(Anthropology, Change and Development Series) Lan Anh Hoang, Brenda S. A. Yeoh (Eds.) - Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and The Changing Family in Asia-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

Transnational
Labour Migration,
Remit tances and
the Changing
Family in Asia
Edited by
Lan Anh Hoang
Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and
the Changing Family in Asia
Anthropology, Change and Development Series
Series Editors:
Laura Camfield, Senior Lecturer in International Development, School of Inter-
national Development, University of East Anglia, UK
Catherine Locke, Reader in Gender and Social Development, School of Interna-
tional Development, University of East Anglia, UK
Lan Anh Hoang, Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Melbourne,
Australia
Mainstream development studies have tended to neglect important aspects of
experience in developing countries that fall outside the conventional preserve
of development intervention. These neglected phenomena include consump-
tion, modernity and mobility, and ambivalent experiences such as uncertainty,
mistrust, jealousy, envy, love, emotion, hope, religious and spiritual belief, per-
sonhood and other experiences throughout the life course. They have most
closely been addressed through critical ethnography in the context of contem-
porary developing societies. We invite submissions that focus on the value of
ethnography of these contemporary experiences of development (as change),
not only to address these neglected phenomena but also to enrich social science
thinking about development.
Titles include:
Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten (editors)

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF UNCERTAINTY IN AFRICA
Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius (editors)
THEATRE AND DEVELOPMENT
Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh (editors)
TRANSNATIONAL LABOUR MIGRATION, REMITTANCES AND THE
CHANGING FAMILY IN ASIA
Forthcoming titles:
Tanya Jakimow
DE-CENTRING DEVELOPMENT
Understanding Change in Agrarian Society
Anthropology, Change and Development Series

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Transnational Labour
Migration, Remittances
and the Changing Family
in Asia
Edited by
Lan Anh Hoang

Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia
and
Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Professor of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Lan Anh Hoang and
Brenda S. A. Yeoh 2015
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and the Changing Family
in Asia (Conference) (2010 : Singapore)
Transnational labour migration, remittances and the changing family in
Asia / [edited by] Lan Anh Hoang, Lecturer in Development Studies,
University of Melbourne, Australia, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Professor of
Geography, National University of Singapore.
pages cm. — (Anthropology, change and development)
“Earlier versions of chapters in this volume were presented at the
International Workshop entitled, Labour Migration, Remittances and
the Changing Family in Asia, 27th–28th July 2010 in
Singapore” — Acknowledgements.
1. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Congresses. 2. Labor

mobility—Asia—Congresses. 3. Emigrant remittances—Asia—
Congresses. 4. Families—Asia—Congresses. I. Hoang, Lan Anh,
1977– II. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. III. Title.
JV8490.T723 2010
331.5 44095—dc23 2015001001
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Series Editors’ Preface ix
Acknowledgements xii
Notes on Contributors xiii
1 Introduction: Migration, Remittances and the Family 1

Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh
Part I Remittances as Gendered Processes

2 Transnational Remittances and Gendered Status
Enhancement in Rural Bangladesh 27
Nitya Rao
3 Remittances and Women’s Agency: Managing Networks of

Obligation among Burmese Migrant Workers in Thailand 50
Kyoko Kusakabe and Ruth Pearson
4 “Good” Sons and “Dutiful” Daughters: A Structural

Symbolic Interactionist Analysis of the Migration and
Remittance Behaviour of Northern Thai International
Migrants 82
Teresa Sobieszczyk
5 “So They Remember Me When I’m Gone”: Remittances,

Fatherhood and Gender Relations of Filipino Migrant Men 111
Steven McKay
Part II Remittances and Generational Dynamics of

Change
6 Migrant Remittances, Population Ageing and
Intergenerational Family Obligations in Sri Lanka 139
Michele Ruth Gamburd
7 Differential Impacts of Migration on the Family Networks

of Older People in Indonesia: A Comparative Analysis 165
Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill
v
vi Contents
8 Migration, Remittances and Social and Spatial

Organisation of Rural Households in China 194
C. Cindy Fan
9 Filipino Children and the Affective Economy of Saving

and Being Saved: Remittances and Debts in Transnational
Migrant Families 227
Cheryll Alipio
Part III (Non-)Remittance and the Family in Crisis

10 Rethinking Remittances through Emotion: Filipina
Migrant Labourers in Singapore and Transnational
Families Undone 257
Sallie Yea
11 Transnational Labour Migration, Debts and Family

Economics in Vietnam 283
Index 311
Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Average annual remittances and percentage of those

who do not remit by gender of respondents 59
3.2 Net earnings of respondents by gender and year 60
3.3 Annual average remittances per remitting respondents
by period and gender 65
7.1 Proportions of adult children by location and
socioeconomic stratum of elderly parents and patterns
of monetary support by children living away from the
community (2005) 170
7.2 Percentage of elderly respondents’ adult children
involved in distance migration (over 100 km) by
socioeconomic stratum of parents and patterns of
monetary support (2005) 180
11.1 Number of Vietnamese workers deployed overseas
(2000–2009) 291
11.2 Comparison of average migration financial costs and
debts incurred to fund migration (million VND) 296
11.3 Use of remittances 297
Tables
2.1 Education levels of migrants 34

2.2 Mean years of schooling by gender 40
3.1 Methods of remittance of respondents (first remittance) 64
4.1 Migrants’ most recent migration trip to another East or
Southeast Asian country: selected demographic and
socioeconomic characteristics and descriptive
information by gender and type of migration 86
7.1 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children: Koto
Kayo, West Sumatra 168
7.2 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children:
Citengah, West Java 169
7.3 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children: Kidul,
East Java 169
vii
viii List of Figures and Tables
7.4 Mean values of annual monetary gifts by adult children

to elders (2005) 181
7.5 Network depletion: non-contributing migrant children
in the lower strata (2005) 182
7.6 Monetary support in the Yasim/Rukmini household
(2005) 184
7.7 Location of elderly respondents’ sons and daughters
(excluding any children living with parents) (2005) 190
8.1 Sampled households in Village G 202
8.2 Migration types of sampled households 205
8.3 Migrant households’ spatial organisation 209
11.1 Average incomes of Vietnamese migrant workers and
the legal recruitment fees for selected countries 292
11.2 CHAMPSEA’s sample for the qualitative study in
Vietnam by migrant worker’s destination and
occupation 295
Series Editors’ Preface
This book series fosters engagement between critical anthropology and

development studies through the notion of thinking about develop-
ment as change. Both applied anthropology and the anthropology of
development have made significant strides in building a more crit-
ical engagement between anthropology and development, and both
are widely acknowledged as pertinent in various ways for students,
researchers and, to a lesser degree, practitioners of international devel-
opment. This recognition inadvertently sustains, on the part of develop-
ment studies, a somewhat selective engagement with critical historical
ethnography, often limited to that which is easily “legible”, as well as
a clear disconnect with a wider swathe of critical ethnography about
modernity in developing countries (e.g., Burawoy, 2009; Murray Li,
2007; Ong, 2011). While both can contribute substantially to under-
standing and valuing change, such ethnographies are mistakenly seen as
being less relevant to the concerns of contemporary development. Non-
anthropologists and those working from a more pragmatic development
orientation may find that they make “difficult” and “uncomfortable”
reading. However, it is precisely this theoretical rigour and the determi-
nation to unsettle conventional perceptions about development that lie
at the centre of the value of critical anthropology for development.
This series goes beyond the remit of an “applied anthropology” frame-
work to include phenomena that have been overlooked by development
studies. It focuses precisely on the important aspects of experience
in developing countries that fall outside the conventional preserve of
development intervention. These neglected phenomena include uncer-
tainty, mistrust, jealousy, envy, witchcraft and ambivalent experiences
such as love, emotion, hope, consumption, modernity, aspiration, social
mobility, religious and spiritual belief, personhood and other experi-
ences throughout the life course. They might also include the sensory
dimensions of life – for example, the pleasures of consumption in
festivals and malls, the experience of love and other less celebrated emo-
tions. Other marginal phenomena include the subjective and relational
aspects of life in developing countries that contribute to anthropo-
logical and sociological critiques of development and modernity. Rich
applications of life-course analysis to developing country experiences,
ix
x Series Editors’ Preface
as well as deeper approaches to experiences of time, and related emo-

tions of hope and aspiration, are offering more meaningful ways of
understanding how different individuals experience, influence and
are shaped by complex, and often rapid, processes of wider societal
change.
The purpose of this series is to bring ethnographic research on these
phenomena into conversation with contemporary development dis-
courses and debates, and to enrich social science thinking about change
and development. Contributions to this series, such as Cooper and
Pratten (2014), show that these phenomena matter in contemporary
developing societies and in doing so offer new theoretical insights for
anthropological engagement with contemporary change and develop-
ment. While development debate over time has substantially opened
up discussion about phenomena that were previously considered to be
beyond its preserve, such as rape, taking a step back from the “devel-
opment lens” (Jackson, 2011) makes visible core elements of everyday
experience that are still not spoken about within development. Factors
such as envy that, as any practitioner can confirm, are a well-recognised
reality in poor communities are rarely seen as a fit subject for theo-
retical analysis within development studies. Placing these phenomena
outside the frame of investigation, rather than analysing them as cen-
tral dynamics of situated developing contexts, severely undermines the
capacity of development studies to develop rigorous theoretical expla-
nations forchange. This series makes a contribution towards focusing
more direct empirical and theoretical attention on these various kinds
of social phenomenon.
In doing so, the series deliberately aims to extend the conversa-
tion between anthropology and development in ways that will deepen
theoretical frameworks and raise questions about development. This
is an intrinsically critical endeavour that involves close attention to
multisited power relations, including those of gender and reflexivity.
Readers will need to look elsewhere for development “solutions”, pol-
icy “recommendations” or visionary “agendas”: instead, the series offers
a serious ethnographic treatment of hitherto neglected phenomena
that are central to contemporary experience in developing contexts.
It encompasses contributions from anthropologists, other social science
researchers and development practitioners using anthropological and
ethnographic methodologies to engage with processes of change, and
raising questions about what they mean for development.
Hoang and Yeoh’s edited volume takes an ethnographic approach
to the social and economic changes that are linked to the rapid rise
Series Editors’ Preface xi
in transnational labour migration in and from Asia, focusing on their

impact on the family. It contributes to a growing number of studies on
this exciting and novel phenomenon, and also to lively debates about
transnationalism, which often lack empirical support. The volume offers
comparative insights into the diverse ways in which the family is being
reconstituted by transnational remittance relationships. More broadly,
it adds empirical substance to the concept of “family” by exploring
variation that encompasses, but goes beyond, gender and generation.
In contrast to much of the scholarship on remittances, the ethnographic
approach enables authors to variously explore links between remittances
and processes such as social reproduction in Bangladesh, the genera-
tion of social capital and meeting obligations in Myanmar, filial piety
in Thailand and masculinity in the Philippines. They also highlight
the intersection of gender, generation and socioeconomic status in case
studies of Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and the Philippines.
These case studies pick up many of the themes that are mentioned ear-
lier in this preface – for example, aspirations and love, but also distrust
and envy. The closing section questions the celebratory tone of much
migration literature by emphasising the structural vulnerabilities that
migrants are subject to.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of chapters in this volume were presented at the Inter-

national Workshop on Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances
and the Changing Family in Asia, 27–28 July 2010, Singapore. We are
grateful to the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable
Development Analysis, the Asia Research Institute, National Univer-
sity of Singapore and the Wellcome Trust, UK, GR079946/B/06/Z and
GR079946/Z/06/Z for research grant support. The Singapore Ministry
of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 (R-109-000-156-112) sup-
ports the work behind the publication of this book. We would like to
thank eight anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive
comments on drafts of the chapters.
xii
Contributors
Cheryll Alipio is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Sci-

ence at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is a co-editor of
Transitioning to Adulthood in Asia: School, Work, and Family Life, a special
issue of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci-
ence (2013). Her publications include journal articles and a book chapter
on left-behind children, migrant youth, transnational families, domestic
violence and labour migration in the Philippines.
C. Cindy Fan is Interim Vice Provost for International Studies, Professor

of Geography and Professor of Asian American Studies at the University
of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. She received her PhD from the
Ohio State University. Her research focuses on labour migration, mar-
riage migration, spatial and social inequality, gender and cities in China.
She has published numerous articles, and her book China on the Move:
Migration, the State, and the Household (2008) is a pioneering study on
internal migration in China.
Michele Ruth Gamburd is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at

Portland State University, USA. A cultural anthropologist, she received
her PhD from the University of Michigan, USA, in 1995. She is the
author of The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s
Migrant Housemaids (2000), Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor
in Sri Lanka (2008) and The Golden Wave: Culture and Politics after
Sri Lanka’s Tsunami Disaster (2013). She is a co-editor (with Dennis
B. McGilvray) of Tsunami Recovery in Sri Lanka: Ethnic and Regional
Dimensions (2010).
Lan Anh Hoang is Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of

Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her
main research interests include migration and transnationalism, sexu-
ality and gender, social networks and identity, children and childhood,
and marriage and family. Her research has been published in various
international journals, such as Gender and Society, Gender, Place and Cul-
ture, Global Networks, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Asian
Studies Review. Her current project is on irregular Vietnamese migrants
xiii
xiv Notes on Contributors
in Moscow, Russia, with a focus on transnational networks, identity and

belonging.
Philip Kreager is Senior Research Fellow in Human Sciences, Somerville

College, and Director, Fertility and Reproductive Studies Group, School
of Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK. During 1999–2007, he was
the Director of Ageing in Indonesia, a multisited longitudinal study
of ageing in three communities, supported by the Wellcome Trust.
His current research, in conjunction with the Oxford-Eijkman Research
Unit, Jakarta, Indonesia, is a pilot ethnographic and demographic study
of malaria treatment-seeking behaviour in Alor, East Nusa Tenggara,
Indonesia.
Kyoko Kusakabe is Associate Professor in Gender and Development

Studies at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. She teaches post-
graduate courses, and she carries out research and outreach activities
in the areas of gender, work, mobility and development in various
countries in Asia. Her recent research is on gender issues in labour
migration and border trade. She has published her research in many
reputable journals, including Gender, Place and Culture and International
Migration.
Steven McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), USA, the Director of the UCSC Center
for Labor Studies and Associate Director at the Center for Global, Inter-
national and Regional Studies. His research interests include labour and
global labour markets in the high-tech and maritime sectors, migration,
race, gender and Southeast Asia. He is the author of Satanic Mills or Sil-
icon Islands? The Politics of High Tech Production in the Philippines (2006)
and a co-editor of New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012).
Ruth Pearson is a feminist economist who has researched and writ-

ten widely on women, work, migration, development and globalisation.
She is Emeritus Professor of International Development at the Univer-
sity of Leeds, UK. She is also an activist and trustee of a number of
women’s organisations in the UK and internationally. Her publications
include work on feminist economic analysis of development as well
as the results of two recent research projects: Burmese migrant work-
ers in Thailand and Asian women industrial militancy in the UK from
Grunwick to Gate Gourmet.
Notes on Contributors xv
Nitya Rao is Professor of Gender and Development at the University

of East Anglia, UK. She has worked extensively in the field of women’s
organization, employment and education for close to three decades. Her
research interests mainly centring around South Asia include explor-
ing the gendered changes in agrarian relations, migration, education,
intrahousehold relations and identities. She has published extensively
on these themes and edited a collection entitled “Migration, Education
and Socio-Economic Mobility” (Routledge, Oxford, 2012), one of the
few to explore the conceptual and methodological links between migra-
tion, education and social change. Her book entitled “Good women do
not inherit Land”: Politics of Land and Gender in India, highlights the
meanings of land as not just a material asset, but a symbolic resource
shaping gendered identities.
Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill is Lecturer in Gerontology at the Centre

for Research on Ageing, University of Southampton, UK. She stud-
ied human sciences and demography at the University of Oxford
and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and
she describes herself as an anthropological demographer. Her research
examines social networks, intergenerational relations, migration and
livelihoods, vulnerability and care in later life. Most of her work focuses
on Indonesia and other transitional societies. She has published in
Ageing and Society, Population and Development Review, Journal of Cross-
Cultural Gerontology, Demographic Research and other journals and edited
volumes.
Teresa Sobieszczyk is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of

the International Development Studies and Peace Corps Prep Programs
at the University of Montana, USA. She has published on gender and
international migration, ageing and fertility issues in journals such as
the Journal of Marriage and Family, Ageing and Society, Studies in Family
Planning, Rural Sociology and the Asian Pacific Migration Journal. Her cur-
rent research explores issues of access to healthcare in remote rural areas
of Thailand and Montana, and the marriage migration of Thai women
married to Japanese men.
Sallie Yea is Assistant Professor in Humanities and Social Studies

Education (HSSE), National Institute of Education, Nanyang Techno-
logical University, Singapore. She teaches and researches in Human
Geography, where she focuses particularly on marginal migrations
and human trafficking in Asia. Currently she has two major research
xvi Notes on Contributors
projects, one focusing on human trafficking and the anti-trafficking

movement in Singapore, and the other on male contract migrant work-
ers in Singapore. Her recent publications include an edited volume,
Human Trafficking in Asia: Forcing Issues (2014), and Trafficking Women in
Korea: Filipina Migrant Entertainers (2015). She has also published papers
in Political Geography, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography and Antipode.
Brenda S. A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) of Geography, as well

as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University
of Singapore (NUS). She is also Research Leader of the Asian Migra-
tion Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS, and she coordinates
the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development
Analysis. Her research interests include the politics of space in colo-
nial and postcolonial cities, and gender, migration and transnational
communities.
1
Introduction: Migration,
Remittances and the Family
The unprecedented rise in both the volume and the velocity of

transnational labour migration in and from Asia in recent decades has
led to significant social and economic changes not just on the scale
of nation-states and communities but also within the most immediate
core of human experience, the family. As people become increasingly
mobile in response to the restructuring of the global economy, the fam-
ily – and the accompanying processes of formation, maintenance and
dissolution – continually adapts itself to changing or emerging liveli-
hood strategies and the resultant shifts in living arrangements. New
concepts such as the “transnational family” and “global householding”
have been developed within migration scholarship to capture ongo-
ing transformations of the Asian family as a result of migration. The
“transnational family” is broadly defined by the notion that the fam-
ily continues to share strong bonds of collective welfare and unity even
though core members are distributed between two or more nation-states
(Yeoh, 2009), while “global householding” emphasises the view that
the formation and sustenance of households are increasingly reliant on
the international movement of people and transactions among house-
hold members who reside in more than one national territory (Douglass,
2006). These concepts demonstrate the resilience and flexibility of the
family in coping with structural changes that are brought about by
migration in an increasingly globalised world.
Asian migration is characterised by two salient features that distin-
guish it from other migratory systems in the world: (a) the majority
of migrants in the region migrate on a short-term fixed-contract basis
under restrictive admission regimes that do not allow migrants to either
bring dependents or obtain long-term residency status in destination
countries; and (b) a large proportion of labour migration movements
1
2 Introduction: Migration, Remittances and the Family
from Asian countries are intraregional.1 The Middle East and countries
with advanced economies in East and Southeast Asia are the main mag-
nets for Asian migrant workers. East Asia (Hong Kong, Macau, Japan,
China and South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Malaysia and Singapore)
host around 6.5 million and 4.4 million migrants, respectively, most of
whom come from South Asia and less-developed Southeast Asian coun-
tries. South and Southeast Asia also claim a large proportion of the total
stock of 15.1 million migrants in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation
Council (Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar,
Oman and Bahrain) (IOM, 2010: 169). Remittances from migrant work-
ers are undoubtedly substantial. Asia claimed 39 per cent of the total
global remittances in 2009 (USD 162.5 billion), and five countries in
the region – India, China, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Pakistan –
are among the top-ten remittance receiving countries worldwide (IOM,
2010: 168).
In this volume we are concerned with inter-relationships between
migrant remittances and the family in Asia. By treating remittances not
simply as economic activities but as complex and nuanced transnational
processes that embody values and relations transcending national
boundaries, we reveal how remittances reconstitute and/or reinforce
the family structures and relations in which they are embedded. The
intellectual contributions that we are making through this volume are
significant for two reasons. First, given its magnitude and continued
growth across the region, in-depth analyses of Asian labour migration
will help us to understand better important social transformations that
are under way in some of the most populous countries in the world.
In this book, we shift the focus on settler migrants in remittance and
transnational studies to “transient” low-waged labourers whose circular
mobility entails unique sets of meanings and expectations. Second, by
engaging with different social contexts of major labour-sending coun-
tries in Asia, this book offers comparative insights into the diverse ways
in which the family is being reconstituted by transnational remittance
relationships. The chapters add valuable empirical substance to the con-
ceptualisation of “family” – a fluid social construct that necessitates
in-depth and comparative analyses across varied transnational social
fields.
Bringing together scholars of different parts of Asia, we look into
three interrelated dimensions of migrant remittances: (a) how broader
social values shape the meaning and purpose of remittances; (b) how
family relations and structures mediate the control, use and distribu-
tion of remittances; and (c) how remittances reinforce or reconstitute
Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh 3
gender/generational norms and ideologies. In examining practices and

meanings of remittances across transnational social fields, we consider
the family as a site of both cooperation and conflict. Bryceson and
Vuorela (2002: 10) argue that the family is an imagined community
where the sense of membership can be a matter of choice and nego-
tiation. We establish that, in the context of Asian transnational labour
migration where remittances tend to become a primary currency of care,
the making or breaking of the family unit is essentially contingent on
how individuals handle remittance processes. In what follows, we first
provide a selective review of the global literature on migrant remittances
and the family, before discussing the diverse ways in which chapters in
this book engage with such scholarly debates.
Migrant remittances and the family
Remittance as both an antecedent and an outcome of migration

has attracted considerable attention from academics, policy-makers
and development agencies alike. The two most important con-
cerns in the classic literature on remittances (as opposed to more
recent transnational studies that move beyond the exclusive focus
on economics) are (a) the inter-relationships between remittances and
(under)development; and (b) migrants’ remittance motivations and
behaviours. In general, studies have shown that remittances work as
a double-edged sword: while they possess development potential for
migrant-sending communities, they also have the tendency to perpetu-
ate various forms of inequality and dependency within these communi-
ties (Lipton, 1980; Rubenstein, 1992; Taylor, 1999; Binford, 2003; Ratha,
2003; Haas, 2005; World Bank, 2006). At the macro level, remittances
are highly valued as an important source of foreign exchange earn-
ings that is much less volatile and procyclical than other capital flows,
such as revenues from exports, foreign aid and foreign direct invest-
ment (Gammeltoft, 2003; Ratha, 2003; World Bank, 2006). At the micro
level, however, many studies have expressed concerns about the fact
that a major proportion of remittances is spent on daily necessities while
very little is allocated to local investments, suggesting that remittances
are unlikely to have a sustainable impact on long-term development
(Papademetriou and Martin, 1991; Gultiano and Xenos, 2004: 16; Haas,
2005). These inconclusive debates about the impact of remittances on
economic development notwithstanding, there is some consensus that
remittances have contributed to poverty alleviation in many parts of
the developing world, particularly in labour-sending contexts with low
levels of investment and economic development (Hugo, 2002; Kapur,

2003; Koc and Onan, 2004; Deshingkar, 2006). In more specific terms,
the everyday diet, access to basic education and health services of many
poor households have been significantly improved with an additional
source of income from labour migration. There is also evidence, albeit
limited, of increased household consumption and local investments in
poor rural areas in Asia, thanks to migrant remittances (Hugo, 2002;
ILO, 2004; Pham and Hill, 2008; Deshingkar, 2009).
The question of why migrants remit money has been examined
by scholars from different disciplines. In their pioneering article on
migrants’ motivations to remit in Botswana, Lucas and Stark (1985)
argue that migrants’ remittance motives range from pure altruism to
pure self-interest, with intermediate motivations being tempered altru-
ism or enlightened self-interest, which represent contractual agreements
between the migrant and the family at the place of origin. In recent
years, scholars have started to move beyond both the developmental-
ist tradition of the field and economic models such as Lucas and Stark’s
towards situating remittances in broader sociocultural contexts, show-
ing how social values of different cultures shape remittance behaviours
and vice versa. For example, studies from the Dominican Republic (de
la Briere et al., 2002), Thailand (Curran and Saguy, 2001) and the
Philippines (Trager, 1988; Tacoli, 1999) note that the perception of
daughters as being more altruistic remitters than sons leads parents to
encourage the former’s migration. This contrasts with findings from
patrilineal China where the greater expectation of sons to provide for
parents is associated with the fact that male migrants are more likely to
remit than their female counterparts (Cai, 2003: 478; Murphy, 2009: 64).
Along the same vein, King et al. (2006: 423) found that male Albanian
migrants in London are more likely to remit money to their parents than
their female counterparts because in the Albanian patriarchal tradition
the latter have no economic responsibility towards their parents, but
only towards their husbands’ families. These findings lend further sup-
port to Goldring’s (2004: 812) position that transnational remittance
flows are intimately bound up with, and regulated by, conceptions of
and responsibilities associated with being a mother, father, son, daugh-
ter, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, godparent, godchild and so on, and
with claims to varying forms of membership in specific communities,
including the locality, transnational community and nation-state.
Since the early 1990s the emergence of transnationalism as a con-
ceptual framework in migration studies has brought forth an important
shift in remittance research. In transnational studies, migration is seen
as “on-going social processes linking together countries of origin and

destination rather than as a permanent rupture with home societies”
(cf. Schiller et al., 1992; Basch et al., 1994; Schiller et al., 1995; Vertovec,
1999). Within this new conceptual paradigm, remittances become a
central concern in analyses of transnational relationships. Thai’s (2010,
2014) research on low-wage Vietnamese American migrants, for exam-
ple, shows that for many people living across transnational social fields,
social ties are often inextricably constituted by flows of money, and that
monetary circulation in transnational families is embedded in complex
systems of cultural expectations, self worth and emotional economies.
In a similar context, Wong (2006) describes how Ghanaian women make
every effort to live up to matrilineal expectations of them as moth-
ers, daughters, sisters and wives by maintaining remittance flows to
their families in the homeland despite their precarious economic con-
ditions in Canada. The scholarship on Latin America and Asia also
draws our attention to the monetisation/commodification of relation-
ships between migrant parents and children who are left behind at
origin. For example, research in Guatemala shows that children begin
to prefer money over intimacy from their migrant mothers over time
and become disappointed with their mothers when they fail to send
money home (Moran-Taylor, 2008: 89).
In this book we seek to advance the position that remittances are
constantly renegotiated processes that constitute social relationships
across social fields (Wong, 2006: 356; Thai, 2014: 35). In so doing, we
not only critically engage with ongoing debates around the notions
of “transnational family” and “global householding” but also expand
our understanding of social meanings of monetary circulation across
national borders. Drawing on cases of The Philippines, Indonesia, Sri
Lanka, Bangladesh, China, Vietnam and Thailand, the authors examine
remittances as being underwritten by transnational migration regimes
and politics in the labour-sending country. We pay particular attention
to the ways in which remittances feature in gender and intergenera-
tional relations within the transnational family and vice versa. While
the chapters share some common features, such as the thematic focus
on low-waged migrant workers and qualitative methods of inquiry, they
showcase highly heterogeneous cultural and political contexts across
Asia. Distinctive specificities of the studied contexts will be highlighted
in the discussion of three main themes pursued by the book in the next
part of this introduction under the headings “Remittances as gendered
processes”, “Remittances and generational dynamics of change” and
“(Non-)remittances and the family in crisis”.
Remittances as gendered processes
As mentioned earlier, it is well established that remittance behaviours

are largely shaped by gender norms and relations. There is abun-
dant empirical evidence across the developing world that suggests that
migrant men – who usually earn more than women – tend to send larger
sums while women appear to be more consistent and reliable remitters
who send larger percentages of their earnings (de la Cruz, 1995; Vanwey,
2004; Semyonov and Gorodzeisky, 2005; UNFPA, 2006; Orozco and
Castillo, 2008). With very few exceptions (such as the case of Moroccan
women in Barcelona who rarely remit money home, as documented by
Zontini (2010)), research in very different contexts such as Tonga (Vete,
1995), Thailand (Osaki, 1999) and Cuba (Blue, 2004) consistently shows
that female migrants have greater moral obligations to send remittances
home. Migrant mothers who leave their families behind are expected to
willingly practice self-denial and self-sacrifice in the name of their fam-
ilies and especially their children, while social norms have made it less
reprehensible, if not more acceptable, for migrant fathers to neglect the
support of their children (Chant and Craske, 2003; Blue, 2004; Abrego,
2009: 1070; Akesson, 2009: 391; Dreby, 2010). This may explain an
observation that mother-away families are more likely to thrive econom-
ically. Abrego (2009: 1077), for instance, concludes from 130 in-depth
interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the USA that 54 per cent of
mother-away families were thriving compared with only 38 per cent
of father-away families, and that a greater proportion of children in
father-away families than mother-away families faced financial diffi-
culties. Women’s ability to remit also appears to have positive effects
on their status and decision-making power in the household, and con-
tributes to changes in gender ideologies in China (Murphy, 2009: 64),
Latin America (Conway and Cohen, 1998) and Southeast Asia (Elmhirst,
2002; Suksomboon, 2008; Zontini, 2010).
The scholarship focused on the management and distribution of
remittances in labour-sending areas reveals interesting gender differ-
ences in various contexts. Studies in Asia, for example, show that
remittances are often under the control of women – the wife (when
the migrant is a married man) or the grandmother and eldest daugh-
ter (when the migrant is a married woman) (Momsen, 1999; Elmhirst,
2002; Parreñas, 2005). Apart from the fact that men are stigmatised as
bad money-managers (cf. Pinnawala, 2008), the general preference for
women to manage remittances also derives from the widespread percep-
tion of them as being more altruistic spenders whose control of family
resources is more likely to result in the enhancement of the collective

wellbeing (Kabeer, 2000: 29; Whitehead and Kabeer, 2001: 19). In some
other contexts, however, remittances tend to flow along the gender
line (i.e., sons to fathers and daughters to mothers) (King et al., 2006;
Rahman and Lian, 2009). The control over remittances can also become
a source of intrafamily conflict, driving a wedge between husbands
and wives, parents and children, or nuclear families and more distant
relatives (Gamburd, 2000: 239). Remittance management becomes par-
ticularly problematic when the migrant is a married woman who fears
that her “left-behind” husband may “squander away” her hard-earned
dollars on “social activities”, such as drinking and gambling, and she
sends money to another relative instead (Gamburd, 2000; Hoang and
Yeoh, 2011). The conflict may extend to wider familial networks when
migrants and their spouses are reluctant to share the economic bene-
fits of migration outside their nuclear unit, thereby rejecting relatives’
claims for mutual access to assets and undermining “deeply held pat-
terns of family and caste associations” (Bruijn et al., 1992; Gamburd,
2000).
A diverse range of theoretical and conceptual frameworks are
employed in the four chapters of Part I of this book to explore the
gendered nature of transnational migrant remittances. They reflect dis-
tinctive specificities of their studied contexts and at the same time
highlight the versatility and multidimensionality of remittances as a
social phenomenon. While Nitya Rao (Chapter 2) is concerned with
the links between social reproduction and remittances in Bangladesh,
Kyoko Kusakabe and Ruth Pearson (Chapter 3) frame the remittance
behaviours of Burmese women in Thailand within the notions of a
“network of obligations” (Curran and Saguy, 2001) and “social capital”
(Portes and Sensenbrenner, 1993). Teresa Sobieszczyk (Chapter 4), on the
other hand, uses a structural symbolic interactionist approach (Stryker
and Stratham, 1985) in her examination of Northern Thai migrants’
remittance behaviour, while Steve McKay (Chapter 5) chooses to look
at Filipino migrant seafarers through the lens of masculinity. Concep-
tual, theoretical and topical heterogeneity notwithstanding, the studies
underscore the view that migrant remittances and gender (as well as
broader values concerning the family and personhood) are mutually
constitutive. They also remind us that gender intersects with other forms
of social difference, such as ethnicity, religion and life course in shap-
ing remittance processes. In the following discussion of the individual
chapters, we elaborate further on the concerns that cut across them as
well as the contextual differences that set them apart.
In her ethnographic research in rural Bangladesh, Nitya Rao

(Chapter 2) asks pertinent questions about the use of remittances for
social reproduction purposes. Like other authors in this book, she
privileges the social or, rather, the interlinkages between the eco-
nomic and the social in her examination of remittance behaviours.
Her research reveals interesting insights into how social status, pred-
icated upon different gender roles and subjectivities for girls/women
and boys/men, is reproduced by the presence or absence of remittances
among Bangladeshi migrant and non-migrant households. Women and
men at different stages of their lifecycle, Rao observes, have different
priorities when it comes to the use of remittances. Whether they are
used to enhance the men’s status through consumption, charity and
participation in rituals and ceremonies or to invest in women’s secu-
rity through dowries, remittances not only help families to meet their
social reproduction needs but also generate the symbolic capital that
might ultimately be convertible to economic capital. Rao’s attention to
life course in her use of the concept of social reproduction helps her to
uncover interesting dynamics of change and continuity in the gendered
lives of Bangladeshi migrants and those who stay behind.
Gender differences in remittance motivations and behaviours are
also central concerns of two chapters on Thailand written by Kyoko
Kusakabe and Ruth Pearson (Chapter 3) and by Teresa Sobieszczyk
(Chapter 4). The studies concur with previous research on Thailand (e.g.,
Osaki, 1999; Curran and Saguy, 2001) that there are greater expectations
for daughters than sons to send money home, so female migrants are
more consistent remitters than their male counterparts. Kusakabe and
Pearson consider the remittance practices of Burmese migrant workers
within a “network of obligations” that bears different weight according
to the gender and marital status of migrants. They point out, however,
that women’s remittances are not entirely motivated by altruism, as
observed by previous studies (see, e.g., Curran and Saguy, 2001). For
many Burmese women in their study, remittance is a pragmatic strategy
to warrant their families’ support in childcare, as well as a form of invest-
ment in social security given their precarious situation in Thailand.
It is noted that Burmese men’s and women’s remittance behaviours
tend to shift in opposite directions after marriage – men’s remittances
decline while women’s intensify. The significance of life course in shap-
ing men’s and women’s remittance behaviours observed in Thailand by
Kusakabe and Pearson and in Bangladesh by Rao is related to Locke
et al.’s (2013) argument for the adoption of life-course thinking in
research on migration, social reproduction and social provisioning.

Discussing migration and social reproduction within a life-course frame-
work, Locke et al. (ibid.: 1891) argue, would help us to accommodate the
importance of the social, the emotional and of the collective and indi-
vidual subjectivities in the iterative renegotiation of gendered family
relations.
Sobieszczyk’s study on international migrants from Northern
Thailand adds further complexity to Kusakabe and Pearson’s analyti-
cal focus on a “network of obligations”. While supporting the view that
young migrants’ remittance behaviours are, by and large, regulated by
the traditional Thai ideology of filial piety, she argues that the meaning
and significance of remittances are more than merely repaying a filial
debt of gratitude. Thai expectations with regard to filial piety are deeply
gendered. While “good daughters” are expected to repay their parents by
working to support them, it is commonly acceptable for migrant sons
to “spend more of their money on kin len (eating and playing) in the
form of alcohol, prostitutes, travel, and other [modes of] entertainment,
or towards saving for a bride price for when they marry”. Sobieszczyk
draws our attention to the fact that, for young and unmarried women
and their families, symbolic meanings of remittances sometimes out-
weigh their economic value. Remitting money back home is particularly
important for women who engage in sex work because the acts of sup-
porting families financially and making religious merit through temple
donations enable them to negate some of the stigma that is attached
to working in a morally suspect occupation abroad. Remittances in this
context are precisely what American sociologist Viviana Zelizer (1989)
refers to as “special monies”, for they serve as an avenue for asserting
migrants’ social worth and status.
The symbolic value of migrant money also captures Steve McKay’s
attention in his study of Filipino seafarers (Chapter 5). In the
Philippines, ideals of fatherhood as the main breadwinner who is
responsible for building and supporting the family home are reflected in
the metaphorical connotation of fathers as haligi ng tahanan (the corner-
stone of the home). While remittances do reinforce local gender norms
in several ways, McKay also shows that they allow many seafarers to
transcend gender divisions to engage in childcare and domestic work
during their visits home. Apparently, men tend to be more flexible in
their performance of fatherhood when their male identity is safeguarded
by substantial financial contributions to the family. This is particularly
interesting when compared with observations of left behind men in
mother-migrant families also in the Philippines (Parreñas, 2005) and

elsewhere in Asia (e.g., Gamburd, 2000), who tend to shun domes-
tic work and childcare for the threats that they pose to their sense of
masculinity. Furthermore, McKay reveals that wives of migrant seafarers
have been able to expand their traditional gender roles to become both
the madre (mother) and the padre de familia (male housekeeper) of the
family. In the men’s absence, their wives have greater freedom and inde-
pendence in decision-making about household expenses and various
educational investments for their children. Migration and remittances
appear to contribute to the relaxation of gender norms and practices,
allowing men and women to transgress gendered spheres of family life
that would have been frowned upon in other contexts.
By focusing on gender as a central cross-cutting element in remittance
behaviours, we reaffirm the view that monetary circulation in the con-
text of transnational labour migration is more than just an economic
activity. It reflects context-specific notions of social obligations, self-
worth, status and personhood, and it transforms them at the same
time. Regardless of contextual differences, there is some consensus in
all four chapters that migrant remittances are valorised across Asia not
just for the consumptive power that they provide to individuals and
families but also for the symbolic value that they generate. Money,
Zelizer (1997: 19) notes, is a socially created currency that is “subject
to particular networks of social relations and its own set of values and
norms”. Migration is indeed a life-changing event, not merely in the
conventional sense that it offers the family and individuals involved
opportunities for upward social mobility but also because it has the
potential to shift social conventions, gender ideologies and ways of life
in the most powerful ways.
Remittances and generational dynamics of change
Schiller et al. (1992: 12) argue that the maintenance of transnational

ties is driven by migrants’ need to keep their options open in the face of
the increasing insecurity entailed by globalisation processes. This posi-
tion is plausible given that the authors focus on Caribbean, Haitian and
Filipino settler immigrants to the USA who tend to have access to nat-
uralisation and family reunification opportunities and, therefore, have
fewer commitments to those who stay behind in the homeland. In the
context of Asian transnational labour migration, opportunities for fam-
ily reunification or even regular home visits are not available to most
low-waged workers who migrate overseas on a transient basis. As a result,
the maintenance of transnational ties, especially through remittances,

is less an option and more of an obligation that migrants are bound
to fulfil as a requisite part of marital and intergenerational contracts.
Remittances in our studied contexts represent the most important global
householding strategy (Douglass, 2006) that the family adopts to cope
with its diminished capacity to meet social reproduction needs within
the boundaries of the nation-state. The family’s economic goals are, nev-
ertheless, in tension with social expectations with regard to care and
family organisation. As Douglass (2006: 434) puts it, “disjunctures in
householding are increasing along with opportunities for various ele-
ments of global householding”. The big questions that we ask in Part
II are: How does the intergenerational contract evolve to adapt itself
to shifts in the reproductive sphere and how do remittances feature in
generational relations and dynamics?
The four chapters in Part II continue to consider migrant remittances
within the frame of family obligations, yet the focus is shifted from
gender to generational dynamics. Case studies of Sri Lanka (Michele
Ruth Gamburd, Chapter 6) and Indonesia (Philip Kreager and Elisabeth
Schröder-Butterfill, Chapter 7) provide us with insights into the effects
of young people’s migration on the older generations. They show that
remittances are important expressions of continuing solidarity across
generations. These authors highlight the facilitating role that elders
play in younger-generation migration as well as the privations that the
absence of their children inevitably creates. While scholarly debates
about global care chains (Hochschild, 2000; Yeates, 2004) and recent
migration studies in the region (e.g., Hoang et al., 2012) have alerted
us to the social inequalities that global care chains are predicated on
and reproduce, we still know little about how the “care deficits” that
result from labour migration are dealt with at the southern end of global
care chains (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Zimmerman et al., 2006;
Kofman and Raghuram, 2009). The emergent body of literature on care
in Asian transnational families has paid an inordinate amount of atten-
tion to left-behind children (e.g., Parreñas, 2002; Asis, 2006; Hoang et
al., 2012), yet it is unclear how the older generations as well as intergen-
erational dynamics are affected by the so-called “crisis of care” (Parreñas,
2005).
Gamburd’s contribution (Chapter 6) is an apt response to such con-
cerns. She looks into the dilemma that is faced by female migrant
workers from southern Sri Lanka – staying put to provide physical care
to family members with few financial resources to draw on, or migrat-
ing and sending home remittances to pay for their families’ needs.
The tensions surrounding female labour migration in Sri Lanka go to

the heart of the contradictions that women face in juggling produc-
tive and reproductive duties: on the one hand, women are expected
to take care of children and the elderly at home; on the other, men’s
inability to provide for the family impels them to migrate overseas
for work. Families find themselves struggling to meet care needs and
at the same time to secure financial stability. Given the rapid ageing
of the Sri Lankan population, the chapter raises important questions
about how the family allocates its resources, especially when families
become smaller and the care work grows more demanding. The femini-
sation of transnational labour migration, it seems, not only challenges
conventional gender roles but also disrupts intergenerational dynam-
ics and family arrangements. This issue is not unique to Sri Lankan
society but, as observed by C. Cindy Fan (Chapter 8), Cheryll Alipio
(Chapter 9) and Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill (Chapter 7), is a preva-
lent phenomenon across the region in the face of increasing female
migration.
While Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill’s contribution does not focus
on care, they share with Gamburd concerns about the effects of
migration on older people. The importance of symbolic values of
remittances raised by Sobieszczyk, McKay and Alipio is further sup-
ported by Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill’s mixed-method research in
three migrant-sending villages in West Java, East Java and West Sumatra,
Indonesia. They note that remittances are lauded less for their finan-
cial value than as material evidence of continuing family solidarity.
Remittances become powerful statements of communal and family
identity as migrants continue to maintain an important moral pres-
ence in the community despite their distance away from home. For the
left-behind elderly, migrant children’s remittances enable them to “par-
ticipate more fully in family and community networks by contributing
to educational, ritual and other costs of children, grandchildren and
other kin” (Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, Chapter 7). However, the
authors also suggest that remittances contribute to reinforcing the social
stratification within rural communities – that is, significant material
advantages of remittances and other support are more likely to accrue
to members of higher socioeconomic strata, and to those with more
cohesive kin networks, while remittances tend to enable families in
poorer strata to get by but not to improve their situation substantially.
Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill remind us that multidimensional values
of migrant remittances vary not only along gender lines and through-
out the life course but also across social strata, further deepening social
inequalities within labour-sending communities.
The interest in the generational dynamics of change in Gamburd’s

and Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill’s chapters is also central to C. Cindy
Fan’s study on China (Chapter 8). Being the only author in this
volume to look exclusively at internal migration, she cautions us against
constructing a discrete divide between internal and international migra-
tion. She argues that the institutional, economic and social barriers
between urban Chinese and rural migrant Chinese, due in part to the
hukou (household registration) system, are quite similar to those facing
transnational labour migrants. Migrants from rural China, for exam-
ple, do not enjoy the same urban social benefits that holders of urban
hukou do, and they are often marginalised in the urban labour market.
Like transnational migrants elsewhere in Asia, rural Chinese migrants
are often separated from their families for extended periods of time
due to the long distances between home and destination as well as
resource scarcity. Using household biographies and narratives collected
from 26 households in Anhui Province in 1995, 2005, 2009 and 2012,
Fan examines changes in the use of remittances over time, and uncovers
fundamental transformations in the rural household’s social and spa-
tial organisation as a result of migrant work and remittances. Her study
shows that in many parts of China, migrant remittances have become
the mainstay of the local economy and migration has become a way
of life for villagers, even though few households would move out of
the village for good. As one of the only two longitudinal studies in the
book (together with that of Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill), Fan’s work
captures interesting shifts in intergenerational dynamics throughout
different stages of the household developmental cycle.
Cheryll Alipio (Chapter 9) is the only author in this book to
look at generational dynamics from the angle of children. Unlike
the previous studies on left-behind children that treat them almost
exclusively as passive remittance/care receivers, Alipio’s contribution
provides rare insights into the ways in which children’s agency is exer-
cised in the absence of their migrant parents. Children are viewed in
her ethnographic research as rational economic actors who play an
important role in the migration process, from maintaining households
and preserving intergenerational familial relationships to managing
remittances wisely. In the case study featured in Alipio’s chapter, chil-
dren’s relationships with remittances and parental migration are medi-
ated by Batang Atikha Savers Club (BASC), a children’s money savings
project initiated by Atikha, a Philippine non-governmental organisation
(NGO) in San Pablo City, Laguna. This seeks to impart Christian val-
ues of filial piety, prudence and a sense of civic responsibility among
left-behind children. Remittances in this particular case are constructed
as a reciprocal form of gift exchange that is associated with the cul-

tural notions of utang (debt) and its refractions of hiya (shame) and awa
(pity). Through the BASC programme, Philippine left-behind children
are taught to recognise that they have an utang na loob (debt of the
inside), and should reciprocate their parents’ love and sacrifice for them
with good behaviour, frugality and the assumption of parental duties in
their absence.
In her analysis of Atikha’s role in generational relations within the
transnational family, Alipio underscores a somewhat tacit, recognition
of the important role that community actors play in the (re)construction
of family values and relations in other chapters of the book, particularly
those of Sobieszczyk, Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, and Fan. While the
use and distribution of remittances are largely individual or family mat-
ters, the discourses around their social meanings and values are, by and
large, a community project. More importantly, Alipio’s account of how
remittances are constructed as a force that unites the Philippine family
triggers questions about the situations in which remittances are absent.
If family membership is indeed a matter of choice and negotiation (and
not fixed by blood and marital ties) (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002: 10),
would non-remittance be seen as a force that unsettles and may ulti-
mately undo the family unit? In the next part of this introduction we
discuss in detail how two contributions in Part III (Sallie Yea’s Chapter 10
and Lan Anh Hoang and Brenda S. A. Yeoh’s Chapter 11) uncover con-
texts around the absence of remittances and what implications they
have for the scholarly debates on the notion of the “transnational
family” and related concerns.
(Non-)remittances and the family in crisis
In their edited volume The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers

and Global Networks, Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) propose two interest-
ing notions that characterise the strategies employed by members of the
transnational family to maintain familyhood, namely “frontiering” and
“relativising”. “Frontiering” “denotes the ways and means transnational
family members use to create familial space and network ties in ter-
rain where affinal connections are relatively sparse”, while “relativising”
refers to the ways in which individuals establish, maintain or curtail
relational ties with specific family members. These notions underpin
the authors’ treatment of the family as an imagined community where
members choose to maintain emotional and material attachments of
varying degrees of intensity with certain kinsmen while opting out of

transnational relationships with others (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002:
10). The view that the family is an unbound social unit where mem-
bers decide to neglect or intensify particular ties is not new. It is related
to the notion of “kinwork”, which is used by Di Leonardo (1987: 440) to
refer to “the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-
household kin ties”. The maintenance of kin and quasi-kin networks,
she adds (1987: 443), is largely women’s work. In this sense, family
membership is not guaranteed or fixed by blood or marital ties but is
open to renegotiation and redefinition. The maintenance of its meaning
and significance requires both emotional labour and material contribu-
tions from all individuals, regardless of their social positioning in the
kinship network.
In the context of transnational labour migration where physical inti-
macy is lacking, remittances become a primary channel for kinwork
(e.g., Artico, 2003; Parreñas, 2005; Moran-Taylor, 2008). However, in the
two contributions featured in Part III, Yea (Chapter 10) and Hoang and
Yeoh (Chapter 11) question the celebratory, albeit one-sided, tone in the
migrant remittances literature. They point out that remittances have
often been taken for granted while, in reality, not every transnational
labour migrant is able or willing to remit money to the homeland. While
both chapters are concerned with circumstances around the absence of
remittances, the different analytical lenses that they employ reveal var-
ied insights into situations of family disruption in the context of migra-
tion. Whether it is a result of a crisis from within (Yea) or outside (Hoang
and Yeoh) the family, the absence of remittances is broadly attributable
to the wider political economy of Asian transnational labour migration.
Celebratory reports on annual increases in remittance volumes conceal
the fact that transnational migrants often work in exploitative and pre-
carious situations that are dictated by global economic inequalities and
restrictive migration regimes. As illustrated by Hoang and Yeoh’s chapter
on the Vietnamese and Yea’s on Filipino workers, the state-sanctioned
debt-bondage system renders migrants highly vulnerable, especially in
the face of crisis. The so-called “structural vulnerability” (Ball and Piper,
2002) that they are subjected to is a product of a system of neoliberal
governmentality (cf. Walzer, 1983: 58) that has been adopted by the host
state to regulate the transnational labour market. Remittances and their
relationships with the family, as such, are embedded in not only local
cultures but also the global economic order and neoliberal migration
regimes in the region.
Yea’s chapter on Filipina domestics and entertainers in Singapore

nuances both Di Leonardo’s emphasis on gender in kinwork, and
Bryceson and Vuorela’s notion of relativising. She reveals that migrant
Filipinas use their salaries to achieve goals that are related to break-
ing up – rather than strengthening – their familial units. Approaching
issues around remittances through the lens of emotion, she shows
that the failure to receive and remit promised salaries is a key site
through which tensions are produced, which may eventually lead to
family break-ups. Yea raises questions about the normative assumption
in the literature about migrants using remittances as a key means of
maintaining and strengthening familial and intimate social ties across
borders. (Non-)remittance is a process, Yea adds, through which Filipina
“women can transcend subordinate gendered positions ascribed locally
and acquire new status and respect through the migration process”. The
physical distance created by migration, it seems, provides migrants with
a certain leeway in dealing with issues in family relationships. The cases
featured in her chapter point to the selectivity of migration – many
migrant women come from contexts of troubled marriages. As such,
marital disruption tends to serve as the catalyst for migration, rather
than the other way around as commonly believed (cf. Landale and
Ogena, 1995; Zlotnik, 1995; Hugo, 2002; Oishi, 2005).
The family crisis that Hoang and Yeoh look into is an economic rather
than an emotional one. There has been some patchy evidence pointing
to the significance of debt in transnational families due to the substan-
tial costs of transnational labour migration (cf. Pertierra, 1992; Jones
and Findlay, 1998: 95; Gamburd, 2000; Afsar, 2005; Hugo, 2005: 73),
yet it is unclear how debt-related economic stress affects both migrants
and families who stay behind. Drawing on their mixed-method research
project in Vietnam, Hoang and Yeoh reveal how indebtedness caused
by exploitative practices of commercial brokers leads to disruptions in
family organisation and relations. Studies on migrant remittances tend
to overlook the fact that a significant proportion of migrant money
goes towards debt payment, which constitutes the primary source of
economic and psychological stress for the transnational family. Debts,
Constable (2007: 78, 79) notes, help to ensure that a worker remains “in
her place” since it is the employer who holds the power to terminate
the worker’s contract and return them, in debt, to their home coun-
try. Hoang and Yeoh remind us that the absence of remittances does
not always represent a strategy of relativising in family relationships.
The notion of relativising implies an active agency, while low-waged
migrant workers from the south are not always afforded the same
level of autonomy in (non-)remittance behaviours that other groups of

migrants are entitled to.
Conclusion
Collectively, this volume nuances our understanding of the reciprocal

relationships between migrant remittances and the Asian family. Carling
(2008), based on his research in Cape Verde, suggests that systemic
interactions between migrants and their significant others at home are
structured by “transnational moralities”, whereby non-migrants in the
homeland possess the so-called “moral capital” which puts them in a
position to demand migrants’ repayment of the debt of communality in
various forms, including remittances. The notion of the “debt of com-
munality” which was drawn from Hage’s (2002) work means that one
remains in the debt of the community by virtue of one’s membership of
it. While stories that we collected across Asia were predominantly nar-
rated in the language of duty and obligation, there is some indication
that the individual is beginning to overshadow the collective in some
particular contexts. Remittance, as illustrated by Kusakabe and Pearson,
Sobieszczyk, and Yea, may represent an individual strategy rather than
an expression of duty and obligation within the frame of “transnational
moralities” (Carling, 2008) or so-called “Asian values” (Willis and Yeoh,
2000). The choices that men and women make in relation to remittances
tell us about the various ways in which they negotiate their collective
identities as well as construe themselves as distinctive individuals in the
context of migration.
The case studies featured in this volume enrich our thinking about
migrant remittances as a major driver of social change, and at the same
time they raise important questions about the meanings and purpose
of the family in an increasingly mobile world. Gender and genera-
tional dynamics in the transnational family are characterised by both
change and continuity. While money could serve as a glue that holds
the (extended) family together and reinforces family connectedness and
solidarity across transnational spaces (Falicov, 2001: 317), it could also
drive family members apart. The presence of migrant money in the fam-
ily (along with the absence of physical intimacy and care) engenders a
new set of expectations and alters the way in which individuals posi-
tion themselves in relation to their kinsfolk. With transnational labour
migration set to increase further in the future, broader values relating to
the Asian family will continue to shift, entailing wider transformations
in the fabric of societies in the region.
Note
1. According to the 2000 census round data, intraregional migration
accounts for 43 per cent of the total stock of emigrants from Asia
(Global Migrant Origin Database, updated March 2007, DRC, University
of Sussex, http://www.migrationdrc.org/research/typesofmigration/Global_
Migrant_Origin_Database_Version_4.xls).
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Part I
Remittances as Gendered
Processes
2
Transnational Remittances and
Gendered Status Enhancement in
Rural Bangladesh
Nitya Rao
Introduction
Overseas migration from Bangladesh has grown rapidly over the last
30 years, involving around 8.4 million workers between 1976 and 2012.
From about 50,000 in the 1980s, about 200,000–250,000 workers emi-
grated annually during 1992–1993 to 2004–2005. This figure stood at
approximately 600,000 in 2011–2012 (http://www.bmet.gov.bd/BMET,
accessed on 18 June 2013). Revenues from remittances, at a record high
of USD 11 billion in 2010, now exceed various types of foreign exchange
inflows, particularly official development assistance and net earnings
from exports (http://www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/bangladesh, accessed on
6 November 2011). It is not surprising that 90 per cent of migrants
remit regularly, as earning an income is the main purpose of the largely
contract labour migration from Bangladesh (Orozco, 2010).
The rising oil prices and the infrastructure boom in the Middle Eastern
countries in the 1970s created a new source of demand for labour
(Siddiqui and Abrar, 2003), and this region became the most impor-
tant destination for Bangladeshi migrant workers through the 1980s
and 1990s. Currently the Middle East accounts for over 80 per cent of
the overseas migrant workforce (Saudi Arabia and the UAE accounting
for 58 per cent of all migrant workers), followed by Southeast Asia at
14 per cent (www.bmet.gov.bd, accessed on 18 June 2013). However,
these countries contribute only 64–70 per cent of the annual remittance
inflow (Jha et al., 2010; Orozco, 2010),1 reflecting the low quality of jobs
that are secured by Bangladeshi migrants. This workforce is largely male
27
28 Remittances as Gendered Processes
(women constitute less than 0.5 per cent) due to the restrictions that
have been imposed on female migration over the years.2
The growing importance of remittances for the national economy led
the Government of Bangladesh to set up the Ministry of Expatriates’
Welfare and Overseas Employment in 2001. Coinciding with the shift in
global perceptions of migration as a problem to migration as a tool for
development in the 1990s, the emphasis is on managing migration and
harnessing remittances (Bakewell, 2008). The ministry seeks to facilitate
higher levels of overseas migration through policies and programmes
that support and protect migrant workers, such as the procurement
of work permits, training, remittance transfers and reintegration in
the face of growing evidence of exploitation and harassment of the
workers.
In policy discourses, nationally and globally, remittances are mainly
defined in economic and financial terms, especially in the context of
contract labour migration. Recent ethnographic research has challenged
this view, emphasising the importance of locating remittances in the
underlying social, political and historical context, its complex and often
contradictory impacts on the lives of migrant and non-migrant peo-
ple, and the gendered character of experience, use, decision-making
and emotions (Goldring, 2004; Kunz, 2008; Gardner and Ahmed, 2009).
While Levitt (1998) uses the term “social remittances” to highlight the
transfer of social practices, ideas and values from one place to another,
Peter (2010) describes remittances as a way of avoiding “social death”
and sustaining social status. Physical separation makes it impossible
for the migrant to participate in the everyday activities of biological
and social reproduction. Remittances then become a project for cultural
production – strengthening a sense of belonging to their families and
communities, it contributes to their sense of self and identity (Carrasco,
2010).
Analyses of social reproduction, as encompassing a range of gendered
and generational relationships that contribute to the enhancement of
social status, belonging and the construction and recognition of identi-
ties, are beginning to emerge (Osella and Osella, 2000, 2006; Charsley,
2005; Gardner, 2009; Rao, 2012). Building on this analysis, in this
chapter I focus on the relationship between the different analytical
strands that are embedded in the concept of reproduction – biological,
reproduction of the labour force and wider social change (Edholm et al.,
1977) and its links to transnational production and remittances. Draw-
ing on ethnographic research, I examine the variations that are visible
between migrant and non-migrant households in rural Bangladesh and
Nitya Rao 29
the ways in which these draw on the linkages and disjunctures between
the local context and transnational life.
After briefly reviewing the literature on remittances and social repro-
duction, I discuss the methodology adopted for the study. I then
draw out the conceptual and empirical links between remittances and
reproduction in the study village, before concluding the chapter.
Remittances and reproduction: Exploring

