Intimacy, identity and relationship in the accounts of Chinese immigrants to Canada: the contribution of narrative analysis

Abstract

In this paper we use narrative analysis to consider how the discursive resources that come with living ‘in between’ countries and cultures unfold in personal stories. We do this by presenting a close analysis of two transcripts drawn from a study about the vulnerability to HIV faced by Chinese immigrants to Canada. Our goal is to illustrate the application of narrative analysis and highlight the contributions it can make to conceptualising how transnationalism becomes consequential in accounts of intimate life. In narrative terms, transnationalism lends each life situation dual or multiple interpretive frameworks. Migrants from China to Canada situate their personal stories in relation to social and cultural norms and features of both nations. Yet, as our analysis makes apparent, ‘Canada’ and ‘China’ do not carry singular or consistent meanings in migrants’ stories. Attention to the role of stories in self-making allows us to better understand why transnational contexts appear as they do in narrative accounts, and responds to calls for more accurate mappings of the interface between transnationalism and the subject. Attention to how stories are ‘put together’ shows that transnational discursive resources are assembled in ways that bolster, and also undermine, entitlements to safe and equitable intimate relationships.

Résumé

Dans cet article, nous employons l’analyse narrative pour examiner comment les ressources discursives associées à la vie « entre » les pays et les cultures se déploient dans les histoires personnelles. Pour ce faire, nous présentons une analyse approfondie de deux transcriptions tirées d’une étude sur la vulnérabilité au VIH chez les immigrés chinois au Canada. Notre objectif est d’illustrer l’application de l’analyse narrative et de souligner ses possibles contributions à la conceptualisation de la manière dont le transnationalisme devient conséquent dans les récits se rapportant à la vie intime. En termes narratifs, le transnationalisme confère à chaque circonstance de vie des cadres interprétatifs doubles ou multiples. Les migrants originaires de la Chine au Canada situent leurs histoires personnelles relativement à des normes et à des caractéristiques sociales et culturelles des deux nations. Pourtant, comme notre analyse le fait apparaître, « Canada » et « Chine » n’ont pas de signification singulière ou cohérente dans les récits des migrants. Une attention particulière au rôle des histoires dans « l’autodidactisme » nous permet de mieux comprendre pourquoi les contextes transnationaux émergent comme ils le font des récits narratifs, et répond aux appels à la constitution d’une cartographie plus précise de l’interface entre le transnationalisme et le sujet. L’observation de la manière dont les histoires sont « concoctées » montre que les ressources discursives transnationales sont assemblées selon des modèles qui stimulent, et ébranlent également, les droits aux relations intimes équitables.

Resumen

Mediante un análisis narrativo en este artículo evaluamos en qué medida sirven los recursos discursivos que surgen de vivir entre diferentes países y culturas para desarrollar historias personales. Para ello presentamos un análisis minucioso de dos transcripciones extraídas de un estudio sobre la vulnerabilidad al VIH que sufren los inmigrantes chinos en Canadá. Nuestra finalidad es ilustrar la aplicación del análisis narrativo y poner de relieve las contribuciones que puede hacer al conceptualizar el modo en que el transnacionalismo se convierte en un tema importante para describir la vida privada. En términos narrativos, el transnacionalismo confiere a cada situación de la vida marcos interpretativos de carácter dual o múltiple. Los chinos que emigran a Canadá sitúan sus historias personales con relación a las normas y características sociales y culturales de ambos países. Sin embargo, tal como se pone de relieve en nuestro análisis, Canadá y China no tienen significados singulares o coherentes en las historias de los emigrantes. Si prestamos atención al papel de las historias para la construcción de la persona, podemos entender mejor por qué surgen los contextos transnacionales de esta manera en los relatos narrativos, y también podemos responder a las demandas de una localización más exacta de la interconexión entre el transnacionalismo y el sujeto. Al examinar cómo se elaboran las historias observamos que los recursos discursivos transnacionales se crean de formas que reafirman y también erosionan los derechos a relaciones íntimas seguras y equitativas

Keywords:

• Narratives
• gender
• transnationalism
• HIV prevention
• Canada
• China

Introduction

As contemporary migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in both home and destination countries has come more into focus (Tsuda 2012), scholars are working to identify methods adequate to the investigation of transnational social spaces and belongings (Ruokonen-Engler and Siouti 2013). Marcus (1995) has provided important direction in this regard, advocating for approaches that ‘follow the …’ people, objects, metaphors, stories, biographies or conflicts.

Even with creative and diligent following, however, the ways in which intimate social relations are shaped by transnationalism can remain elusive. In this paper, transnationalism is conceptualised as simultaneous engagement with two cultures and interpretive frames of reference, cross-country connections and ‘in between’ identities. To investigate transnationalism, much scholarship tracks the circulation of people, capital and culture – and then ‘reads’ subjectivity off of these external social forms (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). Pressing against the insufficiency of such accounts, Povinelli and Chauncey (1999, 444) encourage increased attention to the nuances and details of how discourses normative to multiple localities inlay into subjects’ ‘intimate grammar[s]’ – their (changing) relational and sexual intentions, desires and aversions, languages, experiences and identifications.

