistics 2023; Rosenbloom and Batalova 2023; Statistics Canada 2016b.

17 Ho 2006; Statistics Canada 2016a; Statistics Canada 2016b.

18 De Hass 2010; Mincer 1978.

19 Huang and Yeoh 2005; Man 2019; Ngan and Chan 2023.

20 Cooke 2007; Paul 2015.

21 Slobodin 2017.

22 Cooke 2001.

23 Cooke 2007; Gu 2017; Ho 2006.

24 Ho 2006.

25 Chiang 2008; Man and Chou 2020.

26 Man and Chou 2020.

27 Waters 2015.

28 Ong 1999; Waters 2005; 2006; 2015.

29 O’Sullivan and Tsang 2015.

30 Skeldon 1994; Ley 2010; Ong 1999.

31 Ley and Kobayashi 2005; Waters 2006.

32 With the exception of Ngan and Chan 2022; Ngan and Chan 2024; Ngan et al. 2023. Ley (2010) offers insights into their potential long-term migration trajectories through their life course.

33 Ngan and Chan 2024; Ngan et al. 2023.

34 Quan 2019; Westbrook 2021; Young 2019.

35 See Ngan and Chan 2024; Ley 2010; Ong 1999, Tse and Waters 2013; Waters 2006.

36 Ley 2010; Waters 2006; Yan, Lam, and Lauer 2014.

37 Tse and Waters 2013.

38 Ngan and Chan 2022; Ngan and Chan 2024.

39 Ngan and Chan 2024.

40 A second passport was a decisive condition that allowed these returnee families to make flexible migration decisions, something that is not possible for migrants who do not have such legal status.

41 Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong, 2023.

42 This pattern fits the circular migrations observed by Ley (2010) and Waters (2006).

43 Ley 2010; Waters 2006; Yan, Lam, and Lauer 2014.

44 Hu 1944.

45 Ngan and Chan 2023.

46 Census and Statistics Department, Hong Kong, 2022.

47 Cheung and Kim 2022. While seeking domestic support from elderly parents is a common practice, more families choose to outsource domestic work to FDHs as household structures have increasingly become nuclear. See Chen and Zhou 2022.

48 Cheung and Kim 2022.

49 Research Office, Hong Kong Legislative Council Secretariat, 2017.

50 Government of British Columbia, Canada Nd.

51 Cleveland 2022.

52 Cooke Zhang and Wang 2013; Ho 2006; Man 2019.

53 Kan and Zhou 2022.

54 Gu 2017; Cooke 2007; Wei 2013.

55 Ho and Ley 2014; Ley 2010; Tse and Waters 2013.

56 Cooke 2007; Huang and Yeoh 2005; Friedman 2016; Man 2019.

57 Tse and Waters 2013; Ngan and Chan 2022; Ngan and Chan 2024.

58 Abelmann, Newendorp, and Lee-Chung 2014; Ong 1999; Waters 2006.

59 Huang and Yeoh 2005; Man 2019.

60 Cooke 2007; Wei 2013.