the conceptual links
Bangladesh is one of the top ten remittance recipient countries in the

world (World Bank, 2011). There remains, however, a debate on the
use of remittances at the household level – production and invest-
ment versus consumption (Murshid et al., 2002; de Haas, 2005). Few
have pointed to the deep interconnections between them.3 Concerns
about family welfare (children and parents) and social reproduction
motivate men and women in a transnational context to work hard,
sacrificing their own physical comforts and disrupting emotional rela-
tionships, sometimes with adverse health outcomes (Basheer, 2004;
Carrasco, 2010). Welfare here assumes multiple meanings, from the
remittance of money for food and survival needs, the accumulation of
wealth and status, to the everyday expressions of care, through phone
calls and gift-giving as means to strengthen familial belonging and social
relationships (Peter, 2010).
In a patriarchal context such as Bangladesh, the relationship between
the use of remittances and social reproduction is strongly gendered,
contributing in this case to the maintenance and even the apparent
rigidification of gender divides across spheres of action. While Engels
(1972 [1884]) saw women’s confinement to the home and the reproduc-
tive sphere as the main reason for their subordination, and called for
their engagement with production and the labour force as the route to
emancipation, Meillasoux (1981: 34) saw the family or what he called
the “domestic community” as “the basic cell in the mode of produc-
tion”, with reproduction being central to the process of the subsistence
and sustenance of human society.
Appreciating Meillasoux’ attention to reproduction of the labour
force in the operation of the social system as a whole (social repro-
duction), Edholm et al. (1977), however, critiqued his conflation of
the control over women’s reproductive power (human reproduction)
with the differential allocation of labour power (reproduction of the
labour force). They argued that Meillasoux failed to recognise that the
labour force is socially constituted, “that certain categories of peo-

ple become members of it while others are removed from it” (ibid.:
110). Further, Meillasoux ignores the systematic devaluation of women’s
reproductive work, operating within and across domestic units. Yet, by
restricting their discussion to the context of capitalist and advanced cap-
italist societies, Edholm et al. also ignore the implications of the recent
spurt of transnational migration, and its attendant notions of “global
householding” or “transnational families”, for the concept of “reproduc-
tion” (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002; Yeoh, 2009), and the complex ways
in which social and biological reproduction are tied up with each other,
for both men and women. Rather than necessarily signifying enhanced
subordination, the present gender divides reflect a renegotiation of both
conjugal and wider social relations.
Nevertheless, Edholm et al.’s (1977) analytical distinction between
social reproduction, reproduction of the labour force, and human or bio-
logical reproduction is useful in understanding the status-enhancement
strategies adopted by transnational migrants across genders and gener-
ations. In Bangladesh, transnational migration is largely male, hence
biological reproduction serves the double purpose of demonstrating
male sexual power and establishing greater control over wives, binding
them close to young children, the home (Lindisfarne, 1994: 85) and, in
turn, the men. If cultural and social pressures on women make them
sexually available to men, equally there seem to be pressures on men to
reproduce soon after marriage, not just to prove their masculinity (see
also Locke and Zhang, 2009) but also in the hope that, in their absence,
the child/children would provide both physical companionship and an
outlet for emotions for the mother.
The idea of “reproduction of the labour force” has to some extent
been neglected in recent academic debates due to a general ideological
shift away from Marxist analysis towards either neoliberal perspectives
or poststructuralist and postmodern positions. Education, for instance,
is viewed as “human capital”, contributing to improved skills, knowl-
edge and the potential to earn, rather than as a personal or relational
attribute. Reproduction theorists, however, see formal education as
reproducing social inequalities (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). The mid-
dle classes often migrate to accumulate cultural capital by accessing
higher-value education, reproducing social class in the process (Waters,
2006).
Despite the reality of low educational levels, especially among
unskilled/semiskilled migrants, it has often been argued that educa-
tional investments, including in private tuition, and outcomes are
Nitya Rao 31
greater in remittance-receiving households (Sharma, 2010). However,

this is not necessarily the case – outcomes are often more nuanced.
Age-differentiated patterns were found in a Mexican municipality, with
a positive impact among children aged 5, neutral among children
aged 6–14 but negative among teenagers aged 15–17 (Lopez-Cordova,
2006, cited in Sharma, 2010: 568). McKenzie and Rapoport (2007), too,
demonstrate a disincentive to complete schooling among children in
migrant households in Mexico. Several explanations are suggested for
this, including the high cost and low quality of education (Bredl, 2011),
the lack of parental supervision, the propensity of children to migrate
with their parents and the potential lower returns to schooling in the
future for children who are likely to migrate. This is related to the fact
that educational credentials often have a minor role to play in the occu-
pation assignment of immigrants, which emerges more from the strong
social networks that they develop,4 hard work and skills acquired on
the job. More importantly, Bey (2003: 295) found in Mexico that migra-
tion with their parents for seasonal agricultural work provides children
with an element of learning and apprenticeship, opens up new horizons
and, as an integral part of the families’ reproduction strategies, socialises
them into future adult roles and identities.
Education as a mobility strategy is common among groups that
are settled in traditionally caste- or class-dominated social relations
(Moldenhawer, 2005), but transnationalism appears to shift the indica-
tors of status. In Bangladesh, as I demonstrate in this chapter, with over
50 per cent of the migrants on short-term, unskilled labour contracts
(BMET, 2013), transnational migration is viewed as a temporary strategy
for earning money, accumulating assets and developing a respectable
persona in the locality, rather than a permanent movement. Status
in this context is reflected through lifestyles and the social estima-
tion of honour, rather than the ownership of landed property or even
education. It includes cultural practices such as dress, speech, bodily
dispositions and tastes, which are used by people to organise their per-
ception of social space and indeed social relationships (Bourdieu, 1984).
This has led to the erosion of status hierarchies as ranked categories,
enabling people to move between different social positions.
Unpacking the idea of social reproduction is analytically useful in
pointing to the different pathways that are available to people to
improve their life chances. What needs to be stressed is the multilin-
earity of this process, shaped as it is by the interplay of individual
agency, social relationships, notions of respectability and, importantly,
the “capacity to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004). The aspirational domain,
which is often overlooked, becomes important in understanding repro-

duction within a globalised, transnational context of social, economic
and cultural life because it involves the interaction between existing
normative stances and the construction of subjective identities. While
the outcomes of these interactions are not predictable, given both the
fluidity and the riskiness of global work and social contexts, agency is
expressed in multiple ways – through direct actions and words, with
both positive and negative values attached to them, but equally through
acts of sacrifice and silent support.
In this context, the gender subtext of remittances and social repro-
duction strategies need to be emphasised, especially since one often
finds contradictory meanings hidden within them. For example, fam-
ily status follows the adoption of conservative gender practices, be it the
payment of dowries, early marriage or the confinement of women. Yet,
at the same time, investments are made in female education, with an
expectation of its contribution to an improvement in home manage-
ment and consequently social standing. Female migration contributes
to earnings and consumption at the household level, but importantly
enhances women’s personal confidence and sense of autonomy. Yet
women migrants themselves prioritise spending on their daughters’
dowries and marriages, seeking to shelter them from paid work, which
apart from involving harsh working conditions is perceived as a threat
to the existing patriarchal social order. Here women are responsible for
forging a family culture that provides elite status, by marrying young,
ensuring that the children are educated and leading a domesticated life
(cf. Feuron and Schiller, 2001) rather than pursuing independent careers.
In this chapter I attempt a more nuanced understanding of how social
status, predicated upon different gender roles and subjectivities for
girls/women and boys/men, is reproduced by the presence or absence of
remittances among migrant and non-migrant households. While there
are differences between internal and transnational migrants’ strategies,
I confine myself to transnational migration.
Methodology and context
Achingaon5 is a relatively poor village with 310 Muslim house-

holds in Manikganj district, west of the capital, Dhaka.6 Over the
past 20 years, with improved communication and transport facilities,
employment opportunities in garment factories and welding workshops
around Dhaka, and overseas, especially in the Gulf countries, have
rapidly expanded. People aspire to move from agriculture into other
Nitya Rao 33
occupations, which potentially provide both higher returns and greater

control over their labour.
A preliminary village census was conducted between July and Decem-
ber 2006 to map the scale and nature of migration from the village.
Some 16 men and women, differentiated by age, migration status and
educational level, were then interviewed in depth between March and
May 2007 to explore both their motivations behind and their expe-
riences of migration. In a few instances, where the migrant was not
available, one or more members of their family were interviewed. These
exchanges were transcribed and translated from Bengali into English
and the survey data were processed using SPSS, a statistical analysis
package for the social sciences. Between April and June 2008, follow-
up interviews were conducted with these 16 interviewees and focus
group discussions were conducted with young men and women. These
explored the use and management of remittances in relation to youth
and parental aspirations and social reproduction strategies. Key infor-
mant interviews additionally helped to deepen the understanding of
the context and changes over time.
The household census revealed that 32 per cent of adult men were
engaged in agriculture and 21 per cent in rickshaw/van pulling and
day labouring. The remainder had diversified into small business (10
per cent), factory work (10 per cent), overseas migration (6 per cent),
teaching and religious work (5.5 per cent) and other occupations (15 per
cent). Many of these activities involved moving out of the village for
varying lengths of time. In fact, 27 per cent or 118 men were emi-
grant at that time. Apart from 10 young women who were employed
in the garment factories, the majority of women defined themselves as
home-makers.
Achingaon has a state-run primary school, two non-governmental
private primary schools run by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement
Committee (BRAC)7 and two madrasas, the aliya being state-aided,
teaching a secular curriculum alongside the Quran, and being regulated
by a State Board, and the hafezia not.8 Half of the children went to
the government primary school with the rest being divided between
the maktab (equivalent of primary school in the madrasa stream) and
BRAC schools. At the secondary level there was a shift in favour of the
aliya madrasa, which apart from imparting religious and general educa-
tion was the only post-primary education provider in the village. The
government secondary school was in a market town 2.5 km away. The
latter maintained high academic standards with several of its students
receiving merit scholarships. Despite stipendiary incentives for girls in
secondary education, dropouts persisted. Enrolment and transition data

collected from the high school revealed a completion rate of 42 per cent
for boys and 27 per cent for girls in 20059 (Rao and Hossain, 2011).
Migration and remittances in Achingaon
The survey data provides some interesting insights into the profile of
transnational migrants. Of the total men who were migrant, 30 (27
per cent) were overseas, the majority of them being young.10 Nearly
half of these men were barely educated. The rest had acquired varying
degrees of secondary education or vocational skills (Table 2.1).
This is not surprising given the nature of work that was available to
most overseas migrant workers. Half of them were classified as unskilled
workers, engaged in manual work (agriculture, hotels and construction);
17 per cent as semiskilled (tailors and masons) and less than 5 per cent
as professionals (Siddiqui, 2005). Among the internal migrants, only
a third had less than primary education. A large number had “other
skills”, pointing particularly to the importance of apprenticeships for
boys and young men (Rao and Hossain, 2012). A substantial number
were educated in madrasas and were working as teachers in madrasas
or imams in mosques across the country. The regression results revealed
that an additional year of schooling didn’t have any significant effect
on the migration decision, though other characteristics, such as being
female and married, served as disincentives to migrate, irrespective of
levels of education (Rao, 2009).
The primary reason for migration was poverty (financial crisis)
and the unavailability of employment locally. Earning incomes and
remittances then constituted a central objective of transnational
Table 2.1 Education levels of migrants
Overseas Domestic Total
M F M F M F
Primary 14 (49) 1 (50) 27 (30) 5 (50) 41 (35) 6 (50)

Secondary 9 (31) 0 19 (21) 3 (30) 28 (24) 3 (25)
Madrasa 1 (3) 1 (50) 13 (15) 0 14 (12) 1 (8)
Other skills 5 (17) 0 30 (34) 2 (20) 35 (29) 2 (17)
Total 29 (100) 2 (100) 89 (100) 10 (100) 118 (100) 12 (100)
Source: Village survey; figures in brackets are percentages.

Nitya Rao 35
migration. Interestingly, though, several people reported the desire for

freedom, and an escape from a range of conflicts and abuse, as impor-
tant reasons for migration. While often not discussed, these aspirational
and social reasons were reflected in the use of remittances.
Returns varied by the type of migration – internal or international,
rural or urban, and the costs incurred. Financing overseas migration
necessitated disposing of land or livestock (in 26 per cent of the cases)
or borrowing from moneylenders at interest rates as high as 10 per cent
per month (54 per cent). Working conditions were often poor and risks
high. Higher earnings were then not always assured, although 73 per
cent reported earning more than if they had not migrated.
Only very few respondents noted the problem of sending remittances,
pointing to the success of policy interventions in this area over the
previous decade. While the ostensible use of transnational remittances
was for household provisioning and accumulation, interviews revealed
much greater variety in spending patterns both by gender and over time.
As my sample of female migrants was restricted to two, I am unable to
undertake a systematic analysis of gendered differences in remittance
use and impact. However, insights into their social reproduction out-
comes are offered where possible.
The first priority in terms of remittance use, for both male and female
migrants, was the repayment of loans that had been taken to facilitate
migration. Sabina had sent BDT 200,00011 to her parents in the village
in four years. Her father, Ahmed, 55, noted:
We took a loan of 70,000 taka for her migration in addition to mort-

gaging 120 decimals of arable land. This has now been repaid. We do
not spend on food or clothes for ourselves; this is for Sabina’s mar-
riage. We however donated a small amount to the mosque. In the
future we hope to build a house and buy some land.
Sabina was a domestic worker in Bahrain, who was obliged to migrate

because of the poverty of her parents. The villagers did not respect her
father because he sent her abroad; they cast doubts on her character and
the sorts of activities that she might be engaged in. While her father had
control over her remittances,12 he avoided meeting people. They did not
treat him as a “good man” and this hurt him a lot. Sabina’s migration
had resulted in a trade-off between the family’s socioeconomic con-
dition and its honour. His narrative therefore focused on elements of
status and honour for the family – Sabina’s marriage, donations to the
mosque and ownership of property.
While migration for women is considered to be an act of last resort,

for men it is part of their providing roles, alongside a transition from
adolescence to adulthood – a response to the social pressure “to be a
man” (Osella and Osella, 2006; Boehm, 2008: 21). Migration helps men
to support their parents financially, accumulate money for their own
marriages and develop the identity of a “responsible man” – capable
of providing for his family. Mustafa, 22, was a bachelor but half of his
remittance of BDT 150,000 in the last two years had financed his sis-
ter’s dowry. A brother’s ability to pay his sister’s dowry demonstrates
his social responsibility, enhances his status as a provider and improves
his marriage prospects. In fact, this is often seen as a priority for Gulf
migrants (cf. Basheer, 2004) from South Asia, an interesting though
widespread aberration to the condemnation of dowry in Islam. This ele-
ment of lifecycle transition for men is reflected in other contexts too.
In Cameroon, men chose to engage in labour migration to earn cash for
the payment of bridewealth because marriage entitled them to inherit
land and set up their own household (Stichter, 1985: 69).
The spending pattern for married male migrants was often different
because they had wives and children to support. A large number of them
wanted to save part of the remittance to set up their own business in the
village in the future, because living apart from one’s wife and children
for many years at a stretch can be lonely and emotionally unsettling
(Rao, 2012). Transnational remittances were used to transform their class
identity in their home locality, central to their sense of being a successful
and respectable man (Thai, 2012). Safina’s husband, Kamal, sent back
BDT 200,000 in a year. Some of this was used to repair the house, some
to repaying the loan taken for migration and some for the education of
his younger brothers. However, he also helped one of his brothers start
a mobile phone shop, hoping to join him in due course. Babul from
Sadara spent eight years in Saudi Arabia. He sold his land in order to
migrate. He returned finally with BDT 1.2 million, bought land, made
a brick house with a latrine, invested in a tube well and set up a fruit
business in Dhaka Cantonment.
Unsurprisingly, a large proportion of remittances are spent on house-
hold expenses and the repayment of loans (see also Hoang and Yeoh,
Chapter 11, in this volume), yet the purchase of land, construction
of houses and investment in agriculture and livestock also emerge as
important areas of usage,13 followed by health expenses, the purchase
of consumer durables, educational and business investments. Most
migrants make donations and contribute to religious and charitable
funds. While this represents a small proportion of their remittances,
Nitya Rao 37
it reflects an aspiration to enhance individual status and their sense

of belonging in the community, given the sociocultural significance
attached to such expenditure.
Different uses are thus prioritised at different stages in the lifecycle of
the migrant, providing insight into immediate needs and future aspi-
rations, shaped as these are by the particularities of one’s position in
the countries of origin and destination (see also Kusakabe and Pearson,
Chapter 3, in this volume). Kurien (2002) in her study of three dif-
ferent communities in Kerala notes that while the Muslim Mappilas
engaged in charity to the poor and donations to Islamic institutions,
alongside seclusion of their women, the Syrian Christians invested in
education and dowries while developing stronger spousal relationships.
It is apparent that as migrants don’t consider settling in the Gulf per-
manently, a key priority for them is to accumulate as much wealth as
possible to enable them to alter their status at home and forge new
identities through public display and other contextually relevant, status-
enhancing activities (Osella and Osella, 2006; Rao, 2013). In the next
section I explore the impact of remittances on the process of (social)
reproduction and change in the study village.
The impact of remittances on social reproduction
The use of remittances is multifaceted, but categorising them as linked

to either production or consumption, misses the links between the
economic and the social, between relations of production and repro-
duction, and also, as Zarate-Hoyos (2004) notes, the indirect effects
of consumption on output, income and employment. Investing in
dowries, for instance, is not just seen as conspicuous consumption but
rather as an investment in the future security of daughters/sisters, the
strengthening of social networks and a strategy to expand opportunities
and support in the long term through enhanced social status. Young
women confirmed the widespread acceptability of dowry during a focus
group discussion: “Dowry is now essential for all classes, including the
educated. In fact, it increases with the education of the girl. Apart from
cash, whatever else is needed for setting up the household is given as
dowry – furniture, refrigerator, in fact, recently someone even gave a
motorcycle to the groom.”
Similar is the case of donations to the mosque, or the construction
of large, brick houses and the purchase of consumer durables. Rather
than consumption per se, prestige and renown are forms of symbolic
and social capital that are critical for furthering long-term goals and
perhaps the “most valuable form of accumulation”, one which is easily

convertible into economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984: 179). I use Edholm
et al.’s (1977) classification of reproduction as a heuristic device to clarify
my argument.
Biological reproduction: Issues of fertility and care

Within patriarchal South Asia, inheritance and kinship systems empha-
sise the importance of paternity in the formation of a child’s identity
and rights (Dube, 1997), alongside the desire for a son/sons. This has
led to an insistence on women’s virginity at marriage and control over
her sexuality thereafter, but has equally created the pressure to produce
sons. How has this been maintained in a context of transnational male
migration?
Despite the pressure to reproduce (sons), Bangladesh has seen
a remarkable reduction in fertility rates: from 6.9 in 1970 to
2.3 in 2009 (www.unicef.org/infobycountry/bangladesh_bangladesh_
statistics.html, accessed on 1 February 2012). Among the 31 overseas
migrants in the sample, the fertility rate was 2.1 – marginally lower
than that of the general population at 2.3. Islamic reformers have
supported the state’s family planning programme that has associated
population growth with poverty, while simultaneously pushing for a
stronger demarcation of gender roles, with women being confined to the
domestic domain (Shehabuddin, 2008). Women, too, have been able to
convince their husbands of the need to invest in a few children, while
allowing them to perform their domestic duties effectively, not hindered
by repeated childbearing (cf. Jeffery et al., 2008: 522) – a demonstration
of “positive” agency. Transnationally, migrant men have been willing to
negotiate on this issue because their success is dependent not only on
their hard work and ability to “provide” but also on their wives accept-
ing a life of sacrifice and controls for the sake of the family’s happiness
and prestige, and meticulously performing familial and mothering roles
(Rao, 2012).
Despite fertility decline, the age of marriage for women, at 16 years,
remains low. Evidence from Kerala, India, suggests that migrants seek
young wives (given their absence for several years during the early years
of marriage), and with girls’ parents too seeing a “Gulf man” as a prize
catch, teenage marriage is increasing. Consequently, dowries increase
with the age of the bride (Basheer, 2004). Living alone in a distant
country, away from their young wives, not only feeling lonely and
sexually deprived but at the same time insecure about the loyalty of
their spouses,14 men voiced a preference for having a child, or at least
Nitya Rao 39
impregnating their wives, before they left (Rao, 2012). It is not just
household provision but fatherhood that becomes central to their man-
hood, and indeed to social reproduction. Though the wife is likely to
be watched closely by her in-laws, the investment of time and emotions
required to bring up a child, and also to develop, mediate and maintain
lasting personal relationships across generations, leaves her little time
for other activities, in particular extramarital sexual encounters.
For women migrants the trade-off between earnings and care is
starker. The son of Zahera, 35, a landless agricultural labourer, was just
a year old when his mother first migrated to Bahrain. Zahera’s husband
had to continue his daily wage work to support the family of six, so her
mother came to look after the baby in her absence. She was unable to
care directly for her children, yet she translated her mothering role in
terms of earning for their future wellbeing. One of her stated priorities
was to earn dowries for her daughters in order to ensure them a life of
security – one in which they would not have to engage in paid work.
She said:
It is risky for women to work outside. Girls are unsafe and anything
bad can happen to them. Nobody knows when the girls will be in
trouble. So it is better to marry them off soon. I am scared about my
daughters, so from the money I earned during my first migration,
I got my elder daughter married. In any case she was 19 years old.
Her agency, expressed in terms of sacrifices for the family’s wellbeing,

through working and living in difficult conditions, contributed towards
constraining her daughters’ mobility. This tendency is seen among
male migrants too, who often deprive themselves of basic needs to
send money home for their sister’s/daughter’s dowries, as noted above.
Embedded in such remittance behaviours are not just material objects
that are brought back home but emotions of concern and care (Carrasco,
2010). Agency here cannot be characterised in binary terms – as positive
or negative – rather, the examples point to the inseparability and conti-
nuity of the active and the passive, giving dignity to endurance, patience
and compassion as rational responses rather than signs of victimhood
(Reader, 2007; Rao and Hossain, 2011).
Reproduction of the labour force

Education and skills are seen as essential for one to participate effectively
in a globalised workforce and earn remunerative incomes. As Dilbar,
a 19-year-old student, noted, “The quality of work depends on the
Table 2.2 Mean years of schooling by gender
Girls Boys Children
10–14 15–18 10–14 15–18 10–14 15–18
International 3.1 (7) 2.5 (7) 0.3 (3) 0 (6) 2.3 (10) 1.4 (13)
migrants
National 5.4 (5) 5 (16) 0.7 (17) 1 (25) 1.7 (22) 2.6 (41)
migrants
Non- 2.4 (30) 2.5 (22) 1.8 (25) 1.2 (27) 2.12 (55) 1.8 (49)
migrants
Source: Village survey; figures in brackets reflect n (the number of observations).
level of education because those who are well educated get better jobs.
They can join the police and army; those less educated work in shops
and factories.” Six families of migrants had permanently moved to the
nearby town in order to access better education for their children. For
the majority, this remained an aspiration, far from their present reality,
reflected also in their prioritisation of remittance use.
The survey data from Achingaon points to both age- and gender-
differentiated impacts of remittances on the schooling of children
(Table 2.2). T-tests were used to assess whether the education of children
living in migrant and non-migrant households was statistically differ-
ent between the two groups. For girls, in both age groups, it appears
that those in migrant households received more years of schooling than
those in non-migrant households; however, the pattern is exactly the
opposite for boys, who appeared to do worse at 5 per cent significance
levels.15
Concepts of reproduction of the labour force help us understand why
this might be the case. Social relationships and responsibilities are cen-
tral to household livelihood strategies. In the absence of fathers or elder
brothers, it is the sons or younger brothers who need to support house-
hold farming or other informal work in Bangladesh where female paid
employment is neither encouraged nor easily available. Male children
are socialised into work routines from a young age, perhaps also with
a view to future migration. They may attend a few years of school but
they usually drop out after primary education, and often with low lev-
els of literacy. Given the nature of jobs available to them, the emphasis
on school education does not appear to be strong; rather, several turn
to some form of apprenticeship, to learn a skill that should enable
them to earn money (see Table 2.1). Welding workshops in Dhaka
Nitya Rao 41
are a popular destination for young men, often with a view to learn-
ing a skill that facilitates migration overseas (Rao and Hossain, 2012).
Young men are helped in this venture by migrant networks that pro-
vide information, initial support and opportunities for learning. Among
non-migrant households, boys have higher levels of schooling, which
supports Moldenhawer’s (2005) view of education as a mobility strategy
among settled communities.
For women, both the expectation and the aspiration are to make suc-
cessful marriages and a reputation as good wives and home-makers.
These too are driven by the nature of jobs available to them – low paid
and involving hard working conditions – with little scope for financial
independence. Female education is, however, seen as a desirable trait in
a wife, especially for an overseas migrant, because in his absence she
is expected to manage the household and to ensure the education and
quality of upbringing of his children. Rather than facilitating indepen-
dent careers, the purpose of female education is to prepare women for
managing the process of separation and “global householding”. There
is a preference, therefore, for girls to be schooled in the madrasa. Equiv-
alent to secular education in terms of credentials, madrasas are seen to
emphasise values of patience and sacrifice, creating both pious and com-
petent home-makers in the process (Rao and Hossain, 2011: 631). The
emphasis on female education appears to be stronger in migrant rather
than non-migrant households, though less so among those individuals
migrating overseas. It is perhaps the experience of material prosper-
ity in a relatively short period of time that makes parents aspire to a
transnational migrant as a potential son-in-law, investing in suitable
education for their daughters to better meet this end.
Education has different meanings for differently placed people within
a global economy. Without disaggregating data by age and gender
and locating it within particular social and economic contexts, it
is meaningless to stipulate causality between remittances and educa-
tional investments, as has generally been the case. Disaggregation,
as in Table 2.2, which highlights smaller educational investments
for boys, points to a trade-off between educational investments and
higher incomes for boys in poor households, especially in the short
to medium term. Their short time horizons vis-à-vis migration make
them accept lower wages and hard working conditions for the imme-
diate income and security that it provides. Other strategies are used to
gain status and respect within their communities in the longer term
(including marrying better-educated women), as I discuss in the next
section.
The cultural production of status

While economically marginalised at the destination, the migrants high-
lighted positive experiences of earnings, culture and religion to gain
status within their own society (cf. Osella and Osella, 2000). This is
clearly reflected in their remittance use, the trade-offs between eco-
nomic accumulation and the patterns of reciprocity expected by the
community. In the study village, apart from making investments in
economic capital (land and property, business), migrants focused on
enhancing their social status through consumption, charity, contri-
butions to the mosque, to public and religious events, and personal
markers of a respectable, religious (Islamic) identity including, though
not restricted to, education (especially madrasas). As the father of
26-year-old Karim, a migrant of four years, noted,
Small donations were made to the mosque and madrasa (1500 taka
each), and we gained substantial social prestige by sacrificing a
cow worth 10,000 taka during the Eid festival. I hope to use the
remittances that follow to construct a large brick house, but more
important, I want my son to undertake the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca
before returning to Bangladesh.
Karim’s father sets out quite clearly the importance of becoming a

patron, contributing to community institutions such as the mosque or
madrasa, or making a sacrifice during the Eid festival, to gain social
recognition and prestige through the accumulation of religious merit.
This was found to be the case for all of the overseas migrant households
in the village. After going to Saudi Arabia, Badar sent BDT 10,000 to his
family. He wrote a letter asking them to donate BDT 2,000 to the mosque
and madrasa, and BDT 1,000 to the poor. Muktar’s family was poor, yet
donated BDT 200 to the graveyard and BDT 300 to another poor villager
for his daughter’s marriage. Even though the amounts are often nomi-
nal, these contributions lead to a sense of psychological satisfaction for
the individual migrant and his family, but also social recognition of their
contribution and an acknowledgement of their role in and concern for
the community. Alongside status, they also gain social support, which
partly compensates for possible shortcomings in male breadwinning
roles (Kandiyoti, 1998).
In the context of a democratic polity and in the face of competition
from secular, non-governmental organisations, the Jamaat-e-Islami16
has allowed more flexibility in everyday practices in Bangladesh, includ-
ing fertility control, as mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, gaining religious
Nitya Rao 43
merit remains an important element of success and manliness. This

attention to religion coincides with the growing migration to the Middle
East, especially Saudi Arabia, and witnessing the practice of conservative
Islam therein. Awal, 24, pointed out:
While in Saudi Arabia, I had the opportunity to visit Allah’s house

(Ka’ba/Mecca). I touched the “sacred land” of Prophet Mohammad. I
also liked the “system” of shops remaining closed during the prayer
time as praying is compulsory for all Muslims.
The visit to Mecca is highly sought after in the life of a Muslim and
qualifies them for the status of a hajji or “one who has undertaken the
pilgrimage to Mecca”. A symbol of status and leadership in the commu-
nity, this was an aspiration for most migrants. This social dimension of
the migration process, involving the adoption and imitation of the cus-
toms, habits and values of those at the top of the social hierarchy, while
helping the migrants respond to the global consumer and work culture
in a meaningful way, enabled them to legitimise their claims to a higher
position in the locality.
One might expect that exposure to new countries, new media and
new technology would make people more liberal in their outlook. This
is not necessarily the case. In fact in Bangladesh there is a growing con-
servatism in not just religious practice as noted above but also gender
norms. Apart from an immediate display of wealth, gaining status and
prestige for men involves the adoption of particular forms of social
behaviour which include demonstrating control over their women.
Muzaffar, 26, working as a welder in Saudi Arabia, mentioned, in part
jest perhaps, that he would like his wife to wear a burqa (a full veil) and
stay within the home, as he had observed in Saudi. He had brought
her one as a gift. Several shops selling burqas can now be found in the
local markets. While Muzaffar’s wife wore it for social occasions, her
intention was to demonstrate her moral and material superiority over
others rather than to allow it to restrict her everyday activities (Rao,
2013; cf. Thangarajah, 2003). Yet she remained ambiguous towards the
burqa, recognising the potential risks that it posed to her mobility and
work, especially in the context of the growing influence of the Jamaat
and its insistence on women’s confinement to the private sphere.
The reasons for enhanced controls over women in the recent period
do not necessarily reflect unchanging relations of reproduction (which
tend to subordinate women); rather, they point to the changing needs
of reproduction in a global context. Gender identities are not fixed but
they shift and transform to confront the new challenges that are cre-
ated by transnational migration (Boehm, 2008), including in this case
a sharper separation between production (overseas) and reproduction
(at home). The performance of conservative practices and rituals cov-
ers a series of complex negotiations which simultaneously reflect a loss
of male power at the workplace, an enhancement of women’s power in
home management and the lives of their children and a reassertion of
male dominance in community affairs.
Conclusions: Remittances, social reproductive needs

and changing aspirations
Aspirations of the youth and their parents, especially among the work-
ing classes, are not individualistic, nor are they entirely economically
oriented. Rather, they are embedded in intergenerational familial rela-
tionships and sacrifices that are made for each other. This is reflected in
the use of remittances, which carry deep social meanings and change
with gender and over time. For young male transnational migrants
who are engaged in manual labour overseas, a key aspiration is to
move towards self-employment, setting up a business once they return
home, breaking out of employer–employee relationships and building a
respectable identity in the process. There are classifications within this
too, with the village shop at the bottom and an enterprise in the clos-
est market town or even in the capital city, demonstrating much greater
levels of entrepreneurial skill and status. Consumer durables and the
construction of a house are a material and visible reflection of the stan-
dard of living. When taken together, these investments help individuals
and households to challenge and move out of particular class categories.
In line with Bourdieu (1984), while the commercial classes may lack cul-
tural capital, their ability to gain economic capital and the social process
or trajectory that is pursued for this purpose – in this case, migration to
an overseas destination, and one close to the Islamic Holy Land – can
lead them to adopt particular types of language, culture and lifestyle
that are closer to those of the elites than the working classes. Of course,
culture itself is not static, with mass culture and mass media gradually
taking over the cultural domain from the more exclusive forms of art
and aesthetics.
Ultimately, remittances are not just an economic measure but social
goods through which family membership is expressed and social sta-
tus achieved (see Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, and McKay, Chapter 5, in this
volume). Gaining community recognition is an important political and
strategic goal that requires substantial and consistent investment and
Nitya Rao 45
nurturing, not necessarily achieved through educational spending on

individual children. None of the migrants dispute the importance of
education, yet very few invest substantially in the education of their
children or siblings, especially boys. This is despite the policy push
towards universalising education provision over the last two decades,
the argument often couched in terms of building human capital that is
essential for competing in global markets.
Sacrifices at festivals, charity and donations, purchasing consumer
durables, and dowries may appear to be wasteful expenditure (especially
for the poor), apart from strengthening regressive social norms and prac-
tices, but these are essential signs of distinction and status, and they
can contribute to economic improvements in the future. Changes, how-
ever, are not unilinear but often reflect contradictory combinations of
everyday practices, especially those that are related to status production.
Conforming to particular, coveted, gendered roles and identities can
become an important element of this investment. So, for instance, while
women do negotiate fertility and education decisions, they equally
seek to protect their daughters from paid work by prioritising the pay-
ment of dowries and enforcing restrictions on their mobility. Analysing
remittance use then reveals agency to be a continuum that encompasses
a range of elements, which are seen in development terms as either
“positive” or “negative” but which ultimately attempt to transform and
renegotiate power relationships of age, class and gender.
Aspirations change too. Rather than maintaining the same rural exis-
tence, the youth seek out new opportunities as their horizons expand.
A spell of migration can transform them into both successful providers
and successful consumers. They are hence willing to take risks and make
investments that provide hope, though these may not always pay off
economically. Examining transnational remittances from the perspec-
tive of social reproduction then enables a more nuanced reflection of
the nature of and reasons behind the investments made.
Notes
1. Zahid Hussain, posted on 7 January 2009, accessed on 5 November 2011,
http://blogs.worldbank.org/endpovertyinsouthasia/node/514.
2. Since 2003, restrictions have applied to unskilled and semiskilled women
workers under the age of 35, who are not allowed to migrate on their own
(Siddiqui, 2005: 10).
3. Katy Gardner’s work in Bangladesh is an exception.
4. Some 55 per cent of migrants in the village secured their jobs through
friends, relatives and neighbours. This particularly applies to lower-end jobs,
both within the country and overseas (Rao, 2009).
5. All names have been changed in this chapter.
6. Manikganj district as a whole is better off than other districts in northern and
southern Bangladesh, with only 25 per cent of its population being below the
poverty line (BBS, 2009). Yet, in Achingaon, 48 per cent of households are
landless and 49 per cent have small land holdings (less than two acres). Rel-
atively few (10 per cent) have been in higher education or are employed in
white-collar jobs (less than 5 per cent). While almost half of the households
own mobile phones, only one person owns a motorbike and no one a car
(Rao, 2009).
7. BRAC is a leading NGO in Bangladesh that deals with a range of development
issues across sectors.
8. Hafezia is one type of Quomi madrasa, which focuses exclusively on Quranic
teaching.
9. While net enrolment in secondary education was 45 per cent in 2005 for
Bangladesh as a whole, only half of these students – boys and girls – survived
the entire cycle, making for a completion rate of less than 20 per cent
(Ahmed et al., 2007).
10. 40 per cent between the age of 20 and 25 years and another 37 per cent
between 26 and 35 years.
11. GBP 1 = BDT 126 (Bangladesh taka) on 15 September 2014.
12. Curran (1996), too, points to greater parental control over the remittances
from daughters.
13. Siddiqui and Abrar (2003), too, find that after food and clothing, the five
major areas of remittance use are house construction, land purchase, loan
repayment, social ceremonies and sending family members abroad.
14. The left-behind wives are often quite young: in 2007 over 66 per cent of
women were married before the age of 18 (Bangladesh Demographic and
Health Survey, 2007, quoted in UNICEF, 2011).
15. Shafiq (2009) demonstrates that educational gender gaps in Bangladesh have
reversed and now favour girls. Of 38 with post-secondary levels of education,
only 4 are girls, however (village survey).
16. Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami is the largest Islamist political party in
Bangladesh. It seeks to incorporate an Islamic ideology into the state sys-
tem. It joined the Bangladesh Nationalist Party in an alliance that led to the
formation of a four-party coalition government during 2001–2005, under
the leadership of Khaleda Zia. Several members of the party are alleged
to have played a crucial role in the atrocities during the liberation war,
such as the organised killing of intellectuals, genocide and violence against
women, resulting in the party being banned soon after Independence. http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Jamaat-e-Islami, accessed on 25 August
2009.
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3
Remittances and Women’s Agency:
Managing Networks of Obligation
among Burmese Migrant Workers
in Thailand
Kyoko Kusakabe and Ruth Pearson
Introduction: Remittances, gender and intrahousehold

decision-making
Of the total migrant remittances to developing countries, it is estimated

that some 30–45 per cent are from other developing countries. Such
South–South remittances have not received a great deal of attention
in the literature but their volume indicates that they are significant
and should not be ignored. This chapter explores a particular exam-
ple of such South–South flows – namely the remittances of Burmese
migrant workers from Thailand. Because of the ongoing economic fail-
ure in Myanmar,1 many young Burmese come to Thailand, either with
documents allowing them to work as “irregular” migrant workers or
without any kind of documentation (Kusakabe and Pearson, 2010a),
and like other migrant workers they tend to remit relatively substan-
tive sums to their families back home. Official remittances to Myanmar
were 0.4 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009, but a 2008
study showed that the actual level of remittances is at least four times
as large as the official figures from Integrated Regional Information Net-
works indicate (IRIN, 2010). The World Bank (2008) reported that USD
125 million was remitted through formal channels in 2007. However,
IRIN (2010) noted that remittances from Thailand alone were estimated
to amount to USD 300 million, which is five times the reported level of
overall foreign direct investment in Myanmar.2
Although many of the migrant workers in Myanmar are not from the
poorest section of the population, their families are heavily dependent
50
Kyoko Kusakabe and Ruth Pearson 51
on remittances. Several studies of remittances have tried to iden-

tify links between remittances and development (see, e.g., Kaimowitz,
1990; Ghosh, 2006; Ozden and Schiff, 2007). Some are concerned with
the implications for the migrant remitter and argue that remittances
improve the recognition and decision-making power of the migrants
(Pinnawala, 2008). But there is no consensus on the links between
remittances and women’s empowerment. This leads to our understand-
ing that any empowerment effect through remittances is mediated by
existing gender ideology and relations (Ryan, 2004). Following such
analysis, in this chapter we explore the role and meaning of remittances
of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, and we demonstrate how
remittance behaviours are shaped by gender ideology and gender rela-
tions within the sender’s and the recipient’s households, including the
nature of the migrants’ relationship with their family back home. This
is particularly important for Burmese households since, as explained by
Khaing (1984), there is a general expectation that daughters will sup-
port parents, including providing financial support, while sons are more
free to pursue employment and religious activities, such as serving a
year as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, in order to “make merit”
(see also Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in this volume). This study indicates
that remittances from migrant daughters do not automatically lead to
these workers having a stronger voice in decision-making in the recipi-
ent’s household. However, the migrant daughters have other reasons to
maintain their financial support. Our study indicates that the sending of
remittances is frequently deployed as an explicit strategy against present
and future obligations from the natal family to the migrant worker, par-
ticularly in terms of providing care for migrants’ children. The actual
outcome as well as the shape and nature of the remittance behaviour
therefore reflect the outcome of negotiations between migrant workers
and the family back home. Thus it is crucial to analyse the migrants’
relationship with the family in order to understand their remittance
behaviour.
Women migrant workers and remittances
As King and Vullnetari (2009) note, much of the literature on gender

and remittances has investigated whether women are “better” remitters
than male migrants or not. Some studies demonstrate that women tend
to remit more, or at least more regularly (Osaki, 1999; Curran and Saguy,
2001; Piper, 2005; Pfeiffer and Taylor, 2008), while others identified that
men remit more, particularly in terms of total sums (Semyonov and
Gorodzeisky, 2005). It is argued that men are able to remit more because
of their higher earnings and because of gender discrimination in labour
markets (Kofman and Raghuram, 2009), but women remit a larger pro-
portion of their income (Sørensen, 2005). Wolf’s (1994) study of women
factory workers showed that these young Indonesians were not expected
to remit savings from their wages to their families. On the other hand,
Curran’s (1995) study indicated that there was a clear expectation that
rural–urban Thai women migrants would remit, and that they generally
sent larger amounts of financial support to their homes than did men.
Some studies showed that even though women remit less, they remit
more frequently and are more reliable remitters (Mahler, 2001; Parrenas,
2001; Landolt and Da, 2005; Wong, 2006). Guzman et al. (2008) noted
that based on a literature review, women prefer that their remittances
are used to support education and health for family members, while
men prefer to invest in assets and for business purposes.
Research indicates that gendered patterns and outcomes from
remittances vary, and both are generally shaped by prevailing gendered
power relations (King and Vullnetari, 2010). Remittance behaviour and
outcomes are shaped by various factors, including the profile of the
migrants, their employment in the place of destination, and their level
of integration in the place of origin (Osaki, 2003). The changes are
further fluid since, as Curran and Saguy (2001) claim, even though
Ecuadorian women migrants are traditionally expected to remit more,
recently this pattern has been changing. As Wong (2006: 356) con-
cludes, based on a study of Ghanaian migrants, remittances embody
and express “complex and potentially conflict-ridden relations between
different groups that transpire in various ways and are constitutive of
different gendered, cultural, institutional and spatial contexts”.
To capture the significance of gender and other social relations both
in shaping remittance3 behaviour and in their outcome, it is useful
to utilise a network perspective. Curran and Saguy (2001) noted the
importance of understanding social networks in order to explain the
remittance behaviour of women and men. This approach allows us
to highlight the relations between migrant workers and their families
back home, as well as the positioning of different actors in the net-
work. The concepts that Curran and Saguy (2001) use are relevant to
our study: they specify “networks of obligation” to analyse the links
between the migrating family member and those who remain in their
place of origin. They argue that households select household mem-
bers to migrate and expect them to remit back home, and over time
remittances from migrants become an ongoing household strategy to
diversify their income, echoing Massey’s (1994) cumulative causation

theory of migration. The “network of obligation” and “shared under-
standing” of kinship responsibilities make this strategy feasible, though
it should be remembered that such obligations and responsibilities are
deeply gendered because of different expectations and social obligations
of women and men.
Curran and Saguy (2001) further note that while networks of obli-
gation link individuals, “trust structures the content and formation of
migrant network ties” (p. 59). Following Portes and Sensenbrenner’s
(1993) concept of social capital (mirroring what Curran and Saguy term
“trust”), which implies four specific elements – value introjections, reci-
procity transaction, bounded solidarity and enforceable trust – Curran
and Saguy (2001) argue that these aspects of trust shape the nature of the
ties that further shape remittance behaviour. Value introjections refer
to the “obligation which the individual is supposed to feel” (p. 1323)
and “prompts individuals to behave in ways other than naked greed”
(p. 1323), which is formulated through socialisation. Reciprocity trans-
actions are based on norms of reciprocity and the “good deeds” that
they have done for others. Bounded solidarity emerges out of group sol-
idarity, and as they go through common harsh experience they show
solidarity to each other. Enforceable trust is based on the advantage
of belonging to a certain group, which will reward behaviours that
conform to their norm while punishing that which does not. These con-
cepts that form the basis of social capital that structures the network are
useful for our analysis of gendered nature of remittances.
The concept of value introjections can explain how motivation to
remit is moulded by socialisation. If women were socialised to priori-
tise filial piety, they would be more motivated to remit. The obligation
of migrants towards their family back home is also shaped by their posi-
tion in the family – being a daughter, being a mother (Parreñas, 2001;
Asis et al., 2004; Wong, 2006). As Goldring (2004: 820) points out, as
remittance is a reflection of such values and obligations of reciprocities,
“the elasticity of supply of these remittances” is low.
Bounded solidarity refers to the mutual trust in the face of common
threat. Although Portes and Sensenbrenner’s (1993) original concept
was for immigrant communities in the place of destination, the con-
cept can be applied to cross-border family networks. Ryan (2004), in her
study of Irish women in the UK, reported that family networks there
were important to them, not only for finding employment, accommo-
dation and financial support, but also as a source of relaxation and
solidarity, especially in the face of a hostile social environment. For
many migrants it is important to maintain links with their place of

origin, given the precariousness of many migrant situations, and the
ever present possibility of having to return “home” (Parreñas, 2001; Asis
et al., 2004; Wong, 2006; Kusakabe and Oo, 2007). As Bryceson and
Vuorela (2002: 18; Asis et al., 2004: 200) note, less-well-off migrants
may feel greater insecurity and more compulsion to retain links with
distant family members than higher income families. They may be
exposed to a more pronounced cultural divide in their adopted coun-
try and have more need for a fallback in case they lose their livelihood
or residential rights . . .
Enforceable trust refers to internal sanctions against migrants who fail

to remit. Parents back home can generally police the behaviour of their
children, especially their daughters, in the place of destination through
the community of migrants; since women fear acquiring a bad reputa-
tion back home they are more conscious about their behaviour and try
to avoid upsetting their parents. However, unlike the other three con-
cepts of social capital, this sanction aspect seems to have less impact
with regard to remittances, especially for men, whose behaviour is sel-
dom closely monitored. Family back home may try to police male
migrants and make them recall their obligation through frequent phone
calls (Curran and Saguy, 2001; Goldring, 2004), but this is not always
effective, nor does it constitute sanctions against migrating male family
members.
Although both Curran and Saguy’s (2001) network of obliga-
tion framework and Portes and Sensenbrenner’s (1993) four-point
social capital model are able to capture different aspects and pro-
cesses of remittances and are useful in analysing the gendered
nature of remittance behaviour, both have limitations. Portes and
Sensenbrenner’s (1993) work was applied only to immigrants in the
USA without gender differentiated analysis, and Curran and Saguy’s
(2001) work, which further developed Portes and Sensenbrenner’s and
gendered the use of the concept, did not differentiate between women
who have different positions in the family – women as mothers, women
as daughters, women as wives and women as workers. This study con-
tributes to remedying these shortcomings by analysing how the network
of obligation differs between women in different relational positions.
The gendered norms that underlie networks of obligation, which are
negotiated between the migrants and the family back home, shape
the way in which migrants are able to respond to changing circum-
stances. When the social environment of the place of destination is
harsh and migrants have few resources available to them, as in the

case of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand, women migrants’ nego-
tiation power vis-à-vis their families back home can be weaker. Other
literature, which does analyse the gendered forces that shape remittance
behaviour, fails to discuss the role that migrant women themselves play
in redefining the terms of their obligations. Our study, however, demon-
strates that these network relations shape their remittance behaviour,
but at the same time the migrants themselves reshape the factors that
form the relations, in an attempt to survive and cope with changing
circumstances.
A number of historical and anthropological studies of Burmese
women are at pains to point out the high status of women in Myanmar,
ever since precolonial times (Okuhira, 1979; Mi Mi Khaing, 1984; Than
Than Nwe, 2003; Ikeya, 2006; Harriden, 2012). Some authors argue
that traditionally Buddhist Burmese society, which is matrilocal, gives
land rights and inheritance rights to women on an equal basis to men
(Okuhira, 1979). Women are said to be active in the economic sphere.
They frequently run family businesses alongside their husbands and
have considerable control over the household economy. However, oth-
ers demonstrate that the seemingly high status of women is actually
more complicated: according to Kirsch (1996), the valuation of Buddhist
women’s involvement in economic activities is devalued by their infe-
rior religious and spiritual status. In the Burmese context, hpoun is what
determines the lower spiritual status of women and justifies male supe-
riority (Than Than Nwe, 2003). Only men are able to have hpoun; in
contrast, women are considered to be polluting and potentially dam-
aging to men’s hpoun. The low spiritual status of women prevents them
from taking a political leadership position in Burmese society (Harriden,
2012), and it also makes it less of a threat for men when women have
economic power (Ikeya, 2006; Harriden, 2012).
At the same time, the high status of women in Buddhism, often com-
pared favourably with other religions, has been used by nationalists in
both Burma and India to demonstrate the flaws in colonialists’ justifi-
cation of colonialism in order to achieve social modernisation (Ikeya,
2006). However, the State Peace and Development Council, which is
the military regime governing Myanmar, has frequently focused on
the importance of controlling women’s behaviour and has upheld the
importance of women’s role in protecting Burmese culture (Harriden,
2012). One example of this is its argument that the “Burmese race” is
polluted if Burmese citizens marry foreigners, which was a central argu-
ment used to attack the Nobel Prize winner and opposition leader Aung
San Suu Kyi. Castigation of mixed marriages has been a constant theme
since the 19th century. In the 1920s, “Indo-Burmese” marriages (“India”

here refers to lower-class and lower-caste Muslim and Hindu men and
women from the subcontinent) were considered to be a public concern
by a leading women’s nationalist organisation, which argued that such
unions deprive Burmese women of their rights (Ikeya, 2006).
So the impact on Burmese women’s status of their increased role
in economic activities and contributions to the household is often
counteracted by their inferior spiritual status. And, given that the tra-
ditional status of women has been mobilised as part of the political
discourse against opposition groups, as well as the fact that the woman
was promoted as the “protector of Burmese culture”, Burmese women
have frequently experienced the increase in their roles and responsi-
bilities within the household without any concomitant improvement
in their status. In particular, Burmese women have assumed the eco-
nomic responsibility for their children as well as their parents. The result
has been an increase in the economic as well as the social burdens of
Burmese women, which is exemplified in the remittance behaviour of
Burmese migrant women in Thailand in recent decades. This finding is
supported by Harriden (2012: 117), who noted:
The decline in women’s traditional economic roles and status was

accompanied by an increasing sense of social displacement and cul-
tural degeneration as women were separated from their families and
communities. The fraying of traditional gender roles, which might
otherwise have allowed an increase in women’s economic power, was
offset by the strong belief that women’s primary role was a wife and
mother. The introduction of formal education for females expanded
women’s employment opportunities, but mainly in “appropriate”
professions, which only served to reinforce gender differences.
Burmese migrant workers in Thailand
Since 1994, the Thai government has implemented various policies

to register “illegal” migrant workers as a pragmatic strategy to ensure
enough labour force for its economy. During 2008–2010 there were
approximately 1.3 million migrant workers registered in Thailand, most
of them from Myanmar, plus another estimated 1 million workers who
were not registered, comprising 5 per cent of the total Thai labour force
in 2007 (Martin, 2007). Since 2009, the Thai government has changed
its policy of registration and it now requires would-be migrant workers
to obtain a temporary passport through nationality verification in the
place of origin and then to get work permits once they are in Thailand.
By February 2011 over 200,000 Burmese workers had obtained tempo-
rary passports under this scheme, and more than 350,000 had applied
for nationality verification. Another 270,000 are still under the old regis-
tration scheme (Department of Employment February 2011 data in MAP
Foundation website), which leaves an estimated 1.5 million Burmese
migrant workers unregistered.
Migrant workers are employed in various sectors in Thailand: agricul-
ture, fisheries, domestic work, restaurants, factories, etc. In this study
we focus on migrant workers working in manufacturing, especially
in the garment industries, because the situation of these individuals
directly reflects how migrant workers are situated in the global produc-
tion chain and the effect of regional economic development policies on
women migrant workers and their families (Arnold, 2004; Kusakabe and
Pearson, 2010).
Burmese migrant workers come from all over Myanmar. Most undoc-
umented workers (and even some of those who are documented) are
paid less than the minimum wage of Thailand. For example, in Mae
Sot, a border town in Northern Thailand, where garment production
has expanded 70-fold since 1997, wages are lower than in other parts
of the country – although the official minimum wage in 2008 was THB
147 (Thai baht) per day, many Burmese migrant workers were paid only
THB 60 per day. However, this is a higher wage than in Yangon, where
garment factories were paying the equivalent of around THB 30 a day.
According to the International Labour Organization (ILO, 2007), wages
in Thailand were nine times as high as in Myanmar.
Even when workers are nominally paid the minimum wage, there
are a range of deductions which reduce the actual level of cash that
they receive (Arnold, 2004; FTUB and Robertson Jr., 2006; Kusakabe
and Pearson, 2010). Not only low pay but the confiscation of regis-
tration cards, constant fear of arrest, long working hours and non-
payment/delayed payment of wages are the difficulties that migrants
constantly face.4 Some migrants choose to relocate to the capital in
search of higher earnings. However, the journey to the centrelands is
extremely hazardous.
Given the unpredictability and precariousness of the employment sit-
uation of migrant women factory workers in Thailand, as well as the low
wages that they earn, sending remittances back home is a substantial
burden. In the following sections, we will analyse how pressure to remit
is being shaped, and how female and male migrants are responding. The
rest of the chapter is organised as follows. The research methodology
of the study is described below. Then there is a detailed description of

the patterns, methods and practices of remittances by Burmese migrant
workers in Thailand, distinguished according to gender, which also fore-
grounds the changes across women’s life courses. These differences in
remittance practices are analysed using the four elements of social cap-
ital detailed by Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993), as outlined above.
Lastly we discuss how women migrant workers renegotiate elements of
their social capital and reshape the nature of their familial obligations
in order to relieve themselves of their remittance responsibilities.
Methodology
Between 2006 and 2010, a study5 was conducted with Burmese migrant
workers employed in (mainly garment and leather) factories in three
areas of Thailand: Samut Prakan Province (on the periphery of the cap-
ital, Bangkok) and Bangkok, Mae Sot in Tak Province (a border town
with Myanmar) and Three Pagoda Pass in Kanchanaburi Province (a bor-
der town with Myanmar). A total of 133 Burmese migrant workers
were interviewed in depth. These interviews were conducted in Burmese
by Karen researchers. In addition, 504 semistructured questionnaire
surveys were conducted in these three areas in 2010. Among the respon-
dents, 69.8 per cent were Burman, and 12 per cent each were Karen
and Mon. Other ethnicities include Shan, Rakhine, Dawai, Kachin and
Pa-O. A particular geographical area where garment factories are concen-
trated was selected in each of the three study areas. Only workers who
had been in Thailand for at least two years, and those with children
living either with them or elsewhere, were interviewed because of our
focus on gendered practices of childcare and family networks. In total,
371 women and 133 men were interviewed. Some 86.7 per cent were
married, 9.3 per cent divorced, 1.8 per cent remarried and 2.2 per cent
were widowed. The interviews were conducted with the help of Burmese
members of Yaung Chi Oo Burmese Workers Association in Bangkok and
Mae Sot, and Pattanarak Foundation in Three Pagoda Pass.
Remittances of female and male migrant workers
Even though migrants’ wages may fall well below minimum wage lev-
els, many migrant workers manage to send money and goods back
home. The study conducted by Turnell et al. (2010) that analysed
remittance behaviour for a single 12-month period showed that the
median remittances from a Burmese worker in Thailand was THB 15,000
per year, averaging THB 8,966 for women and THB 19,488 for men.6
Deelan and Vasuprasat’s (2010) study, which considered the amount of
remittances over the two previous years, also showed the same median
for Burmese migrant workers, with women remitting more than men.7
The women participants in our survey remitted THB 13,063 while men
remitted THB 12,369 per year on average during 2000–2009. Although
the difference might not be that great, all of the studies indicated that
women consistently remit more than men.
As can be seen from Figure 3.1, the longer the migrants are in
Thailand, the more likely they are to stop remitting. More men than
women stop sending remittances home, not just because they stay
longer in Thailand. Among those who are remitting, except for the first
year, women constantly remit more than men, even though they earn
less than men (Figure 3.2). Women’s greater obligation to remit was
16,000 60
Average annual remittances in Thai baht
% of total women/men migrant workers