Povinelli and Chauncey’s (1999) commentary occurs in the context of their assessment of the transnational turn in sexualities studies. In Thinking Sexuality Transnationally they assert a conviction that studies of sexuality ‘must fundamentally rethink the relationship between the subject and its intimate productions’ (444). The social factors that shape intimate lives have been assumed to be local, in the sense of proximate in time and place (the local family context, social norms in a geographically bound community, images from national media). Now, the local has exploded: the where, when and who of desire’s production, pleasure’s discipline, intimacy’s weaving have expanded and multiplied. Assumptions, too, about how social forces shape an individual’s body, psyche, desires and imagination are altered. Face-to-face communication in shared physical spaces is only one among many ways to create intimate spaces and relations (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). Carrillo (2004) suggests that ‘transnational forms of movement, including migration, may be one of the primary forces informing the constitution of modern sexualities around the world’ (61). In the most obvious ways, sexuality and intimate relationships can be important prompts for migration (Carrillo 2004). More generally, Manalansan (2006) highlights the constitutive role of sexuality ‘in the formation and definitions of citizenship and nation’ (224). Sexuality and intimacy are routes by which people’s sense of belonging – in relation to cultural, social, legal and economic spheres – unfold.

Again, though, the question of how transnationalism is subjectively mediated is salient, and points to a gap in the methodological literature. Considering bodies that carry queering marks – but in a statement arguably true more broadly – Sanchez-Eppler and Patton (2000) write that ‘intricate realignments of identity, politics and desire take place’ (3) when bodies move between officially designated spaces. The effects of such movements are, however, ‘far from uniform’. Like Povinelli and Chauncey, these authors call us to develop methodologies that ‘make sense of the always poignant … labours of reinvention and renegotiation in new places, or in reimagined old ones’ (3).

The challenge of making sense of the reinventions prompted by transnationalism has been taken up with particular vigour by scholars working in narrative research traditions. Though diverse in theoretical lineage and application (Chase 1995), narrative approaches to qualitative research share certain features. They are case-based, in the sense that narrators’ extended accounts are treated analytically as units rather than segmented into themes. They pay deliberate attention to sequentiality, assigning significance to the order in which events and experiences are presented and to the links between them. In addition, they typically pay attention to both ‘the told’ and ‘the telling’ – that is, to the reported events and experiences, and also how the speaker assembles or ‘puts together’ the story in particular ways for particular audiences and purposes (Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004; Phoenix and Griffin 2013; Mason 2002).

A growing body of scholarship highlights the contributions narrative analysis can make to understanding migrants’ changing senses of self and their capacities for action, including as these relate to intimacy, sexuality and health. Ruokonen-Engler and Siouti (2013), for example, claim that narrative analysis allows fine-grained insights into how a subject’s agency is (re)constructed by transnationalism: narrative approaches can make visible the multiple, diverse and often conflicting sources and practices from which a migrant’s changing sense of self are drawn. Immigrants’ past ways of thinking and living are not erased. As Teo (2007) notes, their ‘frames of reference fluctuate’ between the familiar homeland and the new hostland ‘and not infrequently, arise from both simultaneously’ (214). As Carrillo (2004) points out, immigrants’ ways of thinking about sexuality emerge in part from assumptions about sexual cultures in home and host countries (64) and the contrasts often drawn between them. In a related vein, Chamberlain and Leydesdorff (2004) describe how narrative approaches, exploring migrants’ narrated memories (both nostalgic and critical) of the home country, can reveal and contextualise current tensions of life and identity, including those linked with gender and intimate relationships. Apitzsch and Siouti (2007) highlight the concept of ‘biographical resources’ as especially salient to migration studies. Here, biographical experiences in particular settings – and the knowledge constructed from these experiences – can be studied as resources for making sense of, and taking action in, subsequent settings.

A related body of literature foregrounds an understanding of narratives as practices or forms of social action (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2008; Riessman 2007) at both the individual level and the level of social groups. Here, the focus is on what narrators ‘do’ with stories, and narrative is conceptualised not only as a resource for understanding identity but also as a means by which individual and group identities are (re)created, negotiated and presented. Storytelling is a form of self-making for individuals and also central to migrant groups’ symbolic practices in the wider social sphere (De Fina 2008). Bhatia (2011) elaborates on this latter point, emphasising the significance in migrants’ storytelling of asymmetrical power relations, including legacies of racism and colonisation, as contexts for narrative meaning. She suggests that for individuals whose identities ‘rub up against subtle or violent forms of otherness’ (348), storytelling takes on a particular burden and intensity; the ways that individuals position themselves in relation to others thus requires careful and critical analysis.