14,000
50
respondents working in Thailand

12,000
40
10,000
8,000 30
6,000
20
4,000
10
2,000
0 0
1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th
Number of years in Thailand
women non-remit men non-remit
average total remittances of women average total remittances of men
Figure 3.1 Average annual remittances and percentage of those who do not
remit by gender of respondents
Note: Although not all respondents had remitted regularly every year since they moved to
Thailand, here the x-axis grouped them by the tenth year that they had remitted. Most of the
respondents remitted every year initially but some had irregular remittances. For those who
had irregular remittances, even when they had a blank of 2–3 years after the first remittance,
the following year that they remitted is recorded as their second year of remittance.
5,000
4,500
4,000
3,500
3,000
Thai baht
2,500
2,000
1,500
1,000
500
0
1995 or 1996–1999 2000–2002 2003–2005 2006–2007 2008–2009
before
Year period
women men
Figure 3.2 Net earnings of respondents by gender and year

Note: This is monthly net earnings of respondents. It is calculated by subtracting accom-
modation and other deduction from their wages. Piece rates and daily wages have been
re-calculated to reflect the monthly earnings based on actual number of pieces that they
make and the number of days that they work per month.
also seen during the labour protests that were provoked by deteriorating
wages and employment conditions following the 2008/2009 financial
crisis (see Pearson and Kusakabe, 2012b). Women were more likely than
men to leave the protest, particularly when they had leadership posi-
tions, mainly because they needed to maintain their remittances to
families back home, while the pressure for men was not as great. This
supports other studies that were discussed above that found that women
are more reliable remitters. As we will see below, the network of obliga-
tion for women might be stronger, resulting in women remitting more
and longer than men.
These figures show that there is a clear pattern of remittances. While
they are single, both women and men tend to remit more, especially if
their siblings are working in Thailand. It is generally the eldest child (but
most often the eldest daughter) who gathers together the remittances
from other family members and takes responsibility for sending them
back home.8 However, once they get married, many women and men
stop or reduce their remittances:
So after finishing paying my debt . . . I called them [the siblings] to

come here. For travel cost they don’t have to borrow money like
me because this time, I advanced them the travel cost (baht 16,000
each) . . . Now they are paying me their debt little by little because
they have to send money to my parents. I cannot send money to my
parents as I am having my own family. Let the singles work here and
send money home to our parents.
(Ms May Nwe Nwe Kyaw in Mae Sot)
It would seem that once men are married, families do not expect them
to continue sending remittances home. According to our survey, 90
per cent of women respondents (333) remitted to their parents back
home, while only 60 per cent of men (80) did so. On the other hand,
4 per cent of women workers (14) remitted to their in-laws, while 17
per cent of men (23) did so. This would indicate that after marriage,
women are more likely to continue to remit to their parents to whom
they feel particular obligation. In contrast, male remittances fall off
sharply once they have their own families. Remittance behaviours, as
such, vary not only along gender lines but also throughout the life
course (Locke et al., 2013; Rao, Chapter 2, in this volume). One respon-
dent in Mae Sot said that she was shocked to learn that her brother, who
was remitting money to support her schooling, was getting married. She
was so disappointed that she quit her school and moved to Mae Sot to
work without waiting until the remittances stopped. This shows that it
is a common understanding that after a man gets married, his obligation
will switch to his wife and her family.
Once the women migrants have children, and particularly if they have
sent their children back home (for details, see Pearson and Kusakabe,
2012a), it would seem that women’s obligation to send remittances
intensifies. Mothers are expected to be the primary carer of children
(Thwin, 2001), so when that obligation is shifted to the sending com-
munity, there is an expectation that women will send remittances. The
normal practice is for a female worker to pool both her and her hus-
band’s income and send money to her parents, who normally look after
the children.9 In cases where the wife’s family cannot take care of the
children, either because of financial reasons or because they have other
grandchildren to look after, the woman will send to the husband’s fam-
ily. Even in this case, it is the wife who will pool the money and organise
it being sent to the in-laws:
I obtained an ATM card10 with the help of my employer. My husband

and I put money in my bank account and we both use it to we remit
money to Myanmar as we have two school aged children with my
parents in Taung-gyi. We remitted 500,000 kyat in 2–3 months . . .
(Ms Hnin Zarchi Htwe in Samut Prakan)
Method of remitting
There are several ways in which Burmese migrants remit money. Fre-
quently they use the hundi system which is “an ancient device in which
monetary value is transferred via a network of dealers or brokers from
one location to another” (Turnell et al., 2010: 7). Burmese migrants
generally refer to them as “agents”, so in this chapter we will call
them agents rather than hundi dealers. Agents have their partners inside
Myanmar whom they deploy to effect the financial transfers. When
the agents receive payments in Thai currency from migrant workers in
Thailand, they will call their partner in Myanmar who will contact the
workers’ family back home to give the money in kyat. Migrant work-
ers will telephone their family to confirm the receipt of the money,
and that will conclude the transaction. Agents do not charge a sepa-
rate service fee, but the exchange rate between the baht and kyat will
be determined by the agent. Some of these agents are also engaged in
cross-border trade and will invest the money to buy goods in Thailand
to send back to Myanmar. The partner in Myanmar will often be able
to make a profit from selling the goods from Thailand. In this way,
the agents gain both from a favourable foreign exchange rate and
from cross-border trade. Agents in Mae Sot can be found in the mar-
ket and generally receive cash directly from the workers, but agents in
Bangkok will require migrant workers to transfer the money to their
bank account at the border towns. If the migrant workers do not have
bank accounts they have to use those of their friends, and this incurs
further costs.
Another way is to ask a “carrier” to bring money to their families.
In this case, unlike agents, cash will move physically from Thailand to
Myanmar. The carrier will carry the cash and often other gifts that the
migrants want to send back home for a fee. Carriers receive the cash in
Thai baht, exchange it at the market at the border and bring the kyat to
the families back home. Some migrants who come from remote villages
beyond the reach of agents’ services have to rely solely on carriers.
A third way of sending remittances is to send money via friends and
relatives, which is particularly feasible for migrants whose home villages
are not far from the border towns, given that many local Burmese people
frequently travel to the border and cross to Thailand. Although it is diffi-
cult to travel from Bangkok to the borders, many, especially long-settled
documented migrants, do go back and forth to the border or to locations
inside Myanmar. In a border town such as Mae Sot, where it is relatively
easy and cheap to travel from other towns in Myanmar because of bet-
ter road connections and transportation, some parents will come to the
border to receive the money directly from their migrant children.
Another method is to use bank transfers. Some of the respondents in
Mae Sot said that when they want to send a large sum of money they
will go to Myawaddy, a border town in Myanmar adjacent to Mae Sot,
to send money from the bank on the Burmese side, since the transfer fee
is smaller this way. However, since going to Myawaddy costs time and
money, for smaller amounts they generally use either agents or carriers.
The final option is for migrants to carry the money themselves when
they return home on visits.
The means used by our respondents to send money are detailed in
Table 3.1.11 Those based in Mae Sot demonstrated the most variety in
the method of remittance. As noted above, travel to and from Mae Sot
to other towns in Myanmar is relatively straightforward, so there were
often friends or relatives available to carry money for the workers, and
family members could come over themselves to collect it. However, in
Three Pagoda Pass, which is also a border town, the transportation from
inner Myanmar is more difficult and expensive. Although most of the
migrant workers in this location actually lived on the Burmese side of
the border, their home towns were a considerable distance away. Given
the difficulties for their relatives to travel to the border, these workers
generally relied more on carriers and agents. In Mae Sot, on the other
hand, none of our respondents used agents to send money since their
workplaces were distant from the market where the agents were located;
instead they relied more on carriers and friends who could come to their
workplace to collect the remittances.
The data indicate very little gender difference in the mechanism of
remittance used. Deelan and Varuprasart’s (2010) study reports that
90 per cent of Burmese migrants used informal agents,12 which is sim-
ilar to our result in Three Pagoda Pass and Bangkok, but not in Mae
Sot. Turnell et al. (2010) report that 22 per cent of their respondents
sent remittances by carrier, another 22 per cent through family mem-

bers and 44 per cent by hundi, with only 6 per cent using bank transfers.
They found that women were more likely to send money through banks
and by hand through other people, rather than using agents. Although
it is not clear whether the findings of these studies are statistically signif-
icant either, their results indicate the same pattern as in our findings in
Table 3.1. One of the reasons why more women use banks in Mae Sot is
that they are more willing to cross the river to go to the Burmese side in
order to access Burmese banks. Men reported more reluctance to make
the effort, in contrast with women, who were prepared to do this in
order to save on remittance fees, since bank-transfer charges via Burmese
banks are cheaper than other methods. Women often also decided to use
friends to remit so that they could also send other goods, such as food
and snacks, back home, and the charges were less than for than other
methods.
Migrants gave different reasons for sending money back home. Some
sent it regularly to contribute to the daily expenses of family members,
Table 3.1 Methods of remittance of respondents (first remittance∗ )
Location Method Women Men Total
Bangkok Agent 12 (17.4%) 5 (16.1%) 17 (17%)

Carrier 46 (66.7%) 22 (71.0%) 68 (68%)
Friends 8 (11.6%) 3 (9.7%) 11 (11%)
Carry by oneself 1 (1.4%) 0 (0%) 1 (1%)
Total 69 (100%) 31 (100%) 100 (100%)
Mae Sot Bank 27 (12.8%) 8 (8.8%) 35 (11.6%)
(in Myanmar)
Carrier 94 (44.5%) 44 (48.3%) 138 (45.7%)
Friends 49 (23.2%) 21 (23.1%) 70 (23.2%)
Carry by oneself 4 (1.9%) 1 (1.1%) 5 (1.7%)
Relatives 5 (2.4%) 3 (3.3%) 8 (2.6%)
Family members 6 (2.8%) 0 (0%) 6 (2.0%)
come to collect
Total 211 (100%) 91 (100%) 302 (100%)
Three Pagoda Carrier 26 (28.6%) 3 (27.3%) 29 (28.4%)
Pass Agent 60 (65.9%) 8 (72.7%) 68 (66.7%)
Friend 1 (1.1%) 0 (0%) 1 (1.0%)
Total 91 (100%) 11 (100%) 102 (100%)
Note: ∗ This shows the method that the migrant respondents used when they remitted back
home for the first time after coming to Thailand.
Source: Authors’ analysis of semistructured questionnaire survey 2010.
especially their own parents. Some said that they remit for a particular
purpose, such as for the education of their younger siblings, or nieces
and nephews. Others cited the need to pay medical costs for their par-
ents, or they asked their parents or siblings to save their money by
buying land or building up capital to set up a business when they return
to Myanmar. Women’s concern to maximise the amounts that they
send back is seen in their preferences for using the cheapest methods
of transfer, and also for sending goods as well as money. Such concern
for families back home is even more vividly seen under conditions of
economic crisis, as discussed below.
Remittance behaviour during crisis
Even during the difficult time of economic crisis, many migrants, espe-
cially women, sought to maintain their remittances. As can be seen in
Figure 3.3, men remitted more during 2000–2007, when the economic
16,000
14,000
12,000
10,000
Thai baht
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
Women Men Women Men Women Men Women Men
1995 and before 1996–1999 2000– 2007 2008– 2009
Year
Figure 3.3 Annual average remittances per remitting respondents by period and
gender
Notes: “1995 and before” is the period before the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
“1996–1999” is the period during the crisis.
“2000–2007” is the post-crisis recovery period when economic growth had recovered.
“2008–2009” is the period during the global economic crisis in 2008.
situation in Thailand was relatively better. The periods 1996–199913 and

2008–2009 were two times of economic crisis. In both, the garment sec-
tor, which employs the majority of the respondents in our study, was
affected heavily (Pollock and Aung, 2010). During these crisis periods it
would appear that men respondents decreased their remittances, while
women maintained theirs in spite of the fact that they faced increasing
periods without work. Some 53 per cent of the respondents replied that
the period of unemployment increased after 200814 and women tended
to experience significantly longer periods of unemployment once they
lost their job.15 Among the women respondents, 54.5 per cent were
made redundant at least once after 2008, compared with 61.7 per cent
of the men. These women were out of work for 5.74 months on average,
while the corresponding period for men was 4.39 months. Even though
the net earnings of those women and men respondents who continued
to be employed did not decrease during the economic crisis, women
consistently earned less than men (see Figure 3.2). So although the
economic crises had harsher effects on women workers, these women
maintained their remittances even then. Thus, despite their decreased
income and longer unemployment, the women were still more reliable
remitters than the men.
So what shapes such gender differences in remittances and whether
there are differences among women to remit? We will follow Portes
and Sensenbrenner’s four-point concept of social capital to analyse how
different women’s remittance behaviours are shaped.
Remittances as obligation
The first concept of social capital of Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993)

is value introjections. Typically, Burmese migrant workers conceptualise
their obligations in terms of their duty as daughters and sons:
I could not save money for myself, the money I earn is for my father.
He has been taking care of us without a mother since we were young.
Now it is time for us to take care of him. He is old now, in his late
sixties.
(Ms Hnin Wai Lwin16 in Samut Prakan)
I want my parents to spend money on what they want to buy or
eat and live a happy life while they are alive. I want to be a dutiful
daughter.
(Ms Nyein Nyein Lwin in Mae Sot)
Most of the remittances from single women and men to their parents
reflect this sense of obligation. Although they formulate their duty to
their parents as reciprocity, in terms of the effort and sacrifices made in
bringing them up, in our view it is important to note that this notion
has been internalised through socialisation as a duty of children –
especially daughters – rather than calculated reciprocity. So although
both unmarried sons and daughters feel their obligation to remit, the
expectation is greater for daughters:
I remit more to my parents because I am female and female is

nit nar (literally meaning lose chance – here she means that female
lose chance in life compared to men because they have to remit
money more to the parents after marriage). My husband and I remit
money to my husband’s parents just for their food . . . The money
we send to my parents is for my parents and so that they can buy
land, farms, and jewelry and build a house for us to stay when we
go back.
(Ms Thuzar Khin in Samut Prakan)
A number of older people openly commented that sons are less reliable
and controllable than daughters, a perception which tends to liberate
the young men from feeling a responsibility to remit to their parents
(see also Kusakabe and Oo, 2007; Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in this vol-
ume). At the same time, parents were more protective of their daughters,
even refusing to allow them to go to work in Thailand. But once daugh-
ters were in Thailand, even against the expressed wish of their parents,
they generally sent money to their families from their wages, and their
parents then tended to accept the situation. The daughter had fulfilled
her role as a dutiful daughter even though she transgressed by being
disobedient.
The case of Ms May Sabe Swe, who went to Mae Sot to work, against
her father’s wishes, illustrates this point:
I started to work and I would send about Ks. 50,000–Ks. 100,000 every
two or three months to my home to help support my parents and
my brothers’ education. Seeing I was able to send money home, my
father started to understand about me (working in Mae Sot) and he
was not angry with me anymore.
Married siblings are considered to be outside the boundaries of this fam-

ily obligation and do not generally receive support from other siblings.
There is much less pressure for married children to remit to their parents,
with a general recognition that they will incur more expenses as they
establish new households. But this also reflects the fact that the status as
well as the circumstances of women change when they become wives,
and particularly mothers, and that they should be allowed to use more
of their earnings to meet their own needs:
When I was single, I remitted to my mother regularly. I only kept

enough for my food and accommodation from my wages. Now I have
my family and have to cover the expenses for my child [so I do not
remit regularly like before].
(Ms Mi Saw Thein in Samut Prakan)
Our questionnaire survey shows that of those who had been remitting
before they got married and had children (213 respondents), 55 per
cent (117 respondents) stopped remitting after they had their first
child. Among the 96 respondents who continued to remit after they
had their first child, 62 (65 per cent) of them had their preschool or
school-going children living with their families in Myanmar, hence
they needed to remit for their childcare expenses (see Kusakabe and
Pearson, 2013, for details on childcare arrangements). Such changes in
behaviour shows that the expectation of remittance changes with the
marital status and childbirth of migrants, but it is also linked to the
next concept on social capital of Portes and Sensenbrenner on the issue
of reciprocity.
According to Portes and Sensenbrenner’s framework (1993), the sec-
ond element that shapes remittances behaviour is reciprocity transac-
tion. The most evident reciprocity practices in this study were seen in
childcare. Migrant workers whose children were being taken care of by
their parents/parents-in-laws/sisters had a strong sense of obligation to
send remittances, and they suffered high levels of pressure when they
were unable to send sufficient money. This is illustrated by the case of
Yee Nwe Hlaing, who left her children with her sister in Myanmar, thus
depriving her sister of the opportunity to migrate herself to earn money.
Yee Nwe Hlaing felt great pressure to remit to her sister to reciprocate for
the care and sacrifice that she was making by caring for her children, but
she was struggling to send remittances:
I feel sorry for my sister – her kids are big already – she can leave them
alone. Now she has to sacrifice for me. If she comes and works here,
she could earn money for her family but my children are young – so
they cannot be left alone without any guardian. She lives with my
mother taking care of her as well as my children. Her [the sister’s]
children are taken care of by her in-laws. Her in-laws said, “Nin thwar
loke” (you go and work) “Nin a ma ka lay dway kyi yin nin a twet ma
kyan boo” (if you take care of your sister’s children nothing is left for
you). So she is just sacrificing for my children.
(Ms Yee Nwe Hlaing in Samut Prakan)
The arrangement of reciprocity for childcare is so strong that it is almost

like a binding contract, so, even if migrant workers lost their jobs, they
continued to remit by borrowing money from others:
When my mother needs money she calls me to send money and

I have to do so . . . If I don’t have money, I borrow money from my
friends to send.
(Ms Mi Saw Thein in Samut Prakan)
As I got less income for about one year, I borrowed money from my
friend when I needed to send money to my mother-in-law who is car-
ing for my children. I borrowed money from Burmese friends because
they charge less interest (only 7 or 8% which is much lower than the
20% interest rate asked for by Thai people).
(Ms Lynn Myat Aung in Samut Prakan)
Such reciprocity can be two-way – not only do migrants send money

back home, but in times of difficulty, family back home will support the
migrants, a practice which Vanwey (2004) calls “co-insurance”. By main-
taining two income sources – from migration and from income in the
place of origin – they will be able to complement each other and work as
insurance for each other. During a crisis when a migrant was out of work
or sick, parents back home would send them money and rice, and would
support them by taking on the burden of childcare, as Pwing Phyu Maw
explained:
At the moment, I ask money from my mother. My mother came to

see me last week to give us money. She also brought some rice for our
two sisters. She will send more rice with my youngest sister who will
come to Mae Sot next week. Now our situation is to ask back money
from the parents instead of remitting.
The third aspect of Portes and Sensenbrenner’s conceptualisation of

social capital is bounded solidarity, which they illustrate with reference
to a Columbian-born American policeman who was accused of shooting

a black cyclist. The policeman received substantial sympathy and sup-
port from the Latin community in the USA even though he was not
able to verify his innocence. However, such strong feelings of solidarity
based on a common country of origin are not found among the Burmese
migrant workers. They demonstrated considerable antagonism towards
their own government, and those from minority ethnic groups did not
feel solidarity with Burmans, the ethnic group in the central area and
those who dominate the current regime. However, this does not mean
that the concept is not relevant to our study. Bounded solidarity can
be seen more as their need to show solidarity to people back home in
order to maintain a sense of security deriving from having the option
to return home. Because of their temporary status in Thailand, migrant
workers needed to maintain links with their place of origin in order to
maintain their identity. Most of the migrants would say that they were
in Thailand only to earn money, and that their home was in Myanmar.
As can be seen in the testimony below, because of alienating experiences
in Thailand, they felt strongly about going back home in the future, and
repeatedly said that their sojourn in Thailand was temporary:
Some Thai people don’t have a good impression of Burmese. One

day when I went to do some construction work in a Thai house,
the owner would not allow any other Burmese workers to enter his
house . . . He thinks all Burmese are thieves because their house was
burgled a few weeks ago . . . Indeed some Thai people hate us . . . One
day when we were in our room, a Thai guy passed by [in front of the
house]. One of Burmese guys was talking to his friend and laughed.
But the Thai man thought that the Burmese were talking and laugh-
ing at him so he kicked the Burmese man and the other Burmese
workers did not dare to do anything to him and the owner of the
house had to resolve the situation. Because this is not our coun-
try and we don’t have ID cards [registration cards], we cannot do
anything to them. If we do, we will be sent back to our country.
(Mr Aung Naung of Samut Prakan)
It is always good to stay in your own land. This place [Mae Sot] is
just a foreign land . . . I miss some of the religious and social activities
celebrated when we were in the village like – Thadingyut,17 and other
full moon day activities . . . Here is very different, although we and the
local people believe in same religion, we don’t celebrate such activi-
ties together and we celebrate [only] among our Burmese groups. This
is not my country and I don’t feel the freedom here like in my own
homeland with relatives and friends around. My country, my home
village is a nice place to stay. If I can [save enough money to] set up
my own business and have enough money to spend [I will go back].
(Ms May Sabe Swe of Mae Sot)
Bounded solidarity against harsh experiences in the place of work was

demonstrated among Burmese migrant workers who were striving to
maintain good relations with their family back home, and thus they
needed to keep on remitting when requested. Although some migrants
were keen to settle in Thailand or said that they did not have any place
to go back to in Myanmar (because there was no family in Myanmar
anymore, or because they had already sold their house and belongings
in Myanmar), many female and male migrants who were interviewed
expressed a sense of temporariness, and this had motivated their will-
ingness to remit back home. Such feelings of wanting to keep links with
people back home is closely related to the fourth concept of social cap-
ital discussed by Portes and Sensenbrenner. Even though the feeling of
temporariness is felt both by women and men, the enforceable trust
discussed below is more gendered, resulting in women migrants being
more willing to foster their bounded solidarity with people back home.
The fourth part of Portes and Sensenbrenner’s conceptualisation of
social capital is enforceable trust. Family members back home tend to
police their migrant children, especially their daughters (Kusakabe and
Oo, 2007). Many parents are willing for their daughters to go to Mae
Sot only because there are relatives and neighbours there, so they will
be able to receive news about their daughters. Migrants themselves are
keen not to ruin their reputation back home, and since many people
from the same or nearby villages work in Thailand, news travels fast,
especially in places such as Mae Sot, where family members come to
visit them often. Young women migrants are constantly monitored for
their behaviour, not only with regard to sending remittances but also
with respect to their relationships with men. Although it is true that
young women migrants have more freedom in Thailand, at the same
time, gender norms expecting women to be virgins until they are mar-
ried are reinforced by gendered community pressure (IRIN News, 2007),
which tends to penalise girls more than boys for illicit sexual conduct.
Such values make girls more vulnerable to obtaining a “bad” reputa-
tion.18 What makes girls’ situation worse is that if they become pregnant
as a result of a casual sexual relationship, they generally have to take sole
responsibility for the child. Because of their responsibility for childcare,
and their lower income, as well as their vulnerability to acquiring a

bad reputation, women are more sensitive to pressures to enforce their
responsibility for their family back home. Women migrants’ vulnera-
bility also makes them more dependent on support from their natal
families, sometimes requiring “reverse remittances”, as discussed above.
Even if reverse remittances do not occur, many families will invite their
offspring to return home if they are facing difficulties in Thailand, but
only if the worker continues to be viewed as an acceptable daughter or
son in the eyes of their parents.
Our study demonstrates that the concept of value introjections is
different for women and men because of the different gendered expec-
tations of the role of daughters and sons in terms of ongoing family
support. While boys are frequently seen to be uncontrollable, girls are
expected to give their earnings to their parents. Mr Kyaw Lin in Mae Sot
explained how he has been strict with his daughters:
When we were in Myanmar, I had strict discipline for my daughters. I

let them watch movies only once in a week, and get up early to cook
in turn . . . At that time, I asked them to give me all their earnings.
Reciprocity transactions were also stronger for women because of

women’s dependence on their families for childcare, whereas there
was general acceptance that men would remit less and for a shorter
time, especially after marriage. But the ongoing precarious situation of
migrant workers in Thailand and the ever present possibility that they
will have to abandon their lives there makes it important for many work-
ers to maintain their bond with families back home, which is a form of
bounded solidarity. Women are more susceptible to this pressure because
they are the ones who may be left with the responsibility for their chil-
dren in the case of relationship breakdown, so there is a greater need
for women to keep these bonds in order to tap their family networks for
help when needed.
As for enforceable trust, since policing women’s behaviour is stronger,
women migrants feel more pressure to remit and conform to the
expected role of daughters and mothers. As can be seen, value introjec-
tions were strongest for women as daughters, reciprocity transaction for
women as mothers, bounded solidarity for women as workers/mothers
and enforceable trust for women as daughters and mothers. This shows
how forces that shape a woman’s remittances change over her life
course, but even when the form changes, there is still stronger pres-
sure for her to remit. It should also be noted that since remitting in
this situation basically reflects an obligation, there is little evidence that

it leads to substantial changes in women’s decision-making power at
home.19 Many migrant workers said that they do not specify how their
families use their remittances. As the following informants indicate,
many migrant women have little control over their remittances:
I don’t save money with me. I give all my money to my father . . . He

sometimes needs to give money to other daughters. As a father, when
the daughters are in need, he cannot help but support them. In addi-
tion, he needs to use my money for the house renovation. He also
likes to give donations and offerings to renovate the pagoda and to
construct schools [so, he cannot save for me] . . .
(Ms Lwin Lwin Aung of Mae Sot)
I realized that the money I sent does not last long. I do not know
how they use the money. I was able to send some gold rings but
when I went back home, I could not find them, and I learnt that they
had been sold to meet household expenses.
(Ms Nilar Win of Mae Sot)
These examples illustrate how women’s economic contribution to their

natal household is not necessarily accompanied by an increase in their
power to decide how those resources are spent. This is in line with
Harriden’s study (2012: 38), which found that a woman’s economic
role was highly valued since it contributed to family wellbeing with-
out threatening the man’s position as head of household. Women in
extended families are expected to help to care for other members of
their families, “sacrificing their own needs and desires” (p. 39). Such
attitudes reinforce the tendency for women to continue remitting in
spite of knowing that they will not necessarily have a say in how this
money is utilised by their families.
Managing networks of obligations
Although women migrant workers live in circumstances where the

forces constructing their network of obligation is strong, they assess
their situation and the resources available to them, and adjust their
reciprocity transactions in order to manage their meagre resources. The
following case shows how the respondent managed remittances to both
her own mother and her mother-in-law. She had left her children with
her mother-in-law, but her mother-in-law had economic difficulties
and her children were not being fed properly because she was not able to
send back enough money to compensate her mother-in-law sufficiently
for childcare. So she decided to send her children to her own mother,
who would have more resources to support her children and diminish
her own obligation to remit:
I am also worried that my children will starve. My mother-in-law

works as a daily wage labor in her village. But her income is not
enough for the children. I told my mother-in-law to borrow some
money in the village . . . In the last few days I sent 200,000 kyat for
my mother-in-law in order to repay her debt and 250,000 kyat for
my parents and my children. This is my first time to remit in five or
six months. At present, my children are with my parents . . . and my
sisters who are working in Thailand also remit to them. So I do not
need to worry too much for my children if I cannot remit anything
to my children.
(Ms Lynn Myat Aung in Samut Prakan)
Another way in which women manage their network of obligation is by

declaring a change in priorities. By announcing that she is going back to
Myanmar, a migrant is able to release herself from the pressure to remit –
that is, her priority changes from maintaining a network of obligation
to preparing for living in Myanmar. The type and importance of social
capital required changes with the situation, since women’s ability to
construct social capital in the future depends on their having enough
resources to impress people back home as well as to bring back gifts for
them. They need to save a substantial sum of money to bring back home
since their identity there demands that they keep face and demonstrate
that they have succeeded in the primary purpose of the migration – that
is, to earn and save money to bring back home. They have most control
over the money that they carry home with them, and they can use it to
start up their own business and lead a “decent” life back home. Many
migrants say that they are not able to go back unless they have a lump
sum to take with them, even if they have been remitting for a long time.
Given that they have little control over the money that they remit, this
lump sum is the only guarantee that they have to secure their standing
in the community and to start up a new means of livelihood in their
place of origin.
The third in which women migrant workers manage to challenge their
network of obligation is by bringing their children to live with them
in the place of destination. When they are not able to remit anymore
to their children back home, they call their children to Thailand, thus
reducing their reciprocity pressure to remit. The following conversation
with Ms Leh Leh Khaing in Mae Sot and her daughter, who was in Mae
Sot before her mother, shows the difficulty of managing obligations in
two places:
Interviewer: I am wondering about those who cannot manage to send

money to their family in Myanmar. How are they managing?
Daughter: Maybe they disconnect with their family back home . . .
Maybe they borrow money to send home. But as interest rates
increased . . . there were times I could not send money to my parents.
Interviewer: So how were they surviving?
Leh Leh Khaing: We have some trees, vegetable garden, so we had to
sell the products to eat.
At first, I borrowed money from neighbours. When my daughter
sends money I return the money. The most I borrowed is about Ks.
10,000. When my daughter sends money, I first buy rice and oil for
the children. We reduce our food intake, eat more vegetables [and
no meat]. Then I rent part of my house and I got Ks. 15,000–20,000
per month. So even if my daughter cannot send money, I try to
manage to feed the kids like that.
Daughter: I think it is better to stay together, to reduce the expenses.
Before, we had to eat morning glory and rice in order to save money
to send home. So I thought it would be better if we stayed together.
Changing the place where she is bound by relations of reciprocity,

or cutting off such relations totally, or changing the expected role by
declaring that she is planning to return to Myanmar, are different ways
in which a woman migrant worker is able to modify her network of
obligation and so relieve herself of the pressure to remit.
Conclusion
In line with various previous studies on remittances, ours also found

that women are more reliable remitters even in times of economic cri-
sis. Our analysis of the factors that shape remittance behaviour among
Burmese migrant workers, using Portes and Sensenbrenner’s (1993)
concept of social capital, reinforces the findings in earlier literature
that women experience heavier obligations to remit. However, unlike
Portes and Sensenbrenner (1993), who focused on social capital among
immigrants, we used the concept to analyse the relationship between
migrants and their families back home. Women migrant workers are
pressured by their socialisation of filial piety, as well as reciprocal rela-
tions with family back home, especially regarding childcare. The harsh
environment in Thailand forces migrants to convince themselves that
their lives there are temporary, and so they need to remit in order to keep
their links with family back home alive. The dense network of Burmese
migrants in Thailand works to enforce remittances. As Curran and Saguy
(2001) note, women are more affected by the network of obligation.
Remittance behaviour is guided by trust relationships between migrant
workers and their family back home. Through the network of obli-
gation, gender norms and existing gender relations are strengthened.
Our contribution to the body of literature on gender and remittances
is to demonstrate the importance of accommodating in the analy-
sis the different roles and positions that women hold over their life
courses. Women as mothers, women as workers, women as daughters
and women as wives all experience the network of obligation differently
and negotiate with various factors that shape social capital in differ-
ent ways. As Wong (2006) says, the social locations of women migrant
workers are intertwined with their gendered roles. Women migrants’
remittance behaviour is shaped by their obligation and reciprocal rela-
tions with family back home. But, as this is an obligation, we did not
find much evidence that showed that remittances strengthened women
migrant workers’ decision-making power within their natal households.
At the same time, women are required to manage such obligation net-
works to maximise their benefits in the context of limited resources and
increasing precariousness. Our research indicates that women migrant
workers in Thailand constantly need to balance their obligations to
their families back home with the priorities of their lives as workers and
as mothers. It is a reflection of their creative agency that so many of
them manage to meet both of these imperatives in a context where their
productive as well as their reproductive lives are precarious and insecure.
Notes
1. Since 1989 the official name of the country has been the Union of Myanmar.
NGOs and political activists associate the name change with the repressive
military government that has ruled the country since that time and so prefer
to use the old (colonial) name, Burma. In the Burmese language, the country
is called Bama. Here we use Myanmar for country and Burmese for people.
2. In this chapter we focus on monetary remittances. We recognise the exis-
tence of social remittances, but in our analysis we consider these to be a
factor that contributes to the construction of relations between migrants

and family back home and so do not discuss them separately.
3. In this chapter we focus on monetary remittances. We recognise the exis-
tence of social remittances, but in our analysis we consider these to be a
factor that contributes to the construction of relations between migrants
and family back home and so do not discuss them separately.
4. See Pearson and Kusakabe (2012a, 2012b) for details.
5. The research was supported by the International Development Research
Centre, Canada.
6. Unlike our study, which looked at only garment/footwear industry workers,
Turnell et al.’s study included other sectors, such as fishing, construction,
hotels and restaurants, household services, retail trade, food processing, agri-
culture, forestry and quarrying. It was reported that quarrying workers had
the highest income. The same goes for Deelan and Vasuprasart’s (2010) study.
This covered domestic work, fishing, construction and factory work. The
average income of migrant workers was higher in Deelan and Vasuparsart’s
study. They earned THB 6,650 per month, while the respondents of this
study earned on average less than THB 4,000 for women and THB 4,500
for men (see Figure 3.2).
7. The study covered Burmese, Cambodian and Lao workers in Thailand. With
all three countries combined, the mean remittance for women was around
THB 17,000 and for men was THB 15,000.
8. We did not come across any man who gathered income from his sisters and
managed their remittances.
9. We did not meet any couple who had the opposite arrangement.
10. Normally, migrant workers are not able to obtain a bank account so they are
unable to apply for an automatic teller machine card. They need help from
their employers to do so.
11. The modes of remittance transfers from Thailand to Myanmar do not seem
to change much in subsequent remittances.
12. Although the study did not differentiate, it seems that informal agents
include both agents and carriers in our study.
13. We included 1996 in the crisis period, since for the garment industry the
decline had already started before the actual crash in 1997.
14. No significant gender difference in their period of unemployment was seen
when disaggregated by location. There was higher unemployment seen
among men in Bangkok, while higher unemployment was seen among
women in Three Pagoda Pass. However, the difference is not statistically
significant.
15. Chi square test, 5 per cent significance level.
16. All of the names are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of the respon-
dents.
17. Full-moon day in October, when young Burmese pay their respects to elders
with gifts.
18. Social Watch website (accessed 2 January 2012) pointed out that the cur-
rent militarisation and the state’s official communications reinforces harmful
gender stereotypes by highlighting the notion of obedience and modesty for
women, and by portraying Burmese women as passive social actors.
19. Burmese women enjoy a considerable amount of decision-making in the

household, although their behaviour is quite restricted under gender roles
and norms (see Khaing, 1984; Ikeya, 2006).
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Dansk Institut for Internationale Studier Brief: København K.
Thwin, Aye (2001) “Promoting Household Food and Nutrition Security in
Myanmar”, Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition 10 (Suppl): S34–S39.
Turnell, S., A. Vicary and W. Bradford (2010) “Migrant Worker Remittances and
Burma: An Economic Analysis of Survey Results”, Burma Monitor 10 December
2010, http://burmamonitor.blogspot.com/2010/12/turnellvicaryand-bradford
-migrant.html, accessed on 30 January 2011.
Vanwey, Leah (2004) “Altruistic and Contractual Remittances between Male
and Female Migrants and Households in Rural Thailand”, Demography, 41:4,
739–756.
Wolf, Diane Lauren (1994) Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and
Rural Industrialization in Java. Berkeley: University of California Press.
World Bank (2008) Migration and Remittances Factbook 2008, Washington DC:
World Bank.
4
“Good” Sons and “Dutiful”
Daughters: A Structural Symbolic
Interactionist Analysis of the
Migration and Remittance
Behaviour of Northern Thai
International Migrants
Teresa Sobieszczyk
Introduction
International labour migration from Thailand may be understood as

part of a generalised process of global capitalist expansion and the
increasing mobility of labour both within and across national borders.
Yet the diverse experiences of international labour migration become
meaningful only from the vantage points of migrants’ own experiences
and beliefs, as shaped by the particular sociocultural context in which
they live. International labour migrants may be understood as social
actors, negotiating moral positions in different social fields as they try
to accumulate respect and status, and construct personhood (Malkin,
2004). This chapter uses a structural symbolic interactionist approach
to explore the labour migration and remittance behaviours of North-
ern Thai men and women who went abroad for employment in another
East or Southeast Asian country. It focuses on the sociocultural norms
that contextualise and shape migrant men and women’s remittance
behaviour, the purpose of those remittances and their symbolic mean-
ings, and the ways in which migrants and their families deploy actual
and symbolic remittances to reconstruct their identities, reduce stigma
and improve individual and familial status.
82
Teresa Sobieszczyk 83
Literature review
While economic approaches have dominated the literature on migrant

remittances to date, remittances may also be examined using a soci-
ological perspective, such as symbolic interactionism. This approach
builds on social exchange theory, suggesting that actions are socially
constructed and therefore can take on multiple meanings and that
those meanings develop through interaction. Subjective interpreta-
tions of meaning guide behaviour (Howard and Hollander, 1997: 114).
Like social exchange theory, symbolic interactionism assumes that self-
interest motivates human action and takes the interaction between
humans as the unit of analysis. However, in contrast to social exchange
theory, symbolic interactionism has a richer idea of self, which results
in a much broader conceptualisation of self-interest. Individuals are
believed to be motivated by many desires, including the admiration
and well-being of significant others, the maintenance of valued identi-
ties and the maximisation of their own resources. Thus self-interest may
sometimes involve sacrificing resources to meet other goals (Howard and
Hollander, 1997: 115). And while social exchange theory focuses mainly
on the exchange of resources between actors, symbolic interactionism
emphasises the meaning of these resources and focuses additionally on
the individual self-concept and identities of those giving and receiv-
ing resources. This perspective suggests a need to examine not only
actual remittances but also the various symbolic meanings behind actual
remittances and the ways in which remittances impact the identities of
those who send and receive them.
Like any approach, symbolic interactionism has both strengths and
weaknesses. Its strength is its ability to conceptualise social actors who
can construct their lines of action individually and cooperatively and
who can also alter the social structural conditions within which they
act. Its weaknesses is its inadequate conceptualisation and analysis of
the social structural constraints – ranging from minimal to virtually
total – within which social action is constructed, and its inability to deal
with stability in individual and social behaviour (Stryker and Stratham,
1985: 313).
To begin to address these problems, some researchers have suggested
examining not only identity work, meaning construction and self-
presentation, but also the material resources and structural positions of
those interacting (Stryker, 1980; Howard and Hollander, 1997). In this
sense, a structural symbolic interactionist approach may be employed –
one that considers the ways in which race, gender and class structure or
constrain agency and interactions. Thus the social norms of “appropri-

ate” gendered and racialised behaviour help to guide self-presentation
and impression management (Howard and Hollander, 1997: 131). Gen-
der and the related categories of race and class are central social
categories that organise the identities, social practices and institutions
that influence migration (Donato et al., 2006: 17).
The application of structural symbolic interactionism to understand-
ing migrant remittances suggests a need to examine the following issues:
(a) the resources exchanged or remitted and the meaning(s) of those
resources; (b) how race, gender, and/or class structure or constrain
agency and interactions related to remittances; and (c) the social norms
of appropriate gendered behaviour that help to guide self-presentation
and identity management in daily life, and how they may impact
remittance behaviour.
Data and research approach
The research is drawn from data that were collected as a part of a

larger project that compared the recruitment and migration experi-
ences of authorised and unauthorised Thai labour migrants, both male
and female, who worked in another East or Southeast Asian country.
I conducted ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with 106
returned migrants1 over a total of 17 months between 1995 and 2000,
primarily in three subdistricts in Phayao and Lamphun provinces in
Northern Thailand.2 The research also included informal interviews
with other villagers and some family members of returned and cur-
rent international migrants. The names of the interview participants are
disguised below.
I identified returned migrants through a combination of informal
village censuses and with the assistance of local experts and other con-
tacts in Thailand.3 I conducted the interviews in Thai or Northern
Thai dialect and rechecked any confusing or contradictory information
during follow-up interviews. Migrant interviews included a structured
component that addressed the basic socioeconomic and demographic
background, as well as the recruitment process, the migration expe-
rience, remittances, and the respondent’s current demographic and
socioeconomic status, and a semistructured component that addressed
various issues, including the respondent’s perspective on gender issues
related to their recruitment and migration experiences and the motiva-
tions behind their migration.
In the following analysis I distinguish between three types of migrant:

authorised, unauthorised4 direct-pay migrants, and unauthorised debt-
bondage migrants. Authorised migrants are those who went abroad
using government-authorised recruitment agencies. They paid their
recruitment fees and travel expenses upfront, typically borrowing
money from family members or using their family’s house and/or
land as collateral to borrow from a local money lender. Male autho-
rised migrants paid, on average, USD 2,334 in recruitment fees and
travel expenses, while female authorised migrants paid, on average, USD
2,290, and on average they took 10.8 and 8.9 months to repay their debt,
respectively (see Table 4.1).
Some interviewees chose to go through unauthorised channels.5
Unauthorised direct-pay migrants went abroad illegally but, like their
authorised counterparts, had or could borrow sufficient resources to pay
their recruitment fee at the time of migration. Male unauthorised direct-
pay migrants paid an average of USD 3,591 for their recruitment fees and
travel expenses, and took an average of eight months to repay their debt,
while their female counterparts paid an average of USD 4,173 and took
an average of 4.9 months to repay their debt.
The final group, debt-bondage unauthorised migrants,6 includes those
who wanted to migrate abroad but could not raise enough money to
pay for the travel expenses and recruiter’s commission (fees which often
amount to the equivalent of several years’ salary for unskilled workers
in Thailand) at the time of their migration, and whose families lacked
land or housing of sufficient value to serve as collateral for a loan from
a local money lender. Debt-bondage unauthorised migrants relied on a
recruiter to pay their recruitment fees and travel expenses at the time of
migration. Once abroad, the recruiter turned them over to an employer,
who reimbursed the recruiter; then the debt-bondage migrants worked
off their debt to the employer for an agreed period of months or until
they had repaid their debt plus interest. Debt-bondage migrants owed
an average of USD 11,691 for recruitment and travel expenses, and
they repaid it quicker than other types of migrant, taking, on average,
3.7 months. During this period of “debt bondage” the employer gave
them room and board but kept all of their earnings. As Hong and Yeoh
(Chapter 11, in this volume) suggest, international labour migration
typically leads to at least some degree of debt for migrants and their fam-
ilies, which was the case for all three types of recruitment in my study.
However, three key differences should be highlighted. While authorised
and direct-pay unauthorised migrants obtained recruitment fees and
Table 4.1 Migrants’ most recent migration trip to another East or Southeast Asian country: selected demographic and
86
socioeconomic characteristics and descriptive information by gender and type of migration
Characteristic Type of migrant
Legal male Legal female Regular illegal Regular illegal Debt bondage
male female illegal female
Gender 51% 49% 68.3% 31.7% 100%

Overseas destination
Brunei 3.8% 12.0% – – –
Hong Kong2 – 12.0% 3.6% 15.4% –
Japan 7.7% 4.0% 75.0% 38.5% 50.0%
Macao1 – – – – 8.3%
Malaysia – – – 15.4% –
Singapore – – 3.6% 15.4% 33.3%
South Korea – – 7.1% 15.4% –
Taiwan 88.5% 72.0% 10.7% – 8.3%
Cost of recruitment fee and travel 2,334 2,290 3,591 4,173 11,691
expenses (USD)2
Mean 2,932 2,680 2,390 3,957 8,048
Median 0–3,984 0–3,323 0–9,960 0–9,960 398–31,759
Range
Time spent abroad (months)
Mean 24.0 24.8 63.5 42.1 23.0
Median 24.0 24.0 66.0 42.0 18.5
Range 2–47 8–66 24–111 12–72 0.3–64
First primary occupation overseas
Construction worker 11.5% 4.0% – – –
Wage labourer – industrial 73.1% 72.0% 25.0% 7.7% –
Skilled labourer 11.5% – 14.3% – –
Servant – 16.0% – 7.7% –
Professional cleaner – 4.0% – 7.7% –
Restaurant worker 3.8% 4.0% 57.1% 30.8% –
Bar hostess/sex worker – – – 38.5% 100%
Market seller – – 3.6% 7.7% –
Approximate amount of money remitted per month (USD)2
Mean 502 544 1,120 895 1,073
Median 478 503 1,188 391 400
Range 238–783 79–1,188 336–1,985 0–4,752 0–3,984
Length of time in debt to pay for recruitment fee and travel expenses (months)
Mean 10.8 8.9 8.0 4.9 3.7
Median 6.0 6.0 6.5 0.0 3.0
Range 0–36 0–43 0–25 0–33 0.3–7.0
Estimated total value of monthly 12,557 14,245 74,932 38,096 32,509
remittances, gifts and money
brought home in person (USD)3
Number of persons interviewed 26 25 28 13 12
Notes: 1 At the time of my initial interviews, Hong Kong and Macao had not been reincorporated into the People’s Republic of China.
2 Calculated using exchange rate for year of departure. Remittances for debt-bondage labour migrants calculated beginning with the month when their
debt was repaid.

3 Calculated by multiplying the mean monthly remittances by the total number of months abroad, plus the total estimated value of gifts and money
brought home by the migrant in person. Because migrants may have had trouble estimating or recalling the amount of remittances or the total value
of gifts and money brought home in person, or may have sent remittances irregularly, these should be treated as very rough estimates.
87
travel expenses from their own or their family’s savings and/or local
money lenders, debt-bondage unauthorised migrants obtained these
resources from the recruiter, with the debt subsequently being held by
the overseas employer. A second key difference is in the average amount
paid for recruitment fees and travel expenses, which was greater for
both male and female direct-pay unauthorised migrants, and dramat-
ically larger still for the debt-bondage unauthorised migrants. Notably,
while authorised and direct-pay unauthorised migrants had to use their
initial remittances to repay their families and/or local money lenders
for their recruitment fees, debt-bondage migrants had to work with-
out pay for a period of months to repay their debt, but any money
that they remitted after the period of debt bondage could immedi-
ately be devoted to living expenses, new appliances or even building a
new house (for further details on debt bondage, see Sobieszczyk 2000a,
2000b).
Background on Thailand’s economy and international

labour migration
The economic realities of underdevelopment in rural Thailand mean a

dearth of well-paid earning opportunities, even for those with fairly high
educational attainment (Bello, 1998). To achieve the desired standard of
living, many rural families, particularly in Northern and North-eastern
Thailand, the poorest regions, rely at least in part on remittances from
household members who work in urban Thailand or overseas.
The trickle of Thai workers initially recruited for short-term contracts
in the Middle East beginning in the mid-1970s expanded to a torrent
that peaked in the mid-1990s. In 2004, nearly 149,000 Thai migrants
went abroad for temporary employment through authorised channels,
mainly to other East and Southeast Asian countries, but also to vari-
ous destinations in the Middle East, Europe, North America, Oceania
and Africa (Huguet and Punpuing, 2005). While the authorised interna-
tional labour migration of Thai women has increased significantly, men
continue to vastly outnumber women in authorised migration flows to
all Asian destinations except for Hong Kong, Japan and Saipan Island
(Hugo, 2008).
Unauthorised overseas labour migration has become an increasingly
popular economic option for men and women in Northern Thailand
(Punpuing and Archavanitkul, 1996). Estimates of unauthorised labour
migration flows vary, but in the mid-1990s, when these data were col-
lected, unauthorised labour migration comprised about 40–60 per cent
of the overall migration streams from Thailand (Martin, 1996: 4) and

vastly outnumbered authorised labour migrants in some receiving coun-
tries, such as Japan (Lim and Abella, 1994: 225). In part because there
are fewer authorised overseas opportunities for women (Sobieszczyk,
2000a) and also because of the demand for Thai women in the sex
industry, they are particularly likely to be involved in unauthorised
migration to countries such as Japan (Punpuing and Archavanitkul,
1996: 8).
The social and cultural context of international migration

from rural Thailand
In his description of family remittances, Goldring (2004: 818–819)

notes that
a key characteristic of these remittances is that the practices asso-

ciated with sending money “back home” are steeped in norms,
obligations and/or affective ties that are bound up in processes
of identity formation, gender and socialization, which are in turn
rooted in social networks.
The migration and remittances of Thai workers are framed by the tra-
ditional Thai ideology of bun khun obligations, which mean that all
children owe a moral debt of gratitude to their parents for raising them,
which they are expected to repay over their lifetime (Mills, 1997, 1999).
While rural–urban migration, shrinking family size and a trend towards
nuclear families, particularly in urban areas, appear to be slowly break-
ing down the filial debt of gratitude, this ideology remained fairly strong
in my research villages. In Thai society, individuals’ gender influences
the way in which they may fulfil filial obligations. While sons may repay
their filial debt by being ordained as monks, creating and ritually trans-
ferring to their parents a store of karmic merit, daughters are unable to
be ordained as monks in Theravada Buddhism (Muecke, 1992). Instead,
“good daughters” are expected to repay their parents by working to
help to support them, economically and instrumentally (Curran, 1995).
Because of these norms, villagers in Northern Thailand tend to rely more
on unmarried daughters for remittances (Osaki, 2003), while sons who
migrate are expected to spend more of their money on kin len (eat-
ing and playing) in the form of alcohol, prostitutes, travel and other
entertainment, or towards saving for a bride price for when they marry
(Whittaker, 1999: 52).
While the norm of filial obligation remains fairly widespread in rural

Thailand, other norms that frame international migration, particularly
for young Thai women, are being contested. Traditionally, meanings
that are manifested in behavioural norms limit direct physical contact
between men and women and emphasise the need to control the move-
ment of young female bodies (Mills, 1999: 19). These ideologies make
clear associations between spatial movement and sexual activity, and
they stress the importance of female modesty and sexual purity, and
the need to protect women from the possible dangers, sexual and other-
wise, in the world beyond their families and rural communities (Mills,
1997: 154).7 In Thailand, parents traditionally supervise their daughters’
contact with young men in order to maintain their purity and hence
their marriageability and social status (Mills, 1997; Bandhumedha, 1998:
113–114). When children leave the village, whether to migrate within
the country or abroad, they have an opportunity to engage in premar-
ital sexual relations. In some villages, the parents of migrant daughters
(and sometimes even the migrant daughters themselves, as discussed
below) may fear for young women’s physical safety as well as their sexual
purity because if the young women are known or suspected to be sexu-
ally experienced, members of the older generation worry that they may
be unable to make suitable matches when it comes time to marry (Mills,
1997; Michinobu, 1999: 7). While the ideal of limiting female mobility
to protect feminine sexual purity remains prevalent in most rural areas
of Thailand,8 this ideology, like other gender ideologies, is being con-
tested, in part because of the continued spread of television and video
players that project images of mobile, beautiful and more promiscuous
“modern” women, and “up-to-date” attitudes about female sexuality,
into the homes of even the most remote villages.
Alongside the norm of filial obligation and the varied ideologies about
female mobility and sexuality, young migrants also confront emerging
(and possibly conflicting) desires to be “modern” or “up to date”, which
were increasingly associated with consumerism and a freer, more highly
sexualised lifestyle for women than was typical in most northern vil-
lages. Thailand’s economic boom of the 1980s and early to mid-1990s
heightened the awareness of and desires to be “modern” or “up to date”
among people at all levels of Thai society. Thai notions of modernity
encompass a variety of meanings. One of these refers to a prescriptive
ideal “in which the pursuit of modern social forms and institutions
is hailed as movement towards socially valorised goals of ‘progress,’
‘growth,’ and ‘advancement’ and, as such, represents a break between
the problems of past, ‘traditional’ forms of life and the potential of
future ‘modern’ life” (Mills, 1999: 13). There is no clear set of institu-
tions or ideas that clearly define modernity in Thailand. Rather, debates
emphasise images and standards of “newness”, “progress”, “develop-
ment” or “being up to date”. New technologies and consumer com-
modities are increasingly valued as symbols of modern success and
social status throughout Thailand. As the head of a provincial labour
department in a Northern Thai province explained,
Thais are mostly agricultural workers. They are self-sufficient farm-

ers and don’t sell their crops for profit. But socio-economic change
in Thailand has made money more important, and increasing con-
sumerism makes them want higher salaries to buy new homes, TVs,
motorcycles, and refrigerators.
Feminine beauty is also a powerful symbol of Thai progress and

modernity. The mass media associate up-to-date women’s beauty with
their active participation in modern, urban consumer society, and
popular images display women’s heightened sexuality and freer, more
modern lifestyle. According to Mills (1999: 107), “Thansamay [up-to-
date] urban Thai culture links feminine beauty both to modernity and
mobility in ways that also imply active sexuality.” International labour
migration provides both income and a more independent, mobile
lifestyle, enabling young Thai women to begin to engage the influential
meanings and cultural practices that are associated with “development”
and being “up to date” in contemporary Thai culture.
Remittances: Actual and symbolic
Virtually all of the migrants in this study remitted or brought back

money and gifts to their family in their home village. With this data it
is difficult to meaningfully compare the amount remitted by gender or
type of migration because of the non-random sample and the different
years of departure, destination and occupation abroad, which impact
the value of earnings and remittances. Remittances ranged roughly from
an average of USD 5029 per month, sent by authorised male migrants,
to an average of USD 1,120 per month, sent by direct-pay unauthorised
male migrants (see Table 4.1). Remittances were significant in the village
economy because they were much greater than the average family agri-
cultural income in the research villages at the time (about USD 200 per
year plus subsistence food) and the wages at an industrial park near two
of the villages (USD 115–192 per month).
With the exception of debt-bondage migrants, in order to pay their

recruitment fee and travel expenses, most had borrowed money from
local money lenders, using their family’s land or house as collateral for
the loan. Thus the first order of business for legal and direct-pay illegal
migrants, both male and female, was to remit as much money as possible
to their family to repay their loans, plus interest. Brajorn, who went to
Taiwan legally to work in a car-part factory, was able to remit about USD
700 per month to his father. He discussed the typical use of remittances –
first to repay the debt from the recruitment expenses and then to save.
It’s like this. We’re in this country [Thailand], and the expenses are
high. Sometimes we get our monthly salary and then use it all and
have nothing to save. If we go to work overseas, really, when we
first go, the cost of the [recruiter’s] commission is high, right?! But
after six or seven months, the cost of the commission is finished
[repaid], and we can take what we get for that month and send it
all home . . . . We can save it at home because over there [overseas] we
don’t have expenses. But if we are in Thailand and work for wages,
we don’t get hardly any baht for our monthly salary.
Once they had repaid their recruitment fee plus interest, they typically
remitted money to their families to build a new house or improve an
existing house, buy vehicles or new consumer goods – the telephones,
washing machines, karaoke machines, stereos, wooden furniture, elec-
tric water heaters and microwaves that help to make life more enjoyable,
and moreover represent “modernity” and a higher socioeconomic sta-
tus, both in the village and in broader Thai society. Single migrants
usually remitted to their parents, while married migrants remitted to
their spouses or, occasionally, to their parents, having their parents
manage the funds for their spouses. The use of their remittances or sav-
ings varied by class, with poorer migrants (e.g., debt-bondage female
migrants and some poor legal migrants) remitting to improve their fam-
ily’s daily lives and/or living standards. For instance, Noot worked as
a housemaid in Brunei. While she did not send regular remittances
home, she saved money on her own, and on her return to Thailand she
gave about USD 12,000 to her family, part of which was used to send
her younger sister through school, an opportunity that she herself had
lacked. Similarly, at 28, Boom decided to go to Singapore to work as a
brothel-based prostitute. With no land of her own, she was struggling to
support her illegitimate son and elderly mother by working as an agri-
cultural wage labourer. Once she had worked for about two months in
debt bondage, she worked to fill her own pockets, earning about USD
38–192 per day. After another 45 days, she returned to Thailand with
what she considered to be a significant sum of money – USD 3,846 –
which she used to buy a small piece of land, the first that her family had
owned, and build a small wooden house to replace their former flimsy
bamboo one. Though she spoke of the work in Singapore’s brothel-based
sex industry as “torturing women’s bodies and spirits”, she recognised
the economic benefits of such work, which were fairly lucrative for
someone with little education. In 1999 she returned to the sex indus-
try in Singapore in order to earn money to support her elderly mother
and son.
Home building was also a goal of Yehp, who migrated legally to
Taiwan, where she worked producing computer disks. Each month she
sent about USD 400 or more to her parents, eventually saving enough
to build them a beautiful new home: “Before it [the family’s old house]
was too old; it didn’t have ceilings. So I brought money back to build
a house.” Her pride stemmed not only from repaying her filial debt but
also from ensuring that her family experienced a better standard of liv-
ing and a more up-to-date lifestyle, which denoted higher status in both
their village and wider Thai society. Women in particular mentioned
house-building as an important outcome of their remittances.
Most, but not all, male migrants in this study remitted to their fami-
lies back home, usually fairly regularly. For example, Kao went illegally
to Taiwan, where he worked in several different factories, enjoying the
economic advantages that such work entailed. He remitted about USD
680–800 to his wife each month; he mentioned that he liked working
in Taiwan because he “could bring back money and gold to look after
[his] family well”. Yamamoto, who worked illegally in Japan as a welder
for more than nine years, remitted to his family but with the under-
standing that they would deposit most of the money in the bank for his
later use. Unfortunately, in his case, his family spent rather than saved
most of his remittances. First his parents built themselves a huge, var-
nished teak house and bought a piece of property in the county seat
so that two of his sisters could build houses there, and then they used
his remittances to build a large house for Yamamoto next to his sisters’
houses. But his wife complained that his father and younger brother
benefited more than Yamamoto from these remittances. His father used
some of the money that he was supposed to save for Yamamoto to find
and support a minor wife and the two children whom he had with
her, which so angered Yamamoto that he would barely speak to his
father years later. Yamamoto also sent money to pay the recruitment
fee so that his younger brother could go to work in Saudi Arabia, but
his brother “wouldn’t work, just played around, gambled, and drove
around for fun”, illustrating the “eating and playing” that is typical of
young, unmarried men, as discussed earlier. According to Yamamoto’s
wife, his sisters and brothers had spent his remittance money on tak-
ing his parents to dine and travel in neighbouring provinces. His sisters
(one of whom was a banker) also lent most of the money that they
were supposed to save in the bank to other villagers. Because of the
economic crash in 1997, none of the villagers repaid their loans, leav-
ing Yamamoto with little to show from a decade of working in Japan,
except for his house and several tiny, oddly shaped pieces of land around
the county, which villagers had put up as collateral. These misspent
remittances were a source of disappointment and family discord because
neither Yamamoto nor his wife wanted to support his extended family
to such an extent.
Much like Yamamoto’s brother, several single male migrants in this
study followed the male gender norms that were mentioned earlier,
using a larger proportion of their salaries on their own entertainment
abroad, which reduced their monthly remittances to their families at
home.10 Satid, who migrated legally to Japan at 26 to work as a trainee
chef, illustrated this. When asked whether or not he sent remittances, he
said that he sent part of his earnings to his mother, with the understand-
ing that she would save it for him. He spent the remaining two-thirds
on himself. As he put it, “I had to keep some to use because I was
still a youth. At that time I was single!” Later he described his time in
Japan in terms of travel and new experiences: “It [working in Japan] was
good in another way because I had friends abroad, and I could go see
this and that.” Satid’s and other young male migrants’ somewhat lack-
adaisical attitude towards remittances corresponds with the “vice and
leisure” that male Mexican migrants in the USA often enjoy, despite the
discourse of hard work and suffering while abroad (Malkin, 2004).
Typically, only if migrants were overseas long enough would their
remittances be used to purchase agricultural machinery or to start a new
business. In this study, direct-pay unauthorised male migrants, espe-
cially those working in Japan, stayed abroad 63.5 months, on average –
significantly longer than the other types of migrant.11 Direct-pay unau-
thorised male migrants were most likely to have remitted enough
money for their families not only to build a “Japanese House” (Baan
Yipun)12 and buy new vehicles and other consumer goods, but also to
buy new agricultural machinery or open small businesses, the local
development investment discussed by Hoang and Yeoh (Chapter 11,
in this volume). As Table 4.1 indicates, the overall value of their

remittances and gifts for this type of migrant was significantly higher,
on average, than for other types of migrant, in large part because they
stayed abroad significantly longer than other groups, including direct-
pay illegal female migrants. Indeed, 90 per cent of businesses in the two
Lamphun research villages were owned by former or current migrants –
mainly the direct-pay illegal male migrants who went to work in Japan.
Symbolic versus actual uses of remittances for young,

single, migrant women
As discussed above, remittances could offer significant assistance to

some migrants and their families in improving their living standards.
Nevertheless, the meaning and significance of remittances was much
more complex than merely repaying a filial debt of gratitude, especially
for young single women with no dependents at the time of migration.
In going abroad for employment, young migrant women in this study
negotiated between traditional norms for women (including debts of
gratitude to their parents and possible constraints on female mobil-
ity and values of female domesticity and sexual purity), their own and
their family’s material needs in the context of rural underdevelopment,
and their growing desire to fit in with the “up-to-date” urban lifestyle
that denotes higher socioeconomic status in Thai society. The differ-
ent ways in which female migrants balanced these issues is apparent
in the following comparison of two groups of young, single female
migrants – better off, more highly educated women from a research
village in Lamphun province who went to Taiwan through authorised
channels to work in factories, and poorer, less well-educated women
from a research village in Phayao province who migrated through debt-
bondage unauthorised recruiters to Macao and Japan to work in hostess
clubs as entertainers or sex workers.
The Lamphun village: Nestled between two low mountain ranges, the
prosperous Lamphun village is about 10 km from the county seat and
a 30–40 minute bus ride from the provincial capital. Because of a year-
round water supply, most families are able to plant one rice crop and an
additional secondary crop each year. Many families produce baby sweet
corn on contract, and several non-farming families serve as middlemen
for a nearby canning factory. Because of its proximity to the provincial
industrial park, many young villagers commute daily to work in various
factories there, where the starting wages range from USD 81 to USD 135
per month.
International labour migration from the village began in 1976, when

male villagers began migrating legally to the Middle East. In 1997 my
village migration survey revealed that more than one-third of village
families had sent one or more members abroad for employment and
many had a second generation of international labour migrants. A
direct-pay unauthorised recruiter lived in the neighbouring village and
had helped to send several men to work in Japan, and the town boasted
numerous lavish “Japanese houses” and businesses that were owned by
returned migrants and their families. Another group of young men had
gone to work legally in Taiwan. The village chief, who was serving as the
subdistrict chief at the time, had worked legally in Saudi Arabia in the
past, and his adopted daughter and two other relatives had gone abroad
through direct-pay unauthorised recruiters. This genealogy suggests the
legitimacy of both authorised and clandestine labour migration in the
village.
The Lamphun village had relatively few female migrants, though a
handful of young, unmarried women had used an authorised recruiter
to arrange their employment in factories in Taiwan. With the exception
of the village chief’s daughter, who had married, divorced and worked
in Bangkok before going to Japan, these young women were the first
women in the village to go abroad for employment. Well-educated by
local standards (each had graduated high school), they held fairly highly
paid jobs prior to departure, earning about USD 115–192 a month work-
ing in the local daycare or the nearby industrial park. Even the wages in
the industrial park, while high by village standards, were considered to
be sufficient for unmarried workers to live on but insufficient for them
to generate savings to buy land, build a cement house or save for a
new vehicle. As Dai, who had worked in the industrial park, explained,
“We had money to use, but no money to save; none to put in the bank.”
Prior to their departure, although it was still quite unusual for female
workers in the village to consider going abroad, a large proportion of
men in the village, including their fathers and uncles, had worked over-
seas in the past or were currently working overseas, thus they viewed
temporary employment abroad as a possible economic option, one that
would provide them with access to higher salaries than were available
to them near the village.
The young women’s relatively high educational attainment enabled
them to pass skills tests that were required by overseas employers, which
included some very basic English. Their educational attainment also
indicates the socioeconomic status of their families, since at the time,
education was free and mandatory only through grade six. Their family’s
socioeconomic status made going abroad through legal recruitment
channels a possibility, since their families had either savings, or land

or a house of sufficient value to serve as collateral to obtain a loan from
local money lenders to cover upfront expenses for travel documents and
recruitment fees of approximately USD 2,700, which were needed to go
to Taiwan in the early 1990s.
To these young women, authorised international migration to a fac-
tory in Taiwan was appealing, in part because of the more protective
living environment that was typically provided by such factories. Young
women who had attended high school had lived at home under their
parents’ protection for a longer period of time than those in the other
village, who ended their education at age 12 or 15 to enter the paid
labour force. The educated young women and their parents expressed
greater concern for their personal safety abroad than did other inter-
national migrants and their families.13 For instance, Dai, who went to
Taiwan at 23, insisted on going only through authorised channels.
If it is illegal, I will not go; it is dangerous for women . . . . Some

women were captured and forced to be prostitutes . . . . The women
[the prostitutes] were not allowed to go and eat, only just to stay in
the room waiting for customers, while the pimp waited outside.
The choice of authorised labour migration to a closely controlled factory

environment limited the perceived risk of being tricked into prostitution
and helped the young women to avoid having other villagers define
them within gender-based stereotypes as “loose women” or prostitutes
because of their geographic mobility, which might impede their ability
to make a good marriage after they had returned to the village.
While many authorised migrants, particularly men and some older,
married women, found the living environment in Taiwanese factories
overly restrictive, most of the young women in my study did not mind
it. Thai women working in Taiwan generally lived in single-sex dormi-
tories on the factory grounds and had to obtain permission to leave
the compound. In most cases they were permitted to leave only during
daylight and early evening hours on their days off and sometimes were
required to go out only in groups of other women. Men, even fiancées
or husbands, were not allowed to visit the factory. As Mali reported,
women went out,
but only on Sundays, whereas men could go all the time. After they
got off at 5 pm, they (men) could go. They were not forbidden from
leaving the factory grounds between this time and that one, like the
women.
The young women described how their employer kept track of their
whereabouts as a way of protecting or taking care of them, like an older
male relative or their parents would do at home. In a sense, such factory
regulations allowed them to “remain under the surveillance and protec-
tion of menfolk” (e.g., their employers overseas) (Chant and Radcliffe,
1992: 14), even outside the protective paternalistic atmosphere of their
families and villages.14 Thus these young women did not seem to mind
the restrictive environment of such factories and even sought it out as
a means of self-protection or a way of legitimising their international
migration to their worried parents.
Yet within this relatively controlled living and working environment
in Taiwan, the young women were able to experiment with some of the
consumption patterns and behaviours that were associated with being
modern and up to date. Their international migration gave them access
to cash income and experiences of independence and self-sufficiency
that previous generations of women from their village generally had not
shared. One showed me a photo album from the time when she lived
abroad, proudly pointing out photographs of herself and her friends
(including other returned female migrants in my study) wearing makeup
and miniskirts, having karaoke parties and drinking beer with friends,
and going on outings with older men (their bosses). Working abroad
provided them with wages and social opportunities to participate in
new forms of entertainment. They were also able to acquire some of the
commodity emblems – cameras, high heels, makeup and miniskirts –
that represent claims to a modern, sophisticated identity. Such fashions
and entertainments would not be condoned in the village, though they
are clearly part of the up-to-date, urban lifestyle that rural Thai women
often seek to emulate.
Overseas employment offered these young women a way of tast-
ing modern lifestyles and economic opportunities before resuming life
within the more protective confines of their home villages and the
traditional roles of wife and mother. Having completed their two-year
contracts, they seemed to revert (at least on the surface) to the social
norms for young women that were predominant in the village, carefully
presenting modest behaviour, wearing clothing that concealed their legs
and upper arms, and refusing to go out at night lest other people should
gossip about them. This reversion was not necessarily an easy process.
For example, when I asked Duan whether or not I could treat her at
a local restaurant for an evening meal or if she would wear the shorts
that she had worn in Taiwan while we jogged around the village, she
explained that while she would like to, she couldn’t or “people would
talk”. For these fairly highly educated young women, geographic mobil-
ity and their experimentations with modern clothing and activities had
not permanently damaged their reputation as morally “good” women,
not only because their behaviour took place away from the village
eye but also because they and their families could explain the care-
fully regulated factory environment in Taiwan that “protected” them.
After their overseas employment, they resumed their modest appearance
and behaviour and their more constrained mobility that was typical of
young women in their village. They became desirable marriage partners,
in part because of their savings from their employment abroad. Each
soon married and gave birth to or adopted a child.
These young women, like most of the other returned migrants in my
study, justified the need to work abroad in terms of helping their fami-
lies economically.15 As one explained, the financial benefits of working
in Taiwan enabled her to repay the debt she owed to her parents as a
dutiful daughter: “Abroad we can get money. It’s hard to find money in
Thailand. I wanted to help my family, my elderly mother and father.”16
Working in factories in Taiwan in the early 1990s, these young women
remitted, on average, about USD 500–550 a month. Regular remittances
to their families back in the village also played a symbolic role, pro-
viding continual reminders of their dutiful, moral nature, helping to
justify and legitimise their overseas migration into what was perceived
by most other villagers as a dangerous world, outside the control of their
families.17 However, in reality, their remittances did not go solely to sup-
porting their families. These were used first to repay the loans taken
out to cover the debt from their recruitment and travel expenses (In
Chapter 12 Hoang and Yeoh likewise identify debt as an issue of con-
cern). However, once their loans and the interest on the loans had been
repaid, their remittances took on a symbolic form, going not to sup-
port their families but into the young women’s own savings accounts,
in part because none of the young women were married or had children
when they were working in Taiwan and because their families had other
sources of income.18
On their return to Thailand, the young women had significant sav-
ings, which each invested in large consumer purchases which further
evidenced the up-to-date, material success that was made possible by
their international employment. For instance, one built a new, up-to-
date cement and tile house of her own, while the others purchased new
motorcycles, washing machines or pickup trucks. Remittances there-
fore served multiple purposes. The act of remitting (and their parents
being able to mention their daughter’s remittances to neighbours in
the village) demonstrated the young women’s dutiful nature, helping to

justify what might have been seen as morally dangerous international
migration and protecting the women’s reputation as well as the family’s
“face” in the village. While such remittances may have added to some
extent to their family’s economic stability, at least in the short term, they
ultimately enabled the young women to purchase new homes, appli-
ances and vehicles that demonstrated their own improved social and
economic status, and their ability to participate in the greatly idealised
consumption-oriented “modern” Thai lifestyle.
Phayao village: Located in a dry agricultural plain, the Phayao village
was the poorest of the six villages in the larger research project. It was
about 4 km from the county seat and about 35 minutes by bus from the
provincial capital. The village drinking water supply, built in 1995, had
never functioned well and provided household water on an extremely
irregular basis. The village also lacked a year-round agricultural water
supply, so local farmers typically planted a single crop annually rather
than two crops, as was typical in the Lamphun village. The village had
virtually no businesses, except for a tiny, in-home grocery stand, and the
province lacked an industrial park, so most villagers were involved in
subsistence agriculture or irregular agricultural day labour. According to
estimates from the village chief, approximately 40 per cent of the village
households were landless, having lost their land due to cycles of debt.
Most villagers lived in small, wooden houses, although a few “Japanese
houses” or larger wooden houses were visible, having been built by the
families of current or returned migrants. Interestingly, despite the gen-
eral poverty of the village, its temple complex was large and elaborate,
with many newer buildings, a fishpond and an ornate wall, which in
1998 was being further improved with funds remitted by a local woman
who was employed as a sex worker in Japan.
Unlike the Lamphun village, the Phayao village had never sent work-
ers to the Middle East. Only in the early 1990s had a handful of
men migrated legally to work in Taiwan. However, female international
labour migration was more prevalent. Owing to their poverty, the young
single women whom I interviewed could not afford to pay their recruit-
ment fees and travel expenses at the time of migration and so could
not go abroad through authorised or direct-pay unauthorised recruiters
(unlike the young women from better-off families in Lamphun village).
Instead they utilised the debt-bondage mode of recruitment to access
lucrative overseas destinations, such as Macao and Japan.
Like their counterparts in Lamphun, the young, unmarried female
migrants from the Phayao village who sought overseas employment
negotiated between filial obligations to their parents and their own

desires for a freer, more up-to-date, consumeristic lifestyle that was
increasingly associated with social status in Thai society. Their nego-
tiations, however, occurred in a very different socioeconomic context
than those of Lamphun village. The traditional Thai gender ideology
of limiting young women’s mobility to protect their sexual purity had
long been contested in the village, largely because of economic need.
The women in this district were renowned for their beauty, and this rep-
utation, along with the poverty that was experienced by many families,
had made the area a notorious site for recruiting female sex workers at
least since the Vietnam War era (Phongpaichit, 1982). Because of this
history, and because some older women in the family had previously
worked in the sex industry in Bangkok or Pattaya, poorer families in the
village tended not to stigmatise employment in the sex or entertainment
industry but rather viewed it as an acceptable temporary profession that
could enable young women to provide needed material support for their
families, without impeding their future opportunity to marry, raise a
family and otherwise contribute to the community (Muecke, 1992).19
Following Theravada Buddhist concepts of merit and demerit, prosti-
tutes, particularly those who work in lucrative overseas positions, have
the opportunity to make merit (e.g., by supporting their families mate-
rially or donating money to the temple or to fund the ordination of a
boy, who could share some of the merit that he earned with her parents)
that is ultimately considered in relation to the demerit that they may
have acquired as a result of their career. Thus poor families in the village
commonly viewed working in the sex industry, whether in Thailand
or abroad, as justified, at least if engaged in by dutiful girls who sent
money home. For poor families, the economic, social and religious bene-
fits and potential of social mobility associated with debt-bondage labour
migration outweighed at least some of the social stigma of such work.20
Because female mobility and freer sexuality were generally much more
accepted in Phayao village, particularly among poorer households, than
in Lamphun village, these young women experienced less conflict with
traditional norms that limit female mobility and protect female virginity
than did the young women in Lamphun. Prior to their departure, one
was already working as an entertainer/prostitute at a bar in the county
seat, while the other two were agricultural wage workers. Working in the
sex industry abroad was appealing to these women because wage dif-
ferentials between Thailand and popular migrant destinations, such as
Japan, meant that their earning potential overseas was much greater. For
Fon, who went to Japan at 19, working abroad offered desirable earning
potential and, moreover, meant that she could work in the sex industry
without fear of running into anyone whom she knew, who might not
have condoned her freer lifestyle or occupation.
We want money. We go to work in Japan because it is easy to “find

money” [slang for earning money through prostitution]. If we are
here, we can’t do this work because we are shy, but we can do it
there.
Since several other village women who had worked abroad had mar-
ried foreigners, overseas employment was also expected to improve
their opportunity to marry a foreigner and thereby improving their
socioeconomic status in the long run.
The young migrants from Phayao village were not as well educated
as their counterparts in Lamphun, typically having completed only
the mandatory sixth-grade education. One, who had completed ninth
grade, explained that while she wanted to continue her education, she
couldn’t because her family were too poor to afford the school fees and
uniforms. Their poverty, together with social networks linking former
migrants to potential migrants21 and the booming market for Thai sex
workers in many overseas destinations, which attracted recruiters to the
village, meant that they did not go abroad through authorised recruiters,
who require a significant sum upfront to pay for travel expenses and the
recruiter’s commission prior to travelling abroad. Instead, these young
women arranged to go abroad through unauthorised debt-bondage
recruiters and were held in debt bondage by their overseas employers,
either for an agreed amount of time or until they had repaid a fixed
amount of money, which usually included a very high rate of interest.
One of the advantages of this mode of recruitment was that it provided
opportunities for those who, because of poverty and a lack of land or
a house of sufficient value to serve as collateral to obtain a loan from
a local money lender, would not otherwise have been able to afford to
access what they believed to be lucrative employment abroad.
Besides impacting their recruitment choices, poverty also made their
filial obligations more tangible.22 Fon remitted as much as USD 2,300 a
month from Japan and was able to buy her family a video player, refrig-
erator, motorcycle and truck, as well as a new cement and tile house.
Latee, who went to Macao at 20 to work as a masseuse, explained:
People going to work abroad want money to build a house for their
parents. [Now] we have a beautiful house, but before [going abroad]
we had no money, no food, and an old house. When the rain fell, it
came inside. I had to do work like this to build a nice, beautiful house
for my parents. We didn’t even have a bicycle.
During the two years she spent in Macao, she remitted most of her
monthly income – about USD 385 per month – and met a Singaporean
man whom she subsequently married. While she and her family now
live in Singapore, they return to visit her parents in Phayao each year.
Since her trip to Macao, she had built a new cement house for her par-
ents and purchased a radio, refrigerator, bicycle, motorcycle and truck
for their use. The Phayao migrants’ focus on buying homes or goods
for their families contrasts with the young women from Lamphun, who
used their savings from working abroad to purchase consumer goods
mainly for their own use.
Overseas, the young women from Phayao worked in massage parlours
or nightclubs in urban areas – jobs which blurred into indirect prosti-
tution rather than direct, brothel-based prostitution (unlike Boom, an
older, married village woman mentioned earlier). According to their
descriptions, they adopted an “up-to-date” lifestyle that was focused on
beauty and sexual freedom, including nights fraternising with customers
in bars, drinking beer, singing songs, and wearing fashionable clothing
and makeup.23 Such a lifestyle offered a freedom from social constraints
and traditional norms of appropriate behaviour that is faced by most
young Thai women in rural areas. They described such employment as
“more fun” and “easier” than the hard physical labour of agricultural
work at home, or the factory or domestic work that many other female
Thai migrants found abroad. According to Rohd, her job in a hostess
club in Japan was good because it “allowed her to be free” and because
she got free drinks and food, could sing karaoke and “drink to get
drunk”, a lifestyle which, she explained, was difficult if not impossible
for her to replicate back in her Northern Thai village. Fon put it this way:
The best thing about working overseas was working–there were lots
of lights and lots of people. It was fun. Working in a karaoke bar
was fun . . . . Women have freedom . . . . We can do anything. It is not
like here in Thailand because there are a lot of people who know us
[here].
Contemporary Thai culture celebrates and promotes an ideal of the

mobile, up-to-date woman who is active in a variety of modern
urban settings, such as shopping malls, beauty salons, nightclubs and
entertainment facilities (Van Esterik, 1988). The overseas entertainer/sex

worker who spends hours styling her hair, perfecting her makeup and
clothing, singing and drinking in nightclubs, who may be invited to
fancy restaurants, spas or bowling alleys by her customers, is thus regu-
larly active in the very settings that are associated, directly or indirectly,
with being “modern” and “up to date” in Thai society.
Entering the international sex/service industry allowed these young
women to embrace not only economic opportunities of overseas
employment and the up-to-date consumption patterns that such
employment made possible, but also the modern lifestyle and sex-
ual freedom that is depicted in and valued by the Thai mass media
and urban culture. Two of them met and later married foreign clients,
thereby elevating their own and their families’ social status on a more
permanent basis, while the third eventually married a local Thai man
who ran a small mechanics shop. All became full-time housewives, a role
that is idealised, particularly among members of the Thai lower class.
In going abroad for employment, young rural migrants in Northern
Thailand are enmeshed in a complex set of ideologies, expectations and
economic realities. The young, unmarried Thai women in this study
are particularly interesting. They reacted to gender norms and norms
of filial obligation in diverse ways, depending on the socioeconomy of
their village and household. In Lamphun, young legal female migrants
used the act of sending regular remittances to their parents as a demon-
stration of their dutiful nature and to help to justify their overseas
migration in an environment where women had not normally ventured
so far away, and where norms of female purity and parental control over
young women’s sexuality were still largely in place. Ultimately, though,
they retained most of their remittances for their own use, rather than
using them to meet any actual material needs of their parents.
Alternatively, for women in Phayao village who migrated abroad using
the debt-bondage mode of illegal recruitment, poverty meant that their
remittances from abroad played a more crucial role in meeting their filial
obligations, providing basic necessities for their families and improving
their family’s standard of living. Their remittances (and the economic
necessity of them) helped to reduce any stigma against their temporary
occupation as sex workers, at least in the eyes of poorer villagers and
family members.
Overseas employment provided the income to enable young women
to meet (or demonstrate their potential ability to meet) traditional
filial obligations as “good”, dutiful daughters. Working abroad also
provided the earnings and opportunities for young women to try
consumption patterns and other freedoms that are increasingly asso-

ciated with modernity and being up to date in Thai society, which were
generally less available to them back in their home villages. Experiment-
ing with modern fashions and behaviours may be a more temporary
practice abroad, away from the protective watch of parents and village
elders, as for the Lamphun migrants, who resumed a more modest,
less mobile lifestyle on their return to the village. Or it may be a
more permanent practice, as for a couple of the Phayao migrants, who,
by marrying foreign men, continued to participate in modern, urban
lifestyles abroad, international travel, and extravagant purchases of cur-
rent fashions, consumer items and gifts using the resources that their
spouses provided.
Conclusion
For all but one of the migrants in this study, the goal of earning money
was the most important justification for going abroad for employment.
Virtually all of the migrants remitted money to their parents or fam-
ilies back home, in some cases so that their parents could save it for
them, in other cases dramatically improving their families’ quality of
life and socioeconomic status, sometimes even enabling them to shift
from agriculture into petty trade or other off-farm businesses. How-
ever, beyond these economic impacts, migrants deployed remittances to
influence their identities, and their own and their families’ social status.
Young, unmarried male migrants’ agency relied on their ability to nego-
tiate identities as “good” sons, remitting money to their families back
home or saving it for future spouses and children, but balancing such
goals with the gendered norms of “eating and playing” (leisure, enter-
tainment) while abroad. In some cases, remitting to their families so
that they could save on their behalf proved to be problematic, as when
Yamamoto’s father spent some of his money on his minor wife and her
children rather than on Yamamoto’s own mother, and when his sisters
loaned out rather than banked his remittances and lost them all.
Young female migrants’ agency lay in their ability to negotiate iden-
tities as “dutiful” daughters and modern women across international
spaces. Even when their filial remittances were symbolic because the
money went into their own bank accounts, young legal female migrants
and their parents deployed the idea of remittances as a means of ensur-
ing their reputation as “dutiful”, “good” daughters, despite the fact that
they had temporarily left the watchful eyes of their parents and the vil-
lage elders. The young women who went abroad through illegal debt
bondage to become bar hostesses, masseuses or prostitutes were able

to construct identities that reflected certain qualities of being “dutiful”
daughters as well, by remitting money to their families. The acts of sup-
porting family members materially and making religious merit through
temple donations enabled them to negate some of the stigma of being
involved in a morally suspect occupation abroad.
This analysis has shown that remittances are not merely a form of
social exchange or fulfilling an economic contract; rather, a structural
symbolic interactionist perspective focuses on their multiple meanings
and impact on the performance of normative and idealised roles. More-
over, the act of remitting and the meaning of those remittances operate
in gendered planes; the symbolic weight that they carry can be especially
important for young, unmarried female migrants and their families.
Remittances and the modern houses and consumer goods that they
help to purchase can demonstrate being “up to date” – an identity
which denotes higher socioeconomic status in Thai society. In the end,
then, remittances are important for multifarious reasons: the tangible
goods that they provide, the familial networks that they reinforce, the
meanings that they represent and their impacts on migrants’ identities.
Notes
Research for this article was funded by research grants from the Fulbright-Hays
Program, and three programs at Cornell University, the Einaudi Centre for Inter-
national Studies, the Population and Development Program and the Southeast
Asia Program.
1. Among the 106 migrants were 4 who had subsequently married foreigners
and lived abroad, whom I interviewed when they returned to their home
village for a visit.
2. See Sobieszczyk (2000b) for further details about the demographic and
socioeconomic contexts of the research sites and further demographic details
of the study population, classified by recruitment type.
3. The research I report here is biased towards those overseas migrants who
were able to return home and who went back to their home village, if even
for a visit, who were willing to be interviewed. Because the goal of the over-
all project was not to generalise to Thai labour migration as a whole, but to
provide a preliminary examination of legal and illegal methods of recruit-
ment in a particular context, the methods used to identify interviewees was
appropriate. However, the focus primarily on returned migrants means that
I cannot speak about the possible ways in which remittance behaviours or
meanings varied for international labour migrants from my research villages
who chose not to return or who died overseas.
4. Unauthorised (illegal) migrants are those who migrate abroad with the assis-
tance of an unauthorised (unregistered) recruiter, and/or who lack proper
passports, visas and/or work permits, or who obtain employment after

entering the destination country on tourist, transit or student visas that
prohibit employment, or who overstay legal employment visas and/or work
permits. The two types of unauthorised migrant in this study were respond-
ing to demand for low-wage workers in certain destination countries that
had once limited or continually limit legal labour migration opportunities
(e.g., Taiwan or Japan, respectively). Popular destinations for unauthorised
migrants also typically offer far higher wage rates than those that are avail-
able in rural Thailand and, depending on the destination, higher wage rates
than those available to authorised temporary foreign workers.
5. A variety of factors influenced their decisions to go abroad as unautho-
rised workers, including a weak sense of rule of law, the greater earning
potential of illegal as opposed to legal migrants, and local recruiters and
social networks between former, current and potential migrants, which made
unauthorised labour migration faster and/or easier (for further details, see
Sobieszczyk, 2000a).
6. Debt bondage, which is usually considered to be a form of trafficking, is one
type of unauthorised migration.
7. In contrast, male mobility is widely accepted in contemporary Thai society.
Thai men become monks who take up the meditative practice of wander-
ing, and Thai men have traditionally gone bai tio (travelling for adventure,
work and/or courtship) (Mills, 1999: 97–98). Another contrast is that in com-
parison to women, virginity is not important to Thai men’s social status
and, in fact, men are frequently encouraged by their peers or older male
relatives to experiment with prostitutes from a young age (Havanon et al.,
1992).
8. An exception is Phayao Province, and in particular Dok Kham Tai County,
one of the research sites, which has long been renowned as a prostitution
recruitment area for the Thai and global sex industry (Phongpaichit, 1982).
9. Because of the extreme currency variations at the time of data collection,
figures are reported in US dollars, calculated using the exchange rate of the
relevant year of migration.
10. This is also a way of enhancing the male status as “normal” Thai men, who
can devote at least part of their earnings to their own pleasure and travelling,
rather than merely focusing on remitting to help their families (see Rao,
Chapter 2, in this volume).
11. Because of the difficulty and expense of going abroad illegally, the direct-pay
unauthorised migrants in this study preferred to stay abroad and continue
earning for as long as possible. Authorised migrants, in contrast, typically
had to return to Thailand after completing their one- or two-year labour
contracts and so averaged just over 23 months abroad. Though many debt-
bondage migrants in this study would also have preferred to stay abroad
to earn for as long as possible, a couple returned after a fairly short time to
reunite with their children left behind, while others returned home to marry
someone whom they had met abroad; they averaged only 23 months abroad
(see Table 4.1).
12. These ornate homes were quite impressive, boasting chandeliers inside
and out, electric water heaters, washing machines, stereo systems, large
televisions, and Western-style bathrooms and kitchens.
13. In cases such as the Lamphun village, where international labour migration
had previously been defined as a mainly male sphere, it required a more
complex negotiation for young women to enter migration circuits and to
be protected from negative moral evaluations of their movements than for
young men to enter such circuits (see Malkin, 1998).
14. This resonates with Mills’ (1997) findings regarding Thai women who
migrated internally.
15. This reflects the altruism motive mentioned by Hoang and Yeoh (Chapter 11,
in this volume) and is also part of the “network of obligations” notion
explored by Kusakabe and Pearson (Chapter 3, in this volume).
16. Similarly, in her study of male and female labour migration from Mexico
to the USA, Malkin (1998: 10) notes that “younger women negotiate and
legitimize their departures with the justification that they will help the
family”.
17. McKay (Chapter 5, in this volume) highlights a similar symbolic value of
remittances, in his case for Filipino seafarers both while at sea and back
home.
18. This reflects the enlightened self-interest remittance motive discussed by
Hoang and Yeoh (Chapter 11, in this volume).
19. Thais have a less essentialist construction of self than people in the USA.
Hanks (1962) discusses how Thais move through different statuses and
identities over their lifetime. One may change one’s name, behaviour and
identity at the same time, thus selling sexual services for a time may not
necessarily become an essential part of an identity in the longer term.
20. Middle-class villagers, such as a local grade schoolteacher and the village
chief, still seemed to stigmatise sex work to some degree. For instance, the
teacher told me that she repeatedly criticised sex work in the classroom
and was chagrined when several of her former students had had to stop
their education after the then mandatory six years and later entered the sex
trade. When I interviewed the village’s chief, he initially said that only a few
village men, but no women, had gone abroad for work. Only when I men-
tioned that I had interviewed some village women who had worked overseas
in the sex industry did he admit that many village women went abroad
to “find money” (local slang for prostitution), which he considered to be
conceptually different from other types of “work”.
21. Village women who had previously gone to work abroad either returned
with foreign boyfriends or husbands to recruit their friends to work abroad
or helped to introduce their friends to debt-bondage recruiters who would
take them to work overseas. Such social networks help to initiate and
reinforce community-wide norms for women to go abroad through debt
bondage.
22. According to Osaki (2003), remittances from internal Thai migrants are most
common when the households of origin are of lower economic status. The
international labour migrants in my study followed a similar pattern.
23. Employment abroad clearly also generally included more problematic
aspects, such as the loss of mobility during the debt-repayment period,
the risk of being arrested and repatriated by immigration police, or the
possibility of losing access to their savings as a result of involuntary
repatriation.
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5
“So They Remember Me When
I’m Gone”: Remittances,
Fatherhood and Gender Relations
of Filipino Migrant Men
Steven McKay
Introduction
The Philippines is one of the leading senders of migrant labour into the
global economy, with over 8.2 million Filipinos – or about 10 per cent of
the current Philippine population – working and residing in some 140
countries. These labour migrants, in turn, have played a pivotal role in
supporting the Philippine economy, remitting over USD 21 billion – or
about 12 per cent of the country’s GDP – back to the Philippines (BSP,
2013). As an Asian Development Bank (ADB) paper noted, “Remittances
have become the single most important source of foreign exchange to
the economy and a significant source of income for recipient families”
(Ang et al., 2009: v).
The sheer size of the Philippine labour diaspora and its develop-
ment over the last 40 years have spawned a number of important
studies across a range of occupations – from nurses to domestics to
entertainers – that have made important contributions to key debates,
such as the role of the state in gendering migrant streams (Tyner, 2000),
the gendering and racialisation of particular occupations (Choy, 2003;
Lan, 2006; Guevarra, 2010), the rise of transnational families (Parrenas,
2005) and the interplay between sexuality and workplace discipline
(Constable, 1997). Yet due in part to the feminisation of Philippine
out-migration in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, nearly all of these gender
studies have centred on women. And while feminisation reached a peak
in 2004 when 74 per cent of all migrants were women, since 2007 men
111
have actually outnumbered women every year.1 To help balance the

scholarship on gender, migration and the Philippines, this study focuses
on an important but understudied group of labouring men: merchant
seafarers. Today the Philippines dominates the global seafarer labour
market: nearly one in three merchant sailors in the world is Filipino
and over 366,000 Filipinos sail the world’s oceans, sending home over
USD 4.8 billion a year (BSP, 2013; POEA, 2013a). Some 97 per cent of
Filipino seafarers are men, and in the Philippines they have a reputation
as “exemplars of masculinity” due in large part to the nature of their
precarious work, their stories of adventure and, most importantly, their
high level of earnings and remittances to their families.
The case of Filipino seafarers provides a unique opportunity to con-
tribute to important debates at the intersection of migration and gen-
der studies. First, the study contributes to the burgeoning scholarship
on masculinity, building on the notion of multiple masculinities but
complicating Connell’s (1995, 1998) extension of a single hegemonic
masculinity to the global scale. Rather, the study demonstrates how
masculinities, even when constructed transnationally, may still be based
on and help to reinforce locally specific gender norms. The study of
migrant men thus highlights the continued importance of context
and place even among mobile labour, and how the constructions of
masculinities continue to be situational (Paap, 2006; Gutmann, 2007).
Second, the study helps to address the scholarship on migration, gender
and remittances, but it does so from a relatively unexplored perspec-
tive: that of male migrants and the role that remittances and economic
investments can play in “doing gender” and constructing masculine
selves (West and Zimmerman, 1987; Mahler and Pessar, 2006). This
chapter will address the issues of remittances in terms of how they
relate to seamen’s active gender performances across social fields, and
in their families and communities, both while they are on periodic
“visits” home and when they are at sea, or away from their families
for six months to a year. Finally, this chapter will also contribute to
the study of Filipino masculinity, both generally and how it relates to
migration (Pingol, 2001; Espana-Maram, 2006). While there have been
a large number of studies on gender and migration focusing on Filipino
women, very few studies have addressed issues of migrant men (but
see Margold, 1995; Parrenas, 2008). Similarly, there remains a dearth
of studies on Filipino masculinity, particularly as it differs from Western
norms (Rubio and Green, 2009). Overall, I argue that while men’s migra-
tory work and their remittances may generally help to reinforce local
Steven McKay 113
and national gender norms of Filipino masculinity – particularly in

terms of providership – paradoxically the seamen’s strong position and
recognition as adequate material providers also allows them to tran-
scend some traditional household gender roles towards building closer
emotional ties to their families and possibly expanding what it means
to be a man in the Philippines.
Overview of Filipino seafarers and remittance policies
Filipino seafarers did not have a significant presence in contempo-

rary international shipping until the 1970s. However, a combination
of the global oil crisis, the deregulation of shipping and crewing, a
colonial history of US involvement in Philippine maritime education
and the Philippine government’s own initiation of a labour export pol-
icy in the 1970s contributed to the entrance of Filipino seafarers into
the global labour market.2 A 72-year-old captain and head of one of
the main Philippine manning agency associations commented: “It was
Greek ships that started recruiting Filipinos . . . word spread out in Europe
that Filipinos were good and cheap . . . spread like fire because they were
already short of seamen.” Following the Greek shipowners’ lead, other
European and Japanese shipowners also started hiring Filipinos. From
only 2,000 Filipinos on foreign ships in the 1960s, by 1975 the num-
ber had increased more than ten-fold. By 1980 it had doubled again to
over 57,000, and by 2012 the official number had reached over 366,000
(NSB, 1982; POEA, 2013a). Seafarers represent about 20 per cent of all
overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) deployed in a single year, but less than
4 per cent of the entire stock estimate of 8.7 million Filipinos living and
working outside the Philippines (POEA, 2013a).
Yet despite making up only a small percentage of OFWs, seafarers
nonetheless contribute a disproportionate number of remittances back
to the Philippines. So while overall they represent only 3.8 per cent of
all OFWs, in 2012 they remitted USD 4.8 billion or over 22 per cent of
the total USD 21.4 billion in remittances or over USD14,000 per seafarer
per year (BSP, 2013). The growth of seafarer remittances has also climbed
steadily. From 2008 to 2012, remittances from seafarers grew by 60 per-
cent, or nearly three times the growth rate of land-based OFWs (BPS,
2013). As will be discussed in much more detail below, because total and
average remittances among seafarers are so large, a greater percentage is
often available and used for investment in both human and physical
capital.
Seafarers and mandatory remittances

An important explanation for seafarers’ extraordinary levels of
remittances is the Philippine government’s remittance policies and pro-
cedures particular to seafarers. Before the Philippines developed an
explicit and institutionalised labour export policy, the government sim-
ply encouraged overseas workers, particularly from the USA, to send
some of their earnings back to the Philippines. However, as the gov-
ernment, under President Ferdinand Marcos, formalised the policy of
labour export in the 1970s in response to domestic economic and polit-
ical crises, seafarers were at the forefront of the mandatory remittance
policy experiment. In 1974 the amendment to the new Labor Code
made it mandatory for Filipino workers to remit “a portion” of their for-
eign exchange earnings back to the Philippines through the Philippine
banking system (APMMF, n.d.). However, the law was not specific about
the exact percentage of foreign earnings to be remitted as this was to be
left to the Department of Labor and government agencies that regulated
overseas workers, namely the National Seaman’s Board (NSB) and the
Overseas Employment and Development Board. But it was only the NSB
that quickly established a mandatory remittance policy with a specific
minimum percentage.
The NSB, established in 1974, was explicitly designed to promote and
regulate Filipino seafarers and to generate foreign exchange (NSB, 1976).
The main force in crafting NSB policies was its assistant executive direc-
tor, Captain Benjamin Tanedo, a graduate of the US Merchant Marine
Academy at King’s Point, New York, and a captain in the Philippine Navy
who was personally tapped by the then president, Ferdinand Marcos, as
the highest agency official with direct experience in the maritime sector.
In interviews, Captain Tanedo admitted that he created the mandatory
remittance policy based on his own experience as a seafarer and with
other seamen.
Interestingly, Tanedo’s conception of Filipino seafarers is deeply
connected with their construction as “marginally masculine” or hyper-
masculine men who exhibit certain masculine qualities, such as aggres-
siveness and strength, yet do not match the “ideal” masculinity of
mature and responsible Filipino men as providers, and thus are in
need of protection, even from themselves (Rubio and Green, 2009, dis-
cussed in greater detail below). Tanedo noted that at the time, many
Filipino seafarers were known to exhaust all of their earnings in port
or on “blow-outs” (big parties) upon return home, leaving no savings
or support for their families. Other seafarers who were interviewed cor-
roborated this view of the Filipino seafarer, at least at this earlier point
Steven McKay 115
in time. For example, one who had been sailing for 33 years explained:
“here, the concept of Filipinos about seamen is that of being ‘one-day
millionaires’ – one day they come with lots of money and then the
next, they spend everything in gambling and drinking . . . . Perhaps they
observed it before with seamen, but times are changing and this is no
longer happening.”
Executive Order 857 and the failure to extend mandatory

remittances to other occupations
Based in part on the image of the “immature” Filipino seafarers and in
order to “protect” the seamen and their families from the seamen’s own
vices, Captain Tanedo proposed and created a mandatory remittance
policy after 1976 in which 70 per cent of a seafarer’s base wages were
to be remitted through a Philippine bank directly to an “allottee” of
the seafarer’s choice, usually an immediate family member such as their
wife or mother. This provision for mandatory remittances was the first
of its kind in the Philippines, and the government hoped to repli-
cate and extend such a policy to other, land-based overseas workers.
So in 1982 Executive Order (EO) 857 was issued, which aimed to set
official mandatory foreign exchange remittance levels to go through
official bank channels for all classifications of overseas workers. Provi-
sions of the law were for mandatory remittances of 50–70 per cent of
wages, depending on occupation. EO 857, however, caused a firestorm
of protest from overseas workers, mainly from lower-wage workers who
were residing abroad and who did not earn enough in their jobs to remit
such a large portion of their salary. Overseas workers’ organisations,
particularly in Hong Kong and the Middle East that worked directly
with migrant Filipino women employed as domestics, were galvanised
around the forced remittance issue and successfully mobilised against its
implementation. Thus the implementing portion of the law was almost
entirely rescinded in 1985 due to pressure for reform, and mandatory
remittances were eliminated for all occupations except seafarers. In fact,
the mandatory remittance level for seafarers was raised just a year before,
in early 1984 under EO 924, to 80 per cent of base salary, which is still
enforced today.
Notably, there was little organised resistance by seafarers regarding
EO 857 and the mandatory remittance policies. Individually, some
seafarers who were interviewed complained about the abuse of the
remittance system in which seafarer salaries – paid in foreign currency –
are collected by their manning or employment agency, which then
determines the exchange rate and deposits the equivalent amount in
Philippine pesos into the seafarer’s legal allottee’s bank account. These
complaints often centred on “point-shaving” by the agency, or the use
of an exchange rate below the official bank rate and late payment of
remittances to allottees. These complaints were echoed in a study of
seafarer marginalisation conducted by the International Seafarer Action
Center (ISAC), which surveyed 850 seafarers and found that a significant
minority had complaints about non-payment of wages (11 per cent),
illegal salary deductions by manning agencies (17 per cent) and delayed
payments to allottees (11 per cent) (ISAC, 2004). However, the study did
not find significant complaints about the broader issue of mandatory
remittances, which seems to be an accepted practice among seafarers.
This may be, in part, because the system has been in place from the very
beginning so, unlike for domestics and other overseas Filipino work-
ers who resisted it, EO 857 was not a change in policy and was not
experienced as a shift in past practice. In addition, unlike land-based
migrants, seafarers do not have the same opportunities to spend their
salaries while under contract and onboard ship. And, as mentioned
above, they also have higher-than-average salaries, and do collect 20 per
cent of their base pay and all of their overtime and extra or bonus pay
onboard, making it more likely that they can afford to send more of
their base pay directly to their allottees. In fact, many seafarers appreci-
ated the ability of their relatives to receive cash remittances while they
were at sea, when it would be difficult for seafarers to access banking
services. Finally, seafarer unions, which might appear to best represent
collective seafarer interests and therefore be primary actors in resisting
the mandatory remittance policy, have not made it a central issue. This
may be because, through the current system, unions are able to directly
deduct their dues from seafarer pay from the manning agencies, pro-
viding them with an incentive to maintain the current system rather
than to fight to dismantle it. Seafarer associations and unions have also
focused more of their attention on helping seafarers to better invest their
savings than on challenging the mandatory remittance policy generally.
Filipino masculinities and migration
As noted above, the gender scholarship on Filipino masculinity and

migration remains both empirically and theoretically thin. To address
this gap, it is necessary to draw on but also extend recent scholarship
on masculinity more generally. Central to many contemporary studies
and debates on men and gender is R. W. Connell’s notion of hegemonic
masculinity (Connell, 1995). This is the normative ideal of what is “the
Steven McKay 117
currently most honored way of being a man” in a particular society and

its dominance over subordinate and marginal masculinities as well as all
women (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005: 832; Kimmel et al., 2005).
With rising global economic interdependence and greater cross-border
flows, some argue that a certain “transnational business masculinity” is
becoming hegemonic over the local (Connell and Wood, 2005). How-
ever, while bringing a transnational lens adds an important dimension,
a number of recent volumes point out that there continue to be a quite
diverse range of masculinities among regions and countries, and that it
remains crucial to specify the constraints, contexts and strategies in and
through which such masculinities are formed (Louie and Low, 2003;
Osella and Osella, 2006; Gutmann, 2007; Ford and Lyons, 2012).
The confluence of masculinity and migration is particularly inter-
esting, as migratory work highlights the situational character of mas-
culinity, since there is a greater separation of workplace and home,
and migrant men are able to “do gender” and enact their masculine
identities in a broader array of distinct locations using distinct strate-
gies (West and Zimmerman, 1987). Espana-Maram’s (2006) study of
working-class Filipino migrants to the USA in the early 20th century
shows how this group of low-wage, low-status men nevertheless asserted
their own forms of masculinity, both by enduring harsh and degrad-
ing working conditions and by engaging in gambling, boxing and other
forms of expressive culture during their non-work hours. Other studies
of migrant men have similarly shown that despite exploitative and even
emasculating conditions in the workplace, migratory work can provide
the material and cultural capital to enact exemplary forms of masculin-
ity upon migrants’ return home, particularly through their remittances
and conspicuous consumption, tales of adventure and the ability to ful-
fil the social obligations of high-status males (Osella and Osella, 2000;
Brown, 2006; Datta et al., 2008).
Filipino masculinity
The scholarship on contemporary Filipino masculinity resonates with
some aspects of hegemonic masculinity in the West, as discussed by
Connell and others. Pingol (2001) demonstrates that, in general, local
constructions of masculinity centre on being “good providers, virile sex
partners, firm and strong fathers” (Pingol, 2001: 8). But men’s fash-
ioning of their own masculinity also fell along a continuum: at one
end a focus on self-control and respect from others (kinalalaki), and
at the other end an emphasis on controlling or being feared by others
(malalaki). Respect was earned through a man’s independent earnings,
leadership, self-discipline, endurance of suffering and ability to abstain

sexually, while fear was maintained through physical domination, risk-
taking, psychological coercion and publicly expressing the “machismo
of rogues and daredevils” (Pingol, 2001: 4). In one of the few stud-
ies of gender and Filipino migrant working men, Margold (1995: 290)
makes a similar argument, contrasting the masculine ideals of verbal
eloquence, galante (gracefulness) and adventurousness among Illocanos,
versus the “aggressive control” over wives and children that is chosen
by some “failed” migrant men returning from the Middle East. Impor-
tantly, Margold points out the class associations of the two ends of the
spectrum and how the exploitation and humiliation of low-paid, low-
status labour can limit men’s ability to construct a masculine identity
from actions that garner respect rather than fear.
Rubio and Green (2009) argue that Filipino masculinity differs from
Western ideals in that in the Philippines there is greater emphasis on
“family orientedness” and less focus on “aggression, emotional restric-
tion, dominance, and an overemphasis on strength” (p. 70). It is inter-
esting to note that Rubio and Green’s notion of “family orientedness”
is primarily defined in terms of men’s providership role. In summaris-
ing the existing literature and their own findings, they note: “Filipino
fathers are often referred to as haligi ng tahanan (the cornerstone of the
home), a description that connotes providing economically for and tak-
ing charge of the family. This ideal has been the ultimate indicator of a
truly masculine male in the Philippines” (p. 62).
Impact of migration on constructions of masculinity

Yet Filipino masculinity, and broader gender relations in the Philippines,
have also been influenced by the rise of out-migration. Since 1974 the
Philippine government has promoted a migration- and remittance-led
development strategy, encouraging labour out-migration both to relieve
domestic political pressure and to earn much-needed foreign exchange
(Tyner, 2000; Guevarra, 20010). While early migrants were primarily
men who were concentrated in construction and going to the Middle
East, from the 1980s the Philippines began broadening its labour profile,
sending out greater numbers of women who were working as domestic
helpers, nurses and entertainers. This feminisation of migration grew
steadily until 2004, when nearly 75 per cent of the approximately
4 million temporary labour migrants from the Philippines were women
and overall remittances reached USD 8.5 billion. And, as noted above,
women migrant workers became both more organised and more visi-
ble following the mid-1980s, in part because of the fight against forced
Steven McKay 119
remittances in the movement against EO 857, and in part in response to

a spike in migrant abuses abroad that became heavily publicised in the
Philippines (Rodriguez, 2010). In response to the growing numbers of
women migrants, their increased visibility and their rising remittances,
the Philippine state began honouring them as the nation’s “new” or
“modern day heroes” (Bagong Bayani). This was enshrined by the annual
Bagong Bayani awards that the Philippine state has given out since 1984
to “outstanding and exemplary Overseas Filipino Workers” for their eco-
nomic contributions to the nation as well as “enhancing and promoting
the image of the Filipino as a competent, responsible and dignified
worker” (Bagong Bayani Foundation, 2013).
Despite the often-empty government rhetoric, Filipino migrant
women have embraced this label of “new hero”, in large part because
it gives them more national visibility, increases their political leverage
and acknowledges the broadening of women’s gender roles to include
providership, which as noted above has traditionally been associated
with men (Parrenas, 2005; Rodriguez, 2010). The increase in women’s
migration and women migrants’ “role encroachment” as providers has
thus challenged local norms of masculinity. Coupled with persistent
high levels of un- and underemployment among men in the Philippines,
these conditions have put increased pressure on Filipino men to con-
struct masculinity beyond simple providership, even as providership
remains central to the Filipino masculine ideal.3
Some of the difficulties and complexities of constructing masculinities
in the Philippines is noted by Parrenas (2005, 2008), whose study
of fatherhood and the families of male overseas migrant workers
emphasises a Filipino man’s primary role as the family breadwinner,
who is responsible for literally building and supporting the family
home. Parrenas goes further, however, arguing that while the moth-
ering role expands for mothers who work abroad, “fathering narrows
in transnational families” because men’s migration tends to heighten
gendered norms of conventional fatherhood as absent migrant fathers
are often reduced to providing material support and projecting author-
ity from afar, at the expense of emotional attachment and shared
child-centred parenting (Parrenas, 2005: 34).
However, while Parrenas’ study goes a long way towards helping to
illuminate the connections between migration, fatherhood and con-
ventional Filipino masculinity, it may represent too narrow an interpre-
tation of Filipino masculinity and migrant male gender performances,
particularly because it does not explicitly take into account the perspec-
tive of male migrants themselves. In the section below, I draw on one
of the few studies of Filipino seafarers and on interviews with approx-

imately 100 Filipino seafarers to better flesh out who Filipino seafarers
are; their own understandings of Filipino masculinity; the insecurities
that they face as migrant men, husbands and fathers trying to live up to
these ideal notions; and their strategies for coping with these insecuri-
ties and demands, particularly as they pertain to emotional attachment,
parenting strategies, remittances and spending patterns.
“Doing masculinity”: Roles, relations and remittances

of seafarers
Seafarer profile
Seafaring has traditionally been a male-dominated profession and in
the Philippines this is no different: as mentioned above, 97 per cent of
Filipino seafarers are men. In one of the only comprehensive studies of
Filipino seafarers, Amante (2003) surveyed over 1,000 Filipino seafarers
and students at 11 maritime colleges in the Philippines. He found that
81 per cent of seafarers originated from the three major areas of the cen-
tral and southern Philippines, which are also among the poorest regions
of the country (the Visayan islands, 30 percent; the islands of Negros
and Panay, 28 per cent; and Mindanao, 23 per cent). Interestingly, the
regions that produce the majority of seafarers also produce many female
migrants, who often work abroad as domestics and medical profession-
als. According to the 2011 Survey on Overseas Filipinos, the regions
mentioned above send approximately the same total number of men
and women workers outside the Philippines (NSO, 2012). And from
Negros and Panay islands, probably the most concentrated source of
seafarers, overall there are actually more women migrants than men:
99,000 and 95,000, respectively (NSO, 2012). The rise in out-migration
of both men and women does influence the constructions and negoti-
ations of gender norms, particularly around the gendered meanings of
providership. As noted above, the increase in women who provide for
their families through their remittances is a key source of “role encroach-
ment” that has led Filipino men, and particularly seafarers, to push their
definitions of masculinity beyond – but still including – providership.
The seafarers surveyed were also primarily from rural and poor back-
grounds, with the large majority having fathers who were fisherman
(32 per cent), farmers (21 per cent) or self-employed (16 per cent). Only
9 per cent of seafarers had fathers who were also merchant seafarers,
possibly reflecting the newness of the occupation. Yet because of the
increasing demands of the occupation, as well as rising competition,
Steven McKay 121
Filipino seafarers are increasingly well educated. In Amante’s (2003)

survey, 55 per cent of seafarers had a college degree and 86 per cent
had at least a post-secondary school certificate. And while the major-
ity of seafarers surveyed had mothers that were full-time housewives,
only 3 per cent of those seafarers who were married had wives that
were full-time housewives. In fact, seafarers’ wives had a similar educa-
tional attainment as seafarers, and 37 per cent of them were employed as
professionals (primarily teachers and nurses). The changing class com-
position and position of seafarers has also influenced the models of
masculinity that they try to project, as will be discussed further below.
Strains and hurdles in achieving masculine ideals