In this paper, we draw primarily on Riessman’s (2007) approach to narrative analysis, and her emphasis on contingent sequences – the idea that all stories, in imposing a meaningful pattern on what would otherwise be random and disconnected, ‘demand the consequential linking of events or ideas’ (Salmon as quoted in Riessman 2007, 5). Our purpose is to understand how transnationalism (simultaneous engagement with two cultures and interpretive frames of reference, cross-country connections, and ‘in between’ identities) is consequentially linked to migrants’ understandings and assessments of their intimate lives and relational possibilities, including possibilities for negotiating safer and more equitable intimate relationships. In offering this analysis, we respond to calls in the literature for greater attention to transnationalism’s subjective mediation. Our contribution is methodological. Narrative analysis makes visible the ways that, through storytelling and in stories, transnationalism entwines with subjects’ self-understandings, including self-understandings related to sexual and relational possibilities and entitlements.

Applying narrative analysis to understand the subjective mediation of transnationalism

The main goal of our paper is to illustrate the application of narrative analysis and highlight its contributions to understanding the subjective mediation of transnationalism. The depth and detail that such analysis demands of single interview transcripts permit us to present an analysis of two interviews drawn from a multi-sited, four-year (2011–2015) study that aimed to understand the vulnerability to HIV faced by the recent generation of Chinese immigrants to Canada, the majority of whom are well-educated professionals (Li 2011). Members of the project team conducted individual, in-depth interviews with 66 Chinese international migrants (between China and Canada) and 26 key informants from HIV-related civil society organisations and public agencies at four study sites (Toronto, Vancouver, Beijing and Shanghai). The project received ethics clearance at the universities of all members of the investigative team (in Canada, China and France) and was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The interviews, conducted with the 66 Chinese international migrants, addressed the participants’ immigration and settlement processes (major life changes, relationship to China, links with Chinese community in Canada); HIV and AIDS (how they learned about the disease, where they go for health information, perception of risks, responses to risks, risk behaviour, reflections on how HIV is perceived in China and Canada); and use of HIV-related health and social services.

The two interviews we selected to illustrate the application and contributions of narrative analysis were chosen for their potential to show how migrants’ accounts of their intimate relationships are ‘put together’ with the transnational aspects of their lives. In both transcripts a sense of ‘living in both/living in between’ was relatively obvious (respondents referred often to both settings/cultures). Both consistently referred to their extended families and, more generally, discussion of intimate relationships, intentions and desires was substantial. In selecting these two transcripts, we also sought contrasting experiences, identifying narrators with very different immigration and life trajectories who differed from one another in terms of gender and sexual identity – a heterosexual woman (Ms. Fang) and a gay man (Mr. Wu).

Various traditions of narrative research define the ‘narrative’ somewhat differently – as, for example, an entire life story, a discrete topic-focused story (often told in response to a single interview question) or linked stories that emerge over the course of an interview or interviews (Riessman 2000). We pursued the latter tradition. Labov’s structural approach (Labov 1982; Riessman 2007) provided a conceptual and organising framework. Each of the transcripts was engaged with holistically: the series of stories from each transcript was analysed as a unit, with the goal of producing an explanation of the processes that characterised the unit (Mason 2002) – that is, in this study, the processes by which transnational contexts and intimate relationships were narratively connected. This approach is distinguished from more usual qualitative research methods that compare themes within the first transcript with themes in subsequent transcripts, on the assumption of an ontological similarity of themes (Doyal 2009; Mason 2002). Particular attention was paid to orientation clauses, evaluations and codas. Orientation clauses – clauses that identify the place, participants, time and situation – were especially salient to our goal of understanding how transnational contexts were activated and mobilised in narratives. In evaluation clauses narrators offer their interpretation and indicate how they want to be understood, and often communicate emotion. Codas return the narrative to the present; they are statements of ‘how it is now’, and such statements, as they relate to the narrator’s current sense of their relational situation and possibilities, are central to our analysis in this paper (Riessman 2007).

Narrative analysis: transnationalism in stories and storytelling

In this section our intention is to show how Ms. Fang’s and Mr. Wu’s accounts and assessments of their intimate relationships (including their opportunities for safe and equitable sexual relationships) are consequentially linked in narrative terms with transnationalism. In other words, we show how in their storytelling migrants’ simultaneous engagement with two cultures and frames of reference, cross-country connections and ‘in between’ identities are inlayed into their intimate lives. We do this by taking the reader through a series of linked stories that emerged over the course of the interview (Riessman 2000) that contain references both to transnationalism and intimate life.