Even though the Philippines dominates global seafaring, becoming a
seafarer can be quite difficult and being a seafarer has many challenges.
In terms of recruitment, competition is fierce and seafarers must often
work though labour-market intermediaries to break into the industry.
While there are over 350,000 seafarers who are deployed in ocean-
going ships each year, there are another 300,000 Filipinos who are
certified to sail yet who cannot find work abroad. Seafarers often find
out about vacancies through their networks – whether from their for-
mer maritime schools or programmes, family members, neighbours or
province-mates, friends or former fellow crew members (Amante, 2003).
They might also learn about jobs through the advertisements of crewing
or manning agencies, of which there are over 400 officially registered
in the Philippines (POEA, 2013b). Finally, some find jobs through the
informal seafarer labour market in Manila’s Rizal Park, where each day
thousands of seafarers congregate along the sidewalks in the hope of
landing a spot onboard. This network-based process makes it difficult
for young mariners to get their first jobs unless they have family mem-
bers or other “sponsors”, such as school placement officers, who are
already well connected. The difficulty in getting one’s first ship and the
general precariousness of the labour market means that many seafarers
face extended bouts of unemployment and joblessness, obviously mak-
ing it difficult for them to fulfil the traditional masculine role of family
provider.
Even employed seafarers face many challenges. Amante (2003) found
that approximately 73 per cent of Filipino seafarers were married and
71 per cent had children (for similar results, see NMP, 2006). The
extended absences of migrant husbands and fathers from their spouses
and children can place an enormous strain on marital relations and
their ability to perform, from afar, ideal notions of masculinity centred
on family. One of the most commonly expressed fears among both

active seafarers and their spouses is that of extramarital affairs. This is
particularly acute as seafarers generally have an image of babaero (wom-
anisers) who frequent prostitutes or even have second families in distant
ports. However, many seafarers tended to downplay this reputation and
instead expressed the insecurities that are created by separation from
their spouses. One 46-year-old married second officer with two children
lamented: “I am putting my family life at stake with this kind of job.
In truth, we seamen only rely on the sincerity and faithfulness of our
wives. If they would do ‘kalokohan’ [mess around] and we would know
about it – that would be the hardest thing to accept.” Similarly, a married
second officer with one child noted:
They say sea-manloloko [seamen are tricksters]? That is bullshit

because seamen are niloloko na ngayon [the ones getting tricked].
I know several seamen whom I pity because they are working their
asses off aboard the ship and their wives are doing something wrong
here in the Philippines. They keep on sending money and yet their
wives are free to do anything. So if you are a seaman, your wife should
be trustworthy because you would be away for so many months and
even a year. A lot of incidents like these happen.
A related strain that migration places on seamen concerns their rela-

tions with their own children. In many ways, the seamen who were
interviewed did generally subscribe to Filipino gender norms of con-
ventional fatherhood, performing – as best they can – their roles as
familial authority figures. Yet their laments about their strained rela-
tions with their children even surpassed their fear of wayward wives.
One 29-year-old seaman said in anguish:
I do not get to see my family often because we are on sea for nine
months and are on vacation only for a few months. I feel that I am
growing old but I am not growing old with them. I miss them. It feels
like I am left out. They are all there, growing old together, and then
I come home and see them and I feel like a part of me is missing.
Another 41-year-old seaman with one daughter explained:
I could say that I have spent more time on board than with my fam-
ily . . . my child was one year old . . . . When I was in the ship, whenever
I hear the voice of my daughter, I might be in tears. When I went
Steven McKay 123
home last December, I’m really excited when I saw my family. But
when I was calling her she would not look at my face. She would not
come with me. It took one week before I became near her. Whenever
we would sleep at night, she would cry, so I would sleep outside the
mosquito net . . . . Perhaps [after one week] she understood that I’m
really her father.
Finally, a 30-year-old officer with one child explained:
I often miss my child. When I left, he was only crawling and when
I returned home, he was already running. He did not want to come
near me because I had a mustache. I thought then, “what if I went
on-board again and when I go home he is already married?” You are
not here monitoring your children while they are growing. That is
something. Yes, you are earning this kind of money but there is a
negative effect. That is the negative side of seafaring.
Thus in terms of family relations and fulfilling their roles as husbands

and fathers, Filipino seafarers often find it acutely difficult to maintain
close emotional ties with their children and wives. Yet this does not nec-
essarily mean that the seafarers become emotionally withdrawn. While
Parrenas (2005: 75) found in interviews with children a “tendency of
migrant fathers to reduce expressions of love to the provision of mate-
rial goods”, I found that seafarers do not want to narrow their roles to
simply material provision, but seek multiple ways to connect emotion-
ally with their wives and children. As will be seen below, remittances
can be used in conjunction with other strategies to help migrant men to
“recover”, build and sometimes extend Filipino notions of mature and
emotionally rich masculinity, even when they are not physically present
with their families.
The limit of higher incomes for “mature” masculinity

As other studies have noted, migration and remittances can help
migrant men, despite possibly degrading or “feminized” work abroad, to
achieve masculine ideals at home, particularly in terms of providership
(Datta et al., 2008; Batnitzky et al., 2009). And despite some studies that
argue that women migrants are both better savers and better remitters
than men (Rahman and Fee, 2009), a closer study of Filipino migrants
finds in fact that Filipino migrant men remit more funds than migrant
women (Semyonov and Gorodzeisky, 2005, discussed in more detail
below). This study shows that much of the gender “gap” in remittances
is due primarily to the higher earnings of migrant Filipino men, who

work in generally more highly paid occupations. This is clearly the
case for seafarers, who, as mentioned above, remit on average over USD
14,000 per year. Thus for seafarers – whether officers or of lower rank –
their earnings and remittances represent for their families a real poten-
tial for class mobility. As noted above, seamen come from primarily rural
or working-class backgrounds, with over 50 per cent from farming or
fishing families and only 2 per cent being the children of professionals
(Amante, 2003).
At the community level, seafarer earnings and remittances can help to
bolster their class and masculine standing. One 40-year-old non-officer
with two children explained:
I think our standard of living improved now that I am a seaman. If I

did not become a seaman, I do not know what could have become of
me. We have some land in the province. I might have been plowing
there. Of course when you plow fields, you are nothing. Now when
they see me, I think they have some respect for me.
Similarly, when asked about the status of seafarers alongside other

professions, one older chief officer noted:
in the Philippines, the top is still doctor or lawyer. But now, the
seaman is going up because people know seamen have money. If a
woman knows you’re a seaman, they will want to marry you because
they know they will get a big allotment . . . . But it’s not so high. Sea-
man is a good job for poor people. A good job with good pay that
they can get.
Nevertheless, seafarers – particularly given their increased educational

attainment mentioned above – often feel that they deserve to be
accorded the same status as other, more professional occupations. One
explained: “our salary is bigger than the salary of a bank manager and
yet we are ordinary people. Others look at us as ordinary people and yet
those who work at office just earn PhP20,000 to PhP25,000. They wear
barong [formal Filipino men’s shirt] and people look up to them.” Sim-
ilarly, when comparing seafarers with other professionals, a 41-year-old
married officer noted:
I think we are all the same. The problem is we are accused of being
so many things. One allegation pertains to women. They never call
Steven McKay 125
doctors or lawyers womanizers. It is just us . . . [Seamen] can go to

beerhouses and really splurge. But the truth is, seamen are not the
only ones who womanize or frequent beerhouses.
This image is partly due to the spending patterns of returning seafarers

and/or their families. One seaman explained:
A lot of people see the seamen as only dollars. Sometimes you can’t
blame them because some seamen’s wives are showy. Like in my
sub-division – there are some that buy lots of things to show off, even
if the guy is just an OS [ordinary seaman, the lowest ranked position
onboard].
Investing in masculinity
Because of the lingering negative image of high-earning seafarers as irre-
sponsible spendthrifts, many seafarers try to promote a different mas-
culine image of seafarers as more mature, professional and responsible.
This is often defended in terms of their changing spending and invest-
ment patterns. An engine-room oiler explained: “nowadays, seamen are
different. These young guys now, they know already to save, even the
single ones. They save so they so can have a small business at home,
especially when they are on vacation. The seamen before never saves his
money.” This perspective was echoed by others. Another married oiler
with three children explained: “we are now educated compared to the
seamen before. The old seamen are fond of spending, they even close the
streets for a drinking spree. The seamen now bring home their earnings
direct to their families.” Finally, a young officer, when asked if the iden-
tity of seafarers is changing, noted: “Yes because we are now educated
and devoted with our work. We spend our money wisely instead of hav-
ing a good time at a beerhouse or pubs. We prefer to buy international
call cards to be able to call our families here in the Philippines.” The
responses of these seafarers supports the argument, made above, that
“family orientedness” is at the core of the mature, more “professional”
Filipino masculine ideal and that fulfilment of this role is achieved pri-
marily through earnings and providership.4 These findings echo those of
Rao (Chapter 2, in this volume) and Kusakabe and Pearson (Chapter 3,
in this volume), who find that remittances and spending have different
gendered meanings over a migrant’s life course.
Remittances, then, are central to seafarers achieving mature masculin-
ity, and seafarers tend to emphasise productive investment and family
support when discussing their status within their wider communities.

A 46-year-old chief mate explained:
When I was in elementary and in high school, I really wanted to

become a seaman because I idolized my seamen cousins and uncles.
One of my uncles who was a second engineer had a nice life. He
was sending his children to good schools. So I idolized him and also
wanted to become a seaman so I can have a better to life, support my
family, send my children to school and give my mother an allotment.
An older, chief engineer made similar claims:
I am proud because seafaring enabled me to build a house, buy a

vehicle and buy all the things for inside the house . . . . They [the
townspeople] idolize you because they can see that you have a good
life and your children can wear good clothes. And our tuition fees are
no longer a problem. In other families, these are difficult to pay.
Finally, a 45-year-old officer said that his neighbours “see my lifestyle,

I have my Pajero [a type of sport utility vehicle], my kids are studying
in private school. I have this billiard business. Even though they are not
talking they know how I live a blissful life.” Remittances, in the case
of bolstering community status and claims to masculinity then, tend to
reinforce traditional gender roles of men as providers. However, as will
be seen in the section below, remittances and earnings from migrant
work can also be used by some men to expand their actions beyond
an exclusively provider role, and shift gender and intergenerational
relations within their families.
Remittances and the (re)making of masculinity beyond

the material
The seafarers’ responses regarding their spending and remitting pat-
terns reflect the findings of other studies on migrant Filipino men.
As Maravillas (2005) found, the three primary areas of expenditure are
housing, education for family members and household appliances. One
of the primary investments that seafarers make is in the purchase of land
and the building of a house. And while a house is clearly constructed
for the benefit of the family, it is also an investment that promotes the
seafarers’ image in his community. As Parrenas (2005: 70) argues, “home
measures the masculinity of men in the Philippines, with its size consid-
ered to be one determining criterion of the successful fulfilment of one’s
Steven McKay 127
role as haligi ng tahanan”. Seafarers, like many overseas workers from

the Philippines, are quite well known for constructing often enormous
houses in their home towns (Lamvik, 2002). As a married third engineer
explained,
people can see that seamen have money. In my town, lots of seamen,
and they can build houses . . . . Even an AB [able-bodied seaman] or
OS [ordinary seaman], they can already build a house. And you can
always tell a seamen’s house. They always put an anchor on the gate.
An anchor, or a propeller if they are from the engine department.
And maybe on their car or jeep, the name of their ship, so everybody
knows they are a seaman.
Interestingly, while seafarers often like to boast about their home, the
meanings that such outsized investments have for their families are
often more nuanced. In a discussion with community members in an
area where nearly half of the households are headed by seafarers, one
young person explained: “they have really big houses to announce ‘yes,
I am a seaman’. That way, no one will forget. Maybe they have such
big houses so the family and everyone can’t forget. They are somehow
always there, even if they are not.”
The multiple audiences influenced by the seafarers’ investments into
their homes points to a deeper interpretation as to the meanings of
seafarer remittances beyond material provision. Lamvik (2002), in his
anthropological study of Filipino seafarers and their spending, intro-
duces the notion of “conspicuous absence”. Building on Veblen’s well-
known idea of conspicuous consumption, Lamvik argues that Filipino
seafarers invest enormous resources into building family homes as phys-
ical reminders to all of their sacrifices and that their providership is
made possible by their leaving. As Lamvik (2002: 197) puts it, “to be
away [is to] link them to their families. Their absence makes them
present. Through their investments and expenditures on gifts, phone
calls, housing, education, business projects, etc. They achieve a sort of
conspicuous absence.”
Viewed through a lens of conspicuous absence, we can view Filipino
seafarers’ actions and spending patterns as a way for them to remain
connected to their families, even when at sea. In many respects, the
remittances in these seafarer communities serve a similar symbolic
function as those that Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill (Chapter 7, in
this volume) found among migrant sending communities in Indonesia.
In fact, migrant seafarers demonstrate comparable strategies related to
their spending that help them to deal with family issues or to maintain
closer ties with their families and communities. At times, their spend-
ing and actions can help to broaden traditional Filipino gender roles
for both themselves and their wives. Overall, these strategies tend to
fall along a continuum between simple economic provision and build-
ing more emotional connections. At one end, a seaman and father of
two claimed: “in my own opinion, when you are a successful seaman
with a family, your children are the ones who are lucky . . . because you
can give them whatever they want”. Similarly, a 45-year-old officer with
two children stated frankly: “they [my family] are used that I am always
away. When we have some misunderstandings I just give them money –
everything will turn okay.” However, simply providing material goods is
often seen as only second best, a type of stand-in for the absent father.
A 49-year-old chief engineer with three children said:
I have a problem in communication with my family. And I have a

problem with my children because I cannot supervise them person-
ally . . . . Maybe it is okay if I only have one child. But I have three
children. Now, my eldest is giving me a problem . . . I solve this prob-
lem by being open and frank to them. I try to explain to them our
situation. [But] even if we have cellphones, sometimes we cannot
contact our families because there are places where there is no signal.
And sometimes, there are places where it is expensive to call. We have
to pay $5 per minute, off-peak. I would rather buy “pasalubong” [small
gifts] for them.
Another form of conspicuous absence is the buying of physical

reminders of the absent father. One of the main ways is by having many
pictures of the seafarer displayed in the home. One 43-year-old father
explained: “When I arrived here, my children didn’t recognize me. I was
also outside the ‘kulambo’ [mosquito net]. But now, they have already
adjusted because my picture is always shown to them.”
Gender roles for the wives of migrant seafarers can also be somewhat
extended, in relation both to remittances and to fulfilling the needs
of the family. Again, in large part because seafarers face a mandatory
remittance level of 80 per cent of their base earnings, there is substan-
tial capital available for families, which needs to be administered and
spent. And according to the interviews, the vast majority of the “allot-
tees” or receivers of these funds are women (usually wives). In terms of
decision-making about spending, wives are often given much leeway.
For example, a 37-year-old junior officer with two children explained:
Steven McKay 129
I give 60 percent [of my salary] to my family and 40 percent for

myself . . . . My wife and I decide on the allotment. She cannot just
decide by herself on the 60 percent just because I gave it to her. That
money was so difficult to earn. Pretend that you are not husband and
wife but friends doing a business. You should decide what to be spent
now and what should be spent later . . . . When I come home, she still
has a share from my 40 percent. After all, it was in the contract that
everything I own, she also owns.
A 50-year-old captain with two children went even further. In discussing

spending decisions regarding remittances, he noted:
my wife decides. If I would be the one to keep the money, I would not
be able to save. Our arrangement is that my wife is both the “madre”
and “padre de familia” so I do not know if I have money or not. I give
her all that I earn. I have trusted her for many years already. I trust her
100 percent. Before I complained that she was using up the money.
I did not know that she got educational plans for our children. Now
that it is taking me a long time to go on board again, at least I do not
have problems. She has foresight.
Finally, a 41-year-old senior officer with three sons said:
I remit 80 percent of my pay to my family. My wife decides [how to

spend it]. I am just working. Everything about the house she takes
care of it. I have a very good wife. Sometimes she would consult me
about our expenses. If possible, I would send her all of my salary and
not just 80 percent of it.
For wives, then, managing the household and the remittances may be a
way for them to expand their traditional gender roles. As noted, being
left in charge of the household and family often allows them (requires
them?) to be both madre and padre de familia. Although, clearly, their
managerial role does not threaten the providership role that their hus-
bands take and therefore does not completely disrupt traditional gender
relations, it does at least open up another avenue of agency of the
wives of migrant workers to participate in areas that might otherwise
be dominated by their husbands or by other men.
Finally, seafarer themselves, when at home, are often able to draw
on their resources to build connections with their family. Investments
in small businesses, such as rice milling or trading, retail trade or
transportation, can allow seafarers to parlay their higher-than-average

earnings from migrant work into a way to spend more time with their
families and children. For example, one 34-year-old officer with one
child explained:
For instance your eldest is 18 years old, maybe the time you actually
spent with him is just less than five years. Yes you can talk to him
on the phone, etc. but you do not see him in person . . . . After con-
tract, I go home directly. I usually stay here from four to six months.
My company keeps on calling me to come back. Now, it has been two
years already since I last boarded. It is okay because here on-land, I am
also productive, unlike other seafarers . . . I have business on land and
I can be with my child.
Although seamen held generally conventional views of fatherhood,

these migrant fathers did not necessarily or simply accept an emotion-
ally detached role. Instead, they tried quite hard upon their return home
to re-establish emotional bonds with their children. As Parrenas (2008)
speculates, it seems that seamen’s ability to perform as “good providers”
can make it possible for them to transgress other gender roles. In fact,
many seamen break with gender role stereotypes and expand their
household duties when they are on vacation in order to build closer,
more intimate relations. One seafarer explained:
I could say that my relation with my children is affected because I am

often away. But I catch up whenever I am on vacation. I am always
with them. Wherever I am on training, they are with me. I always
give them advice. I allot one month just for them. I always time it
during summer vacations.
Speaking about returning home, a married bosun said: “I’ll be the one
to cook for my kids, go shopping, take them to school, stay home. I try
to do the things my wife does for nine months, to give her a break and
let her relax. I like to do those things for my kids.” Finally, a 45-year-
old second mate with two children took a similar approach in order to
maintain his relevance in the lives of his children:
when I arrive they’re excited, but if I’m staying for a long time, I’m
like nobody here. That’s why I make up for my absence. I wake up
in the morning to prepare their breakfast and I personally give them
their allowance and sometimes I approach them to tell their problems
and be open with me.
Steven McKay 131
As these examples, suggest, gender role transgressions are not limited

to emotionally distant tasks, and they can include child-centred and
emotionally caring activities that help the seaman to re-connect with
his children and be a “good parent”, as well as a “good provider.”
Conclusions
The scholarship on gender and migration has been enlivened in recent

years by the increased study of masculinities, and the meanings and
impact of remittances. Yet the intersection of these debates has not
been fully explored. While much work has been done separately
on hegemonic masculinity, gender issues related to migrant working
women, and remittances as a form of development, few studies have
addressed directly and in concert issues of gender, migrant men and
remittances. In terms of the scholarship on remittances, some studies
in Southeast Asia and more broadly have identified “female migrant
as better savers and remitters than their male counterparts” (Rahman
and Fee, 2009: 112). Yet this study’s findings are more consistent with
other more detailed studies, particularly of the Philippines, that have
shown that Filipino male migrants remit more, “even when taking into
consideration earning differentials between the genders” (Semyonov
and Gorodzeisky, 2005: 45). In fact, Semyonov and Gorodzeisky (2005)
found that the income of households with men working overseas
was significantly higher than those with women migrant workers, and
that the difference is largely due to the higher level of men’s earning
and remittances. The case of seafaring – with its extremely gender-
segmented division of labour and uniquely high level of mandatory
remittances – clearly demonstrates why such broader gender dispari-
ties in the Philippines may exist. And seafarers’ explanations of their
spending and investments also support Semyonov and Gorodzeisky’s
(2005: 63) conclusion from statistical analysis that “the economic com-
mitment of fathers to the households and to their children is no lower
than the commitment of mothers”. Yet it is also clear from the inter-
views that remittances, earnings and spending patterns represent and
mean far more than simple material support to households. Economic
provision, as argued above, is considered to be the cornerstone of mature
Filipino masculinity, and seafarers’ ability to fulfil this traditional role
may in fact make it possible for them to go beyond it as well.
Thus in terms of gender theories, this study has attempted to more
fruitfully mine the intersection between masculinities, migration and
remittances by examining how migratory work helps to open up
opportunities for men to pursue multiple strategies towards securing
a masculine identity. As Connell and Messershcmidt (2005: 841) note,

“ ‘masculinity’ represent[s] not a certain type of man, but, rather, a way
that men position themselves through discursive practices”. My anal-
ysis lays out such discursive and actual practices, and how a particular
group of men actively “do gender” through their interaction with family
members, through their spending and investments, and through partic-
ular actions that are made possible in part by their high level of earnings
and remittances.
What remain in questions is whether Filipino seamen might use their
status as both providers and masculine exemplars to help to influence
changing gender roles in the Philippines. While Filipino seamen are
able to fulfil the role of family provider, they often demonstrate a real
remorse for the emotional distance from their children and partners that
is created by their migratory work. Through transnational communi-
cation and upon their return, these men try hard to re-establish their
emotional links as part of what they consider to be essential to being
a “good father”. Here again, their middle-class position, which allows
them to better control their gender performances, may in fact open up
space to transcend traditional gender roles towards the development of
more emotionally engaged parenting.
Notes
1. This has been due in large part to the relative decrease in the number
of women going abroad, especially a dramatic reduction in the num-
ber of women entertainers going to Japan as well as a decline in the number
of domestics going abroad (Asis, 2008).
2. A much more detailed treatment of this historical process is part of a larger,
ongoing research project.
3. I develop more fully this nuanced construction of the gender order in a
separate article on the remasculinisation of the hero (McKay, 2011).
4. Again, the changing class background of seafarers creates some tension
between older, working-class models of masculinity and newer, more middle-
class or “professional” models of masculinity. I discuss the tensions between
these class models of masculinity in much more detail in another article
(McKay and Lucero-Prisno, 2012).
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Part II
Remittances and Generational
Dynamics of Change
6
Migrant Remittances, Population
Ageing and Intergenerational
Family Obligations in Sri Lanka
Michele Ruth Gamburd
Introduction
In the early decades of the 21st century, countries are increasingly

participating in the global economy. Many developing nations, such as
Sri Lanka, send not only goods but also labourers into international mar-
kets. Since the late 1970s, working-class Sri Lankans have sojourned in
West Asia as guest workers in ever-growing numbers.1 In 2009, when the
data that are analysed here were gathered, Sri Lanka had a population
of 20 million, and roughly 1.8 million transnational migrants worked
abroad (SLBFE, 2010: 4, 142). Migrants thus constituted 9 per cent of
the population, and over half of the migrants were women (SLBFE, 2010:
6). Some 89 per cent of these sojourner women worked as domestic ser-
vants, most of them in the Gulf (SLBFE, 2010: 11). Female migrants’
most often stated goal was to earn money abroad, buy land and build a
house in Sri Lanka and improve their family’s status. Recently, members
of the younger generation (often well-educated children of the older
labour migrants) have been going abroad, heading not only to the Gulf
but also to more desirable destinations, such as Korea, Cyprus, Malaysia,
Israel and Italy, sometimes with the hope of settling permanently in
their host country.
As scholars have repeatedly pointed out in cases worldwide, migration
patterns affect family strategies for caring for household members (Cole
and Durham, 2007: 12; Kusakabe and Pearson, Chapter 3; Magazine and
Sanchez, 2007; McKay, Chapter 5; Parrenas, 2005; Rao, Chapter 2, in
this volume; Lamb, 2009). Although a number of scholars have writ-
ten about the effects of migration on the children of migrants (Athauda
139
140 Remittances and Generational Dynamics of Change
et al., 2000; Parrenas, 2002, 2005; Gamburd, 2008; Nicholson, 2006),

fewer have examined the migration outcomes for elders (Lamb, 2009;
Liu, 2014). Care for elders is an issue of growing global importance, par-
ticularly in the face of widespread population ageing that is now taking
place in developing nations.
Sri Lanka’s population is ageing faster than those of most developing
countries (de Silva, 2007: 23).2 The population size is stabilising, but the
population structure is changing rapidly, from a pyramid with many
young people and few elders, to the column that characterises most
developed nations. The change will have a dramatic outcome: Sri Lanka
“will have the third oldest population in Asia and the largest share of
elderly relative to its income status in the world by 2025” (Gamaniratne,
2007: 2–3). The change in population structure will create significant
social, political and economic challenges in the near future, as fewer
children are born, family sizes shrink, elders need increasing amounts
of care and individuals have fewer siblings with whom to share these
filial responsibilities. Douglass (2014: 315) refers to this situation as a
“decline of the intergenerational resilience of households” and queries
whether (and, if so, how) transnational labour migration can help fami-
lies, households and societies to sustain themselves and cope with such
demographic change.
As the demographic shift progresses, how will Sri Lankan families
navigate the confluence of these trends in migration and demography?
In this chapter, I ask how emerging remittance practices will influence
existing family relations, and how changing family structures and care
needs will affect migration strategies. Key to investigating these topics
is learning how families prioritise the importance of remittances and
care work. Currently, the burden of care is shouldered by women of
the “sandwich generation”, the working-age population that looks after
both children and elders. Coincidentally, women in this demographic
group also make up the bulk of the transnational domestic workers who
sojourn in the Gulf, remitting much-needed foreign exchange.
Based on qualitative ethnographic data that I gathered in 2009,
this anthropological essay explores how Sri Lankan families formulate
strategies to cope with social reproduction. Drawing on concepts of
linked lives (Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke, 2008) and global householding
(Douglass, 2014: 313), I focus on intergenerational obligations, examin-
ing what happens when migration comes into conflict with gendered
kinship duties to care for needy children and elders. Insights from Sri
Lanka may shed light on patterns of labour migration and population
ageing in the wider global economy.
Michele Ruth Gamburd 141
Working-class migration to the Gulf: Family and finances
Since 1992 I have studied the effects of labour migration on resi-

dents in Naeaegama,3 a coastal village of Sinhala-speaking Buddhists
in Sri Lanka’s Southern Province. In Naeaegama, as in much of the
rest of the country, the jobs available for working-class individuals are
mostly poorly paid and temporary (Jayaweera et al., 2002: 24). Employ-
ment opportunities for men include work in the armed services or the
tourism industry, civil service jobs, daily manual labour jobs, and self-
employment as cinnamon peelers, or makers and peddlers of coconut
fibre brooms. Opportunities for women include making coconut fibre
rope, teaching and working in local garment factories. Most signif-
icantly, since the early 1980s a large and ever-growing number of
women from Naeaegama have gone to work abroad as domestic servants
(Gamburd, 2000).4 Although transnational female domestic workers
earn only an average of USD 100–120 a month while abroad, this is
more than double the median monthly per capital income for Sri Lanka
(a bit less than USD 40 in 2006; Department of Census and Statistics,
2007: 28). A transnational domestic worker earns between two and five
times what Naeaegama women could earn working in Sri Lanka, and
such wages equal or exceed the wages that are earned locally by most
village men.
In 2009 about 10 per cent of Naeaegama residents had experience
working abroad, and roughly 50 per cent of the village households
had, or had had, at least one person abroad. Three-quarters of these
migrants were female. Reflecting national trends, most female migrants
from Naeaegama came from the 20–45-year age range, had six to nine
years of schooling, were married and had two or more children and had
not otherwise worked outside the home (Eelens et al., 1992; Weerakoon,
1998: 102). Data from Naeaegama corroborate studies that suggest that
each migrant woman supports an average of four to five members of her
family (Weerakoon, 1998: 109; Jayaweera et al., 2002: 1).
Kinship imposes intergenerational rights and moral obligations
throughout the extended family (Stone, 2010: 5). Migrants earn wages
and send remittances to their families back home to fulfil a num-
ber of purposes. Migrants often borrow funds from moneylenders in
order to pay manpower recruitment agencies. Thus in their first months
of employment their remittances often repay these debts (Gamburd,
2000). Filial duties create fiscal responsibilities, and remittances repay
symbolic debts to families (see also Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in this vol-
ume). At the same time, remittances create further obligations within
the family. “Deposited”, in a metaphorical sense, into the domestic

economy, remittances count as contributions to a savings account or
as payments to an insurance scheme. Migrants who work to repro-
duce the whole family (including children and elders) at the current
time could be seen to repay costs for their own upbringing and to save
for their future retirement. Families most often view these exchanges
between generations as a form of generalised reciprocity, in which no
accounts are kept (Cronk, 2008) and for which no thanks are expected.
Nonetheless, filial obligations and duties create a firm sense of social
responsibility between family members, which most individuals strive
to the best of their ability to meet. Years of family history create “webs
of interdependence” (Liu, 2014: 305) and “networks of obligations”
(Kusakabe and Pearson, Chapter 3, in this volume) across generations –
duties and expectations that link lives and evolve over the life course.
In Sri Lanka as elsewhere in the developing world, choices about
migration depend not only on individual whims and family conver-
sations, but also on larger social and economic factors (see Hoang and
Yeoh, Chapter 11; Yea, Chapter 10, in this volume). When people can-
not make ends meet at home and migrate in order to support their
families with remittances, they face challenges in “doing family” at a
distance (Locke et al., 2013b: 1883). Hoang and Yeoh point out in the
Introduction that need for remittances and subsequent migration can
shift not only individual identities and family relations but also social
conventions in sending countries. Family negotiations take place within
(and simultaneously recraft) an “inter-generational contract between
parents and children” (Huijsmans, 2014: 299–300). Indeed, demogra-
phers use this concept to evoke “the dependencies between generations”
(Whitehead et al., 2007: 5), considering both cooperation and possible
conflicts between family members regarding the exact nature of kin obli-
gations and expectations. In conversation with the current literature on
householding, I here explore “the changing nature of intra-household
dynamics” while also attending to “persistence of norms surrounding
gender and generational responsibilities and identities” (Brickell and
Yeoh, 2014: 260).
The extended family plays a key role in facilitating women’s migration
from Naeaegama (Gamburd, 1998), and household financial strate-
gies have changed over the years in light of the multiple demands
on migrants’ remittances. Evidence suggests that families narrow the
bounds of kin-based reciprocity to reward those relatives who directly
facilitate the migrant’s endeavours (Gamburd, 2004). In many cases, a
migrant woman’s mother, mother-in-law or other female relative takes
on domestic duties such as childcare, thus enabling the migrant to work

abroad. In return the migrant finances daily consumption needs for the
family and seeks to repay her kin as best she can. How does this debt
play out, however, after a migrant’s return from overseas? And what
happens as individuals in the parental generation age and require care
themselves – a situation that may impede a migrant’s future mobility
and wage-earning capacity? I explore the national context for these
family questions below.
Demographic shift: The ageing of Sri Lanka’s population
Most developing countries have a low percentage of elders in the pop-

ulation. Until recently, Sri Lanka shared this characteristic, but the
situation is starting to change: in 2000 the percentage of the population
over 60 was 9.2 per cent, but by 2050 it is predicted to be 29 per cent
(World Bank, 2008: ii, 2). Although the total population in Sri Lanka
will remain stable at roughly 21 million people, Sri Lanka’s population
structure will change rapidly and dramatically as elders live longer and
fertility rates drop.
This population-level transformation, also called a demographic shift
or revolution, reflects progress regarding a number of social indicators.
It reflects declines in mortality and increases in longevity due to the
development of Sri Lanka’s public health system (e.g., the eradication
of malaria), as well as inherently gendered changes such as progress in
family planning (e.g., greater availability of contraception), the decline
in fertility and the rising rate of female participation in the labour force
(de Silva, 2007: 8, 12). On this note, labour migration certainly con-
tributes to lower fertility, because women defer or delay childbearing
while they or their husbands are working abroad (Morrison, 2004: 30).
Other factors in the shift include a rising standard of living (including
better nutrition), changing concepts of the ideal number of children,
greater education for women, increased age at marriage, and the avail-
ability of social security systems that do not rely on kinship networks
(Gamaniratne, 2007: 2, 3; World Bank, 2008: 6).
Although the demographic shift results from a number of positive
social changes, it also creates new challenges in caring for the aged.
A recent World Bank report suggests that Sri Lanka urgently needs to
shore up its traditional support system for the elderly, develop com-
munity care services (which are all but non-existent today), figure out
income sources for the elderly, adjust the healthcare system to meet the
needs of the aged, and think creatively about how to get older workers
back into the labour force (2008: iii–iv). The authors suggest that unless
Sri Lanka makes major adjustments to meet this social challenge, it will
face “serious problems or even crisis” (World Bank, 2008: i). The execu-
tive summary of the report concludes with bold-faced text: “Inaction is
not a viable alternative” (2008: vi).
In Asia, tradition dictates that relatives take care of elders at home.
A 1990 UN study examined the role of the elderly in several develop-
ing nations. The vast majority of elders in the survey felt that children
should take care of their elderly parents. In Sri Lanka at that time,
85 per cent of elders lived with their children and often contributed
as they could to household tasks, such as caring for grandchildren,
preparing food and taking care of other chores (Kaiser and Chawla,
1994: 44–45). A decade and a half later, figures in Sri Lanka had
changed little. The World Bank’s 2006 Sri Lanka Aging Survey reports
that “nearly 80% of old people live with their children” (World Bank,
2008: 7), and Gamaniratne reports that 90 per cent of Sri Lankan
elders live in multiple-person households (2007: vii). Recent literature
on “householding” challenges ethnographers to consider how migra-
tion forces the concept of household to include family members who
do not live under the family roof at the moment in question but remain
intimately engaged with the people who do.
Elders’ economic activity

The World Bank report notes the need for Sri Lanka to figure out income
sources for the elderly and to get older workers back into the labour force
(2008: iii–iv). These points deserve comment and critique. The evalua-
tion of elders’ economic activity must happen on a family or household
basis rather than on an individual basis, in contexts such as South Asia
where extended family arrangements are prevalent and the family serves
as a unit of economic activity.
As numerous scholars have pointed out (e.g., Kreager and Schröder-
Butterfill, Chapter 7, in this volume), elders around the world might
not engage in wage work but their domestic labour often enables other
family members to work locally or abroad. In Sri Lanka, grandparents
regularly look after grandchildren. For example, one Naeaegama grand-
mother spent 20 years looking after half a dozen youngsters while her
daughter and two daughters-in-law worked abroad. As the demographic
shift progresses, people not only live longer but remain active further
into old age. The age of 60, which is a key cut-off point for calculating
the dependency ratio, does not necessarily represent a point at which
an individual needs or receives care.
A number of elderly informants in Naeaegama made clear that they

received much less financial and social support from their families than
they provided. For example, a retired military officer (68) noted that
even though he had provided lavish dowries for his four daughters when
he sent them to their in-laws’ homes, all were back at his house – with
their husbands and children – significantly draining the household cof-
fers. “I have no peace and quiet to sleep, let alone to meditate,” he
grumbled acerbically, and he lamented the lack of money in his savings
account. When grandparents provide food and lodging or enhance a
family’s economic status by facilitating migration, they perform a finan-
cially significant function and should not be considered economically
inactive. Such elders are not a burden but rather an asset to the fam-
ily. Conversely, as Lloyd-Sherlock and Locke point out (2008: 791), it is
problem children who can provide “a prevalent source of unhappiness
and vulnerability among older people”.
Despite financial reserves and the ability to work past the age of
60, the fear of penury in old age is a perennial one. Sri Lankan elders
who were surveyed in 1990 felt that low economic status was their
primary problem (Kaiser and Chawla, 1994: 47). Many migrants in
Naeaegama went abroad explicitly to address this sort of family predica-
ment. And remittances do aid the extended family. For example, a study
in Bangladesh found that migration was beneficial to both the financial
status and the health of migrants’ parents (Kuhn, 2005: 204).
Tensions can arise as families strategise about how best to deploy
their available resources. Locke and Lloyd-Sherlock note that in devel-
oping countries, “Existing expectations and experiences of life stages
are often changing rapidly” (2011: 1132). Pressures on these expecta-
tions arise through the conjuncture of the demographic transformation
and ever-increasing integration into the international labour market in
Sri Lanka as elsewhere in Asia (Huijsmans, 2013: 1896). As their parents
age, Sri Lankan migrants (particularly women) must choose whether to
go abroad and earn money for the family or to remain home and care for
their relatives. The remainder of this chapter covers normative expecta-
tions and practical negotiations in Naeaegama as people struggle to fulfil
conflicting kinship duties in light of population ageing and widespread
female migration.
Field research
In 2009 I undertook two months of systematic research on the topic

of intergenerational family obligations surrounding ageing and the life
course. My long-time research associate Siri and I realised the diffi-

culty of directly broaching topics of kinship duties and elder care. Such
queries probed intimate emotional and financial matters. After nearly
two decades of developing rapport with members of these families and
learning Naeaegama norms for appropriate interactions, bluntly asking
questions about these topics would have seemed inexcusably rude and
intrusive. Therefore Siri and I employed an indirect approach. We asked
our interviewees to comment on 12 fictional scenarios.5 Three scenar-
ios that deal with migrant remittances and intergenerational exchanges
of care work are discussed here. We asked that for each scenario our
interviewees discuss what they thought the people in the scenario
should do and why. We asked this of all interviewees. When we felt it
was appropriate, we asked whether the interviewee knew of any actual
cases of this sort. In some circumstances, people volunteered informa-
tion about a situation in their own family. In such cases we let people
provide as much or as little information as they saw fit. Using this strat-
egy, we garnered rich data without making bad-mannered demands for
private information, and our interlocutors could avoid what they per-
ceived as sensitive subjects without discourteously refusing to answer a
question.
As a research technique, the use of scenarios offers both advan-
tages and disadvantages. An advantage is that scenarios trigger nuanced
replies with lower risks of bias because respondents can be objective in
their responses without the fear of having their private lives intruded
upon. However, a disadvantage is that this approach is likely to elicit
normative responses – a tendency perhaps enhanced by the presence
of my research associate, a high-status local resident. As ethnographers
commonly note, what people say they would do in an ideal case can be
at odds with what they actually do when confronting a real situation.
Therefore here I present some actual cases from Naeaegama as well as
villagers’ discussions of the scenarios. I contextualise these qualitative
ethnographic data within longitudinal information about the village of
Naeaegama, its people, its migration patterns, its kinship structures and
its gender norms.
Breadwinning vs. care work
Naeaegama’s norms and values about remittances and care work unfold
in the context of two large-scale trends: increasing transnational migra-
tion and rapid population ageing in Sri Lanka. To gather data on this
topic, my research associate and I crafted two scenarios to explore family
choices between keeping lucrative jobs and caring for needy relatives.
In scenario #1, a husband and wife both have good jobs in Sri Lanka.
One member of the couple has an ageing mother. When she was able,
the mother cared for the couple’s children. Now she is ill and needs
to receive care herself. We described the fictitious situation and asked
our informants, “How should the ageing mother be cared for and who
should do it?” In scenario #2, a migrant mother is working abroad.
Her mother-in-law, who has been caring for the children, falls ill. We
described the situation and asked our informants, “Should the migrant
return?” In both cases, an elder who has facilitated economic activities
by providing childcare has reached a state where she must call on her
family to reciprocate many years of kin work. Discussions of these sce-
narios revealed local norms and values surrounding filial duties, social
reproduction, social and financial resources, social protection, and the
risk of insufficient care for children and elders.
Filial duties
Informants uniformly agreed that the family members in both scenarios
were obligated to care for the ailing relative. In their responses, they fre-
quently used the words “responsibility” and “duty”. For example, Janaki
(a retired female school principal from a cash-strapped but respected
family in the village) remarked about scenario #1, “They must look after
her. It is a duty, and only rarely would someone refuse to do that job.”
People in Naeaegama praised and honoured people who looked after
their parents. For example, Lalini and her contractor husband noted
that it was better for the family members to take care of the ageing rela-
tive themselves than to hire someone. Lalini’s husband said, “We would
do it willingly/eagerly for our own relative.” Caring for elderly family
members is conceived of normatively as a duty and a pleasure, and ful-
filling such an obligation is a source of social prestige in Naeaegama,
where neighbours usually know what happens in others’ homes.
Turning to an actual example, Lalani and her husband noted that my
research associate, Siri, had cared for both his mother and his father.
His father had recently passed away in the family home at the age of
96. Siri had foregone formal employment to look after his father; the
family subsisted on Siri’s wife’s earnings and his father’s pension. During
our research, many of our other informants remarked positively on the
service that Siri and his wife had provided for his parents.
Discussing the scenarios, informants often distinguished between
acute but short-duration situations (a family member near death, or
recovering from a broken leg or about to undergo a serious operation)
and chronic situations requiring long-term care (blindness or dementia).

To care for acute illnesses, short-term leave for the couple in scenario #1
(if no one else was available to deal with the problem) and a short return
from the Gulf by the migrant in scenario #2 were advised. For exam-
ple, Rosalin, an impoverished elderly woman living alone, suggested
that a migrant should come home if the grandmother were critically
sick. Similarly, while peeling cinnamon with her husband, Shiromali
said that the wife in scenario #1 needed to take the ailing elder to the
hospital. Shiromali’s husband Lalith nuanced the situation, noting that
if long-term care was required, the couple should hire someone for a
reasonable salary to look after the mother, without quitting their jobs.
Informants expressed a consensus that when possible, people in the
scenarios should fulfil their filial responsibilities with short-term leave,
without endangering their prospects of long-term employment. These
statements reveal that in Naeaegama as elsewhere in the world, people
approach “householding” as a holistic strategy involving the “translo-
cal production of social security by migrants and their families” (Locke
et al., 2013b: 1886).
Financial resources
Informants invariably asked about the financial resources of the fami-
lies in the fictive scenarios. Reflecting local realities, most informants
assumed that the remittances sent by the migrant in scenario #2 were
vital to the family income. Referring to this scenario, retired male
schoolteacher Dayawansa noted, “She can’t leave her job and come
home, because the family income would go down. If she didn’t need
money, she wouldn’t have gone abroad in the first place, would she?”
Similarly, policeman Anura said,
If she comes home and she was the one who was supporting her hus-
band and kids, then they’ll have economic problems. The husband
can look after everything at home if he is good and can control the
money that she sends. If the wife comes home, the family will have
no income. Everyone depends on her money.
Along these lines, Malani (a middle-aged woman astrologer) remarked,

“If someone here can look after the sick person for pay, it is better for
the migrant to stay abroad. If the woman comes home, she can help the
person, but there will be no money, so the family will start to have prob-
lems.” Amerasinghe (an 85-year-old man recovering from a debilitating
stroke) summed it up this way: “The woman should stay abroad and
send money. It would be foolish to come home.” In all of these cases,

migrant remittances were deemed key to family wellbeing. The obliga-
tion to maintain financial stability for the whole family trumped the
migrant’s individual duty to provide personal care to the ailing elder.
These sentiments echoed the values that were used to assess the suc-
cess and failure of local migration endeavours. For example, Lakmini
was a 52-year-old mother of four who had over a dozen years of
experience in the Gulf. In 2005 she blamed her daughter’s five failed
migration attempts for the family’s poverty and continued debt. She
said, “My daughter keeps going abroad and coming home after only
one year. If she is going to go abroad, she should go and stay there, even
if she is suffering.” Lakmini had provided the money for her daughter’s
endeavours. Breaking a labour contract is detrimental to a migrant; if a
domestic servant leaves her job early, she often has to pay for her ticket
home out of her savings and then has to pay the recruitment fees for
another job. In contrast, women who complete their terms of service
successfully can often renew their contracts without charge and receive
free round-trip tickets from their employers for a month-long vacation
in Sri Lanka. Choices about early return have significant financial effects
on entire families, and people usually encourage migrants to complete
their contracts.
Informants’ discussions of family income in scenario #1 were slightly
more nuanced, given that there were two earner/care-givers and that
they were employed locally rather than in the Gulf. Nevertheless, vil-
lagers felt that both members of the couple should, if possible, retain
their jobs. Ramani, a stay-at-home mother, noted, “They need to keep
their jobs. These days you need two salaries to live and to take care
of a family. So they should get a servant.” Similarly, the elderly man
Amerasinghe expressed his opinion: “They need to keep their jobs, oth-
erwise how will they all eat? If someone quits a job, it’s not good for
either the old parent or the young couple.” Maintaining a stable income
again superseded other familial duties and responsibilities. The actual
strategies employed in Amerasinghe’s family mirrored those in both
scenarios. Amerasinghe’s two sons and two daughters had all worked
abroad at some point. One daughter sent occasional financial support
from Cyprus and had not returned to Sri Lanka despite her father’s
stroke. Amerasinghe lived with his son (who at the time of our interview
worked as a bus conductor) and his daughter-in-law (who also worked
outside the home), and he looked after his three school-age grandsons.
In discussing both scenarios, informants regularly asked whether the
ailing relative had property or a pension, and whether the migrant’s
husband had a job. If the potential care-giver was a major breadwinner

in a family with few if any other resources, economic prudence dictated
that the breadwinner should keep his or her job. With their lives linked
together, the long-term wellbeing of members of the entire family rested
upon these financial decisions.
Social networks
Another major issue pertained to the social resources that the families in
the scenarios could call upon. Informants in Naeaegama assumed that
extended families would and could provide short- or long-term labour
to deal with health crises. Gender played a role in discussions about
which member of the couple in scenario #1 should take leave or give
up a job. Janaki suggested that it would be rarer for the husband to give
up his job than for the wife to give up hers. This view aligns with the
general expectation that women will do care work and men will serve
as breadwinners. It also reflects that men earn more than women on
the local job market. Most informants suggested, however, that if other
individuals were available to do care work, those people should be called
upon, rather than asking either of the spouses in scenario #1 to give up
their job, or asking the migrant in scenario #2 to return home.
Family members were preferred as care-givers, but hiring help was also
a common suggestion. For example, a returned female migrant, Indrani,
suggested for the couple in scenario #1 that “They should hire a servant.
Or they could get a daughter or daughter-in-law to help, even if she had
to give up her job.” Indrani implicitly suggested that someone already
engaged in care work for children could relatively easily expand her role
to look after the needy elder. A number of people suggested that poor
relations could be called on to take on the duty. For example, Sumitha,
a retired female schoolteacher, commented on scenario #1:
Let’s suppose that one of the couple has an unmarried relative. Per-
haps there’s a relative on the sick mother’s side. Ask her if she can
come to look after the mother. It’s best if it’s a relative. And if there
are young kids, you can hire a servant to look after them. The relative
can look after the mother and supervise the servant, instructing her
how to look after the kids. If there isn’t a relative to bring like this,
it’s not so good. A servant isn’t going to do the job right. You need a
trustworthy person.
Daughters, daughters-in-law and poor female relatives, by virtue of their

gender and their kinship connections, could be called upon to take on
such long-term, potentially onerous family responsibilities.
Local families seeking servants found themselves in competition with

wages offered abroad. The issue of hired care prompted Janaki to lament,
“In the old days people had servants to look after the elders. They gave
those servants rice and coconuts in exchange. Now everyone has gone
abroad, or is at work. One can’t find servants now!” She noted that
ongoing female labour migration to the Gulf had reduced the pool of
available poor relatives and hireable help in the village.
A vocal minority of sandwich generation women, all of whom had
experience in dealing with the long-term care of needy elders, felt
that family members should take on the responsibility for ailing elders
without passing it on to hired help. For example, Darshini (whose
mother-in-law suffered from dementia) felt that for long-term care, one
of the couple in scenario #1 would need to leave his or her job. She
noted, “Hiring someone isn’t the same; that person won’t treat the aged
mother like a family member would.” In this case, one of Darshini’s
sisters-in-law was working abroad and the other had moved out of the
village, delegating their mother’s care work to Darshini. As the wife
of the youngest son of the family, Darshini had assumed the tradi-
tional role as parental care-giver in exchange for her nuclear family
inheriting the parents’ house and property. She had never worked out-
side the home, though she made breakfast foods for sale at a local
shop. Her care work freed her kin to go abroad, but their migration con-
strained her family structure and her employment options. The village
temple’s Buddhist monk, Mahanama Thero, said that he understood
the economic need to hold a job but thought that looking after the
elder oneself held intrinsic value and generated karmic merit. In these
cases, social norms and religious traditions reinforce the ethic of family
responsibility for elders.
Vulnerability
The fictional individuals’ stage in the lifecycle and degree of vulner-
ability to various sorts of harm influenced how informants discussed
the decisions faced by the families in the scenarios. Informants often
focused on the age, gender and amount of attention required by the
people who needed care. Indeed, providing “social protection” for
elders and children, particularly during life-course transitions, may
require that families or households “renegotiate inter-generational care
arrangements” (Locke et al., 2013a: 1874).
Interesting differences arose between the care of elders and the care
of children. Informants uniformly suggested that it was more important
for the migrant in scenario #2 to come home to care for her children
than it was for one of the couple in scenario #1 to resign from his
or her job to care for the elderly mother. At stake here was malleabil-
ity of character; children were deemed more likely to “go wrong” or
“go bad” without maternal care. One informant, a single mother with
two grown children, thought that a servant could take care of a needy
elder. However, she noted, “You can’t hire someone to look after your
kids. The kids won’t turn out right if you do that.” Sumitha similarly
stated, “The migrant woman must come back. If she’s not there, then
the whole family will be ruined. The education of the kids and other
such things won’t get done.” Lalith and his wife Shiromali (neither of
whom had worked abroad) opined that mothers should not go to the
Gulf at all; “Their kids will go bad.” Shivanthi, a female high-school
teacher, noted, “It’s hard to educate kids if their parents are abroad.” The
stakes were different in caring for children and elders; elders might not
receive sufficient help from servants, but their characters were not sub-
ject to corruption. Without proper care for the children, however, the
family’s future was at risk. “Lives are lived interdependently”, as Lloyd-
Sherlock and Locke point out (2008: 792), and familial social relations
play out over generations through the life course of multiple family
members.
Gender formed an additional vector of choice in understanding
vulnerability and harm. For example, informants asked whether the
children in scenario #2 were sons or daughters, and also wondered about
their ages. Daughters (particularly those who had reached puberty) were
deemed at more risk than were sons. From the onset of menstruation
until the day of marriage, a young woman’s parents (particularly her
mother) are responsible for guarding her reputation and her virginity,
thus preserving the young woman’s eligibility for marriage. High-school
teacher Shivanthi and her mother Emaline agreed that girls could “get
spoiled” without their mothers. Emaline noted, “If one of the migrant’s
daughters reaches puberty, there’s no way the grandmother can keep
track of her.” Such sentiments were shared widely in Naeaegama.
Indeed, many female migrants planned their two-year contracts to allow
them to be home for their daughters’ vulnerable teenage years. In a real
case, a Naeaegama migrant found herself unable to return to the Gulf
because her eldest daughter had reached puberty and neither grand-
mother was able or willing to look after the girl. Another woman told me
that she ceased migrating after her eldest daughter turned 13. She said,
“It wouldn’t have been worth it to have more money if the kids had
gone wrong.” In South Asia, where arranged marriage is key to family
status and caste relations, people attend to the supervision of unmarried
teenage daughters with great care (Kapadia, 1993; Gold, 2010: 81). In Sri
Lanka as elsewhere in the world, “Individual lives are inter-related with

the events and transitions experience by close relatives and associates”
(Locke and Lloyd-Sherlock, 2011: 1136).
Households respond contextually to external changes and internal
dynamics (Huijsmans, 2014: 294). The household arrangement resulting
from bringing in a servant was also subjected to gender-related criteria.
For example, speaking of scenario #2, Ramani said:
The husband can’t take care of the sick mother because you need a
woman to take care of another woman. And you can’t bring a female
servant into the house to take care of the sick mother because the
husband is there but the wife is not. So the only solution is for the
migrant to come home. The husband can take care of the kids but
not of the wife’s mother.
The actual situation in another Naeaegama household mirrored the

values that Ramani expressed. Lal and his mother for many years
looked after Lal’s brother’s four sons and daughter while his sister-
in-law, Indrani, worked abroad and his brother worked in Sri Lanka.
Lal’s mother’s inability to bathe without aid triggered Indrani’s return
from abroad. Indrani had no explicit objections to having a servant
take care of an elderly family member; indeed, she said during our
interview, “A servant looked after my mother for a number of years.”
Although Indrani’s remittances could easily have covered the wages of
a female servant to care for her mother-in-law, the family deemed the
arrangement inappropriate because Indrani herself was not in the home
with her husband and brother-in-law. Indrani relinquished her job and
returned to Sri Lanka. Both in actual and in fictive cases, Naeaegama
villagers were keenly aware that improperly channelled sexuality could
damage reputations and destroy marriages, particularly when migration
separated spouses for many years.
Hiring domestic help could also create situations of unwanted inti-
macy. Commenting on the servant who had looked after her mother,
Indrani said, “She was a good person, and there were no problems.
Sometimes young servants get involved with other people. But you
don’t want to get an old person to look after another old person,
either.” Indrani suggested implicitly that youthful servants had more
strength and energy, but that they might also cause problems through
sexual affairs and unwanted pregnancies. In other words, ideal servants
focused on the reproduction of their employers’ households rather than
engaging in reproductive functions of their own.
Children and elders need and are entitled to social protection from
their kin, particularly during periods of transition (Locke et al., 2013b:
1881). As these informants’ words suggest, vulnerabilities of gender and
age nuance the question of whether a worker should give up his or her
job to care for children or elders. Mahanama Thero, a local Buddhist
monk, caused a gale of laugher with this succinct summary of the dan-
gers: “If the family gets ruined, it’s no use having earned a lot of money.
When a woman is abroad, her husband sometimes takes another wife,
and the kids are running around like baby monkeys.” In discussing these
two scenarios and making actual decisions about migration, informants
weighed economic gain from income (from local jobs or from overseas
remittances) against various duties and risks in evaluating a strategy
that would be for the entire family’s long-term benefit. In the process,
they highlighted expectations of intergenerational care, debts incurred
to parents for their past services, and the long-term investments that
parents made in their own offspring.
Grandchildren
The first two scenarios dealt with the choice of sandwich-generation

individuals between keeping a lucrative job and caring for a needy fam-
ily member. The third scenario asked informants to compare at the
grandchild generation the relative value of remittances and care work.
My associate Siri and I crafted this scenario to decipher how genera-
tional distance and phase in the life course affected kinship obligations
to do care work. In this scenario, an elderly grandmother has two grand-
children. One lives close by and provides “help from the hand”. One
lives far away or works abroad and sends money home. We described
the fictitious situation and asked informants, “Which service does the
grandmother value more? Why?”
The data gathered from scenario #3 seem on the surface to contra-
dict the information from scenarios #1 and #2. In scenarios #1 and
#2, informants uniformly felt that family members who had lucrative
jobs should not give those jobs up in order to care for elders and chil-
dren unless no other acceptable care arrangements could be made. This
would suggest that remittances and general financial support trump the
performance of care service. But evidence from scenario #3 suggests that
from grandchildren, care is valued more than money. As I discuss below,
youths’ low potential earning power, variation in different generations’
affective interactions and financial responsibilities, and an elder’s need
both for provision and for practical, day-to-day help formed key aspects
in informants’ evaluation of this scenario.
Village attitudes towards the fiscal responsibilities of youth may reflect

patterns in their employment opportunities. In Sri Lanka, young adults
(those up to the age of 29) are more often unemployed or underem-
ployed than older adults, with rates in the Southern Province (where
Naeaegama is located) higher than those in other areas (Department
of Census and Statistics, 2011: 21, 26). Even when work is available,
wages for locally employed youth are often quite low. Migrant youth
earn more. But in both cases, families hope to use youth earnings for
the youth’s own future endeavours (e.g., money for a dowry or capi-
tal to invest in land or a business). Parents and grandparents prefer not
to rely financially on their children, but they welcome and appreciate
“help from the hand”, the “emotional and instrumental support” (Liu,
2014: 311) that greases the wheels of daily practice.
In migrant families in which women from the sandwich genera-
tion had worked abroad, a grandparent’s investment of devotion, love
and time created reciprocal obligations and duties for grandchildren.
A number of informants commented on how much they loved their
grandchildren. For example, Perera, a house-painter, suggested that
grandchildren and grandparents often had close emotional bonds, espe-
cially if the grandparent had cared for the child while the mother
worked abroad or outside the home – as his mother-in-law had done
during his wife’s absence, and as he and his wife did for their daugh-
ter. “Grandchildren often love their grandparents more than they love
their own parents,” Perera said with a wide smile. “If your kids’ kids are
around, it’s good. It’s busy.”
When asked which grandchild was most valued in scenario #3,
Emaline (a grandmother) replied, “That one is obvious, isn’t it?” She felt
that the answer was so straightforward that it required no discussion,
and only replied explicitly after Siri and I twice pushed her to do so.
Like most of our informants, she said that the more valued grandchild
was the one living next door who stopped by to help. “The one living
abroad can’t come and look in. And if the grandmother is dying, the one
next door will help. The money isn’t worth as much as coming over to
help.” Similarly, a retired handyman said, “The close one is better. The
major work is done close by. The best quality is to be there and to help.”
Stroke-affected Amerasinghe, who looked after three grandsons while
his son and daughter-in-law were at work, put it bluntly: “You can get
by without money, but you need help.” And when pushed to explain his
choice of the close grandchild as more valuable, cinnamon peeler Lalith
said, “The close one does the things you can’t do with money. You can’t
do everything with money.” Darshani elaborated on the fickle nature of
money. “Money disappears!” she grumbled. My research associate Siri,
replied, “You have money today. I have your money tomorrow. The next
day, it’s all gone!” From grandchildren, the presence of a reliable helping
hand was deemed more valuable than sporadic remittances.
Informants often elaborated on the sorts of service that the grandchild
living next door could provide. Titus, a middle-aged father of three sons,
noted that the close-by relative could fetch food from the shop and
bring water from the well. An older, unmarried woman with no chil-
dren suggested, “Those relatives look in and see about your suffering
and health, no?” A poor single mother said, “You need someone nearby
to ask if you have had something to eat and drink, to ask if your eyes are
okay.” Another woman noted that her own aged mother, for whom she
had cared up until her death a month before our interview, had told her,
“You are here to give me a glass of water.” Other interviewees mentioned
similar low-cost but vitally important services, including helping some-
one to stand up, or drawing water for a bath at the well or for use in the
toilet. Ramani said, “It’s better to have kaenda (a low-cost but nutritious
vegetable and rice gruel) from the near grandkid than to have fancy
foreign food from abroad.” A retired mask-maker noted of scenario #3,
“Money isn’t what’s needed in this case. What’s needed is someone to
look after the grandmother.” He asserted with pride that looking after
elders in this way was a Sri Lankan custom.
Although receiving help from the hand of a grandchild was deemed
superior in most discussions of scenario #3, many informants did note
the continued importance of money. Sumitha did not rank the service
of the two grandchildren. She said, “Both are good. One sends money
and the other looks after the grandmother. Without money, you can’t
help someone. You must have both.” Similarly, Janaki opined:
One can’t live without money! It is nice to look in on someone,

but we need money to live. For every step, we need it. Everything
is expensive. Medicine is expensive. You need 600 Rupees just to
speak two words with the doctor! That’s just for five minutes and
a prescription!
She went on to detail the expenses that her family had incurred in cur-
ing a serious infection on her husband’s leg, and their need to purchase a
cochlear implant for her deaf grandchild. Rosalin, a poor elderly woman
who lived alone in a ramshackle house, simply noted that, in her opin-
ion, the money would be more important. All three of these informants
were older women who could still take care of themselves but who faced
financial difficulties.
The replies above suggest that individuals in the grandchild genera-

tion are burdened with fewer financial obligations than are individuals
in the sandwich generation, but they are still expected to provide care
services for a grandparent if they are in the vicinity. My research did
not directly explore whether and how a grandchild’s obligation changed
in scenarios where no other family members were available to provide
financial support to the elder, but the data overwhelmingly suggest a
baseline requirement for money. Also, information from other research
scenarios (not discussed in detail here) shows that the obligation to care
for an elder is passed along family lines. Grandchildren would be obliged
to assume financial responsibilities if their seniors had not already done
so. Nevertheless, family obligation thins over the generations, partic-
ularly if an elder has no children, has not provided care for nieces,
nephews or other junior relatives in the past, or has few or no valuable
assets or independent sources of income (Gamburd, 2013).
An ideal situation for an elder, several interviewees suggested, would
be to have family members both at home and abroad. For example,
policeman Anura discussed one of his relatives, an older man who lived
alone:
He has a son in a nearby town, a married daughter living across the

street, and a married daughter living in Oman. The daughter across
the street can give meals and look in on him. The others are sending
money. The one who is married to a doctor comes if there are any
health problems.
Similarly, Indrani and her son discussed scenario #3 energetically.