As noted, Ms. Fang and Mr. Wu have very different life and immigration trajectories. Ms. Fang’s immigration was occasioned by her husband’s, and her post-immigration life was characterised by struggle: divorce, workplace injury and downward social and economic mobility (though the latter is downplayed in her narrative compared to other study participants). A relationship with a Caucasian man seemed to carry the possibility of intimacy and social integration. Yet she withdrew from this relationship in response to racism, to preserve her own dignity (a move not apparent in other narratives in this wider study data-set). Mr. Wu immigrated with the intention of being able to live openly as a gay man and (similar to other study participants) struggled to secure employment commensurate with his skills and experience. His narrative shows a pattern of return migration to China due to employment difficulties in Canada, and then return again to Canada because of homophobia in China. An interracial intimate relationship carried the promise of intimacy, family and social integration, yet also carried considerable sexual health risk, and unfolded in the context of a racial hierarchy: in some sense both health risk and racism are the costs of Mr. Wu’s ‘freedom’ as a gay man. The ways various features of life are weighed, traded off, asserted or compromised – the complexities of self- and relationship-making in the context of transnationalism – are analysed below.

Ms. Fang: the shifting significance of ‘living in the present’

Ms. Fang, in her early-50s at the time of the interview, was a high-status professional in China before her immigration to Canada 15 years ago. Early in the interview she referred to ‘setbacks in life’. Asked to talk about these, she spoke of a work injury and the dissolution of her marriage. Later in the interview she described being ‘forced to immigrate to Canada’ with her husband in an effort to end his affair with another woman. This effort failed and she described feeling ‘psychologically tortured’ by her husband. She spoke of working hard in this context to create a financially secure environment for her child – so hard that she injured herself; at the time of the interview, she lived on government social assistance. After her marriage ended and with the ‘collapse’ of her physical body, she said, ‘it is almost like I am a huge failure in life.’ Yet, as she said, over time she ‘stood up again,’ learning to deal with adversity and realising her strength.

In early passages in the interview, Ms. Fang told the interviewer that her family and friends often tried to convince her to find a companion. The next passages (further orientation clauses, in narrative analytic terms) highlighted the broader context of her life experience. In these passages she asserted the impossibility in the Chinese community in Canada of someone in her condition (with a disability) to secure a suitable partner (that is, finding a Chinese man of similar socioeconomic status). She linked this reality with a worldview attentive to the future, which anticipates the possibility of a disabled person becoming more disabled and a burden to a life partner. This concern about the future was directly contrasted in the story sequence with ‘Caucasian’ ways of thinking and living: ‘they live in the present’. She said she initially believed Caucasian men might simply not express their reservations about dating someone with a disability; later she discovered that ‘it is not that [Caucasians] don’t think about these things, it is just that they are not as realistic as Chinese people.’

In the next section of the interview (in a series of evaluation clauses) Ms. Fang assessed a potential partner and his worldview negatively (‘all he thought about is my disability … he is just living in the future’) in contrast with her own view of her situation: ‘right now, I am living in the present’ (said twice); ‘I am quite OK now’. To think about the future in the way he did, she said, would be pointless and self-defeating. Indeed, she described having ‘changed this way of thinking’. In the context of her orientation clauses, we can see that at this point in her narrative the changed way of thinking was from ‘Chinese’ to ‘Caucasian’/Western.

Over the entire set of linked stories, however, this assertion about a changed way of thinking was called into question. Even as she oriented the listener to a negative assessment of disabled people as potential partners in the Chinese community, Ms. Fang acknowledged that ‘if I am in their shoes, these are things I will consider as well.’ It appears that, mobilised in different narrative contexts and from different standpoints, words about ‘living in the present’ and ‘being realistic’ (about the future) may have had distinct meanings and purposes, both for her as an individual and in a broader social context.

The next story sequence focused on Ms. Fang’s experience dating a Western man. In the beginning this relationship was welcome; it gave her confidence and ‘helped me to feel that I am not useless’. The action of the narrative was complicated when she asked him if he loved her, and he replied that he did. This raised a kind of wariness in her: she wondered how he could love her when their relationship was only a few months old. In the narrative, his declaration of love was situated in an explicit contrast between Western and Chinese culture. She said:

I am beginning to understand Western culture, when they say love, when he told me he loves me, it is said lightly and I have to evaluate it. Chinese don’t necessary say those words, but … Chinese man, if they have a good heart, then their behaviours will be good. Of course I love to hear those sweet words, there are no women that don’t like it, women are easily tricked …

In this quote, as in other evaluation clauses in the narrative, Mr. Fang drew attention to the significance of behaviour and action as true markers of character, and to the potentially deceptive nature of words. Her focus on true love as illustrated much more by actions demonstrating mutual commitment, responsibility and sacrifice than by words, reflected the value typically assigned to traditional Chinese culture by Ms. Fang’s generation. This passage also raised concerns about the ‘suitability’ (a term used repeatedly in this context to signal compatibility in personal, cultural and socioeconomic terms) of Caucasians as potential partners. In this respect, the move from individual to social was salient: in the final sentence above she began from her personal desire to hear words of love, then shifted to position herself as a woman among all women who desire such words – and are easily tricked by them.

The coda – the statements that brought the action back to the present – reflected uncertainty about the wisdom and value of investing energy in seeking a partner:

Looking back now and reflecting on it, I have experienced so much in those years, I am not sure if I will still be searching for a mate, I’ll just let life lead the path. If I can find someone, that’s great; if not, that’s ok too. I just need to make sure I live happily and peacefully, that’s enough.

The next linked story brought tensions between ‘living in the moment’ and ‘considering the future’ into explicit focus. She told the interviewer that a counsellor she had seen subsequent to her difficult divorce had wondered if a Caucasian partner would be suitable for her. She noted that she ‘continue[d] to think about this question’. And, positioning herself as wiser (‘I read a lot of books, and experienced a lot in life’), she responded that she did not think this Caucasian partner was suitable for her.

The interviewer asked her to clarify the meaning of suitable: for marriage or for spending time together? She replied with a re-affirmation of her earlier statements about Western culture being present-oriented: ‘the importance is to enjoy life now. Who cares if you are paralysed in 10 years’ time?’ At this point in the narrative, however, unlike in the earlier passage, she troubled this worldview. She said: ‘But I feel conflicted about this. Even though I want to enjoy now and not worry about the future, yet sometimes I can’t help but think if I don’t have a future with you, why am I wasting my time with you now?’

This coda echoed the one earlier: ‘why not just be single? I think this is very important. I learned that I need to build myself up, be strong, if I live a good life, then a relationship is just an added bonus, I can still have a good life without him.’ It was, however, more assertively and optimistically expressed, linked directly with a positive evaluation of her own learning and the possibility of a good life as a single person.

Both codas rendered a long-term relationship highly unlikely, if not impossible, for the speaker. The narrative established that a ‘suitable’ Chinese man would never choose her, and eventually it made clear that she would never choose a Caucasian man.

In a subsequent passage, Ms. Fang’s analysis of the risks of relationships with a Caucasian man became clearer and the wider social and political context of those relations entered more obviously into the personal narrative. In a series of orientation clauses she introduced the interviewer to her brother as a character in her story. She then noted that her brother, hearing about her boyfriend’s background, indicated that he ‘didn’t think it will work …’. She went on to say that, over time, her boyfriend revealed that he had had a girlfriend in China. As she learned more, she began to feel that something was wrong. Eventually she realised that:

… this isn’t about him liking Chinese culture, it’s about him taking advantage of Chinese culture. He likes Chinese girls because, first, he can date someone younger than him …. He also told me he dated Thai woman, and women from other places. I said, ‘you are visiting around the world, not looking for [a] relationship.’ He said no, he was quite serious, he vows that he loves me. … Later I told my younger brother, my younger brother told me not to listen to him, just look at what he does, what he’s like behind that mask. Later, I decided it is not going to work.

The final sentence in this quote, her resolution of this story, echoed and endorsed her brother’s assessment: this relationship would not work. Also validated by the structure of the narrative were the sources of her brother’s insights that she cited in the orientation: he had longer knowledge of Western society and he also had a stronger sense of Chinese heritage; he was her family outside China, and, in turn, he symbolised someone whom she could fully trust and rely on at personal, emotional and cultural levels. Linked to the latter, there was also a deepening of the previous theme of disjunctures between words and actions, particularly how ‘sweet words’ of love can mask a true character.

The nature of this true character was further revealed in a story in which the narrator described being invited to dinner by this man’s parents:

Ms. Fang: After dinner, there’s a huge pile of dishes, his father jokingly said that ‘it is time for the Chinese woman to clean the dishes, do the washing.’ I said ‘Who told you this shit?’ I wasn’t polite, I was very direct. And then, my ex-boyfriend laughed and said that ‘Yes, that’s what people say.’ I told him not to tell me shit. When we went back, I told him if he dares to say these things to me again, don’t complain that I am not polite.

Interviewer: How did he respond?

Ms. Fang: He said, sorry, sorry. I said that he is insulting people, who told you that Chinese woman need to wash dishes? I told him what era do you think you are in? I told him not to say nasty things to me. I told him if we are in China, and even if he wants to carry my shoes, I wouldn’t want him.

It was in the context of both of these stories that her resolution was forged: ‘it is not going to work’.

These stories affirmed the value, in these story contexts, of a strong sense of Chineseness for evaluating people’s characters in the Canadian context. The salience of Chinese culture to the unfolding action of these stories, and especially to the evaluative passages, was apparent. Her boyfriend’s father represented her as a category rather than a person, and her boyfriend endorsed (or at least did not challenge) this representation. Imagining her boyfriend with her in China was part of how she conveyed the significance of the insult: he and his father positioned her as a mere category and as a servant; were they in China, even if he wanted to serve her, she would not want him to.