Indrani asserted (as many informants did) that the child nearby was
more valued. Indrani’s son, however, pointed out, “The far-away one
is doing what he can from a distance. Sending money is also good. You
need that money to buy medicine and things like that.” He then person-
alised the question, noting that his brother was sending money from
Korea, while he himself was at home to help. All of these informants
implicitly reinforce the importance of the extended family in providing
both finances and “help from the hand” for ageing relatives.
Conclusion: Pondering the future
The data gathered from these three scenarios suggest that Naeaegama
residents highly value both care work and remittances. Family members’
duties and obligations vary by gender and generation. Patterns in the
data show that the sandwich generation holds primary responsibility

for supporting an elder financially. In that generation, men are expected
to earn a living, but if a man cannot support the family, his wife must
assume the burden, often by working abroad. This obligation supersedes
her duties as care-giver to an elderly parent or in-law, but may not super-
sede her obligation to her children, particularly her teenage daughters.
Grandchildren’s primary responsibilities are to care for their grandpar-
ents, unless financial difficulties make earning money a priority.
What implications do these modest findings have for a discussion of
the future of Sri Lankan migration, remittances and the extended fam-
ily in a context of rapid population ageing? The World Bank report on
ageing in Sri Lanka suggests that modernisation in Asia brings about
a series of changes that strain the traditional family support of elders:
(a) lower fertility means that there are fewer children to share care;
(b) higher education levels among children may lead to differences of
opinions between parents and children (e.g., about who should provide
care, and how much); (c) female labour force participation may decrease
the number of care-givers at home; and (d) rural–urban migration may
remove young people from the rural areas where most of the elders
live (2008: 9). In Sri Lanka at the moment, economic necessity prompts
labour migration, and female migrants are drawn from the same popula-
tion as care-givers. As the data from Naeaegama show, migration affects
all four factors listed above in ways that will require creative strate-
gies to harmonise financial opportunities and family obligations. The
challenges revolve around issues of gender and intergenerational family
obligations.
Gender
Local gender norms are crucial to understanding elder care. In Sri Lanka
as in much of the rest of the world, women live longer than men and
are less likely than men to have access to public sector pensions or non-
family sources of income (Gamaniratne, 2007: 52). In India, widows
occupy a socially and religiously unfavourable position (Lamb, 2000,
1997: 294). In contrast, Sri Lankans in Naeaegama did not discuss ritual
inauspiciousness, but both villagers and scholars note that Sri Lankan
women of any age should not live alone (Marecek and Appuhamilage,
2011). This limitation will cause a gendered variation in care arrange-
ments, particularly as the proportion of elderly women rises in the
population.
In addition to the gendered perceptions of the elderly, gender roles
also govern care work. The reciprocal bond between parents and
children in Sri Lanka is channelled through women, with daughters-

in-law and daughters bearing the major responsibility for caring for
their parents and parents-in-law. This same group of women has the
corner on care work in the international market. The overseas demand
for elder care is likely to continue to grow in the USA, Japan and the
European Union as neoliberal state policies in labour-receiving countries
continue to privatise care work, and women in those countries turn to
market proxies to fulfil their own filial duties (Chang, 2000; Ehrenreich
and Hochschild, 2002; Ibarra, 2002; Sassen, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo,
2007). Similarly, demand for domestic servants remains strong in the
Gulf. For example, 90 per cent of households in Kuwait employed at
least one domestic servant in the late 2000s (Ahmad, 2010: 27). Thus
choices about remittances and care work take place within pre-existing
national and international understandings of gender identity, family
responsibilities and state-sponsored social services.
While paying careful attention to existing contexts, it is also impor-
tant to understand how gender roles can and do change. For example,
there are changes now under way in roles for Sri Lankan men, who now
do more domestic work than in the past in Naeaegama (Gamburd, 2000,
2008) and in Italy (Näre, 2010). Informants currently note the lack of
local female servants in Naeaegama; women who can work abroad are
eager to do so. But as the migrant profile shifts in Naeaegama and in
Sri Lanka as a whole, more men and fewer women are likely to go to
the Gulf due to family preference and government policy (SLBFE, 2010:
139). Thus the gender composition of the migrant labour force remains
in flux. Similarly, the current high value of virginity in teenage daugh-
ters could change with the growing emphasis in Sri Lanka on women’s
education and employment (Lynch, 2007; Hewamanne, 2008). Changes
of this nature take place slowly, but culturally constructed gender roles
are constantly subject to social transformation (Ortner, 2006; Huijsman,
2014).
Intergenerational family obligations

Contrary to many demographic assumptions about elders’ economic
activity, people in Naeaegama expect that as they age, they will con-
tinue to perform vital services for their extended families. Over the past
three decades, elders have taken on care work for their grandchildren
to allow migrants to work abroad. This pattern seems likely to continue
into the future. Culturally shaped intergenerational kinship obligations
require that returned migrants and grandchildren will in turn care for
family elders when such care is needed.
Within this context, however, migrants’ aspirations provide a source

of social change. In Naeaegama, a generation of poor migrant women
has invested heavily in education for their children. Successful mem-
bers of this educated younger generation have moved from Naeaegama
to the capital city of Colombo or are working abroad in destinations
such as Korea, Italy and Australia that provide opportunities for immi-
gration rather than merely allowing cyclical guest-worker employment
(Wanasundera, 2001; Cole and Booth, 2007; Näre, 2010; Brown, 2011).
As predicted by the World Bank report, these younger individuals are
likely to find that their careers, their migration trajectories and their
family duties pull them in conflicting directions. They are not, however,
likely to forget their financial obligations to family members, as numer-
ous scholarly discussions of remittance behaviour make clear (Trager,
2005; Naufal and Termos, 2010; see also chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 in this
volume). The issues will revolve not around the availability of fund-
ing to support these elders but instead around the availability of kin to
provide “help from the hand”.
Naeaegama’s residents value both financial provision and care work,
both “economic and affective exchanges” (Whitehead et al., 2007: 5),
when considering the complex web of intergenerational debts and obli-
gations. Ideally, an extended family can provide both sorts of social
support for its members. Currently, families use their kinship network
to maximise availability, mobility and job opportunities. Unemployed
relatives or poor servants step in to help women in the sandwich
generation to fulfil their filial duties. Families distribute responsibili-
ties between able-bodied adults so as to retain financial stability while
simultaneously providing the care required for children and elders.
As the demographic transition progresses, however, extended families
will grow smaller and care work will grow more demanding. Both finan-
cial and caring responsibilities will fall increasingly on the young. The
reallocation of obligations is likely to cause tension, stress and conflict
as family members work together to meet the challenges posed by an
ageing population in a globalising world.
Notes
1. Labour migration is not the only source of transnational mobility for Sri
Lankans. Over the past 50 years a steady trickle of the rural elite has moved to
the capital city of Colombo and abroad to Australia and the USA (Morrison,
2004: 32; Waxler-Morrison, 2004: 246). The country has also seen significant
out-migration of Tamil-speaking citizens due to the longstanding civil war
(e.g., Thiranagama, 2014: 268).
2. The median age in Sri Lanka is projected to increase from 30 in 2001 to 33 in

2011, 43 in 2041 and 47 in 2081 (de Silva, 2007: 23).
3. “Naeaegama”, or “the Village of Relatives,” is a pseudonym. Throughout
this chapter I also use pseudonyms for interviewees in order to protect their
privacy.
4. From 1988 to 2007 female migrants outnumbered males, but in recent years
greater numbers of men have journeyed abroad (SLBFE, 2012: Overview,
Table 2.1).
5. The scenario data discussed here come from 29 Naeaegama informants who
were interviewed individually or in groups of two or three during July and
August 2009. Some informants (8) were in their 60s and 70s but did not yet
need care. Others needed some extra care (4) or had experience as care-givers
for elderly family members (17).
References
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7
Differential Impacts of Migration
on the Family Networks of Older
People in Indonesia:
A Comparative Analysis
Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill
Introduction
Elementary questions of migration research often require discussion

grounded in family and community structures: Which members move?
What ties remain to the home community? What information, goods
and other people then move along the same channels? Any individual
member’s migration is, in effect, a potential geographic extension of
norms that guide family solidarity. Yet at the same time it can mark a
break from those norms. Migration provides avenues for meeting com-
mitments, but also ways of escaping them. This chapter considers how
family networks adjust to meet these uncertainties, and examines partic-
ularly the impacts of younger members’ movements on the population
aged 60 and over. We begin by summarising briefly the context of
migration from rural areas in Indonesia, drawing on published results
of Ageing in Indonesia, a longitudinal anthropological demography of
three rural communities.1 A comparison of local-level data is not of
merely provincial interest. The evidence points to more general issues
in Indonesian and European migration history, and the second section
draws on wider literature to show how transnational migration evolves
out of longstanding patterns of local and distance movement within
a country. The third section then presents data on distance migration
and remittances from the three communities in the 2000 and 2005 sur-
vey rounds, together with case studies that are necessary to interpreting
aggregate patterns.
165
The central focus is on the importance of qualitative network ties

relative to remittances, drawing in related issues such as gender pref-
erences and family solidarity. Each community has evolved a distinctive
migration profile. We see, on the one hand, how differences between
them are recognisable variants of long-term migration history. On the
other hand, outcomes for different family networks – particularly how
well they are able to provide for elderly members – show substan-
tial differences. Different patterns of movement may achieve the same
ends, but not for all migrants and networks. These differentials reflect
the way in which family systems, socioeconomic strata and local eco-
nomic constraints shape migration. Particularly important in the case
of Indonesia – and no doubt elsewhere – is that transnational migration
does not exist separately from other forms of movement. Comparison
of the three communities opens a door to the tremendous variation in
labour migration below the national level, and how transnational migra-
tion needs to be understood as an alternative among several preferences,
all of which are of continuing importance.
A research baseline
Three rural communities that were actively engaged in the wider

Indonesian economy were selected for longitudinal study in 1999,
one each in West Java, East Java and West Sumatra. The three were
selected for a combination of characteristics that are typical of con-
temporary social and economic development. The national language,
Bahasa Indonesia, is spoken, but in family and informal contexts the
local languages are preferred: Javanese in the East Javanese community
of Kidul; Sundanese in the West Javanese community of Citengah; and
Minangkabau in the West Sumatran community of Koto Kayo. All three
communities are Muslim, although there is a Hindu minority in the East
Javanese community. With the exception of Kidul, which has long had
in-migration from Madura (without Madurese forming a distinctive sub-
group), each community is composed of a single ethnic group. Javanese
and Sundanese families have long been nuclear in type, with small fam-
ily units and households bound up in bilateral networks of kin. The
Minangkabau are matrilineal, with a strong preference for extended
family co-residence of mothers with at least one daughter in their ances-
tral property. All three communities retain an agricultural base but are
bound up in the labour markets of the wider Indonesian and South-
east Asian economy. Most family income derives from employment
in trade, agriculture, transport, services, small-scale manufacturing or
government jobs.
Philip Kreager and Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill 167
Classic ethnographic methods of participant observation provided the

basis for several datasets: life histories of older people; mapping of elders’
networks; qualitative and quantitative data files synthesising in-depth
interview data; and two rounds (2000, 2005) of surveys on household
economy (N = 205 households), and health and healthcare use (N =
207 elders). Semistructured interviewing of between 80 and 97 per cent
of the older population in each village, and of key younger family mem-
bers in their networks, enabled life courses to be tracked and checked
by comparing different members’ accounts. In-depth and repeat inter-
views of between 20 and 60 informants provided detailed case studies on
the memberships, structure and change of family networks. Wherever
possible, the same families were revisited for qualitative and quanti-
tative follow-up five years after the initial study in 2000. Economic
levels that were evident in survey data on assets, income and expen-
diture were analysed and compared with results of in-depth interviews
on critical factors such as the reputation, size and solidarity of networks,
support preferences, health crises and major events affecting a person’s
life course. This combined quantitative and qualitative methodology
enabled us to document four socioeconomic strata in the commu-
nities,2 and to link people’s relative success to evidence on elderly
support.
As you will see, the findings of this combined, multisite methodology
reveal that many common assumptions about population and develop-
ment do not hold across much of Indonesia. Several of these should
be noted at the outset. Vulnerability and poor socioeconomic status
are associated with having too few children, not too many (Hull and
Hull, 1977; Schröder-Butterfill and Kreager, 2005). Families and house-
holds on Java have long been nuclear in form (Geertz, 1961; Boomgaard,
1989). Such arrangements are therefore not evidence of “modernisa-
tion”, demographic transition or uniform weakening of previous kin
network arrangements. Because small family groups are nested in net-
works of family and community support, standard household survey
data on their own cannot capture principal economic relationships
between households, or the frequent changes in such relationships,
both of which are often critical to elderly status and support. In this
context, distance migration of younger members is not a recent phe-
nomenon. Movement within the archipelago, and across long distances
on the major islands, has a long history and is very prevalent in
some groups. While increasing female involvement in such migration,
and other changes such as a decline in arranged marriages, are rela-
tively recent, they come in a context in which women’s ownership
of property, active role in decision-making and access to divorce are
established practices (Jones, 1994). Marriages between members of dif-

ferent ethnicities are an occasional byproduct of migration, especially in
urban areas.
Transnational migration in relation to other movement patterns

A number of findings provide a baseline for examining labour migration
impacts on older residents, and the place of transnational movement
in this picture. One is the sheer importance of migration. At the
time of the first survey round, between 45 and 75 per cent (depend-
ing on community and socioeconomic strata) of younger generations
in the three sites were living away from their home communities.
Much local movement is not relevant to labour migration because it
reflects marriage patterns. Moves over 100 km, however, are for work
purposes. Distance migration within Indonesia is characteristically to
more urbanised locations, notably Jakarta, Surabaya and Bandung, and
forms part of families’ adaptation to economic and social opportunities.
As Tables 7.1–7.3 show, there are marked differences in distance migra-
tion between the communities. The Minangkabau community of Koto
Kayo stands out, with three-quarters of young adults being involved in
distance migration. This reflects the centrality of labour migration or
rantau in Minangkabau culture: all men and most women are expected
to seek their, and their lineage’s, fortune outside the community; for
over a century, Minangkabau have established a reputation in Southeast
Asia as successful traders (Indrizal et al., 2009). In the case of Koto Kayo,
trade is chiefly in cloth.
Table 7.1 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children: Koto Kayo, West
Sumatra
2000 2005
All (%) Extra-village All (%) Extra-village

(%) (%)
Same village 10.6 − 9.6 −

Nearby place (<10 km) 10.6 11.8 11.2 12.4
Medium distance (10–100 km) 2.0 2.2 6.4 7.1
Long distance (same island) 36.4 40.7 41.0 45.3
Very far (different island) 34.4 38.5 29.8 32.9
Abroad 6.0 6.7 2.1 2.4
Total 151 135 188 170
Source: Authors’ household survey, 2000 and 2005.

Table 7.2 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children: Citengah, West Java
2000 2005

(%) (%)

Nearby place (<10 km) 18.2 36.0 10.4 21.5
Abroad 0.5 0.9 0.0 0.0
Total 220 111 249 121
Table 7.3 Locations of elderly respondents’ adult children: Kidul, East Java
2000 2005

(%) (%)

Nearby place (<10 km) 18.2 31.4 19.1 15.2
Abroad 2.0 3.5 2.8 16.2
Total 148 86 141 99
The other end of the spectrum is shown by the West Javanese com-
munity of Citengah, where a flourishing agricultural economy based
on premium rice land enables families to keep many children closer to
home. Here, the number of all adult children involved in distance migra-
tion is only between 10 and 15 per cent, representing 20–30 per cent of
all migrant children. This also reflects the fact that the major migration
sites (Sumedang, Bandung and Jakarta) are within 100 km.
Distance migration in the East Javanese community of Kidul, at over
20 per cent, reflects an adaptation to economic conditions between
the other two communities. There is relatively little premium rice
land (as in Citengah), and no principle of rantau promoting distance
migration (as in Koto Kayo). Instead, the local economy is more
100
90
80
70
60
%
50
40
30
20
10
0
Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum
I II III IV I II III IV I II III IV
Kidul Citengah Koto Kayo
away, giving annual money away, not giving annual money nearby
Figure 7.1 Proportions of adult children by location and socioeconomic stratum

of elderly parents and patterns of monetary support by children living away from
the community (2005)
diversified and contributions of adult children in the village or within

medium distances draw on a variety of income sources (local trade and
manufacturing, and market and office jobs in nearby towns).
A second main feature of migration is that major differences are evi-
dent between socioeconomic strata. This is observed whether moves
are local or long distance. Figure 7.1 provides an overview of elders’
children’s location for the three communities by strata. Each column
separates those living away and providing monetary support to the
parental generation at least once a year (in black) from those who do
not provide such support (in grey), and those living in or close to the
community (in white).3 Once again, a distinctive pattern is evident for
the Minangkabau community, in which 40–80 per cent of migrants pro-
vide monetary support. By contrast in the two communities on Java,
percentages remitting are 19–40 per cent. Annual contributions prevail
over non-contributing migrants in all but the poorest strata in Kidul.
Greater levels of support in Koto Kayo reflect the importance of rantau in
Minangkabau society: regular remittances carry added value as evidence
of individual and family success. In strata I–III there are far fewer local
children to provide support; higher levels of remittances reflect the far-
flung demographic distribution of network members. Direct financial
support is more likely to be the major mode over long distances, for
obvious reasons. The more mixed patterns of support by strata in com-

munities on Java is partly a function of greater accessibility of support
from those nearby. We return to the issue of the balance of support from
local and distance network members below.
A third finding is that differential movement does not just reflect
strata differences – it reinforces them. Belonging to a higher strata pro-
vides more security and less vulnerability to losing the contact and
support of adult migrant children. Older people in higher socioeco-
nomic groups have larger kin networks and more options for gaining
assistance when they need help (Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, 2007).
These advantages are the compounded benefits of relative wealth and its
transmission across generations. Better-off older people usually enjoyed
a more healthful younger life, enabling more childbearing and child sur-
vival. In their middle years they could provide better education to their
children, who then tend to be more successful, more likely to retain
contact when they migrate and are better able to provide substantial
support. Later in life, wealth often facilitates closer links with other
kin (e.g., support to nieces, nephews and adoptees, who then provide
assistance if the children are busy or far away). Poorer elders are, in con-
trast, much more likely to suffer childlessness in old age, have migrant
children who have ceased contact or provide no real support, and face
much greater dependence on community charity (Schröder-Butterfill
and Kreager, 2005).
However, as the propensity to migrate affects one in five young adults
or more at any time in virtually all strata, movement is evidently not
just a function of relative wealth or education. As Figure 7.1 shows, only
in Koto Kayo do higher strata have a markedly greater likelihood of
migrating than lower. A fourth finding that is fundamental to under-
standing distance migration is that it is a normal component of family
security. For older people, migration affects the supply of children for
immediate support in personal and health crises (see also Gamburd,
Chapter 6, in this volume). Of course, this works two ways, as children
may also rely on them. Most elders have a mixture of children near and
far away, which enables family networks to compensate effectively for
absent children. Such constellations can be understood as a kind of divi-
sion of labour within a network. Some adult children remain local and
play primary roles in sharing food, companionship, labour and intimate
care. Those who live at greater distances visit occasionally, and their
support is most readily conveyed monetarily. This “some near”/“some
far” arrangement is also flexible. At a given moment, some children do
very little to assist their parents, perhaps because they are just starting
their careers, have commitments to their own children, are on bad terms
or are not in demand because others are preferred or already helping.
Networks change, however. Alteration of one child’s economic or par-
enting circumstances may mean that siblings or elders need to take on
their roles. As elsewhere in Asia (see, e.g., Hoang et al. 2012; Kusakabe
and Pearson, Chapter 3, in this volume), elderly parents commonly
take on major responsibilities in rearing grandchildren while their chil-
dren are on labour migration (Schröder-Butterfill, 2004, 2005). Gender
relations are also mediated by this process. Preference for daughters as
carers in later life is strong in all three communities (Schröder-Butterfill
and Fithry, 2014), especially among older women. Increasingly, how-
ever, daughters make up a significant proportion of distance migration:
55 per cent in Kidul, 50 per cent in Citengah and 37 per cent in Koto
Kayo. At a given point in time, preferred daughters are thus commonly
not in the home village.4 For this reason, and also because grandparents’
taking over main parenting roles is strenuous late in life, networks may
provide only a more or less acceptable, or hopefully interim, alternative.
As these variations indicate, the influence of migration functions in
different ways, both undermining and helping to secure ties between
members. The fifth point is that this perspective needs to be extended
to how we understand change in aggregate patterns of material support
over time – that is, what economic demography calls “intergenera-
tional wealth flows”. Intergenerational support may sometimes consist
of purely dyadic relationships between an older person and an adult
child. More generally, several children and others are involved so that
the role of networks makes a more subtle approach necessary. The usual
stereotype is to compare wealth flows between generations in a unilinear
fashion: flows are either “upward” (i.e., from young to old) or “down-
ward” (from old to young) (e.g., Lee, 2000; Caldwell, 2005). The reality
is much more varied and interesting, at least in the three communities
studied here. Balanced, upward and downward net flows coexist in all
strata, and the proportions of each vary between the communities over
time according to differing cultural preferences, the timing of life-course
transitions, and changing economic conditions (Kreager and Schröder-
Butterfill, 2008). Comparison of survey and case-study data here gains
critical importance, as networks function not only to convey material
benefits but as mechanisms of continuing participation and shared com-
munality. As we shall see below, remittances are in most cases valued
less for their financial value than as material evidence of continuing
family solidarity. They are tokens of potential future, and possibly more
substantial, support should the need arise.
Transnational migration, as the tables above show, is a modest but

normal part of the overall propensity to migrate, and it fits readily into
the five features just outlined. Thus, as with distance movement more
generally, support is received from transnational migrant children in
all but a minority of cases, and it takes the form of remittances and
annual or less frequent visits. Remittances, as the case studies later
attest, are not just for elders but assist other network members, and
they are intended to facilitate the activities of elders in these networks.
As with monetary support from other migrant children, the amounts
are normally modest, although in exceptional cases there may be major
support for construction or medical costs. The usual situation is one in
which children who work away supplement support given by those who
live nearby. The tendency of migration to reinforce strata differences is
pronounced, with 82 per cent of transnational migrants coming from
the upper two strata. As with internal distance migration, transnational
migration involves a mixture of long- and short-term arrangements:
only half of young people employed outside Indonesia were abroad in
both survey rounds. Destinations are predominantly Southeast Asian,
notably Malaysia and Hong Kong, with employment usually in domestic
service and occasionally factories. Put another way, most transnational
migration entails distances that are not much greater than moves within
Indonesia, although the range of employment opportunities is smaller.
The Middle East figures as a destination in a few cases, one of which is
discussed below.
Differences between communities in the volume of transnational
migration reflect the differing adaptations of these communities to local
economic constraints. The community with the greatest outward move-
ment, Koto Kayo, has the largest transnational migration in absolute
terms, although the percentages for movement “abroad” in Table 7.1
remain modest given the high overall levels of migration. Koto Kayo’s
established and lucrative networks within the archipelago suggest that
there is relatively little incentive to expand into movement abroad.
Kidul, in contrast, shows a growing number of transnational migrants as
a percentage of extra-village movement. The more vulnerable economic
situation of many family networks, relative to the other two communi-
ties, combined with a local precedent for international migration since
the late 1990s, are reflected in a greater openness to new options and
the uncertainties that they may entail. Citengah, with its strong agri-
cultural base and nearby urban employment opportunities, shows the
least propensity to transnational movement, just as it does to distance
movement generally.
To summarise, the five preceding points reveal how migration, and

its relation to wealth, status, ethnic and gender differences, can be
understood as aspects of the normal working of family and commu-
nity networks. This is true whether movement is within Indonesia or to
the wider world. The support that networks enable for older people pro-
vides a good basis for comparing communities and understanding their
differing development. Network migration, the study of movement as a
dimension of usual family, kin and community structures, enables us to
see that transnational migration is not separable from other local and
distance migration patterns. The decision by a young adult to migrate,
whether made independently or not, whether temporary or permanent,
and whether national or international, carries multiple implications for
the utilisation of family assets and incomes, for reputation, and for the
organisation of care and support in all generations. The meaning and
frequency of remittances and visits need to be understood in relation to
other ongoing patterns of movement.
Network size and variation by strata and stage of the life course are dis-
cussed in more detail elsewhere (Schröder-Butterfill, 2005, 2015; Kreager
and Schröder-Butterfill, 2007). The main features, which hold across the
differing kin systems and ethnicities of the three communities, may be
briefly noted. The size of a person’s kindred as a whole (i.e. kin and
affines that a member knows) suggests quite a large network, often
more than 40 people, on whom they might call for assistance. In prac-
tice, those with whom there have been important material relations
(giving or receiving money, labour, care, education, property, etc.) are
much fewer, varying around a mean of 10 between strata. The range
of kin members on whom an elderly person actually depends is small,
varying from 0 to 4 in poor strata, and 3 to 6 for the well-off. The
accessibility of network members away on migration is obviously a
basic part of this variation. Assessing relative poverty or vulnerability, in
consequence, cannot be judged merely based on household residence,
incomes, expenditures and assets.
Connecting micro- and macroperspectives
The preceding overview of distance migration as a component of

Indonesian communities confirms that it is a normal aspect of support
networks and of varying individual, family and community access to
the wider economy and society. Transnational migration needs to be
understood as part of a complex of network adjustments. The fact that
migration is shaped by differences between strata and local networks has
an important bearing on how we interpret migration at the macrolevel.

The migration literature now recognises that these issues require a shift
away from conventional approaches in two respects. The first is that
distance movement is not a new or separate phenomenon. Treating dis-
tance migration as an independent phenomenon tends to be an artefact
of conventional classifications. As Hugo et al. (2003) remark, conven-
tional migration data dichotomise populations as rural or urban, then
treating migration chiefly as a one-off move from the latter to the for-
mer. A diverse set of movements – temporary, seasonal, commuting –
are not in the evidence. As Tables 7.1–7.3 show, migration viewed
from community perspectives shows a volume and diversity that are
not in the macrorecord. Either/or classifications (e.g., urban/rural, or
upward/downward wealth flows) record reported outcomes, not pro-
cesses: the role of network and strata differences as mechanisms gov-
erning whether, when and to where migration takes place, whether
recurring patterns come to be established, and why some members send
remittances and others don’t, all remain incompletely examined. The
need to place these issues at the centre of the agenda of migration stud-
ies has been recognised for some time (e.g., Massey, 1990). If we anchor
our approach to distance migration in family and community networks,
rather than standard classifications, we can then explore to what extent
transnational migration may be a variant of historical patterns of inter-
nal migration (often involving considerable distances), rather than a
new and separate phenomenon.
A second important shift in our thinking, consequently, has to do
with the critical role of evidence of variation between subpopula-
tions. This is particularly important in understanding how migration
increases or mitigates potential impacts of macrolevel trends. The data
in Figure 7.1 indicate important strata and ethnic variations. A fur-
ther factor may be cohort differences due to age-structural transition.
Demographers and economists (e.g., Tuljapurkar et al., 2005) have
remarked that “age waves”, or large cohort imbalances that are conse-
quent on fertility declines, are projected for Southeast Asia and else-
where. These waves may have a tremendous impact on people’s lives.
Available support for elders in cohorts with relatively fewer children
seems likely to become a case in point.
But do cohort effects act independently to control the supply of
younger generations? Local-level data in the three communities do,
indeed, show that current older cohorts are subject to a significant rela-
tive shortage of adult children who are available for support (Kreager
and Schröder-Butterfill, 2010), a phenomenon that is not unique to
the context of Indonesia (see Gamburd, Chapter 6; Fan, Chapter 8,

in this volume). As with previous attempts to project cohort cycles
as major mechanisms of change,5 however, an exclusively top-down,
macrolevel view of demographic change is not well suited to track-
ing local and middle-range variations that actively shape people’s lives.
In the three Indonesian communities, a multilevel approach shows
that relative shortages of adult children are structured not primarily
by cohort imbalances but by the way in which strata and network
differences shape child availability (Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill,
2004, 2010). Elders in the upper strata compensate effectively for the
cohort decline in child numbers via network options such as adoption,
and this is a crucial factor in understanding the effects of migra-
tion since it enables them to compensate for children who live away.
Those in the lower strata, however, suffer an even greater shortage
of children than age-structural imbalances would suggest, including
a greater likelihood of a lack of continuing contact with those chil-
dren who migrate. They lack the resources needed to send children
on transnational migration, and thus are unable to capitalise on its
potential benefits. The existence of subpopulations with widely vary-
ing capacities to adapt is thus a real concern, which evidence at
the level of national cohort imbalances and migration data may dis-
guise.
Indonesian transnational migration in historical

perspective
As transnational migration has developed in the context of established

patterns of movement, a historical perspective will help us to under-
stand how micro- and macrolevel processes are related. Before analysts
look forward in time to projected age structural imbalances, we need to
consider how patterns of movement have long shaped the availability of
younger family members. Current and longer-term network behaviour
provides the most likely models for how societies will cope. Recourse to
distance movement, both transnational and internal, is a common fea-
ture of societies that are undergoing modern political and demographic
transition. Local studies are of much more than “merely local” interest:
they provide in-depth case studies of general, long-term processes. They
also show that Indonesian migration shares important features with his-
torical developments elsewhere. European historical demography will
serve as an example because of the extensive documentation that it

provides on local and regional patterns.
The propensity to migrate

One important observation to emerge from European history is the
extensive mobility of rural populations before and during economic
development (Schofield, 1970). Wrightson and Levine (1979: 80–81), for
instance, show that in the 17th-century community that they studied,
only one-third of couples who baptised their children were themselves
married in the community, and only 40 per cent of these couples lived
on in the village until their deaths. Tilly (1978: 188) estimates that in
the 18th century around one in ten members of agricultural communi-
ties in Europe changed their village of residence every year, a figure that
is confirmed by subsequent estimates (Hochstadt, 1981).
An established propensity to move thus preceded industrial capital-
ism by at least two centuries and it had long-term consequences. As in
Indonesia, most movement was initially to nearby locations, reflecting
family labour and marriage arrangements. This precedent made migra-
tion customary. People often moved more than once, and one member’s
migration stimulated others’. In the end, whole families might move,
but not all at once. Much of the movement reflected seasonal shifts
in labour demand, and return migration. As Lucassen (1987), Wrigley
(1967) and Moch (1992) have shown, these patterns remained charac-
teristic of manpower deployment as industrial centres developed. Up
to the early 19th century, most movement to industrial jobs was still
between rural sites. From the migrants’ standpoint, the 19th-century
shift to large urban destinations began as an extension of established
patterns. Three basic features of European migration that are outlined by
these historians find clear analogies in post-war Indonesian experience.
The first is the volume of migration and continuity between local
movement and its expansion over ever-greater distances. Most European
movements before 1800 were within a radius of 10–20 km. Temporary,
seasonal and circular patterns predominated. By the end of the 18th cen-
tury, with the expansion of rural industry and consolidation of regional
agricultural systems, large-scale regional patterns of circulation emerged,
involving both sexes in somewhat longer moves (say, in a range of
70 km). These established patterns engaged up to 100,000 people each
year in seven parts of Europe. This gradual increase in normal distance
for circular, seasonal and occupation-specific migration is also evident
in Indonesia. Although historical data are much more fragmentary for
Indonesia, studies show that Indonesian migration gradually expanded,

beginning from local movements and then augmented by successive
colonial policies (e.g., Naim, 1974; Hugo, 1980; Firman, 1997; White,
1991; Gooszen, 1999). Hugo (1981, 1982) has particularly emphasised
the continuing importance of circular and temporary migration. Cribb’s
(2000: 54) mapping of the main data source, the Dutch colonial census
of 1930, documents this remarkable propensity to move. Internal migra-
tion between provinces in Java shows 31 migration streams between
provinces, most numbering 10,000–50,000 persons. In three streams,
movement was of the order of 90,000–150,000 persons. Interisland
movement, much of it reflecting colonial policy, generated a further
24 streams, most in the range of 10,000–30,000 persons; aggregate
movement from Java to Sumatra was in excess of 400,000.
Second, as greater distances became normative in Europe, greater
reliance came to be placed on networks. Flows of information from dis-
tant family and community members assisted subsequent movements
of others. As networks create differential flows of information and sup-
port, communities that were closer to industrial developments, or to
agricultural areas with heavy demands for labour, were able to estab-
lish denser ties. Migration patterns came to have marked geographical
variation. Similarly in Indonesia, the growth of networks linking partic-
ular communities and families to jobs in particular regions or cities has
long played a strategic role. Temporary and circular movements come
to encompass greater and greater distances, and to encourage perma-
nent moves; different communities consolidate their access to changing
opportunities according to their own networks and differing proximity
to regular employment (e.g., Guest, 1989; Firman, 1991; Spaan, 1995).
Third, migration in Europe tended to enforce differences between
socioeconomic strata. The need to move to find work, subsistence and
a secure place in society weighed more heavily on the poor. Circular
and seasonal migration enabled them to improve their circumstances
beyond what was possible in the village, and to assist those remaining
there. Those with property were in a better position to choose whether
or not to respond to opportunities in the cities. Strata differences in
Indonesia likewise shaped migration opportunities, in turn reinforc-
ing existing advantages of status and wealth (e.g., Guest, 1989; Spaan,
1995; Breman and Wiradi, 2002). As in Europe, both sexes became
actively involved in movement, especially via female factory labour and
involvement in petty trade (e.g., Hetler, 1989; Saptari, 1991; Wolf, 1992).
How did these migratory patterns impact on older people? On the one
hand, predominantly local movement could enable family networks
to be kept intact. One of the functions of rural family and household

structures in Europe was to facilitate migration that could protect and
assist domestic economic interests (e.g., Kussmaul, 1981; Hajnal, 1982;
Kertzer, 1984). On the other hand, as cities grew and health conditions
in them deteriorated, increasing numbers of young migrants died and
were lost to families. Poverty, and a lack of banking infrastructure for
the poor, made remittance difficult, and thus increased elders’ vulnera-
bility. Before the immense industrial expansion of the 19th century, low
wages, ill health and job insecurity combined to keep many migrants
without the wherewithal to marry, let alone support kin. This, in turn,
shaped old-age vulnerability. High levels of childlessness were typical
of many parts of Western Europe, in which, over long periods, 12–20
per cent of the population stayed single, and significant delays in mar-
riage were normal (Kreager, 2004). The early role of community charity
(Thomson, 1991) testifies to the vulnerability of older people, many of
whom lacked the support of children as well as of wider social networks
that the marriage, labour and childbearing of adult children would nor-
mally have entailed. We turn now to the implications of this general
picture of expanding distance migration for older people in Indonesia.
Strata, remittances, networks
As noted, a central issue in migration studies is that movement works in

contrary ways, in some cases supporting, in others undermining, inter-
generational relationships (see Alipio, Chapter 9; Gamburd, Chaper 6;
Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4; Kusakabe and Pearson, Chapter 3, in this vol-
ume). Are there regular determinants of such differential outcomes? Are
particular patterns of younger people’s movement associated with dis-
advantageous outcomes for older people? We shall argue that a central
issue in trying to answer these questions is the division of labour among
network members. How do members balance the support that they pro-
vide to older kin with their responsibilities for other members? Are older
people’s network contributions an important factor that facilitates the
several functions that network members perform? More particularly,
what are the implications of the division of labour in support networks
for the significance of financial remittances and other assistance coming
from more distant members?
Figure 7.2 shows the distribution of elderly respondents’ adult chil-
dren in 2005 living more than 100 km from their parents in the three
communities, and proportions providing or not providing annual mon-
etary assistance. It follows the format of Figure 7.1, but the focus here
100
90
80
70
60
%
50
40
30
20
10
0
Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum Stratum
I II III IV I II III IV I II III IV
away, giving annual money away, not giving annual money nearby (<100 km)
Figure 7.2 Percentage of elderly respondents’ adult children involved in distance

migration (over 100 km) by socioeconomic stratum of parents and patterns of
monetary support (2005)
is only on young adults involved in distance migration. Figure 7.2 is a

remarkable statement of network participation: with the exception of
the poorest strata in one community, Kidul, in all strata at least 60 per
cent of children living at a distance provide financial support at least
once a year, and in several strata the level is 90 per cent or more. The
sums remitted are in most cases small, and are not intended as older
people’s main support. Modest gifts are usually given during annual vis-
its after Ramadan. Even where elders are poor and the monies given are
more substantial, remittances are not exclusively for elders. Rather, they
enable elders to participate more fully in family and community net-
works by contributing to educational, ritual and other costs of children,
grandchildren and other kin.
The mean value of monetary remittances is given in Table 7.4. These
are informants’ own estimates and need to be interpreted with caution.
What they reveal is consistent with the picture given by Figure 7.2. With
the exception of Citengah, where there is much less distance migration,
support in the form of money by distance migrants is more than double
that given by nearby children. This reflects the portable nature of mone-
tary gifts, the fact that distance migration is often undertaken expressly
to exploit economic opportunities, and preference for support in food,
care and companionship by those close by. Data on remittances by strata
Table 7.4 Mean values of annual monetary gifts by adult children to elders
(2005)
No. Mean Mean No. Mean Mean No. Mean Mean

(IDR) (GBP) (IDR) (GBP) (IDR) (GBP)
Near 90 119,000 8.80 211 202,000 15.00 33 544,000 40.00

Away 19 326,000 24.20 38 201,000 14.70 98 1,185,000 87.60
Strata I 29 119,000 50 346,000 15 1,090,000
Strata II 23 106,000 83 166,000 57 1,463,000
Strata III 43 243,000 81 173,000 41 630,000
Strata IV 15 43,000 54 139,000 18 493,000
Notes: In a few cases, data regarding location are missing, hence the difference in number
of children between upper and lower parts of the table. For Kidul, four outliers have been
removed. Their inclusion would push the mean value of annual gifts by children up to IDR
743,000. Indonesian rupiah (IDR) values are converted to pounds sterling at August 2005
rates (IDR 13,500 = GBP 1).
Source: Authors’ household surveys.
in Table 7.4 include all children. The distance migration economy of

Koto Kayo stands out, producing remittances that are four to six times
as large as in the two communities on Java, and local children are
also much more likely to provide greater monetary support. Even in
the poorest strata, monetary support to elders is more substantial than
in any strata in the other two communities. Variations between strata
within communities (e.g., in Kidul, where strata III children are signifi-
cantly more generous) reflect specific events, such as hospital costs, that
affected some family networks.
Another way in which the impact of migration on elders’ support
networks can be assessed is to identify those migrants who are not con-
tributing support as a percentage of all adult children in the network.
In Figure 7.2 these are indicated in grey. This issue is important chiefly
for vulnerable older people – that is, poor elders (strata IV), and a sub-
set of strata III elders whose growing physical incapacity and absence
of children imply that they will soon slip into dependence on charity.
An estimate of the average number of children whose support is lost
to a vulnerable household’s network following migration can be calcu-
lated by relating those migrant children who do not contribute to the
network to the number of elderly households from which they origi-
nated (Kreager, 2006). This calculation is carried out in Table 7.5, where
the average number of non-contributing migrant children is glossed as
Table 7.5 Network depletion: non-contributing migrant children in the lower

strata (2005)
Elderly households 17 15 17
Total number of children 28 50 79
Non-contributing migrant children 8 5 8
Averages
Children per elderly household 1.65 3.33 4.65
Child depletion per household 0.47 0.33 0.47
“child depletion”. On average even the vulnerable subgroup of elders

considered in Table 7.5 “loses” less than half a child per family network.
Case studies
Average and mean values thus paint a picture of remarkable intergenera-
tional solidarity, yet we also need to consider the circumstances in which
solidarity breaks down, why this happens and what such instances
tell us about the durability of arrangements. Network support, while
flexible, must negotiate the competing needs and capacities of many
members. Strategic demographic events – not only migration but death,
illness, divorce, remarriage, reproduction and adoption – generally have
ramifications for available support that affect several network mem-
bers. Three case studies of older people and their family networks have
been selected to illustrate this flexibility and its limits. Each reveals the
long-term presence of distance migration as a factor in family networks.
The first describes a stable and successful network in the East Javanese
community of Kidul, in which transnational and long-distance internal
migration play similar roles.
Yasim and Rukmini

Yasim, in his late 70s, is originally from Kidul. He worked most of his
life as a porter in a local cooperative. His wife, Rukmini, also from Kidul,
was a seller of tofu. They are both in good health. Their social and eco-
nomic characteristics put them near the top of strata III. They have five
children. The first, Ngatmini, lives with her husband and family in the
adjacent house. Yasim helped to build his daughter’s house, and now the
two households are closely entwined. All occupants eat at Ngatmini’s,
who cooks with her mother’s help. Ngatmini, like her mother before
her, sells tofu, and when she is out, Rukmini and Yasim are responsi-
ble for the grandchildren. Ngatmini’s husband works in Surabaya and
only returns every fortnight. He then gives his mother-in-law about IDR.
5,000 as “pocket money” and his father-in-law some cigarettes. The sec-
ond child, Sunari, is a driver and lives a few houses away. He visits about
once a week and gives his parents a little money, aside from which the
two households exchange food and visits. The third child, Lastri, lives
on an island to the east of Bali. When Lastri and her husband moved
away, they left their two sons, Yoris and Robert, to be raised by Yasim
and Rukmini. They quite regularly send money for the upkeep of their
sons, but to pay for their schooling the parents and grandparents have
to pool resources. The fourth child, Sampe, works as a seller of sand and
is married with no children. His house in his wife’s village, 10 km away,
was built with Yasim’s help. He visits several times a week but is currently
not able to support his parents. The youngest daughter, Susianti, started
working in Malaysia after her divorce. She left her daughter, Yulia, to be
cared for by her sister and parents. She returns roughly every two years
and sends money every few months. This money is carefully divided,
with some of it going to each elderly parent, some for Yoris and Robert –
as Susianti was helped by their mother to pay for her schooling – and
some for Ngatmini, as she helps to care for Yulia.
Several important features of this network stand out. Major and con-
tinuing flows of support are given between generations. The network
depends on different kinds and levels of input from those in or near the
community and those at a distance. The case study shows how networks
evolve over time, as roles and capabilities change. The contributions
of Lastri, who is distant within Indonesia, and Susianti, who is on
labour migration in Malaysia, are structurally similar. While their mone-
tary contributions, summarised in Table 7.6, are much more substantial
than their siblings’, much of this is also support for their children
who live with their parents. Distance migrants are, in effect, support-
ing each other as well as the other generations in the village. A view
of remittances to the Yasim/Rukmini household as chiefly support for
elders would obviously be too simple. Likewise, an attempt to evaluate
flows of support in terms of net balances between generations at one
point in time will give an artificial view of the network. Viewed over
time (if continuous data series were possible), the picture would more
likely show that flows gradually shifted from “down” to “up”. More
importantly, especially from the network members’ own point of view,
the net differences between upward and downward flows over the long
term are likely to be modest. Mutuality – the cohesiveness of the family
Table 7.6 Monetary support in the Yasim/Rukmini household (2005)
Member Location Interval Sum per occasion Annual sum
Sunari Same village At least weekly IDR 5,000 IDR 260,000

Lastri Different At least IDR 350,000 IDR 4,200,000
island monthly
Sampe <10 km At least IDR 7,500 IDR 15,000
half-yearly
Susianti Different At least IDR 2,000,000 IDR 4,000,000
country half-yearly
Ngatmini Next door At least (Support predominantly in kind)
monthly
network as a moral as well as a material entity – is arguably the most sub-

stantial “product” of intergenerational support. There is, however, no
surplus of financial capital in this system, and that is its vulnerability.
As long as the eldest generation can continue to make their contribu-
tions as household heads, child carers and general coordinators of the
network, then the status quo can be maintained. But the absence of a
surplus means that there is no substantial support available if necessary
for medical care or other crises.
The second case study describes a Minangkabau network headed by
an elderly head of house, Fatimah Saleh, which has a similar mix
of intergenerational contributions but shows different strengths and
limitations.
Fatimah Saleh
Fatimah Saleh was born in Koto Kayo and is the daughter in her gen-
eration with responsibility for lineage property and the continuity of
the local descent line. She and her family belong to strata II. Both of
her husbands left on labour migration and did not return. She has three
surviving children by the second husband, on whom she was appar-
ently able to rely for remittances, as well as drawing on her own kin and
property as is customary in a matrilineal society. Fatimah strongly sup-
ported the education of her children. Her daughter, Rusda, remains in
the ancestral property with her mother, and has followed her avocation:
she is a teacher in the village school. Rusda has four sons but no daugh-
ter, which is a serious worry to her because without a granddaughter
ancestral properties cannot be passed on and the family will die out.
Fatimah’s two sons are both on labour migration, and her relations with
them are good. Both send remittances, although she is not dependent
on them as she has support from others in the matriline. One son has
resided for many years in Malaysia, and although on one occasion he
paid for her to visit him, he does not visit, and she has not met some
of his children. The other son lives in Surabaya, at the eastern end of
Java. He visits at Idul Fithry, and Fatimah has been to visit him sev-
eral times. Regular monetary and other material support comes from
her older brother and his son, as is normal in Minangkabau kin net-
works. One of her male cousins has even financed Fatimah’s pilgrimage
to Mecca.
Fatimah’s family network, like that of Yasmin and Rukmini, draws
support from distant children as well as local family. The identities
of supporting local kin are different in the Minangkabau case (chiefly
mother’s brothers and their children), which reflects the logic of the
matrilineal system. Their roles in support, however, are essentially the
same. The support that Fatimah receives from her brother is under-
pinned by the remittances of his children who are away on rantau.
This family network is financially much more secure than Yasmin and
Rukmini’s because it is able to draw on a wider range of members on
labour migration, as well as on family agricultural holdings. Her sons are
thus not crucial to her support, although there would be great shame to
the family if they did not help to provide for her. Remittances are pow-
erful statements of traditional Minangkabau and family identity. Their
distance away, and the secondary nature of their support, does not keep
them from being important to family structure and solidarity. Whether
they will someday return to Koto Kayo is far from clear. Fatimah’s own
network contribution, now that her children are adults, involves the
care and education of her daughter’s children. Her primary role is iden-
tified chiefly with her position as moral head of the family and guardian
of its property. The value of remittances is likewise double – moral and
material – supporting her in this role. While in Fatimah’s case the net-
work functions very successfully in both respects, the smooth working
of the system finds its vulnerability in the absence of granddaughters.
This is a fundamental problem that her sons can do nothing to solve.
The third case study is of Sum, an elderly widow in the East Javanese
community. Her story shows that where migration does not play a rel-
atively stable role, as in the first two case studies, then considerable
upheaval and a decline in family fortunes may ensue.
Sum
Sum belongs to a prestigious family in Kidul and she has had three
status marriages. She had two children by her first husband. The first
marriage ended in divorce, her son remained with the father in Cen-
tral Java, and she lost contact with him; her daughter, Tati, stayed
with her. Her second marriage was childless and ended in divorce.
She then married a wealthy local official. There were no children,
but on his death in the early 1970s she inherited land and a sub-
stantial home. She was still living in this home in 2000, together
with her daughter, Tati, a granddaughter, Diana, and her husband, a
great-granddaughter whose husband worked in Sumatra, and two of
their small children. Tati’s daughter, Diana, had recently returned from
extended labour migration in Saudi Arabia from where she had remit-
ted occasional support. Sum used to work as a trader and traditional
healer, and her daughter sold secondhand clothes. Their incomes were
very modest, and over the years Sum had gradually sold all of her agri-
cultural land in order to meet the needs of her grandchildren (e.g.,
illness requiring hospitalisation; expensive circumcision ceremonies;
and capital for Diana’s migration and business). The grandchildren and
great-grandchildren and their spouses provided only occasional gifts
and small sums of money. Although Sum’s age and sense of responsi-
bility for her family over the years commanded respect, there was no
disguising that her economic status had fallen radically in the course of
her life.
This fragile economic situation was then demolished by the behaviour
of her granddaughter, Diana. On her return from the Middle East, she
was a wealthy woman in village terms. She set up a business and was
courted by several men. She persuaded Sum to sell her the family home,
promising her residence in it and support to the end of her days. The
business failed disastrously, and as the man she married remained unem-
ployed, Diana was soon bankrupt. She then sold the family house out
from under Sum, and departed again to the Middle East. For a time, Sum
and Tati lived in a small shack, with small amounts of support from Tati’s
children and neighbours. When Arin, one of Diana’s daughters, became
second wife to a local politician, she obtained a house and an adjacent
shack where Sum and Tati now live. Arin provides them with food.
Sum’s story is one of incremental social and material decline, in
which her consistent support for members of her network was never
fully reciprocated. Her daughter’s support was limited by her poverty,
and, indeed, Tati appears to have been partially supported by Sum for
most of her adult life. Diana’s extended transnational migrations, rather
than a source of support, have proved to be a major drain on Sum’s

property and security. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren have pro-
vided only minimal and intermittent support. Multiple ties, in short,
may prove to be multiple sources of vulnerability, not bonds of mutual
support.
Conclusion
This chapter has viewed remittances and distance migration from the
bottom up – that is, as a dimension of historical patterns of movement
that are grounded in family and community processes. This perspec-
tive enables us to show how transnational migration shares established
features of distance migration within Indonesia, including principal
variations between major ethnic groups, and between socioeconomic
strata and family networks within them. A striking positive feature of
all but the poorest strata in one of the communities is that family net-
works benefit from monetary support from the majority of those who
work away from the communities. On the negative side, however, this
remarkable solidarity has relatively little ability to improve the socioe-
conomic status of poorer elders and their networks. It is important to
ask why. One clear answer lies in the relatively modest level of most
remittances: their purpose is to contribute to necessary costs, such as
the education of younger siblings and grandchildren, or health costs.
Substantial one-off remittances are rare, occurring in probably no more
than 5 per cent of families. Remittances that are expended simply for
conspicuous consumption, whether for ritual or prestige objects, are the
exception, not the rule. Migrants who are able to earn more while res-
ident in urban areas may, at relatively short notice, find capital to pay
for elders’ emergency hospitalisation, but whether this counts as a “sur-
plus” of financial capital in the network seems unlikely, given that such
costs are deemed to be necessary.
Thus, in poorer strata, solid support from those who are involved in
transnational migration, as in the case of Mbah Yasim and Bu Rukmini,
goes to help elders and their families to get by, but their networks
remain dependent on these elders’ own fitness and continued contri-
butions. In this network, should a major crisis arise, there is no safety
net and the sustainability of the network is likely to be imperilled seri-
ously. Where networks are not cohesive, as in the case of Mbah Sum,
not only the capital accumulated during transmigration but the elder’s
own reserves may be dissipated. Even in the case of Fatimah Saleh, who
heads a much more economically secure and extensive network of the
kind favoured by the Minangkabau, remittances go chiefly to sustain

the social status quo. What makes this status quo vulnerable is not a
lack of financial gain from migration but status loss that is consequent
on the absence of key local members. The central importance of distance
migration in the Minangkabau economy and society has long enabled
men of the younger generation to choose permanent departure, yet to
remain part of the moral community by virtue of continued contact and
remittances. As this pattern comes to include young women’s perma-
nent departures as well, older female heads of the descent line face more
and more difficulty in securing a fundamental baseline of Minangkabau
society – namely, daughters who are willing and present as heads of
family networks in Koto Kayo itself.
Can we say, then, that remittances from transnational and other
distance migration are a major force of change in these Indonesian com-
munities? Panel surveys and ethnography reveal no radical economic
improvement or decline in the relative position of family networks:
those in higher strata generally remain in a better position to cap-
italise on potential advantages that migration creates. To assess the
argument that remittances may be critical transformers of society, we
need to look more closely at how migration is managed as one element
of the networks – the systems of family and community exchange –
that compose the social and economic structure of these communities.
If remittances are a motor of change, then we would expect to see sig-
nificant adjustments in the way in which networks are structured and
function.
Networks don’t just redistribute members in space and time. One of
their normal functions in Indonesia is to create roles and sustain val-
ues that promote the need for active older people. Should remittances
replace or devalue the roles and significance of older people’s contribu-
tions, this would without doubt mark a major social change. Although
the three communities have made different adjustments to economic
change, of which different levels of migration are a major component,
there is little sign that intergenerational solidarity has lessened. The
integration into wider labour markets of family networks in Koto Kayo,
Kidul and, to a lesser extent, Citengah has increased the opportuni-
ties for remittances, but this appears, if anything, to have depended on
elders’ continuing reliability.
Elders remain key players even though, as we have noted, the impacts
on them of their children’s migration over ever-greater distances, and
of their reliance on the remittances that they send, are not necessarily
positive. Impacts work in contrary ways. On the one hand, remittances
are important expressions of continuing solidarity (of migrants’ moral

presence in the community, even though they are physically away); on
the other hand, they are a socially acceptable strategy of separation
that enables some members to keep their own daily lives outside the
community. The remittance economy can substantially reduce elders’
economic security, even while reinforcing solidarity in the active roles
that elders take on in caring for migrants’ children. Assessing the impact
of remittances is thus not a simple matter of the amount of financial
support that they provide or how this is spent, since their meaning
depends on their several implications in a network as a whole.
Hence a second major change would be network attrition: a decline
in the size or flexibility of networks in which elders participate, and of
the support on which they can rely. The central mechanism that regu-
lates network participation, the flow of remittances, and their social and
material values is what we have called the “division of labour” in family
networks. At base this is mere network demography: the fact that some
members are present in or near the home community while others are
migrant. This arrangement, which is normative in all of the communi-
ties, enables the load of support to be shared among several members,
and provides options should the situation of any one member change.
One of the striking features of support patterns in the three commu-
nities is that very few young people – fewer than one adult child per
network on average – choose not to participate. Supplies of children liv-
ing nearby, and of support from them, remain ample to complement
those who live at a distance. And even where, as in the Minangkabau
case, there is a shortage of key local network members, the problem does
not arise from remittances (which are ample) but from the continued
importance of matrilineality.
Notes
1. Data reported here are the collaborative work of the Ageing in Indonesia team,
including Tengku Syawila Fithry, Haryono, Edi Indrizal and Vita Priantina
Dewi. We are very grateful for their contributions, and to the Wellcome Trust
and British Academy for support.
2. The four categories are (a) rich; (b) comfortable; (c) getting by; and (d) poor.
While villagers lack an explicit scheme of social stratification, these four dis-
tinctions follow common patterns of speech that are used to assess local
hierarchy, and are confirmed by economic data. The “rich” are identified read-
ily on the basis of a combination of property, office and reputation. Those who
are “comfortable” do not have great wealth but belong to networks with mul-
tiple incomes, and their overall income and assets are twice the value of those
who are just “getting by”. The latter are dependent day to day on their own
labour and have no safety net. The “poor” rely on at least occasional charity
for survival. See Kreager (2006) for a more complete discussion.
3. This figure updates the 2000 survey round, with which the results are consis-
tent. Note that support may also in some cases come from siblings’ children,
notably for the Minangkabau. The 2000 data are reported in Kreager (2006).
4. Senior daughters who are involved in distance migration from Koto Kayo
may be unwilling to return to manage family properties, as is prescribed by
tradition. This is a recurring source of despair in a matrilineal society in which
daughters are key players in property transmission (Indrizal, 2004). The raw
data on gender-specific migration is shown in Table 7.7.
Table 7.7 Location of elderly respondents’ sons and daughters (excluding

any children living with parents) (2005)
Sons Daughters Sons Daughters Sons Daughters
<100 km 63 49 109 102 28 23