These stories also negatively evaluated ‘living in the present’. The narrator recalled initially not listening to her brother, and described herself in terms similar to those in the ‘in the present’ passages: ‘at the time I didn’t care, I continue to date him. I wasn’t thinking about marriage, I wasn’t thinking about love, I just thought that having a friend is better than none.’ By the end of these stories, with the boyfriend’s true character revealed (and recalling the humiliation of her previous marriage), this earlier narrative self was entirely discredited. Her stories in this section of the transcript strongly endorsed the importance of carefully considering whether a relationship has a future (and, in implying that sometimes having no relationship is a better situation, echoed the earlier codas).

The future the narrator evoked in this section was not merely her personal future, and nor were the stories she told only hers. It was in these sections that we could vividly see how a personal narrative was deeply entwined with – and confirmed the subjective salience of – a broader transnational context. Ms. Fang’s evaluations of her boyfriend emerged from accounts of very daily domestic moments around the dinner table at his parents’ home and from the arguments that ensued between the two of them. At the same time these evaluations mobilised a critique of colonial relations between ‘the West’ and China and of racist tropes of Asian women as in service, both sexually and domestically, to Caucasian men. In unfolding a ‘realistic’ evaluation of this intimate relationship, her narrative considered not only what being with this specific man would mean for her over time, but also what being a Chinese woman in a relationship with a Caucasian man means in the broader transnational world at this moment in history.

In closely analysing this narrative, then, we can see how Ms. Fang, in telling a personal and emotional story, also told a transnational story: she drew on social, cultural and discursive features of both nations. We can also see how the availability of both Canada/Canadians and China/Chinese as touchstones and evaluative frames related to her sense of self, entitlement and possibility with respect to intimate partnerships (though it was also clear, as in other transcripts, that Canada and Canadians often stands in for broader interpretive/evaluative frameworks of ‘the West’ and Caucasians). More particularly, we can see that the overall arrangement of the narrative – in how it established that a Chinese man would not choose her and she would not choose a Caucasian man – rendered her necessarily single. In a final coda she said: ‘if you don’t offer me this future, then don’t waste my time. It doesn’t matter how fun you are, I can live on my own. I want to live peacefully and be strong, so I don’t need to look for those things.’ As assertively as this was framed, towards the end of the interview Ms. Fang also revealed her worry about growing old and her ‘secret anguish’ that she could not expect much of her son in terms of companionship or care – a reality she ascribed to his growing up in Canada and accepting Canadian ways.

Mr. Wu: the tensions of reassembling family

Like Ms. Fang, Mr. Wu, in his early-40s at the time of the interview, was a high-status professional in China. He migrated to Canada about five years ago, primarily because ‘China is not friendly or tolerant for homosexual people like me.’ Over several passages in his narrative Mr. Wu described the ‘tremendous and unthinkable’ pressure faced in China by socioeconomically successful men who do not have female partners. His narrative conveyed the increasing difficulty of proffering ‘various excuses’ to his family, refusing offers of introductions to women and explaining the fact that nothing came of introductions to so many eligible women. Importantly, these family pressures were felt even in the ‘mega-city’ of Beijing. And it was in the ways his migration reconfigured his relationship with his family that we can understand one aspect of the profound subjective salience of transnationalism to this narrator.

In the transcript, immediately after a passage in which he recalled his parents and brother having ‘no clues’ as to what was ‘wrong with him’ (why nothing had come of all these introductions to promising female partners), his narrative returned to the present: ‘Now, I phone my mother … [or] brother every weekend and we are really close.’ This coda – the closure he offered to this part of the story – affirmed his persistent connection to his family in China as made possible by his migration to Canada. In the distinct socio-geographic and symbolic space of Canada, his failure to be heterosexually married could be accommodated, or at least ignored, by his family. In this narrative, crossing the national border rendered the speaker beyond the reach of his family’s relentless call to heteronormativity, while also allowing a sustained close relationship with them.

Towards the end of the transcript, evaluation clauses described his own relational and sexual situation as very favourable. This assessment was made in relation to a litany of struggles he assigned to heterosexual male migrants: they did not have decent jobs (especially compared with their jobs in China) and their English language skills remained limited. They could not integrate into mainstream Canadian life and there was ‘no way they can get a girlfriend, so … there is no sex life and no love life at all’. He described the consequences to these men: their minds were ‘twisted and I feel that they are not themselves anymore’. In relation to these men he assessed himself as ‘very lucky … extremely lucky’. Indeed, he suggested that knowing more of his life might well prompt jealousy from his heterosexual peers.

At the same time, aspects of the narrator’s account undermined or at least tempered a reading of the narrator as ‘lucky’. Throughout his narrative Mr. Wu repeatedly asserted the desirability of Caucasian men and the undesirability of Asian men. Asian men’s desires for Caucasian men (and not for other Asian men) were presented as ‘common sense’: ‘It’s a known fact that 90% of Caucasian guys are more good looking than Asian guys, even the most plain looking Caucasian guys.’ His boyfriend’s attraction to him thus merited explanation: he described his partner as one of the very rare Caucasian men ‘born’ desiring Asian men. Over the course of his narrative Mr. Wu also affirmed a conviction that ‘foreigners’ (White people) know how to protect themselves during anal sex even when not using a condom (by withdrawing before ejaculating); he described assuring his former boyfriend in China that Caucasians, asked in the right way, would be honest about their HIV status. As in other transnational narratives, this passage showed biographical knowledge moving between settings (Apitzsch and Siouti 2007) – in the context of HIV, though, this knowledge was more a liability than a protective resource.

It was in relation to this racial hierarchy that the relational and sexual difficulties Mr. Wu assigned to heterosexual male immigrants came into narrative alignment with his own relational situation. There might have been ‘no way’ that heterosexual men could ‘get a girlfriend’, but his own partner was one of the ‘very few’ Caucasian men born with a desire for Asian men; his having a boyfriend depended on this rare (and apparently unalterable) circumstance. He did make clear later in the interview that he (unlike his heterosexual peers) could always easily find safe sexual partners. Yet, as the interview revealed, a ‘love life’ was elusive for the narrator.

As the narrator told the story of his efforts to ‘make the family of me and my boyfriend here a real family’ the significance of his continued engagement with Chinese culture and values was apparent. He said that in China, everyday routines and the shared influence of Chinese culture ‘makes’ a family. To establish himself and his boyfriend in Canada as ‘a real family’, then, he tried to make his boyfriend ‘think like a Chinese guy’. He encouraged his boyfriend to enjoy Asian food and to more carefully steward his money. But (as he said twice) ‘it’s impossible’: his boyfriend maintained his desire for North American food (and his particular aversion to Asian food); he also maintained his ‘Western’ spending habits.

As in Ms. Fang’s narrative, we can see how the availability of both Canada (and Canadians/Caucasians) and China (and Chinese) as touchstones and interpretive and evaluative frames shaped assessments of relational possibilities. Mr. Wu arrived, in a sense, at a position opposite to Ms. Fang’s. While Ms. Fang affirmed that no Chinese man would want her, and expresses wariness about a relationship with a Canadian (Caucasian) man, Mr. Wu affirmed that only a very rare Caucasian man would want him, and that he would never wish to have a relationship with an Asian man.

Discussion

In the ways it reveals the subjective salience of transnational social forms and contexts, narrative inquiry has much to offer studies of migration. The analysis presented in this paper helps make visible a particular contribution of narrative approaches: namely, that understanding each individual’s story as a self-making processes can help make sense of the range of ways transnational contexts feature in migrants’ accounts, including their accounts of sexual and relational possibilities and entitlements. At face value, the stories analysed here appear to have very little in common, the life and immigration paths are so distinct. Yet narrative analytic resources (including orientations and evaluation clauses, and codas) that focus attention on the story structure can reveal a range of common ways that transnationalism is linked with narrators’ intimate lives. The tensions that emerge – between self and family, autonomy and integration, desired selves and relationships and the costs of sustaining or compromising these – echo and extend findings of other papers from this data-set (Zhou 2016).

Narrative analysis shifts our attention away from the more usual focus in qualitative research on topics or themes that cross-cut multiple narrators’ accounts, and towards the purposes and consequences of each topic, for each narrator, in specific story contexts. In keeping with this approach we have drawn attention to the purposes that ideas about ‘living in the present’ have for Ms. Fang. In early story sequences, ‘living in the present’ means that her disability need not limit her or deny her the possibility of a relationship. In later stories, ‘living in the present’ has different and more difficult consequences. In these later stories, rejecting ‘living in the present’ affirms her strength, independence and capacity to resist exploitative intimate relations with (Caucasian) men. Narrative analysis, then, helps us understand why the single theme of ‘living in the present’ is taken up by Ms. Fang in very different ways in each story. The phrase and idea ‘do different things’, have different self-making purposes in each story: in one story, it supports her continued possibility for relationship; in another story, it helps her affirm her independence. Similarly, for Mr. Wu, ‘the Chinese family’ has a range of purposes or ‘does different things’: in early stories the Chinese family is a problem that makes his migration essential; in a later story being part of a Chinese family is a deeply valued aspect of his identity that he strives to affirm with his boyfriend in Canada. Narrative analysis, and particularly understanding stories as self-making processes, allows us to make sense of each narrator’s ‘labours of reinvention and renegotiation in new places … [and] in reimagined old ones’ (Sanchez-Eppler and Patton 2000, 3).

For both narrators, the social and cultural features of nation-states are mediated in subjective terms by their changing intentions in storytelling. More broadly, a narrative approach stands as a corrective against overgeneralised assumptions about how cultures or countries are woven into any particular subject’s story. When it is obvious that a single cultural trope – the ‘Chinese family’ ‘living in the present’ – is subjectively salient in distinct and even contradictory ways in the course of a single narrative, it becomes difficult to sustain the idea that any of the social forms of transnationalism can have singular or stable meanings in relation to subjects’ intimate lives. As Blackwood (2008) notes in her study of the multiplicity of queer subjectivities in Indonesia, the intersection of global and local is complex, ‘characterised more by hybridity and syncretisation than mimicry or reflection’ (501). Narrative approaches offer one way for future researchers to create more accurate mappings of connections between transnational social forms, and the subject and her desires (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999).