100 km + 13 16 19 19 86 51
All 76 65 128 121 114 74
The potential negative impact of network changes on older men also deserves
note. This is a recurring issue for elderly Minangkabau men, reflecting
the structure of residence, marriage and inheritance in matrilineal society
(Indrizal et al., 2009), and it may be problematic in Javanese communities
in which poorer men tend to build less secure networks over their life course
than women (Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, 2014).
5. The best known are “Easterlin cycles”. See Murphy (1992) for a discussion of
the limitations of this approach.
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8
Migration, Remittances and Social
and Spatial Organisation of Rural
Households in China
C. Cindy Fan
Just 40 years ago, China’s urbanisation was only 20 per cent. Today it
has surpassed the 50 per cent mark. Such rapid urbanisation is a result
of not only skyrocketing economic growth but also massive rural–urban
migration. The remittances that migrants sent home have for the past 30
years been crucial for the livelihood of the rural Chinese. “Going out” or
dagong, meaning leaving home to work somewhere else, is widely con-
sidered to be the only means for rural households to overcome poverty
and improve their standard of living. In the Chinese countryside, arable
land is extremely limited. Massive poverty and starvation are still fresh
in the memory of the rural Chinese – 30 million people died in a famine
just half a century ago. It is therefore not surprising that millions have
left farms to look for urban work since the economic reforms that began
in the late 1970s have made such mobility possible.
Rural–urban labour migrants represent the bulk of the “floating pop-
ulation”, or persons not living in their place of household registration
(hukou), who amounted to 230 million in 2012 or 17 per cent of the
population, and they are projected to increase to 350 million by 2050
(People’s Daily, 2010; National Population and Family Planning Com-
mission, 2012). There is a large body of research on the household
registration or hukou system (e.g., Goodkind and West, 2002; Mallee,
2003; Wu and Treiman, 2004; Wang, 2005; Chan, 2009). The insti-
tutional, economic and social barriers between the urban and rural
Chinese, due in part to the hukou system, are quite similar to those fac-
ing transnational labour migrants, especially those at the lower end of
the economic spectrum. For example, the rural Chinese do not enjoy
the urban benefits that holders of urban hukou do, such as access to
194
C. Cindy Fan 195
subsidised housing, education, healthcare and desired segments of the

labour market. Jobs that are available to rural migrants are usually on
the bottom rungs, with low pay, poor working conditions and no career
prospects. In addition, much like transnational migrants, Chinese rural
migrants are physically separate from the rest of the family for extended
periods of time, resulting in split households that are stretched across
long distances. Also similar to transnational migrants, rural migrants in
China seek to maintain the family as an intact social unit despite their
physical separation.
This chapter focuses on the rural family, the site where decisions
about migrant work are made and where the impacts of migration and
remittances are felt directly. In particular, I aim to show how migrant
work and remittances, interacting with social norms, have transformed
the production and spatial organisation of rural households. Draw-
ing from interviews with 26 households conducted at multiple times
between 1995 and 2012, as part of a project that includes 300 house-
holds in Anhui and Sichuan provinces, I identify a nascent lifecycle of
migrant households that spans two, in some cases three, generations.
Using household biographies and narratives, I highlight the importance
of remittances, how their use has changed over time, and how in the
process of pursuing migrant work and remittances rural households
have reorganised themselves socially and spatially.
Remittances and household organisation
Remittances are at the core of explanations for labour migration. The

literature on international migration and internal migration highlight
the role of remittances in reducing poverty and raising standards of liv-
ing, diversifying risk, and improving investment in human and physical
capital (e.g., Russell, 1986; Hadi, 1999; Taylor, 1999; Hoang and Yeoh,
Chapter 11, in this volume; Sana and Massey, 2005; Yang, 2006; Adams
and Cuecuecha, 2010). At the same time, scholars have pointed out
that remittances may make the left-behind more dependent and vul-
nerable, and that not all migrations are successful (Hoang and Yeoh,
Chapter 11, in this volume; Kothari, 2002; Skeldon, 2004; Azama and
Gubertb, 2006).
While most studies that address remittances focus on the economic
rationale and impacts, less attention has been paid to the social dimen-
sion of labour migration. But migration and remittances are part of
the social processes that shape the meanings of the home and house-
hold. For example, to the migrants, “home” takes on new meanings
as a physical site that offers security but is distanced from daily life
(Fan and Wang, 2008; Fan, 2009; Graham et al., 2012). “Being fam-
ily” also takes on new meanings in the face of geographic separation
and reconfiguration that impact intimate relationships (Yeoh, 2009;
Bustamante and Aleman, 2007). The productive and reproductive rela-
tions between migrants and the left-behind are constantly reworked,
negotiated and renegotiated, constrained by and challenging traditional
gender and generational roles and norms (Hugo, 2002; Asis et al., 2004;
Xiang, 2007). In the vein of the new economics of migration theory,
Stark and his associates advanced the notion that remittances are part
of an implicit agreement between the migrant and the left-behind under
the assumption that the migrant will eventually return (e.g., Stark and
Lucas, 1988). Transnational migrants who move frequently across bor-
ders may be maintaining “flexible families” with the left-behind spouse
and children on home or foreign soil (Skeldon, 1997; Waters, 2002;
Willis et al., 2004; Hugo, 2006). Who is the migrant and who is/are left
behind is not only an economic question but fundamentally a social
question. To the extent that households are the site where migration
decisions are made and where remittances make direct impacts, a social
dimension to considering remittances is necessary, involving questions
such as how remittances shape family structure and household organ-
isation, including gender roles and intergenerational relations and the
spatial configuration of the family across or within national borders.
Investigation of the social dimension of remittances demands one
or more of the following strategies. First, social structure and relations
are complex and difficult to measure, requiring analytical approaches
beyond macrolevel aggregation, such as mixed methods, qualitative
inquiry and/or field observations. The voice of the migrant and their
family is an effective tool to capture the nuanced processes of collabora-
tion and conflict in the household (Rigg and Salamanca, 2011). Second,
both the migrant and the left-behind constitute the family structure
that frames the pursuit and use of remittances. Therefore a “migrant–
left-behind nexus” approach (Toyota et al., 2007) which informs under-
standing of the family as a site of negotiation, strategising and agency
is superior to one that considers migrants and the left-behind in iso-
lation or sees the left-behind in a passive light. In the same vein, it is
useful to conceptualise the family and extended family support as not
necessarily in situ but possibly spatially dispersed. For example, stud-
ies of the “transnational family” (Hochschild, 2000; Yeoh et al., 2002,
2005) and “global householding” (Douglass, 2006) which focus on inter-
national migration consider family relations that are stretched across
C. Cindy Fan 197
nations. As mentioned earlier, internal migrants who are physically

separate from their family members for extended periods of time –
such as rural–urban migrants in China – share similar householding
experiences with transnational migrants. Finally, the analysis of gen-
erational changes requires a longitudinal perspective to observe how
a household’s lifecycle unfolds, a task that demands sustained engage-
ment, including multiple visits rather than a one-off survey (Kusakabe
and Pearson, Chapter 3; Rigg and Salamanca, 2011; Rao, Chapter 2,
in this volume). The empirical study on which this chapter is based
was designed to include all of the above three strategies: a qualitative
bottom-up approach; consideration of migrants and the left-behind as
part of the nexus rather than dichotomously; and a longitudinal view
of the family’s lifecycle spanning up to 30 years or more.
While migration in China is the subject of a large body of research,
this study is particularly informed by research that focuses on the house-
hold and on different generations of migrants. To pioneer migrants,
predominately male, who began dagong in the 1980s, remittances
helped them to overcome poverty and made their subsistence possi-
ble (Quanguo zonggonghui, 2010; Yue et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2011).
Back then, migrant work was considered to be a short-term rather than
long-term solution. But that proved to be a short-lived assumption
as migrants continued dagong year after year, despite its requiring the
household to be split between the village and the location of migrant
work. Clearly, the lack of economic opportunities in the countryside
compelled migrants to rely on dagong for earnings for as long as they
could. Many have become “career” migrants, leaving their wife and chil-
dren behind (Yue et al., 2010; Zhu and Chen, 2010). Over time, migrants
who had achieved subsistence would use remittances to finance house-
hold expenditures, including house construction or renovation – guided
by and reinforcing a deep-rooted tradition that a new or expanded house
is necessary for a son to get married (see below) – weddings, children’s
education, and agricultural and entrepreneurial activities. It appears that
dagong as a way of life is being passed from one generation to the next
(Liang, 2011). For the younger generation who grew up witnessing pio-
neer migrants bring back remittances that were converted into a new
house, a television set or a washing machine, it is only logical that they
should take up migrant work as soon as they finish school (Wang, 2001;
Liu and Cheng, 2008; National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). The reliance
on remittances also explains why the younger generation is increas-
ingly receptive to both spouses doing migrant work, leaving the children
behind to be raised by their grandparents, and sending back remittances
that support care-giving and other rural activities (National Bureau of

Statistics, 2010; Fan et al., 2011).
Despite the increasingly broad participation in migrant work – espe-
cially spouses and the second generation – there is little evidence that
migrants want to leave the countryside for good (Zhu, 2007; Cai and
Wang, 2008; Fan, 2008: 166; Cai and Xu, 2009; Zhu and Chen, 2010;
Fan, 2011). Barriers to permanent settlement in cities include not only
hukou-related constraints but also the absence of a sustained economic
future and a sense of social belonging. Migrant work is not stable, does
not offer career mobility and cannot support the urban cost of living.
Moreover, migrants are seen as outsiders and inferior to urbanites, and
they are not integrated into urban society. Therefore, to migrant work-
ers, the city is considered to be a place to earn wages and augment
household income rather than a place to take root. As a result, circu-
lar migration and split households persist, for the purpose of protecting
and building the social and economic bases for migrants’ eventual
return to the countryside (Fan and Wang, 2008). This in part explains
migrants’ building new houses and expanding existing houses in the
village despite their constant absence. Some have decided to purchase a
house or apartment in nearby towns in order to engage in non-farmwork
upon their return (Duan and Ma, 2011). Along the same vein, migrants
leave behind family members to farm or lease out farmland to others –
usually without collecting rent – not because of economic gain from
agriculture but in order to safeguard and maintain their farmland, again
for anticipated return in the future.
Gender roles and intergenerational relations are crucial to understand-
ing the lifecycle of a migrant household, whose social and spatial organ-
isation is continuously being reshaped and renegotiated (Gamburd,
Chapter 6; Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, Chapter 7, in this volume).
Thus it is useful here to review briefly the cultural and social bases of
gender and kinship norms in rural China that are especially relevant
to this research. Patriarchal ideology underlies three household tradi-
tions: the inside–outside dichotomy, patrilocal exogamy and household
division or fenjia, all reflected by son preference and reinforcing gen-
der inequality. The inside–outside dichotomy defines the woman’s place
to be inside the home and the man’s responsibility to be outside (nan
zhu wai nu zhu nei) (Entwisle and Henderson, 2000: 298; Hershatter,
2000; Mann, 2000).1 This spatial division of labour prescribes women’s
productive role to be in the domestic sphere, including care-giving,
and men’s role to include earning wages. Therefore, when a migrant
work opportunity is available, it is expected that the husband will take
C. Cindy Fan 199
it while the wife stays behind (Stockman, 1994). However, the avail-
ability of migrant work since the 1980s has shifted the inside–outside
boundaries – the departure of the husband leaves all farming work to
the wife, whose “inside” sphere then increasingly encompasses not only
domestic work but also farmwork (Jacka, 2006).
Second, with patrilocal exogamy, the wife moves out from the natal
family to join the husband’s family. This practice is historically cen-
tral to household formation in rural China. The tradition underlies
women’s low status because the eventual loss of daughters (and their
labour) to the husband’s family discourages the natal family to invest
in girls’ education relative to their male siblings (Li, 1994; Lu, 1997).
Patrilocal exogamy also explains early marriage, because the husband’s
family is eager to recruit the daughter-in-law for her labour and repro-
duction, whereas the natal family is interested in shifting her living
expenses to the husband’s family. Marriage as an institution is there-
fore practised as a contract negotiated between two families involving
the transfer of rights over women and their production and reproduc-
tion. In this connection, the prospective husband’s economic capacity
becomes important. Monetary compensation to the natal family for rais-
ing the daughter takes place in the form of the brideprice. In addition,
a new house or an expanded house – often judged in terms of size –
is one of the determining factors of men’s competitiveness in the mar-
riage market, especially in light of the grossly imbalanced sex ratio at
birth due to draconian birth-control policy (e.g., Cai and Lavely, 2003).
It is logical, therefore, for rural households to use remittances to fund
house-building projects.
Finally, fenjia, or household division, refers to a traditional practice
especially in rural Chinese households where the father at an advanced
age would divide his property among his adult sons. Fenjia is gendered
because traditionally sons but not daughters have the privilege of inher-
iting household property. It is a process of transmission of economic
control from one generation to the next and of adult sons to estab-
lish their own households (Wakefield, 1998). However, the prevalence
of migrant work among rural households reinforces the value and prac-
ticality of an extended family living under one roof, so that non-migrant
members, especially parents, can help to care for the left-behind farm-
land and children. Recent research has shown that the amount of
remittances that migrants send back is a function of the amount of care-
giving provided by the non-migrants (Fan and Wang, 2008; Fan et al.,
2011). In short, intergenerational collaboration among the extended
family facilitates migrant work, and as a result migrant households
may favour skipping or postponing the traditional kinship process of

household division and opt for tightening the extended family ties
instead.
Village G
As part of a joint project with the Renmin University of China, we con-

ducted in-depth interviews with 300 households in 12 villages – three
villages each from two counties in Sichuan and another two counties in
Anhui – during the Spring Festival of 1995, 2005 and 2009, with sup-
plementary visits up to January 2012. We selected Sichuan and Anhui
because they are major sources of rural–urban migrants. Within the
provinces, we selected the counties and villages based on the following
criteria in 1995: in terms of economic development they were represen-
tative of the respective provinces; they had been sending out migrant
workers for quite some time; and migrant workers accounted for at least,
respectively, 20 per cent of the county’s labour force and 30 per cent of
the village’s labour force (Du and Bai, 1997: 5; Du, 2000). In each village
we randomly selected 15 migrant households (where one or more mem-
bers had had migrant work experience) and 10 non-migrant households
to be part of the sample. Over time, as expected, almost all non-migrant
households have become migrant households.
In this chapter, I focus on one of the 12 sampled villages. For the sake
of confidentiality, I shall not disclose Village G’s location other than by
saying that it is in the northern part of Anhui, six hours of ground trans-
portation from the nearest major airport and quite remote from urban
life. Also, I refer to villagers only by their pseudonyms (see Table 8.1).
There are about 1,600 households in Village G with a total popula-
tion close to 6,000. Practically every household has sent one or more
members to engage in migrant work. At present, approximately two-
thirds of the population are migrant workers. Despite the prevalence
of migrant work, very few households have moved out of the village
for good. Since 2005, only five households have decided and managed
to move their hukou registration elsewhere. Fewer than 20 households
are completely physically absent from the village, leaving no members
behind while still keeping their hukou registration there. This is not dis-
similar to rural areas elsewhere in China – despite many years of migrant
work, the rural Chinese are not planning to move to cities on a perma-
nent basis. As discussed earlier, research has shown that economic, social
and institutional barriers have all contributed to migrants’ intention to
eventually return to the countryside (see also “Household biographies”
below).
C. Cindy Fan 201
Village G shares other features with villages that send out migrant
workers. First, the village is poor. Not until the early 2000s was elec-
tricity available for every household in the village. Second, the labour
surplus is persistently large because arable land is in short supply. The
average amount of farmland allocated per household is only 0.8 mu
(approximately 0.13 acres or 0.05 hectares). As such, agriculture is sim-
ply not enough to make ends meet and has lost its subsistence function.
Increasingly, the cash economy has replaced the subsistence economy –
villagers sell crops and buy foods and consumer goods from the town-
ship market and have virtually given up animal husbandry. Therefore
almost all pigsties are now left empty. Third, non-agricultural economic
activities in or near the village are limited. To earn non-farm wages, vil-
lagers must leave home to work in the towns and cities. Fourth, over
time the number and range of labour migrants have increased. During
the 1980s and 1990s, considerably more men than women engaged in
migrant work. At present, participation in migrant work is much more
extensive, involving men, women and their children, as well as the
second-generation migrants who have been born since the 1980s.
With two-thirds of the population, primarily of working age, living
elsewhere most of the year, children and the elderly constitute the de
facto population of the village. Not surprisingly, the absence of parents
has had negative impacts on children’s education. Most children of the
village quit school at junior high. Every year, fewer than ten children
continue to senior high.
Table 8.1 is an inventory of the 26 households that constitute our
sample. It is organised based on information in 2009, assuming that a
husband–wife pair constitutes the core of a household, and sorted by the
age of the oldest child (see on next page). “Interviewees” are marked by a
single asterisk, referring to (a) the oldest migrant in a migrant household
during the 1995 interview or (b) the household head in a non-migrant
household during the 1995 interview. In addition, the first person(s) in
the household to do migrant work are referred to as “first migrants” and
are marked by double asterisks. The vast majority of individuals with
one or two asterisks are men, reflecting the traditional gender norms in
rural China where men are the designated household heads and wage
earners.
I created pseudonames for husbands and wives to correspond with
their respective real family surnames. For example, all of the Zhous cor-
respond with the same real family name. Family names in Village G
reveal strong lineage, as is the case in many Chinese villages. Nine of
the husbands and two of the wives are Zhus. Other common family
names are Zhang, Zhou and Ding.
Table 8.1 Sampled households in Village G
202
House- Husband Wife Age (2009) Migration type∗∗∗

hold
Husband Wife Oldest Youngest Parent Parent Oldest Youngest 1995 2005 2009
child child #1 #2 grandchild grandchild
#1 Zhang Da∗ Zhu Yifang 36∗∗ 35 11 6 67 63 1 1 1

#2 Zhang Jiang 38 39∗∗ 12 1 1 N N
Daiyang Fuming∗
#3 Li Housheng Zhu Yijie∗ 40 37∗∗ 13 9 65 1 N 1
#4 Yu Zhushan Zhang 39 35∗∗ 14 1 O O
Fengying∗
#5 Zhu Anhua∗ Deng 44∗∗ 43 17 9 1 1 1
Wenying
#6 Zhang Jian∗ Gao 35∗∗ 34∗∗ 17 15 65 N 1 1
Yongqiao
#7 Lu Zhushi∗ Jiang Lan 37∗∗ 35 18 14 80 1 N N
#8 Zhu Jiang Zaimei 42∗∗ 41 19 15 75 75 1 1 2
Ansheng∗
#9 Zhou Deng 43∗∗ 45 19 17 72 1 1 1
Weijin∗ Huangsheng
#10 Zhou Ding Shilan 41∗∗ 41 19 17 1 1 2
Zhenxia∗
#11 Ding Li Jizhu 44 44 21 20 8 2 N N N
Nianbao∗
#12 Ding Yin Yurong& 46 22 20 1 2 2
Baopeng∗ 47∗∗
#13 Zhu Anfa∗ Li Xujie 48∗∗ 47 23 22 1 1 2
#14 Zhu Anmao∗ Zhang 49 47∗∗ 23 21 N N 1
Jinfang
#15 Deng Yang 46∗∗ 44∗∗ 23 20 N O 2
Wenzhong∗ Chiping
#16 Zhu Yiping∗ Jiang 46∗∗ 43 25 18 1 2 R
Yongmei
#17 Zhu Wenkuo∗ Zhang 47∗∗ 45 25 19 65 65 1 2 1
Wenqing
#18 Zhu Shitai∗ Yang 50∗∗ 50 26 24 5 1 1 2 R
Shanlan
#19 Jiang Fujie∗ Li 49 48 26 18∗∗ N N 1
Dongmei
#20 Zhu Anshu∗ Yin Fuping 70∗∗ 65 29 23 1 2 2
#21 Chen Qian 57 55 29 27 N N N
Wenping∗ Pufang
#22 Zhu Shixi∗ Jiang 56∗∗ 48 30 24 7 4 2 R R
Zhongrong
#23 Zhou Yuyang∗ Deng 61 60 35 29∗∗ 8 4 N 1 N
Hou’en
#24 Jiang Binyi∗ Deng 62∗∗ 60 37∗∗ 33∗∗ 17 9 2 2 R/2
Baozhu
#25 Deng Jianjia∗ Shi 59∗∗ 58 40∗∗ 24 15 5 2 R R
Shaoying
#26 Jiang Luo 64∗∗ 65 41∗∗ 20 16 2 2 R/2
Zhongfeng∗ Jinying
∗ Interviewee.
∗∗ First migrant(s).
203
∗∗∗ N, 1, 2, R, R/2; see definitions in Table 8.2.

The inventory also includes the oldest and youngest children, the
oldest and youngest grandchildren, and the husband’s parents. Some
of these family members may not be living under the same roof as
the interviewee but, since intergenerational assistance is common, I
included in the inventory the interviewee’s children and grandchil-
dren, and the husband’s parents whose permanent home is in the same
village. Because of the patrilocal tradition, the inventory includes the
husband’s parents – who, if available and able, are expected to help with
farming and the left-behind children – but not the wife’s parents. How-
ever, in general, interviewees gave only scant information, if any, about
their parents. As for interviewees’ children, although some are grown
and have established their own separate households, they are included
in the table because they may be relying on the interviewee and spouse
to help to take care of left-behind grandchildren and/or farmland. For
the sake of simplicity, Table 8.1 excludes the wife’s parents; family
members who died before 2009; daughters- and sons-in-law; married
daughters and married granddaughters (who are seen as members of
another household); and the interviewee’s siblings.
There is clearly a correlation between the interviewee’s age and the
family’s lifecycle. Interviewees in their 30s and 40s mostly have chil-
dren who are teenagers or younger. Interviewees in their 50s and 60s
have older children and may already have grandchildren. By sorting
the households according to the age of the interviewee’s oldest child,
Table 8.1 resembles a progression from “young households” to “old
households.” In general, young households more frequently report the
presence of parents, probably because those parents are also younger
and are healthy enough to be involved. Conversely, older households
are more likely than younger households to report grandchildren.
An exception is household #11, where the couple, both 44 years of
age in 2009, already has two grandchildren.2 The last three columns
of Table 8.1 describe the migration types, the definitions of which are
given in Table 8.2. Although three points in time (1995, 2005 and 2009)
do not encompass all the household changes that have taken place, the
two tables together point to two significant trends which I shall elabo-
rate on below: migrant work is increasingly prevalent; and the number
of two-generation and/or replacement households has increased.
Migrant work is increasingly prevalent
By design, 7 of the 26 households interviewed in 1995 were “non-

migrant” households (#6, #11, #14, #15, #19, #21 and #23). By 2009
the number of non-migrant households had declined to five (#2, #7,
C. Cindy Fan 205
Table 8.2 Migration types of sampled households
Migration type 1995 2005 2009
Non-migrant N No household members doing 7 7 5

migrant work.
One-generation 1 All migrant workers are from 15 8 8
one generation.
Two-generation 2 Migrant workers are from two 4 7 6
generations.
Replacement R Return of first-generation 0 2 4
migrants. All migrant workers
are from the second
generation.
Replacement/ R/2 Return of first-generation 0 0 2
two-generation migrants. All migrant workers
are from the second and third
generations.
Other O Attaining city hukou; or 0 2 1
missing.
Sum 26 26 26
#11, #21 and #23). Those five households shared an important feature –
all had engaged in local entrepreneurial and/or government work. And
the interview narratives show that four of the five households had been
involved in migrant work activities at some point between 1995 and
2009. Only household #21 reported no migrant work activities at all
throughout the period. These results underscore the notion that migrant
work is increasingly common and is very much the norm among rural
households.
It seems that the only households that had not participated in
migrant work at all were those engaged in profitable and/or stable
non-agricultural activities locally. Chen Wenping of household #21, for
example, was an entrepreneur who in the early 1990s started an indus-
trial enterprise in a nearby town. Since 2001 he had been employed as a
teacher at a local elementary school. Absent such activities, agriculture
alone was a grossly inadequate source of livelihood, leaving villagers
with few options other than migrant work in order to make ends meet.
Two-generation and replacement households
I have categorised migrant households into “one-generation”, “two-

generation”, “replacement” and “replacement/two-generation” house-
holds. For the sake of simplicity, hereafter I shall omit the
“migrant” description of those households (e.g., two-generation migrant

households will be referred to simply as two-generation house-
holds). Over time, the number of “one-generation” households
had declined while the numbers of “two-generation”, “replacement”
and “replacement/two-generation” households had increased. These
changes reflect three processes. First, as households age and as chil-
dren become adults, more households will become “two-generation”,
“replacement” and “replacement/two-generation” households. The
inventory in Table 8.1 shows that none of the oldest children in “two-
generation” households were under 19; and none of the oldest children
in “replacement” households were under 25.
Second, migrant work as a way of life is being passed from one gen-
eration to the next. Not only are two-generation households increasing
in number but third-generation migrants – whose parents and grand-
parents are, or have been, migrant workers – have also come into
being (#24 and #26). In both households #24 and #26, by 2009 the
interviewees were in their 60s and had returned from migration, being
replaced by their children and grandchildren as second- and third-
generation migrants. These younger migrants, who grew up in the 1980s
and 1990s, witnessed how their parents and other villagers brought
back remittances that benefited their own families. Such observations
might have motivated them to start migrant work as soon as they fin-
ished school or reached working age, and to consider migrant work
a “career path” rather than a short-term solution. As a result, the
younger generations were increasingly detached from farming, while
multiple generations of villagers found themselves heavily dependent
on remittances.
Third, two-generation and replacement households revealed specific
decisions made by first-generation migrants. Two-generation house-
holds may be a result of first-generation migrants continuing migrant
work well past the peak ages for the migrant labour market (e.g., con-
struction and factory assembly lines) and even after their children
have already begun migrant work themselves. An extreme case is the
70-year-old in household #20, who despite his advanced age contin-
ued to work as a janitor in Jiangsu. These veteran migrants want to
earn urban wages as much as they can and as long as there is work.
In that light, the second-generation’s joining migrant work does not
necessarily replace first-generation migrants. Another decision of first-
generation migrants is to return in order to facilitate their children’s
migrant work – by taking care of farmland and grandchildren. Among
the six “replacement” and “replacement/two generation” households,
C. Cindy Fan 207
four had grandchildren under the age of ten (#18, #22, #24 and #25).
Replacement makes it possible for the second generation to pursue
migrant work but does not necessarily mean that returnees are giving
up non-farmwork altogether. For example, Zhu Yiping of household #16
continued to do non-farmwork near his village. Zhu Shitai of household
#18 still planned to do migrant work in the future. The above under-
scores the fact that agricultural work is an inferior source of livelihood
and that migrant work is instead the priority for both older and younger
generations.
Clearly, remittances were an important source of income for Vil-
lage G. Over time, the use of remittances had changed, and reliance
on remittances had transformed the social and spatial organisation of
households. The household biographies below aim to showcase those
changes as well as the underlying social processes.
Household biographies
In the following I use two households’ biographies and narratives to

illustrate the importance of remittances, how the use of remittances has
changed over time, and how migrant work has transformed households’
social and spatial organisation and given rise to tensions and conflicts
as well as new opportunities for collaboration in the household. Per-
sonal stories and narratives are powerful means by which to identify
migrants’ agency, and they enable a bottom-up research approach that
foregrounds the voices and experiences of marginalised individuals in
society (Nagar et al., 2002; Jacka, 2006: 10; Rigg and Salamanca, 2011).
Qualitative materials based on household biographies and narratives are
especially useful in revealing complexity, details and subtle processes,
such as negotiation and practices that are “taken-for-granted, ruled out,
or modified in the process of blending individual narratives within
household narratives” (Jarvis, 1999). Jarvis’ comment about households’
qualitative life history succinctly summarises its multilayered advan-
tages: “a biographical representation of household behaviour comprises
not only the interweaving of parallel histories (work histories, family
milestone events, personal relationship histories) but also the negoti-
ation of the interlinkage and temporal ordering of such events . . . ”.
In a similar vein, and arguing that migration is a much more com-
plex concept than a journey from one place to another, McHugh (2000)
calls attention to research approaches that represent “migrations as cul-
tural events rich in meaning for individuals, families, social groups,
communities and nations”.
The terms “family” and “household” are often used interchangeably.

“Family” is usually thought of as comprising individuals related by
blood or marriage, and “household” as comprising individuals who live
in the same residence. Households may comprise the nuclear family –
spouses and their children – and their relatives and other individuals.
Across cultures, it is expected that members of the nuclear family live
under the same roof. In that light, in this research I focus on the spa-
tial organisation of the nuclear family, with attention also being paid to
other close relatives. In particular, I examine the split-household family,
referring to a family whose members who under normal circumstances
would live in the same place are in reality living in different places. With
regard to the nuclear family, a split household refers to the split between
spouses, and between them and their children.
Over the past two to three decades, rural migrants in China have
engaged in different forms of household arrangement and split house-
holds. During the 1980s and 1990s, “single migrants” (unmarried
adults) and “sole migrants” (one of the spouses) were the most preva-
lent. Men constituted the vast majority of sole migrants, who pursued
migrant work while leaving behind the wife and children. As mentioned
earlier, this is an extended form of the traditional inside–outside division
of labour. Upon marriage and the husband’s pursuit of migrant work –
the outside – the wife then shoulders the responsibility for not only
the physical home but also other village activities, including agricul-
ture, all forming part of the woman’s inside sphere (Jacka, 2006). Since
the 2000s, “couple migrants” – both spouses pursuing migrant work
and leaving their children behind – have become increasingly com-
mon. Unlike the sole migrant model where one of the parents stays
behind to take care of the children, couple migrants leave their children
behind to be raised typically by grandparents or other relatives. Other
forms of household arrangement include the spouses bringing some of
their children (“partial family migrants”) or all of their children (“family
migrants”) to the location of the migrant work. All in all, the prolifera-
tion of split households has resulted in a large number of children and
elderly being left behind (Zhou, 2004; Xiang, 2007). Table 8.3 provides
brief definitions of the different forms of spatial organisation of migrant
households (see also Fan et al., 2011).
I have selected to highlight households #26 and #12 because they
are of different generations. By 2009, household #26 had had three
generations of migrant workers; household #12 had had two. Appen-
dices A and B show for selected years the respective age and location
of the husband, wife, sons, unmarried daughters, grandsons, unmarried
C. Cindy Fan 209
Table 8.3 Migrant households’ spatial organisation
Type Description
Single Single.
Sole Married, spouse and all children in village.
Couple Married, spouse also migrant, all children in village.
Partial family Married, spouse also migrant, brought along some children (not
working) and left other children behind in village.
Family Married, spouse also migrant, brought along all children (not
working).
granddaughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters-in-law. They also

summarise the use of remittances, household events such as house-
building and children getting married, and the household’s spatial
arrangement according to Table 8.3.
Household #26
Jiang Zhongfeng started migrant work in 1983 when he was 38 years old.
Poverty compelled him to take up coalmine work in Shaanxi, leaving
his wife, a son and a daughter behind, and starting a sole-migration
arrangement:
In 1983, my son was going to get married. We were poor and our
house that was made of mud and straw was small with only two
rooms. [To bring in a daughter-in-law] we had to expand the house
and took out a loan. Also, adding one person increased the demand
on food. Our 5.1 mu (0.85 acre) of land was not enough even for sub-
sistence. We needed cash to pay off our debt and buy food. There was
no other way out except dagong.
The above quote exemplifies the poverty that many rural Chinese have
faced, as well as the social norms that motivated and pressured them to
build new houses or expand existing houses. The patriarchal ideology
which centres on sons, combined with the patrilocal tradition, demands
that parents create space for sons when they get married. Not only was
Jiang Zhongfeng under the pressure to enlarge the house but also he
took out a loan of CNY 4,000 (yuan) in order to fund the brideprice.
The remittances that Jiang Zhongfeng sent during ten years of
coalmine work “lifted the family out of poverty”. Not only did he pay
off the debt but he added five brick rooms to the house, thus allowing
his married son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren to live under the

same roof. However, the extended-family practice is gender specific. The
son remains a member of the household even after he is married and
has children. The daughter, however, left the household upon getting
married in 1993 and from that point on virtually disappeared from the
narrative.
Patriarchal ideology is further illustrated through Jiang Zhongfeng’s
commitment to find work for his son, whereas he made no mention
of his daughter’s work. In 1993, Jiang Zhongfeng arranged for his son,
about 25 years old then, to join him in Shaanxi in construction work,
but his son could not tolerate the work and returned home shortly
afterwards. Jiang’s assistance did not stop there:
I decided to use my savings and took out a loan to buy my son a

truck, so that he could do transportation work [at home].
Therefore, despite the son’s coming of age, Jiang’s sole-migrant arrange-

ment prevailed. Over the years, his remittances improved the family’s
wellbeing, as summarised by his wife, Luo Jinying:
In the past, we were poor and always hungry. Now, because of dagong,
we can make fried snacks for the Spring Festival. And we can buy
fertilizer . . . We have cash to rent machines to plow, sow seeds, and
harvest. We are eating better and we have more dishes at meals.
My son can afford to smoke. We now drink tea instead of just water.
Remittances support not only subsistence but also investment in agri-

culture, as well as consumption – such as cigarettes and tea. In 1995
the family installed a telephone. Miscellaneous other expenditure,
including social expenses, were also made possible by remittances:
In the village, there are lots of expenses. We need cash for wedding
and other kinds of gifts, medical expenses, etc. Therefore, dagong is a
must.
In short, while migrant work was seen in the 1980s as a means to

provide subsistence and a short-term solution to poverty, by the 1990s
it was considered to be a necessary step towards building the family’s
future, including household formation:
Without dagong, you have no future. You will have to borrow money
for food. People who stay behind cannot even get a loan, let alone
find a wife.
C. Cindy Fan 211
The above comment underscores a widely held notion that remittances

are key to rural households’ economic and social sustainability, whereas
the future of non-migrant households is bleak.
In 1995 and 1996, Jiang changed jobs from coalmines to construction
and moved to work first in Shanghai and then in Ningbo. About four
years later, in 2000, Jiang’s son decided to sell the truck and together
with his wife joined Jiang to work in Ningbo. Jiang’s son worked in
transportation, having benefited from his transportation work at home,
and his daughter-in-law worked in a factory, leaving behind three
children aged 11, 9 and 7 to be raised by grandmother Luo.
The decision of Jiang’s son and daughter-in-law to work in Ningbo
was a significant step in the household’s lifecycle. First, this was the
beginning of second-generation migration and couple migration, both
facilitated by the parents, Jiang and Luo, and by changing gender and
generational roles and changing productive and social relations between
the migrants and the left-behind. Much like how he had helped the
son buy a truck, Jiang’s experience in and familiarity with Ningbo was
a catalyst for his son and daughter-in-law to find work there. In addi-
tion, the availability of Luo to take care of the three grandchildren was
a critical factor in making couple migration possible. While the wife’s
joining migrant work was uncommon among Jiang and Luo’s own gen-
eration, due to persistent gender norms and perhaps the absence of help
to raise children, the second generation who benefit from intergenera-
tional division of labour can more freely pursue couple migration. But
this also means that a grandmother like Luo would be performing care-
giving for two generations of children – first to her own children and
now to her grandchildren. Although the daughter-in-law called home
every two or three days, Lou was the de facto parent for all three young
children. As mentioned earlier, intergenerational division of labour was
also the reason why fenjia or household division was postponed.
Second, couple migration has changed how remittances are used.
Jiang’s remittances in earlier years were used for housing, wedding and
agriculture, and over the years had boosted the household’s standard
of living, permitting, for example, the purchase of a washing machine,
a refrigerator and a colour television. The bulk of what Jiang’s son
and daughter-in-law sent back, however, was used on the left-behind
children’s education.
Third, the second generation’s pursuit of migrant work might moti-
vate the beginning of a replacement process, leading to older migrants’
return to the countryside. Beginning in 2005, Jiang gradually reduced
the time that he engaged in migrant work, first to six months a year and
by 2008 to two months a year.
Finally, by inheriting migrant work as a source of livelihood, the sec-

ond generation is not only practising “migrant work as a way of life”
but is a conduit passing it down to the third generation and beyond.
By 2005, Jiang’s oldest grandson, aged 16, had finished junior high and
decided to go to Ningbo to work. In other words, three generations
of migrants from the same family were working in the same city. The
other two grandchildren, aged 14 and 12, stayed in the village to attend
junior high and primary school, respectively, and were taken care of
by Luo. From Jiang to his son to his grandson, the age of first migrant
work decreased from 38 to 32 to 16. Also reduced was the children
and grandchildren’s extent of experience with farming and local eco-
nomic activities. Jiang’s main livelihood was farming prior to his starting
migrant work in 1983. His son, though not actively involved in farm-
ing, did transportation work in and around the village prior to migrant
work. The grandson, however, started migrant work immediately after
finishing high school. All of the above suggest that from one generation
to the next, migrant work is increasingly accepted as a logical step in
one’s work life, and remittances have become a normal and necessary
means of livelihood.
In 2007, Jiang’s second grandchild finished junior high and started
to work in a factory in Ningbo. Jiang, then 62, had begun to plan his
return to the village to start a tricycle business. Tricycles that load pas-
sengers and goods are commonly seen in and around the village and are
a popular means for the elderly to earn cash.
By 2009, all three grandchildren of Jiang’s had left for Ningbo. The
oldest grandson was married and his wife was also doing migrant work.
The youngest granddaughter quit school after the seventh grade. Quit-
ting school before finishing junior high is more common among girls
than boys, again reflecting patriarchal ideology – it is quite typical in
rural China that boys are encouraged, expected and given opportunities
to be educated more than girls.
Between their Village G and Ningbo residences, the three generations
owned one computer, two televisions, two refrigerators, two washing
machines, one motorcycle, one tricycle and more than ten cell phones.
When the grandson got married, his wife’s family received CNY 16,000
as a brideprice from Jiang. Clearly, earnings from migrant work had
enabled the family to maintain a standard of living that was superior
to Jiang’s prior to his pursuing migrant work. Nevertheless, the cycle of
household events financed by remittances, including building or ren-
ovating houses and funding sons’ weddings, seems to have continued
across the generations.
C. Cindy Fan 213
Despite the fact that by 2009 Jiang’s son, daughter-in-law and three
children were working and/or living in Ningbo, they did not plan to
stay there for good. As mentioned earlier, most rural migrants do not
plan to live in cities on a permanent basis due to the absence of an iden-
tity and future there, socially, economically and institutionally. Both the
son and the daughter-in-law indicated that they continued to think of
themselves as nongcunren or peasants, that they were raised in the vil-
lage and were happy to live in the village. While such a sentiment may
reflect their inability to fully enter urban society rather than a longing
for rural living, in their defence the grandson argued that “Chengshiren
(urbanites) eat three meals a day, so do nongcunren.”
Household #12
Ding Baopeng (husband) and Yin Yurong (wife) of household #12 are
about 20 years younger than Jiang Zhongfeng and Luo Jinying of house-
hold #26. However, like Jiang, Ding started migrant work in the early
1980s and he left behind his wife, Yin Yurong (sole migration). Unlike
Jiang, Ding was newly married and did not have children when he first
started migrant work. Similar to household #26, it was poverty and
lack of land that motivated him to work in coalmines in Shanxi. His
remittances not only fed the family but also allowed him to buy a tractor
in 1992, which motivated him to lease land from other villagers to farm.
However, Yin, who gave birth to two sons in the late 1980s, was practi-
cally the only person farming because Ding was absent most of the time.
This sole-migration arrangement was a source of frustration for her:
My husband left home after the Spring Festival and didn’t return
until the next Spring Festival. I didn’t want him to go, but we had no
choice. We had too little land and couldn’t survive on that. I was left
alone, which was really painful. I worked on the farm while my chil-
dren (ages 5 and 3, around 1992) were crawling everywhere. I could
not manage to clear the weed – the boys were crying and clinging to
my feet.
Her frustration led her to take the children to join Ding for a short while.
While in Shanxi, Yin cooked meals for her husband and other migrant
workers. After she returned home, in 1995 Ding decided to return home
to farm and leased farmland from other villagers. He explained:
Migrant work is not a long-term solution. Now that we have the

tractor, we can lease farmland from others. We can raise pigs and
do other odd-jobs . . . Leaving behind a spouse to take care of the chil-

dren, farm, raise pigs and chickens is not a good idea. If I stay home,
we can manage well all the above.
Yet, in 1999, after four years of farming, the couple concluded that
migrant work was necessary for their livelihood. Yin explained: “We lost
hope (in the economic situation) at home.” But should it be just Ding,
both Ding and Yin, or both the couple and their children, who leave
home for the city?
By 1999 their children were 11 and 9. Given that migrant children’s
access to schooling in cities is difficult and is especially so beyond ele-
mentary school, Ding and Yin decided to leave their children in rural
schools. Their younger son did later attend a migrant children’s elemen-
tary school in Ningbo, but after a year he had to return home to attend
junior high.
As for Yin, Ding was reluctant for her to go out, on the grounds
that most wives of the village stay home. But Yin contested and Ding
finally compromised. They sold the pigs, sheep and tractor, and they
left behind their two sons to be taken care of by Ding’s elderly parents.
They went to Ningbo, where Ding worked in recycling – a sector that
had hired many migrants from Anhui – and Yin worked in a factory.
As a result of Ding and Yin’s decision to leave home as a couple, Yin
has been seen in the village as a pioneer, starting the practice of the
wife doing migrant work and challenging the gendered inside–outside
dichotomy. This was just one of many examples where contesting tra-
ditional gender norms produces tensions and conflicts, and necessitates
negotiation and renegotiation. Having been exposed to urban society
and lifestyle, Yin is critical of rural men:
Urban men are more reasonable. They go home and do chores. Anhui
men are no good. They’ll earn some money and become full of
themselves. Some even get mistresses and divorce their wives.
Yet Yin’s contesting traditional gender norms is contradicted by her own

endorsement of the notion that major household decisions, including
how remittances and savings are used, should be made by men, as seen
in another argument between them, described below.
By the mid-2000s, Ding and Yin had used migrant earnings to buy
consumer goods such as a television and a washing machine. Yin wanted
to invest their savings but Ding wanted to use it for their sons’ weddings.
Yin described their differences:
C. Cindy Fan 215
When the town first created a development district, I wanted to

spend 20,000 yuan to buy some land there. That piece of land is now
worth 40,000 yuan. If we built a two or three-story there, we could
have sold it for 80,000 yuan. But my husband is very conservative.
He disagreed and wanted to use the savings to build houses for our
sons. We had a big fight. Even though the husband should decide on
major household matters, I am still mad at him.
Again, Ding’s decision to spend the savings on new houses is rooted

in the persistent patriarchal tradition where sons are expected to
bring in daughters-in-law, and where marital transactions require men
to demonstrate their material capacity. From this perspective, using
remittances to build houses and preparing sons to get married is not
only reasonable but expected. Despite the entrepreneurial soundness
and originality of Yin’s proposal to buy land, in 2006 Ding decided to
spend CNY 150,000 (yuan) to build two houses, one for each son. The
same year, the older son, aged 19, joined the husband’s recycling work in
Ningbo. Three years later, the older son got married, for which Ding and
Yin spent CNY 100,000 on the brideprice. They also bought a motorcy-
cle and four cell phones. By 2009, remittances accounted for 100 per
cent of the household income. Agriculture contributed nothing because
all of the farmland had been leased to other villagers.
The story of Ding and Yin illustrates how the use of remittances has
changed over time and how remittances have precipitated both eco-
nomic and social changes. In the 1980s, remittances were necessary
for subsistence. In the 1990s, they were used to invest in agriculture.
However, by the late 1990s, the couple had given up on agriculture
as a source of livelihood and decided to be completely dependent on
migrant work. The use of remittances is situated in gendered traditions
that persist in spite of the migrants’ exposure to urban living. Yin’s par-
ticipation in migrant work represented her challenging the gendered
inside–outside dichotomy. She was one of the pioneers in the village
to engage in couple migration, as an alternative to the sole-migration
model which left her dissatisfied. Yet she continued to endorse the tra-
dition where the husband is the household head and decision-maker,
even though she was critical of him and his decisions. Yin’s idea to
buy land was original and creative; while Ding’s decision was one that
reinforced gendered traditions – namely, a man must have a house in
order to attract prospective wives and get married. Both Yin’s interest
in buying land in a nearby town and Ding’s decision to build houses
in the village show that the countryside remains their home. As long
as the city is out of reach economically, socially and institutionally, a

permanent home in the countryside is still necessary.
Conclusion
Using qualitative material about 26 households from a village (Village G)

in Anhui, including household biographies and narratives, I have sought
to highlight the transformative impacts of remittances on the social and
spatial organisation of rural families in China. Over the past 30 years the
pursuit of migrant work has redefined the economic and everyday life
of the village.
First, remittances are now clearly the main source of income for Vil-
lage G. Arable land was meagre to begin with; and population increase
further eroded any chance of an increase in land allocation per capita
and per household. Agriculture’s capacity to maintain mere subsistence,
let alone savings, is weak. Villagers have given up animal husbandry,
and their approach towards arable land is maintenance – hence leas-
ing it to other villagers at no cost – rather than as a productive asset.
Instead, migrant work provides practically the only means for villagers
to earn non-farm wages and is fast becoming a way of life. Dependence
on remittances is the norm. In fact, migrant work is akin to any wage
work outside the home, except that the former requires the migrant not
to live in the village for extended periods of time.
How remittances are being used is revealing of social norms as well as
social and economic changes in rural households. For pioneer migrants
who started migrant work in the 1980s, remittances made survival pos-
sible and kept the family from being hungry. Also, urban wages funded
expensive but necessary items, such as medical bills and house con-
struction or renovation. The house not only provides shelter but is
heavily imbued with gendered and intergenerational meanings – a new
or expanded house is a prerequisite for the son to find a wife. Due to
patriarchal and patrilocal traditions, parents are motivated to support
sons’ marriage arrangements, often requiring the father to undertake
migrant work in order to fund a house project and brideprice. In that
light, house-building is not only a social tool but also a practical and
necessary step towards continuing the family lineage.
Households that managed to accrue some savings might invest in agri-
culture, such as buying fertiliser and agricultural machinery. But there is
little evidence of commitment to agriculture as a desirable and long-
term means of livelihood. Since the 1990s and especially the 2000s,
C. Cindy Fan 217
households have increasingly used remittances to invest in children’s

education. Finally, households may choose to spend their savings on
consumer goods, such as washing machines and televisions, signalling
not only urban influence but also improvement in the standard of liv-
ing. Despite the eradication of poverty, the reliance on remittances has
not declined but is in fact increasingly the norm across the village. In the
rare cases where a household has never participated in migrant work, it
is usually because of government appointments such as village officials,
or successful entrepreneurial activities.
Migrant work as a way of life is being passed to the children
and even the grandchildren, such that two-generation and three-
generation migrant households are increasingly common. The younger
the migrants, the more likely that they will start migrant work imme-
diately after finishing school, and the more likely that they have not
had any farming experience. While the older generation of migrants,
especially men, tended to choose sole migration – leaving the spouse
and children behind – the new generations are much more ready to
undertake newer forms of split households, especially couple migration
that involves both spouses. The newer forms of spatial organisation
almost always entail intergenerational collaboration and negotiation.
The wife of a pioneer migrant, for example, who was responsible for the
“inside” under the sole-migrant model may find herself providing care-
giving again to her grandchildren so that her children can pursue couple
migration. In short, traditional kinship practices of fenjia or household
division are being postponed in order to facilitate intergenerational col-
laboration. The reliance on and pursuit of remittances is therefore not
simply an economic activity but is a negotiated endeavour that demands
new and specific forms of social organisation. In this chapter, I have
sought to show how remittances have shaped households’ social and
spatial organisation, by focusing on the rural family as the site where
migration decisions are made and where the impacts of remittances
are felt, and allowing biographies and narratives to construct a nascent
lifecycle of migrant households.
Appendix A: Household #26
Year Husband Wife (Luo Son Daugher- Daughter Grandson Grand- Grand- Grand- Remittance Household Spatial
(Jiang Jinying) in-law daughter- daugher daughter and usage event arrange-
Zhongfeng) in-law ment
Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location
(work) (work) (work) (work) (work) (work) (work) (work) (work)
1983 38 Shaanxi 39 Home 15 Home 16 Home NA Home Subsistence Son got Sole
(con- (trans- (food, married.
struction) portation) house, Borrowed
medical) money to
build
house for
son and
fund
brideprice.
Husband
started
migrant
work
1993 48 Huainan 49 Home 25 Home 26 Home NA NA 4 Home 2 Home About CNY Daughter Sole
(coalmine) (trans- 2,000 a got married
portation) year. Built and left
five rooms. household
Bought a
truck for
son
1994 49 Huainan 50 Home 26 Home 27 Home 5 Home 3 Home 1 Home Land Sole
(coalmine) (trans- adjusted
portation) from 5.1
mu to 4.9
mu
1995 50 Shanghai 51 Home 27 Home 28 Home 6 Home 4 Home 2 Home About CNY 4,000 a year, Installed telephone Sole
(con- (transfor food, fertiliser, and
struction) portation) machinery rental
1996 51 Ningbo 52 Home 28 Home 29 Home 7 Home 5 Home 3 Home Sole
(con- (trans-
struction) portation)
2000 55 Ningbo 56 Home 32 Ningbo 33 Ningbo 11 Home 9 Home 7 Home Bought washing machine, Son sold truck. Both 1: Sole; 2:
(con- (trans- (factory) refrigerator, and colour son and Couple
struction) portation) television daughter-in-law
found work in
Ningbo
2005 60 Ningbo 61 Home 7 Ningbo 38 Ningbo 16 Ningbo 14 Home 12 Home (ele- Remittances were main Grandson finished 1: Sole; 2:
(con- (trans- (factory) (trans- (junior mentary) source of income. high school, joined Couple; 3:
struction) portation) porta- high) Grandchildren’s education. father’s work in Single
tion) Built a second house with Ningbo
six rooms
2007 62 Home 63 Home 39 Ningbo 40 Ningbo 18 Ningbo 16 Ningbo 14 Home (7th Husband had 2: Couple;
(tricycle (trans- (factory) (trans- (cloth- grade) returned 3: Single
business) portation) porta- ing home. Oldest
tion) factory) granddaughter
joined migrant work
in Ningbo. Youngest
granddaughter quit
school
2009 64 Home 65 Home 41 Ningbo 42 Ningbo 20 Ningbo 19 NA 18 Ningbo 16 Ningbo Combined furniture Grandson got 2: Family;
(tricycle (trans- (factory) (trans- (migrant (cloth- (non- (Ningbo and home): one married. Youngest 3: Couple/
business) portation) porta- work) ing working) computer, two televisions, granddaughter single
tion) factory) two refrigerators, two joined family in
washing machines, one Ningbo
motorcycle, one tricycle,
more than 10 cell
phones. Brideprice for
granddaughter-in-law CNY
16,000
Spatial arrangement: 1: first generation; 2: second generation; 3: third generation.