In looking across stories, researchers in the narrative tradition do not attempt to identify substantive themes common to multiple stories but, rather, draw attention to similar narrative features and processes (Riessman 2007). As we have noted, a feature of transnationalism salient to individual narratives is that living ‘in between’ countries and cultures lends each life situation dual or multiple interpretive frameworks. In telling any particular story, narrators must bring the ideas they hold about both countries and cultures into some relationship to one another. Not uncommonly, this involves privileging one culture or country (or one aspect of that culture or country) over the other.

De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008) describe this narrative process in terms of struggles for legitimation and recognition between social groups. In her study of an Italian American men’s card playing club, for example, De Fina (2008) draws on Bourdieu to describe how narrative negotiations of the position of ethnic groups in wider social spaces are designed to ‘accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power’ (421).

Narrative processes of this kind are also apparent in Ms. Fang’s account. Early in her narrative Ms. Fang establishes the threat posed by ableist discourses that she labels ‘Chinese’ to her dignity as a disabled woman. In a quite conscious way she takes up a discourse that she identifies as Caucasian to assert an alternative to – to dismiss, to displace – the Chinese interpretive frame. This narrative move (re)positions her (and disabled women generally) as worthy, respected and desirable. In a parallel way, the later story sequence establishes ‘Western’ framings of Chinese women as a threat to her social position, and entitlements in intimate relationships. Arguably Ms. Fang’s personal story elevates the status of Chinese women and echoes and reaffirms collective resistance to colonial relations (though we can also see how symbolic capital is not so much accumulated as its erosion – by ableism, racism and colonialism – is countered).

We can see how Mr. Wu’s narrative also involves the negotiation of social hierarchies: like other gay men in China, he finds material and discursive ways to subvert ‘heterosexual hegemony’ (Li, Holroyd, and Lau 2010, 411). In this case, however, comparative interpretive frames are also arranged in ways that undermine (rather than bolster) symbolic capital for the social group to which the narrator belongs. In Mr. Wu’s narrative we perceive that a discourse of Caucasian superiority has becomes embedded in his desires, ‘orienting [his] expectations and demands’ (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999, 444) in intimate relationships.

Writing specifically about gender and sexuality, Carrillo (2004) considers how judgements about the sexual morality or gender culture of the host country are mobilised in immigrants’ narratives – and with what effects. He reviews a study by Espiritu (2003) in which Filipina respondents tended to construct White women as immoral, and this construction functioned to encourage ‘sexual virtue’ among Filipinas. He also cites a study by González-López (2003) in which some Mexican women came to believe that US men treated them well, and this promoted critique of Mexican men and examination of the home country gender culture. His concern is to point to the consequences of these collective discourses for women’s sexual agency.

Carrillo (2004) encourages analysis of the ‘ideas that immigrants associate with sexual cultures in home and host countries’ (64) and to the kinds of questioning or support for these ideas that occurs with migration. In narrative analytic terms, Carrillo is encouraging attention to the consequences of how narratives are ‘put together’. Mr. Wu’s narrative consistently positions Asian men as less desirable than Caucasian men and himself as unusually fortunate to have found a rare Caucasian man attracted to him. Consistent with the racial hierarchy he affirms throughout his narrative, Mr. Wu assigns superior knowledge and honesty regarding HIV to White gay men. The personal and embodied risk of putting his story together in this way is apparent.

In this paper, we have shown how narrative analysis can make visible the range of ways that discursive resources that come with living ‘in between’ two countries, cultures and frames of reference can be brought together in personal stories and articulated to accounts of desire, self and relationship. In this way, we respond to the call for a more careful mapping of the ways transnationalism is rendered subjectively salient. As De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008) note, storytelling can be understood as a ‘context-shaping discourse activity’ (276), with implications for social and personal rights. As the paper also shows, transnational discursive resources can be assembled in ways that both bolster and undermine collective and individual entitlements, including entitlements germane to the negotiation of safer and more equitable intimate relationships.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (grant number 111081) and a McMaster Art Research Board Scholarly Publications Grant (grant number 2016-2018).

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their appreciation to the research participants of this study in both Canada and China. We also thank this project’s research associates and assistants (Helen Hong Su, Liping Peng, Emmy Arnold, Nancy Johnson, Xiaoqing Gao, Xiaoxin Ji and Jane Ma) and collaborators (Chi Heng Foundation, Shanghai, China; Institute of Sexuality and Gender, Renmin University of China; Asian Community AIDS Services, Toronto, Canada; St. Stephen’s House, Toronto, Canada) for their contributions at different stages of this study.