“Home” includes working in nearby townships, which permits daily commute to and from the village.
Appendix B: Household #12
220
Year Husband Wife (Yin Son Daugher- Son Remittance and Household event Spatial
(Ding Yurong) in-law usage arrangement
Baopeng)
Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location Age Location
(work) (work) (work) (work) (work)
1984 22 Shanxi 21 Home Subsistence (food) Husband started Sole

(colamine) migrant work
1987 25 Shanxi 24 Home 0 Birth of son Sole
(coalmine)
1989 27 Shanxi 26 Home 2 0 Birth of son Sole
(coalmine)
1992 30 Shanxi 29 Home 5 3 Bought a tractor Leased farmland from Sole
(coalmine) villagers
1993 31 Shanxi 30 Shanxi 6 Shanxi 4 Shanxi Wife and two sons Family
(coalmine) (home joined husband
making)
1994 33 Shanxi 32 Home 8 Home 6 Home Earned CNY 5,000 in Sole
(coalmine) one year. Bought
fertiliser, bicycle, tape
recorder
1995 34 Home 33 Home 9 Home 7 Home Husband returned Non-migrant
home to farm and
lease farmland from
villagers
1999 37 Ningbo 36 Ningbo 12 Home 10 Home Both husband and Couple
(recycling) (factory) wife found work in
Ningbo. Sold
agricultural
machinery, all sheep
and pigs. Husband’s
parents (70+) took
care of two children
2001 40 Ningbo 39 Ningbo 15 Home 13 Ningbo Younger son attended Partial family
(recycling) (factory) (Migrant migrant children’s
children’s school in Ningbo.
school) Returned home after
one year
2004 42 Ningbo 41 Ningbo 17 Home 15 Home Television Older son graduated Couple
(recycling) (factory) from junior high
2005 43 Ningbo 42 Ningbo 18 Nanjing 16 Home Bought washing Older son stayed with 1: Couple; 2:
(recycling) factory) (Learning machine. Bought uncle in Nanjing to Single
to drive) CNY 20,000 worth of learn to drive
bricks to build houses
for two sons
2006 44 Ningbo 43 Ningbo 19 Ningbo 17 Home Spent CNY 150,000 to Older son joined 1: Couple; 2:
(recycling) (factory) (recycling) build two houses parents in Ningbo Single
2009 47 Ningbo 46 Ningbo 22 Ningbo 22 Just 20 Home Brideprice CNY Older son got 1: Couple; 2:
(recycling) (factory) (recycling) married 100,000. Other married. Younger son Couple
properties: graduated from junior
motorcycle, four cell high
phones
Spatial arrangement: 1: first generation; 2: second generation; 3: third generation.

“Home” includes working in nearby townships, which permits daily commute to and from the village.
221
Notes
1. The notion of “men till, women weave” has long been considered the norm
for the gender division of labour in the countryside, although it inaccurately
portrays Chinese women as absent from the field even though they have made
significant contribution to agriculture (Entwisle and Henderson, 2000: 298;
Hershatter, 2000).
2. Their oldest child, who was 21 in 2009, was married to a wife aged 23.
They seemed exceptionally young to have two children aged eight and two.
I suspect that the eight-year-old was adopted.
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9
Filipino Children and the Affective
Economy of Saving and Being
Saved: Remittances and Debts in
Transnational Migrant Families
Cheryll Alipio
In 2006 over 50 million migrants from the Asia-Pacific region sent

home more than USD 113 billion in remittances (International Fund
for Agricultural Development, 2007). Six years later and 10 million
more migrant workers worldwide, these remittances had more than dou-
bled to USD 260 billion, representing 63 per cent of global flows to all
developing countries (International Fund for Agricultural Development,
2013). With the scale and scope of remittances and migrants from the
Asia-Pacific region continuing to comprise the highest regional total in
the world, not only are an estimated 70 million Asian households – that
is, one out of every ten – benefiting from these financial flows (Interna-
tional Fund for Agricultural Development, 2013) in terms of subsistence,
poverty alleviation and economic mobility (Massey et al., 1993) but also
national governments and their GDP, where the amount of remittances
have far exceeded the value of official development assistance and for-
eign direct investment in countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka
and Indonesia (Rosewarne, 2012). In the Philippines, the inflow of over
USD 21.4 billion (nearly 12 per cent of GDP) in 2012 (Bangko Sentral
ng Pilipinas (BSP), 2014) and outflow of almost 4.28 million migrants
in 2010 solidifies the country as the third largest remittance recipient in
the world which, in terms of Southeast Asia, accounts for over half of
all remittances (International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2013)
and leads as a migrant-sending country to top destinations such as the
USA, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Australia, Italy, Qatar, the
UAE and the UK (World Bank, 2011).
227
Yet despite the nexus between migration and remittances in the

Philippines, some economic studies find that remittances have not
been shown to effectively generate development (Rosewarne, 2012) and
rebalance growth in the long run by creating domestic demand (Ang
et al., 2009). Rosewarne (2012) suggests that institutional failings and
money-transfer practices frustrate the regular flow of remittances and its
availability for investment, which may have prompted initiatives from
the central bank of the Philippines, BSP, to enhance transparency and
competition in the remittance market, improve access to financial ser-
vices, encourage savings and investment, and increase financial literacy
among overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and beneficiaries (Bayangos
and Jansen, 2011). Also, development may not be a primary motiva-
tion for migration (Rosewarne, 2012). A study of Tongan and Western
Samoan migrants shows that in addition to being driven by altruism
to support family members who are left behind, remittances were used
to fulfil personal self-interest goals, such as asset accumulation, and
to partake in mutually beneficial arrangements, such as loans (Brown,
1997). In the Philippines, several studies found that remittances reduce
the level and depth of household poverty (Ang et al., 2009), increase
spending on education and housing (Adams, Jr, 2007), and lead to more
schooling and less child labour (Yang, 2008). From this perspective,
Semyonov and Gorodzeisky (2008: 620–621) suggest that labour migra-
tion for remittances can be viewed as a rational economic strategy that is
adopted by families “to maximize potential economic gains and to min-
imize the scope of economic risks”, while functioning concomitantly as
“a form of investment in human capital of the future generation” rather
than as an investment in national development.
While this literature on migrant households and economies points to
the many reasons why migrants remit, it also takes adults as the key
actors in these transnational practices, subsequently rendering invisible
children’s participation in the migration process (Orellana et al., 2001),
and their contribution in sustaining their own livelihoods and that of
their families (Bourdillon, 2006). By taking a child-centred approach
in treating children not “simply as objects of care and protection”
(Bourdillon, 2006: 1207) but as “economic agents” (Levison, 2001),
this chapter challenges conventional analyses about the circulation of
remittances in transnational migrant families by specifically consider-
ing the activities and agency of those who are caught in what Tadiar
(2009: 9) calls, the “global undersides” of capitalism. In this case, these
are the left-behind children of low-income, land-based OFWs, who have
grown up in the Philippines outside the physical proximity of one or
Cheryll Alipio 229
both parents and who often face a more economically unstable liveli-
hood due to parents’ un- or under-employment, inconsistent wages,
delayed remittances, debt repayments and even clandestine “second”
spouses and families.1
First, this chapter follows Wong’s (2006: 6) lead in evaluating “the
ways in which discursive practices of expectations, gender roles and
relations and cultural norms intersect with structural factors to shape
(and to be shaped by) remittances”. The study of children implicated in
these debt-laden, “dense interlinkages among individual, family, state
and international systems” (Peebles, 2010: 235) highlights “remittances
as a social practice” that is premised on notions of reciprocity along-
side economic rationality (Wong, 2006: 376). Second, it explores the
economic and social interventions offered by an NGO to families
of OFWs, thereby adding another link to the systems that influence
how children organise and negotiate remittance behaviour. The case
study of two female children – both of whom have OFW parents
working in Saudi Arabia – supplemented by ethnographic participant
observation, interviews, personal narratives, newspaper accounts and
promotional material gathered during fieldwork from 2006 to 2007 –
reveals the effects of remittances on the everyday lives of individu-
als and their families, and underscores the skilled ability of children
to deal with shifting economic transformations, familial arrangements
and cultural debts. Finally, in tracing the flows, investments and rela-
tionships in remittances, Pessar and Mahler (2003: 817) reminds us that
transnational practices are rooted in imagining, imaging, planning and
strategising (Appadurai, 1990). This chapter thus engages children’s cog-
nitive processes, or the “mindwork”, that Pessar and Mahler (2003: 817)
argue is necessary in a migration-remittance framework that privileges
agency. The examination of children’s mediations on and manipula-
tions of the money and gifts received from their OFW parent reveal
how the expanding economies of transnational migration continue to
draw upon indebted kinds of relation along with those that are affec-
tively built upon the “cultivation of individual ethical practice” of
accountability, productivity and rationalisation (Rudnyckyj, 2009: 116).
Remittances as debt: An ethic of reciprocity

and responsibility
While families assume a central role in the migratory process, women’s

labour migration has come to feature prominently in the economic and
labour export agendas of the Philippines (Parreñas, 2001b; Oishi, 2005;
Rodriguez, 2010) as women migrants now make up more than 50 per

cent of overseas workers (ADB, 2013) despite the initial out-migration
of men in the international merchant marine and construction indus-
tries in the 1970s (see McKay, Chapter 5, in this volume). The past
three decades in particular have seen a steady increase in demand for
service workers (of which around 70 per cent were domestic workers
and care-givers), in contrast with a recent substantial decline in profes-
sional workers (in comparison with their growth in the 1990s) and a
surge in production workers due to the growing construction boom in
parts of Asia, such as Singapore and Macau, and the Middle East (which
evokes the early 1970s demand of middle- and low-skilled workers who
were sent to the oil-rich countries of the latter through the government’s
Overseas Employment Programme, instituted in 1972) (Ang et al., 2009).
With the creation of labour institutions, such as the POEA (established
in 1982), educational systems (most notably for nurses) to support the
recruitment of Filipinos overseas, and regulations (i.e., EO 857 of 1982
and EO 925 of 1984) stipulating that 50–80 per cent of earnings must
be remitted through official banking channels and remittance centres
(Asis, 1992; McKay, Chapter 5, this volume), the feminisation of migra-
tion and the deployment of OFWs, particularly of lower-salaried service
and construction workers (as a major source of foreign currency and
sustained levels of remittance inflows) became a much more important
strategy in contemporary economic development policies (Gibson et al.,
2001: 368) rather than the promotion of the domestic manufacturing
sector (World Bank, 2013).
Because migrants’ labour is considered to be crucial to the Philippine
economy, former president Cory Aquino heralded overseas Filipinos as
modern-day national heroes in a speech given to a group of domes-
tic workers in Hong Kong: Kayo po ang mga bagong bayani (You are the
new heroes) (Maglipon, 1993, as cited in Rafael, 1997: 274). Following
Aquino, former president Fidel Ramos depicted them as “internation-
ally shared human resources” and former president Gloria Macapagal
Arroyo has variously described “overseas Filipino workers” as “over-
seas Filipino investors” (Weekley, 2004: 352, 356) and even as “ ‘new
aristocrats’ and the ‘ambassadors of goodwill’ who have a crucial respon-
sibility to build the country’s economy and promote a positive image
of the Philippines” (Guevarra, 2006: 527). Those considered the most
outstanding are given the POEA’s annual Bagong Bayani award. In
Indonesia, where women constitute an estimated 75 per cent of migrant
workers (ADB, 2013), the government uses a similar sentiment, describ-
ing them as “foreign exchange heroines” (Committee for Asian Women,
Cheryll Alipio 231
2009). The nationalist discourse of “new heroes” and “investor heroes”

(Rosewarne, 2012: 67) therefore emerges from two overlapping, moral
discourses.
First, conflating the OFW with “new money” and investment comes
from a specific “economic calculus” in which the development poten-
tial of overseas migrant workers is governed (Gibson et al., 2001: 369).
This calculus follows what Guevarra (2006: 527) explains as a “neolib-
eral market rationality of economic competitiveness and entrepreneur-
ship” to “manage”, not “promote”, the productive labour migration
and economic conduct of Filipino citizen-workers through an “ethic
of responsibility” towards the nation, their families and themselves.
In Guevarra’s (2006: 525, 527) reading, this discursive construction of
the modern hero, linking nationalism, capitalism, morality, religion and
filial piety, are both gendered – departing from the hegemonic mas-
culinity that is usually associated with the hero image (Connell, 2005)
and skewed towards a feminine ideal to ensure “good” citizens, workers,
wives, mothers and daughters – and empowering – to liberate OFWs to
act on their desires and choices to seek “greener pastures” abroad. Yet
this empowered act of migrating or “doing good” necessitates a kind
of sacrifice: that of leaving. Second, heroism must then be articulated
within what McKay (2007: 625) calls a “particular cultural repertoire of
Philippine nationalism” that is at once “pathos- and deference-laden”
(Rafael, 1997: 273). The term “new hero” gains its currency from the
modern nation-state practice of naming male founders (Rafael, 1997).
The Philippines’ “first Filipino” hero was the martyred Jose Rizal whose
life and death fighting and perishing at the hands of Spanish colo-
nial rulers has been likened to the popular Pasyon narrative of Jesus
Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection (Ileto, 1982). Rallying around
his name, revolutionary millenarian uprisings against Spain ensued dur-
ing the late 19th century (Ileto, 1979), making Rizal, like Christ, more
potent in death than when he was alive (Rafael, 1997). In the search
for kalayaan (freedom) from colonial powers, Ileto (1979) finds that all
normal hierarchical relations that structure Filipino society are inverted.
Kaut (1961) explains that utang na loob (literally, “debt of the inside”,
or variously translated as “debt of gratitude” or “debt of prime obliga-
tion”) is a particular Filipino value that exposes an important system
of reciprocal obligations and behavioural expectations, which in turn
govern and limit socially meaningful relations.2 Utang na loob, Cannell
(1999: 231) further contends, becomes a “sequence of exchanges whose
ordering and consequences are predictably governed by the rules of
reciprocity”. As such, it can never be paid off due to one’s unequal,
asymmetrical status, though it could be acknowledged through constant

repeated acts of deference (Cannell, 1999). Here, utang na loob usually
results from a given gift (kaloob), signalling a set of social customs, while
utang (debt) results from a deferred payment, a loan (pautang), denoting
a business transaction. The gift, at the same time, can be considered to
be a loan, which would then establish a state of indebtedness between
the giver and the receiver, or the patron and the client. However, Rizal’s
ability “to evoke populist visions of utopic communities held together
by an ethos of mutual caring, the sharing of obligations (damayan) and
the exchange of pity (awa)” (Rafael, 1997: 275) allowed the revolution-
ary Filipinos to seemingly overturn the foundation of indebtedness.
Ileto (1979: 230) observes that as they begged for food, shelter and
protective care, “the gift [becomes] a mode of strengthening the bonds
of loob among men”, creating a horizontal, rather than a hierarchal,
relationship with their benefactor “akin to love”, wherein “things are
in fact turned upside down – the debtor is the man of power”. In his
analysis of debt during the 16th- and 17th-century Philippines, Rafael
(1993) also finds that the debt-bondage society was structured by the
Tagalog notion that the loob of a person could only be created and main-
tained through relations of exchange. Thus the loob is not circulated
in exchanges between superordinate and subordinate but, instead, par-
ticipation in social relationships of obligation itself makes the “inside”
(Rafael, 1993: 122–127).
Mauss (1990: 3) stresses that participation in these social transactions
is in theory voluntary, “apparently free and disinterested but neverthe-
less constrained and self-interested”, pointing to the “deep and strong
affective nature” at the core of utang na loob. In Cannell’s (1999: 231)
ethnography of the Bicol region of the Philippines, she found that
Bicolano relationships were not structured by ideas of exchange or
even utang na loob, but through an “emotional economy”, such that
social sentiments such as pity and shame (hiya), or love and deference,
as exemplified by Ileto and Rafael, came to represent the experiences
of such encounters. Often in the name of love and care, studies of
Philippine migration have acknowledged the vital role that is performed
by families in both internal and international migratory processes (see,
e.g., Trager, 1988; Parreñas, 2001b). Intensified by kinship ties that
are bilaterally composed of extended family members and godparents
from consanguinity, affinity and ritual, assistance patterns within fam-
ilies carry a sense of reciprocal obligation (Tyner, 2002). Hage (2002:
203) argues that membership in social groups can be a guilt-inducing
process as “one remains in the debt of the community, repaying in small
instalments through a life-time of participating in it”.
Cheryll Alipio 233
As discussed elsewhere (Alipio, 2013), these debt-laden bonds create

a wide exchange of financial and emotional aid and the sharing of
responsibilities if economic conditions at home are poor, subsequently
adding to the immense pressure on young Filipinos to seek employment
abroad. Failure to help their family and kin risks “arousing bitterness
and betrayal in the family” as well as being seen as walang utang na
loob (without a debt of gratitude) or, even worse, as walang hiya (with-
out shame) by “not honouring [the utang na loob] system of socially
approved norms of conduct, or by acting ungrateful or without any guilt
to those who have invested in their futures” (Alipio, 2013: 218–219).
For example, in the families of Filipino seafarers, parents and family
members who invest in “quality” children and anticipating “return[s] of
greater assistance from their children later in their elderly lives” (Alipio,
2013: 217) often finance the costs of schooling and training for cre-
dentials, provide loans for placement and deployment fees, manage the
migrant’s household and provide care to left-behind family members
(see Parreñas, 2005). McKay (Chapter 5, in this volume) notes that, in
Filipino culture and tradition, while men’s masculinity fell along a con-
tinuum from possessing self-control and respect from others (kinalalaki)
to controlling and being feared by others (malalaki), men are idealised
as the main breadwinner, who economically provides and takes charge
of the family. Similarly, there is an expectation that firstborn children in
the Philippines, particularly the eldest daughters as Basa et al. (2011: 14)
observe, hold a stronger moral obligation to provide support to the natal
family. Basa et al. (2011: 14) state that of the OFWs in Rome, “many
women take pride in being responsible for their families back home”
as they “tend to feel good by ‘sacrificing’ and ‘giving’ . . . and at peace
that they are able to (at least temporarily) solve financial problems back
home”. As a result of their greater responsibility for and moral obligation
towards the maintenance of transnational households and the social
reproduction of the family, daughters and migrant women from the
Philippines (see Trager, 1988; Tacoli, 1999; Parreñas, 2001b), like those
from Burma (see Kusakabe and Pearson, Chapter 3, in this volume),
Ghana (see Wong, 2006), Sri Lanka (see Gamburd, 2000) and Thailand
(see Osaki, 1999; Curran and Saguy, 2001; Angeles and Sunanta, 2009;
Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in this volume), are often perceived by family
members to be more reliable, even more conscious and conscientious,
remitters than men, as Wong (2006) remarks.
Such “capitalist scripts” (Mohan, 1997) of “daughter duty” in the case
of Thailand (Angeles and Sunanta, 2009) and of “altruistic daughters”
and “martyr mothers” in the Philippines, who pursue and prioritise their
family’s interests in repayment for their love and care (Asis, 2002: 92),
lead parents in these countries to encourage their migration as well as

reinforce the reproduction of normative gender roles and inequalities
in relation to children’s moral obligations and debts. Rosewarne (2012:
64) argues that the expectation of daughters to comply with scripts like
these and to migrate to maintain the lifestyles of fathers, brothers and
other male relatives who, in Sobieszczyk’s study (Chapter 4, in this vol-
ume), spend money on “eating and playing” (kin len) is a patriarchal
process that conceals a lack of choice and contributes to narratives that
maintain “women migrants are more committed to enhancing famil-
ial well-being and community development than men who choose
offshore waged work”. However, McKay (Chapter 5, in this volume)
counters these gendered norms, finding that men are much more flex-
ible in their performance of masculinity and fatherhood in terms of
childcare and domestic work. He discovers that women, too, transgress
and expand these gendered practices by inhabiting both female man-
agerial and male providership gender roles in family life. A study of
Filipina and Filipino migrant workers and recent surveys of migrant
households also challenge these gendered assumptions as male migrants
were generally found to earn more than women (subsequently raising
higher the income level of their left-behind households) (Semyonov
and Gorodzeisky, 2005), due to their higher educational levels and their
ability to remit more regularly – at least 2.4 times as often (ADB, 2013).
These findings confirm an earlier claim that, while women for the most
part are able to participate in sending remittances, their typically lower
earnings reduce their ability to significantly save or remit money home
(Ghosh, 2009).
At the same time, discourses surrounding the ethics of reciprocity and
responsibility underscore the reality that many families who are left
behind depend on these remittances as their sole income. The surveys
on migrant households conducted by the ADB reveal that 15 per cent
of migrant households in the Philippines were in wage employment,
1 per cent were in non-wage employment and nearly 80 per cent were
unemployed (ADB, 2013). These data are in stark contrast with cur-
rent official labour-force estimates, which show that out of a working
population of 63 million Filipinos aged 15 years and over, 93 per cent
were employed in 2012 with only 7 per cent unemployed and 20 per
cent underemployed (NSO, 2013). These statistics also suggest what Ang
et al. (2009: 10) call both a “curious issue” and a “moral hazard”: “the
poor [who] come to rely on remittances, instead of on jobs, for finan-
cial security” (Hernandez and Cousin, 2006: 199). Thus, in addition to
nationalist discourses that rationalise the out-migration of its people,
Cheryll Alipio 235
overseas labour migration is clearly driven by a particular socioeconomic

and moral landscape that is in place at home in the migrant house-
hold. Furthermore, families whose adult migrant children are unable
to remit experience a sense of shame and embarrassment. The emo-
tions (see, e.g., Yea, Chapter 10, in this volume) and symbolic value
(see also Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, Chapter 7; McKay, Chapter 5;
Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in this volume) tied to remittances point to the
considerable effect of the interconnectedness of cultural constructions
on debt and reciprocity, the social norms of gender roles, as well as to
the economic and structural limitations of migrants’ labour on the cre-
ation of unequal and differential remittance practices, intergenerational
relationships and transfers, and the production and reproduction of the
everyday lives of transnational households and families.
Both giving and not receiving remittances, therefore, exposes the
inherent “costly” nature of remittances and disputes its perception as an
exclusively altruistic gift. In the next half of this chapter, I explore how
the children left behind by OFWs negotiate these costs through an NGO,
Atikha Overseas Workers and Communities Initiative, Inc. (hereafter
Atikha) and its children’s money-saving intervention programme, BASC.
By analysing the children’s participation in BASC activities, I demon-
strate that affect is more useful than emotion in understanding the
relationship between children’s engagement with remittances and gifts
and their intergenerational relationships within the transnational fam-
ily. Here, affect is used to look at what feeling structures rather than in
what structures feeling as affect indexes the “means through which peo-
ple both conduct themselves and conduct others by structuring possible
courses of action” or practices (Richard and Rudnyckyj, 2009: 62). Fol-
lowing Rudnyckyj’s (2009: 107) study of the connection between Islamic
virtues in Indonesia and the construction of a new type of neoliberal
subject – the “worshipping worker” – I begin with an anecdote to detail
how the affective forces of gratitude and sacrifice become the starting
point from which children begin to transform into rational economic
actors, who save money not just to earn but also as a way to invest in
one’s self, family and community.
Affective economies: Gifts and the children left behind
In May 2006, a group of 15 children of OFWs gathered in San Pablo

City in the Southern Tagalog province of Laguna for an orientation
about their local NGO, Atikha, and its money-saving programme, BASC.
At the time of the orientation they formed part of an estimated 4,500
households of the city that contributed at least 20,000 migrants (Atikha-

Balikabayani Foundation, Inc, 2002) to the 7.3 million overseas Filipinos
living and labouring in every region of the world (Commission on
Filipinos Overseas, 2006). For this group of children, many of their
OFW parents were seafarers or in Canada, France, Hong Kong, Italy,
Japan, Saudi Arabia, Spain or the USA as a result of family chain
migrations. While many of the elementary school-aged children were
already recruited BASC members, a few were not and the staff of Atikha
wanted to reintroduce the children to its comprehensive “economic
and social interventions that address the social cost of migration and
tap the potential of migrant resources for the development of migrants,
their families and communities” (Atikha, Inc, 2013). As a staff member
walked to the front of the room and placed a large, brown, taped-up
box on top of a desk, immediate signs of recognition were heard escap-
ing from the children’s mouths when she turned it round and they
read the hand-printed words “Balikbayan Box”. The staff member asked
the children if they knew what this box was and what it meant, and
as she scanned the room, looking for any signs of understanding, one
child called out that it was where pasalubong, or gifts, came from. The
child was specifically referring to the gifts given to relatives and friends
that are packaged in tightly secured, oversized cardboard boxes, either
shipped through freight companies or personally brought back to the
Philippines by overseas Filipinos, officially called balikbayans, returning
from a trip or work abroad.
The children, thinking it was only an empty balikbayan box, were sur-
prised when the staff member suddenly started to pull things out of it.
However, their excitement quickly dissipated into confusion when she
pulled out coloured pencils, crayons and white sheets of paper instead
of the imported chocolate, expensive toys and brand-name clothes that
are usually given to and desired by children. With these art supplies, she
asked the children to draw one item that they have always dreamt of
and would like to see placed inside the imaginary balikbayan box. The
children illustrated such things as computers, books, sneakers and doll-
houses, while an eight-year-old girl drew a simple but large sketch of a
single, green USD 100 bill. When all of the children were done with their
pictures, the staff member questioned them about why they drew these
particular items. Most of them replied that they wanted the computer,
books and money for school. After listening to all of their responses,
the staff member urged the children to think more deeply about the
meaning of the box before pointing out that their parents went abroad
and sent these goods back to them on the condition that dreams of a
Cheryll Alipio 237
better life could be fulfilled. Rather than shaming the children as being
indebted to their parents and risk harming the children’s self-esteem,
she entreated them to reflect upon the true value of these gifts, evoking
Simmel (2004), who believed that value is not rooted in human labour
but out of individual desire that creates exchange. Through this exercise,
the children’s “mindwork” about what the balikbayan box symbolised
reinforced how remittances arise through the “transnationalization”
of families (see, e.g., Hochschild, 2000), and the desire to ameliorate
the distance and maintain the intimacy between migrant parents and
left-behind children through the giving of gifts (Parreñas, 2005).
Atikha was formed by a group of migrant returnees, human rights
advocates and religious leaders in response to the execution of Flor
Contemplacion, a mother who had left three children behind in San
Pablo City when she was charged and hanged in Singapore in 1995 for
allegedly killing a fellow domestic worker and her ward. In her after-
life, just like Rizal and Christ, she was hailed as a martyr mother and a
Bagong Bayani. Her sacrifice and suffering triggered not only an imme-
diate state response that eventually led to the creation of the Republic
Act 8042, The Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995,
which safeguards the individual rights and protection of OFWs, but
also the founding of Atikha to raise awareness of these rights, and the
formation of BASC to quell what they saw was the undermining of chil-
dren’s personal growth. With as many as 75 per cent of the city’s OFWs
being women and with 70 per cent of them leaving children below the
age of 17 behind in the Philippines, Atikha has concluded that there
are problems if there is no one, particularly no women, to take over
the migrant mother’s role (Atikha-Balikabayani Foundation, Inc, 2002).
Despite alternative mother substitutes, such as grandmothers, aunts and
older sisters to take over the care work (Parreñas, 2001a, 2001b), Atikha
has found that the “yearning of children for their real mothers could not
be quenched” (Atikha, Inc, 2007). While social costs arising from family
separation are apparent in some studies (see, e.g., Battistella and Conaco,
1998; Asis, 2002), the escalation of social problems due specifically to
maternal migration remains debatable. Yet female migrants continue to
bear the blame while the left-behind families and husbands are not sim-
ilarly held responsible (Guevarra, 2006). Nevertheless, Atikha follows
the same logic as another NGO, Women in Development Foundation
(Guevarra, 2006), in believing that these children are vulnerable to
physical separation from their migrant parent, suffering psychologically
and often turning “to deviant ways as a way of expressing their anger
and discontent” (Atikha, Inc, 2007), such as seeking solace through
their barkada (same-age peer group), boyfriends and girlfriends, or to

drugs and alcohol. These “deviant” ways become problematic when the
subsequent lifestyle change leads to estranged relationships and risky
consumption.
By opposing unfettered capitalism and increased materialism, con-
sumerism and interdependency, just like the Protestant ethic, but
encouraging a personal responsibility and practicality by amassing sav-
ings and performing good works – a Catholic investment which, unlike
the Protestant ethic, merits immediate gratification in and maximised
quality of the present “life world” (Rose, 1999: 103–104) – Atikha calls
for a kind of ethic that stresses foresight, prudence and calculation
in the rational and disciplined use of money. Atikha notes that while
some children act more economically frugal, “Most children engage
in conspicuous consumption and lead a luxurious lifestyle. A growing
number have stopped studying and working, [becoming] totally depen-
dent on their migrant parents’ earnings” (Atikha, Inc, 2007). With the
subscription to a “proper” model of children as well as a “profitable”
model of money, both of which emphasise the importance of maturity,
growth and progress, the very public nature of children’s misdeeds in
the absence of their migrant parent is said to be intentionally breaking
the system of parent–child reciprocal obligations. That is, children are
seen as not truly loving their parents, dishonouring the filial bond or
acting ungrateful in the midst of their parents migrating to work abroad
for their benefit.
As with adults who face being seen as walang utang na loob or walang
hiya when they do not follow the normative script for expected or recip-
rocal behaviours, children face the same threat. In this context, the
notion of hiya works negatively by revealing publicly and visibly the
status of children in debt – for example, their lack of resources, support
or even parents who are physically present and emotionally available.
Rafael (1993) argues that it is hiya, rather than utang na loob, that is the
crucial element in this system of reciprocity because hiya functions to
instil the fear of being exposed as one who lacks, needs and must subse-
quently defer and recognise one’s subordinate status, instead of one who
has extra and can therefore give and receive gifts due to their superor-
dinate position. A provisional third party, such as Atikha, is therefore
needed to guarantee the repayment of gifts that could mend the psy-
chosocial gaps in the parent–child relationship. Perceiving the children
of low-income migrant families simultaneously as “victims” and “prob-
lem kids” to be especially pitied, deserving of sympathy, assistance and
guidance, Atikha, consequently, steps in to essentially take over the once
Cheryll Alipio 239
privileged role of the family as the caregiver, educator and disciplinar-

ian. Effectively becoming a “site of deep affective attachments and the
scene of forceful affective enactments” (Richard and Rudnyckyj, 2009:
59), Atikha, like other community actors across Asia (see Fan, Chapter 8;
Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, Chapter 7; Sobieszczyk, Chapter 4, in
this volume), plays an important role in (re)constructing cultural values,
family relations and intergenerational dynamics that have been dis-
rupted, especially by the feminisation of migration (see, e.g., Gamburd,
Organised in 2003 with the help of Atikha, BASC was born out of ideas
that were exchanged between the children of OFWs:
We realized that we could do a lot to show our appreciation of our

parents’ work and sacrifices. We now understand that we have to
value our money. We used to be carefree, now we understand the
value of discipline and saving money. That is why we did not have
any second thought in joining Atikha’s Batang Atikha Savers Club.
We felt that we, members of BASC, are lucky because we have found
the key to our success in the future.
(Atikha, Inc, 2006)
Recognising the limited savings capacity of OFWs and capitalising on

the children’s utang na loob to their parents, BASC draws from its Tagalog
name, the word atikha, literally meaning “to be able to slowly save and
invest”, in order to teach the children to appreciate the work of their
migrant parents and to counteract their dependency on their earnings.
The motto on BASC’s informational brochure therefore reads “Discipline
[sic] spending for the purpose of more money tomorrow”. Here, Atikha
invites children, up to the age of 21, with or without migrant parents,
to join BASC. After paying a total of PHP 200 (Philippine pesos) for
BASC’s membership and their share of capital fees, these children are
considered fully fledged BASC members and are able to earn interest on
their savings through a partner bank.3 While paying the PHP 200 may
be a factor in children’s decision to join BASC, this does not exclude
children from participating in BASC workshops or other events. BASC
actually perceives these occasions as opportunities to recruit new mem-
bers and to encourage current, not-yet-full, members to continue saving.
As such, children are instructed to deposit as little as PHP 5 of their
remittances or allowances from their parents into their BASC savings
account each week. This practice mirrors what Rodriguez (2010) calls
the “labour brokerage state” of the Philippines, in which BASC engages
in neoliberal, institutional and discursive practices through which it

mobilises its members to generate a “profit” from migrant remittances
and ultimately break the cycle of poverty that initiates migration in
the first place. Because the children’s weekly savings accrue interest, in
December 2007 the total savings of Laguna province’s 350 BASC mem-
bers was estimated at PHP 1.7 million, an amount that can be said to
symbolise how much they appreciate the “gifts” of their parents.
Performing good works: The case of Rachel
Along with having a real savings account at a bank, being a member of

BASC allows children access to orientations, workshops and seminars
on value formation, life-skills development and skills training, all of
which are part of BASC’s Information Education Campaign to empower
children to creatively self-address the psychosocial effects of migration
and to discover their own potential and talents as young entrepreneurs.
In situating and rooting this initiative in the local community, neigh-
bourhoods and schools, Atikha is able to simultaneously connect to a
wider movement on the part of NGOs and corporations, like Citibank,
which aim to include children and their families in formal financial
practices and develop their financial capabilities. The branch manager
of Citibank Philippines in San Pablo City, who calls himself “Doc”, said
that partnering with BASC was a special project to serve the community
and introduce in the rural areas the idea of formally saving in a finan-
cial banking institution (personal interview, 24 October 2007). Because
a minimum of at least PHP 30,000 was normally needed to open up
a savings account, he remarked, “The people here are not able to do
so.” However, through community and corporate partnerships, Atikha
and Citibank Philippines demonstrate that they are able to enhance
financial inclusion and to leverage the support that they need to pursue
their information education campaigns without the aid of governmen-
tal intervention, unlike Child and Youth Finance International (CYFI)
(2014), a later worldwide “Movement” that was launched in 2012 to
increase the “Economic Citizenship” of children and youth.4
In comparison with the partnership between Atikha and Citibank,
CYFI (2014) relies on the “expertise and innovation from within its net-
work of global organizations”, though in the case of the Philippines it
collaborates with two government-formed agencies – BSP and the Com-
mission on Filipinos Overseas – which promote the interests, rights and
welfare of Overseas Filipinos. However, CYFI, shares a similar sentiment
with Atikha:
Cheryll Alipio 241
Children and youth are the future economic actors whose financial
decisions will dictate the future of world economies. Providing young
people with the economic and social environment to prosper and
the competences (financial, social and livelihoods) to thrive has a
meaningful impact on the lives of individuals and the communities
in which they live. Communities will [therefore] benefit, as a new
generation of financially capable children and youth grow up to be
responsible investors and entrepreneurs.
(CYFI, 2014)
The balikbayan box exercise and other BASC activities can be seen
not only as a way to teach children practical, technical and life skills but
also as a means to discipline and produce new autonomous consumers –
that is, “wee children of capitalism” who, conscious of their social and
economic rights, invest their money and resources towards improving
themselves and their communities.5 One of these activities is the BASC
Congress, a day-long celebration that is held at Atikha’s headquarters
during Christmas time, when many balikbayans are expected to return
home. The congress in December 2006 drew more than 130 children of
all ages and their friends and family from around the Southern Tagalog
region.
The guest speaker was Rachel,6 a BASC member who joined when
her mother first went to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic worker
and who had graduated as a high-school valedictorian the year before.
Days before the congress, she had dropped by the Atikha offices with
her balikbayan mother and brought with her a thank-you letter to the
“Friends of Atikha” who had provided financial assistance to augment
the funds that were needed for her university tuition, as well as another
letter in which she sought more financial aid for her college living
expenses and future tuition, naming the money as her “daily bread” –
a reference to “the body of Christ”, symbolised in the consecrated
bread taken at Holy Communion during Roman Catholic Church mass.
As I helped her to edit the second letter, it became clear how painstak-
ingly aware she was of her family’s financial situation. With her migrant
mother’s salary being diverted primarily to educate her older brother in
college and her younger sister in elementary school, Rachel, the eldest
daughter but middle child in her family, wrote in her Christian-inflected
letter that she was “bothered” by her limited resources. Yet she was able
to respond to what she called this immense “challenge” – an allusion to
the Calvinist “call” – by relentlessly pursuing a higher education for, in
her words, “there is no other way”. In wanting to ease the burden and
financial stress on her family, especially her OFW mother, she promised
to perform “good works” by “render[ing] [her] services back at Atikha’s
Batang Atikha Savers Club” whenever she came home for the school hol-
idays, hoping that this service would prove her worthiness that could,
in turn, merit a future reward of financial assistance (personal interview,
22 December 2006).
Capitalising on this pledge, the executive director of Atikha, Estrella
Dizon-Añonuevo, asked her to give the inspirational message at the
congress. Rachel fulfilled this request with a story:
During Christmas, when my mother was still in the Philippines,

Santa, whom I secretly knew was my mother, always gave me can-
dies during Christmas time. I resented the gift because I thought I
deserved more than just candies. Then she went abroad and for three
Christmases I was not able to see her. I missed her so much and I real-
ized that I should have valued my mother more when she was with
us. No matter how cheap her gifts were, I should have valued them
and valued her efforts in providing something for us. Material things
are not important compared to being together with our parents so
we have to study hard so that we can be with them [at] the soonest
possible time.
(quoted in Dizon-Añonuevo, 2006)
Writing an editorial titled, “From Laguna with Love”, in the national

newspaper, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Dizon-Añonuevo (2006) remarked
that though she was pleased at “seeing these children of Atikha grow
before [her] eyes”, “Oftentimes, the children of OFWs feel depressed
and deprived because their family is never complete. This leads to
resentment toward their parents. But Rachel’s story gave them another
perspective.” Her account centred on valuing the sacrifices of migrant
parents abroad, underscoring one of Atikha’s main objectives for the
congress: for children to recognise their role in the challenges of migra-
tion and their responsibility, their utang na loob, towards their family.
Rachel seemed to accept this utang na loob by stating: “We have to be
good children and the fact that we are children growing up without our
parents should not be an obstacle to our success in life.” Her statement
further shows the degree to which children can rationalise the sacrifices
that are made by them and their parents while working abroad, as well
as the extent to which they can exercise self-discipline to compensate for
the lack of direct parental affection and to keep intact a sense of fam-
ily cohesion. Asked what affected her most about Rachel’s message, a
Cheryll Alipio 243
14-year-old BASC member, whose father works in a hotel in Qatar, said:

“I was affected by her story and I felt the grave sacrifice of our parents
which we should repay by being good and studying hard. I will never
forget her story about Santa.” Another member, who is a daughter of a
return migrant worker from Italy and who grew up with her aunt for
eight years, realised: “we are very fortunate for having parents who sac-
rifice so much so that we will have a better future” (Dizon-Añonuevo,
2006).
For the “unsolicited gift” of being brought into this world, and the
risks and sacrifices that child-rearing entails, Kaut (1961: 270) states
that children cannot fully repay their debt to their parents as they
were already born into an existing field of obligation relationships.
Rather, one of the “return gifts” that they can offer to their parents
is to duly obey and later care and save for their elderly parents, as
well as to assume parental duties when they are absent. For Rachel,
this meant securing financial aid for her living expenses during col-
lege. For a ten-year-old BASC member who is the first born and eldest
son in his family, his birth position created a greater sense of respon-
sibility and moral obligation. Thus he cleans more and even cooks
breakfast and washes the dishes for his mother while his father is
away in Saudi Arabia. It is because of children’s ability to assume adult
responsibilities and of children’s anticipatory gifts, such as “care work”,
that parents often refer to their children as an “investment” or as
their source of “wealth”. Because of this cultural construct, OFW par-
ents are given to sending remittances for their school tuition, and
balikbayan boxes full of items to “reward” their children’s patience,
such as fancy candies, and to aid in their children’s development, such
as with clothes and imported dry milk. Yet, in her Christmas story,
Rachel alluded to the re-evaluation of gifts as something more than mere
commodities, a practice of rationalisation and compensation that was
taught during the balikbayan box exercise. Her story takes us beyond
Malinowski’s (1984) attention of “sentimental associations” and sug-
gests valuing them much like Weiner (1992) does in her own analysis
of Trobriand gift-giving. In this exchange, gifts link people together
through the “spirit of the gift” (Mauss, 1990), such that possessions
are inscribed with memories and imbued with the “aura” (Benjamin,
2007), or an “aspect” (Mauss, 1990), of the giver, thus reinscribing
the possessions with symbolic and social capital along with its mon-
etary or consumptive value (Weiner, 1992). Similar to Weiner, Rachel
emphasises that it is not the material thing itself that is important;
what is more important is remaining aware of what is being kept back,
not exchanged and not circulated (Weiner, 1992) – direct parental love
and care.
The science of saving: The case of Nielice
Rachel’s Christmas story reminds us that the gain, or opportunity, of

work abroad also brings with it a loss of intimate personal contact in the
“gift-giving” exchange between parents and children, which Durkheim
(1995) argues to be the force that drives reciprocity. Transcending the
typical accounting and calculating of money and goods, I argue that
understanding this potential loss of symbolic and social capital that is
embodied in remittances and gifts is part of an ethic that BASC has cul-
tivated with its child members. Similar to the POEA’s annual Bagong
Bayani award, at the end of the congress, Atikha praised a more tradi-
tional form of its capitalist ethic by giving awards to 20 BASC members
for being Modelong Batang Atikha (Role Model of Children of Overseas
Filipinos). These are children who save their money weekly in BASC.
Nielice, whose father is an electrician in Saudi Arabia, is one of these
habitual savers, having received the award for a third consecutive year.
When she became a member at eight years old after attending a BASC
orientation at her school, she said that she wanted to be less of a gas-
tadora (extravagant spender). In addition to being a Modelong Batang
Atikha, she is also the Modelong Batang Atikha of the Year of Laguna
province – all achievements, exemplifying Atikha’s notion of the con-
summate economic actor, who in all respects saves to earn “interest” and
contributes to development by investing this “capital” towards commu-
nity endeavours. As a youth leader both in school and the community,
she is so highly regarded as a role model by both younger children and
her same-age peers that they address her with the respect title of Ate,
meaning “elder sister”. With this social status and her position as the
only daughter in her family, Nielice, the middle child with two broth-
ers, attributes the development of her moral character, personality, skills
and talents to BASC workshops, reflecting:
Before, I thought I would only learn how to save money from Batang
Atikha [Savers Club] but that is not so. There are always many activ-
ities to join whenever it is summer. There is really a lot that you can
learn [from them] . . . Whenever we are dancing or performing, when-
ever there is a program at school, I am now more confident so [my]
development is nice.
(interview with Atikha, 2007)
Cheryll Alipio 245
Because of her leadership skills, Nielice, with the help of her school’s
BASC chapter, coordinated a sold-out, two-hour variety show fundraiser
for her elementary school’s Science Club in August 2006 to solicit funds
for the club’s future activities. BASC members performed choreographed
dance numbers; acted in puppet show plays explaining the realities
of migration, savings consciousness and children’s rights; and gave a
presentation on the various school and community activities of BASC.
While it was Nielice’s goal to raise funds for her Science Club’s activities,
she was also instrumental in promoting and recruiting BASC member-
ship at her school, especially as the variety show was performed twice
to accommodate all 600 students of the elementary school and their
invited family members. Of all of the educational BASC puppet shows
done throughout the city that year, the fundraiser garnered the most
attendants, making it a success. Nielice also generated more capital-
ist returns as the BASC members playing the puppeteers were given
PHP 150 as an honorarium for their hard work, which was directly
placed in their individual BASC savings account to gain further interest.
Nielice once stated that she thought that BASC was just about saving
money, but after participating in BASC activities she found that she
learned much more than just how to discipline her spending habits.
She believed that these activities had improved her personality and
confidence, and had further developed her talents (personal interview,
18 October 2007).
Nielice’s command of the BASC ethic may be a reaction to seeing her
mother, Alice, struggle from her father’s irregular remittance of money
during the 13-plus years during which he worked abroad. Alice revealed
to me that her husband remits only about PHP 10,000 monthly but
that it was always late, an amount that is not enough to pay the high-
school tuition fee for the special science pilot programme that Nielice
enrolled in after graduating from elementary school. Subsequently, Alice
augments this unstable income with entrepreneurial side jobs, such as
providing massage and reflexology services, and running a small store
in back of Nielice’s public elementary school, selling snacks to stu-
dents during their recess breaks and after school. Each week Alice gave
Nielice and her two brothers some pesos saved from the profits of her
store and from her massage service. Nielice would then deposit this
money into her own individual BASC savings account after reserving
some food money for school. Despite the family’s tight budget, Alice
showed me a scrapbook of her daughter’s achievements and insisted that
“even though [you] don’t have money, education is important” (per-
sonal interview, 23 October 2007). Pasted on one page was a Philippine
Daily Inquirer article from the section of the newspaper that was geared
specifically around OFW issues. The very public nature of Nielice’s edu-
cational and civic success had attracted the attention of a reporter. Alice
said that the reporter had telephoned them and, like the balikbayan box
exercise, inquired if Nielice had a special wish.
Barely five years old when her father first went to Saudi Arabia, Nielice
has very few memories of him but nevertheless he was the source of her
wish, as Alice recounts:
Ever since my father went abroad, he didn’t attend any of my recog-

nition ceremonies. Since daycare I received fifty-three medals. Kahit
walang handa, kahit walang pasalubong, kahit walang pera, gusto kong
uuwi ng tatay [Even without prepared food, even without gifts, even
without money, I want my father to return home].
(personal interview, 23 October 2007)
A week before her graduation day, the article reported that Nielice’s
prayers were answered and her wish granted. Her father had “moved
heaven and earth just to be able to attend his daughter’s proudest
moment. And finally, with tears and smiles, head held high, Nielice
walked with her father to the stage to accept her accolades – medal per
medal” (del Rosario, 2007). Later she told the reporter that she “was the
happiest girl in the world. It was nice to get recognition for my dili-
gence and hard work” (del Rosario, 2007). In her valedictorian speech,
she repeatedly expressed her gratitude to her parents, saying her suc-
cess is the best gift that she could give them for their ceaseless efforts
to make ends meet so that she and her brothers could go to school:
“My parents have always been, are and will always be my inspiration.
I offer them my success” (del Rosario, 2007). Her wish in the end was
only achieved temporarily because a few weeks after her graduation day
her father went back to his work abroad. Perhaps because of this, Nielice
commented to the reporter about her lack of plans to become an OFW,
saying: “I don’t ever want to leave my family behind no matter what”
(del Rosario, 2007).
Conclusion: Being saved
From Bagong Bayani to Modelong Batang Atikha, much has been

made of the developmental potential of OFWs and their transnational
families. However, these awards and the promotional discourses that
surround them, on the one hand, expose the “tensions, sacrifices, and
Cheryll Alipio 247
emotional costs, which the literature often fails to recognize” (Wong,

2006: 369). On the other hand, they obscure the structural inequal-
ities, normative gendered roles and cultural values about debt and
reciprocity, which makes the institutionalisation of overseas labour
migration and the formation of transnational families possible. As a
result, the Philippine state escapes accountability, with responsibility
of securing the needs and welfare of its citizen workers falling more to
NGOs such as Atikha, which have consistently advocated for migrant
rights but have increasingly turned their focus to developing interven-
tion programmes that address the social and economic costs of migra-
tion by equipping OFWs and their families with knowledge and skills.
Atikha’s unique financial literacy programme for children, BASC, takes
these interventions a step further by acknowledging that children play
an important part in the migration process, from maintaining house-
holds and preserving intergenerational familial relationships to caring
for kin relatives and managing remittances wisely. With an idealised
image of children and family, Atikha creates a particular affective econ-
omy in BASC, linking nationalism, cultural values, religious beliefs and
filial piety alongside capitalist ideals of economic rationality, investment
and savings, entrepreneurship, financial management, productivity and
development.
In encouraging children to be educated about migration and remind-
ing them of their affective, yet indebted, bonds to their migrant parents,
Atikha deploys remittances and gifts as pedagogical tools in instilling a
stronger sense of personal, familial and civic duty. As children set aside
a few pesos each week from the remittances received from their migrant
parent or from the allowances given by their non-migrant parent, Atikha
believes that they are becoming more conscious of the realities and
difficulties of overseas migration through their “entrepreneurial spirit”
(Atikha, Inc, 2009). Following Ochs and Izquierdo’s (2009: 404) line of
reasoning, “children’s active participation in seemingly simple embod-
ied practices that orient them to regard phenomena [like debt and
shame] . . . worthy of consideration” creates a habitus of affect that is
“critical to children’s becoming moral practical reasoners”. Through
routine, corporeal participation in tasks, such as saving money, Atikha
thereby engenders social awareness, social responsiveness and self-
reliance in the BASC children and hopes that these repetitive acts will
become an inhabited practice that perhaps could lead to more elabo-
rate undertakings, such as giving inspirational speeches and organising
community fundraisers.
With the skills of self-presentation, self-direction and self-management
taught by Atikha, BASC children are able to manoeuvre around the
psychosocial and economic effects that are caused by migration to

make productive, rational decisions that account for familial consider-
ations, like those of Rachel, and civic investments, like Nielice. Even
though Rachel and Nielice inhabit the ideal economic actor in different
ways – one who accounts for all that is exchanged or not exchanged
symbolically and monetarily, versus one who saves to gain economic
interest – they both “show how affect and reason are not necessarily
confined to separate realms of social action” (Richard and Rudnyckyj,
2009: 62) but are rather mutually constitutive of each other. In the
affective economy created by Atikha, new types of actors and renewed
intergenerational relations were formed, such that Rachel and Nielice
were both able to fulfil and even exceed BASC’s goal of cultivating
responsible child citizens through workshops and performances to serve
as model leaders and organisers for other children in the community
who are in similar situations.
At the same time, it is precisely BASC’s production of wee devout chil-
dren of capitalism – that is, educated children who save, and “saving”
children who can be educated – that exposes the paternalism embedded
in Atikha. For instance, children, like Rachel and Nielice, are applauded
for having the agency to engage in particular values and ethics. By con-
trast, the agency of their migrant parents and their caretakers, especially
in the discipline and education of their child, is largely unspoken about
and passed over, even though telecommunication technologies and
social media now make “long-distance parenting” and “collaborative
parenting” much more feasible. With NGOs, such as Atikha, entering
the domestic realm of parenting, the intimate relations between chil-
dren and their various caregivers become pivotal sites where complex
nationalist discourses of citizenship, normative constructions of gender,
cultural values of debt, Christian notions of work and capitalist ideolo-
gies of investment and savings converge in neoliberal practices of child
development and the mobilisation of what is considered to be a proper
model of childhood. For Atikha, this is clearly an alternative type of care
that sees therapeutic qualities in the saving of money and in a child-
hood that is structured on meriting and rewarding maturity, growth and
progress.
Notes
The research for this chapter was accomplished while I was a Fulbright Institute
of International Education scholar under the sponsorship of the Philippine-
American Educational Foundation and a visiting research associate at the Insti-
tute of Philippine Culture at Ateneo de Manila University. The chapter was
Cheryll Alipio 249
revised during my tenure as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asia Research Insti-

tute of the National University of Singapore, while the initial write-up was
generously supported by a Presidential Dissertation Fellowship in the Social
Sciences and Social Professions from the University of Washington Graduate
School, a Stroum Endowed Minority Dissertation Fellowship from the Univer-
sity of Washington Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program,
and a Brett E. Baldwin Memorial Scholarship from the University of Washington
Department of Anthropology. I am deeply indebted and full of gratitude to the
staff and members of Atikha, Inc and the Batang Atikha Savers Club. This chapter
has benefited enormously from fellow panellists and audience participants of
the following academic gatherings, where earlier drafts were presented: Inter-
national Workshop on Debt, Interdependence and Mobility at the University
of Chicago Center in Paris; Transnational Labour Migration, Remittances and
Changing Family in Asia at the Asia Research Institute and Asian MetaCentre
of the National University of Singapore; and 2008 Working Group on Child-
hood and Migration Conference at Drexel University. I also wish to thank Rachel
Reynolds of Drexel University, along with the anonymous reviewers from the
Working Group on Childhood and Migration, for their insightful comments on
previous versions of this chapter.
1. McKay (Chapter 5, in this volume) notes that unlike land-based Filipino
migrants, seafarers have “higher-than-average salaries, and do collect 20 per
cent of their base pay and all of their overtime and extra or bonus pay
onboard, making it more likely that they can afford to send more of their
base pay to their allottees”.
2. Kaut (1961: 257) defines loob as literally meaning “the inside of something
(as opposed to the outside – labas) or personal volition”, thereby indicating
that the phrase utang na loob could mean a “debt stemming from personal
volition” or gratitude. In addition, Kaut (1961: 257) reports that utang (debt)
is a widespread term used not only throughout the Philippines for “credit,
obligation, and financial indebtedness” but also in Indonesia. In Thailand,
Angeles and Sunanta (2009: 555) report that a parallel value to utang na loob is
luk katanyu, “loosely translated as grateful children repaying their eternal debt
to their parents”.
3. In 2007, Citibank Philippines joined Atikha as a partner organisation, taking
special interest in promoting savings consciousness within communities of
OFW families. With this partnership, Citibank took charge of managing the
children’s money from the Koop Balikabayani International, a local savings
and credit cooperative.
4. CYFI (2014) reports that “the Movement has already spread to over 100
countries and has reached more than 18 million children”.
5. The phrase “wee children of capitalism” comes from a reviewer of the Work-
ing Group on Childhood and Migration, who edited a previous version of
this chapter and made this notation in relation to a comment that children’s
practices of saving are pedagogical in nature.
6. For consistency, all of the personal names featured in this chapter are the
actual names of Atikha staff and BASC members, who are mentioned or
featured in national newspaper publications in the Philippines or in Atikha
publications.
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Part III
(Non-)Remittance and the
Family in Crisis
10
Rethinking Remittances through
Emotion: Filipina Migrant
Labourers in Singapore and
Transnational Families Undone
Sallie Yea1
Introduction
At particular times and in particular places, there are moments where

lives are so explicitly lived through pain, bereavement, elation, anger,
love and so on that the power of emotional relations cannot be
ignored.
Kay Anderson and Susan J. Smith (2001: 7)
In 2003 I met a Filipina, Eva,2 who was deployed in a South Korean bar
as an entertainer in one of the “camp towns” that emerged to cater for
the US military personnel who were stationed at nearby bases. Although
Eva did not receive all of the salary that she was promised, she was very
clear in her intentions to save and use all of her meagre income and
any tips she received from her customers for a single purpose – to pay
for the costs associated with the annulment of her marriage back in
the Philippines. I later discovered that her husband was a drug addict
and dealer, was currently serving a jail term and had been physically
abusive to Eva throughout most of their marriage. Annulment was also
linked to Eva’s crystallising transnational project of formalising her rela-
tionship with her American soldier boyfriend, whom she had met while
working in Korea, through marriage – something that seemed far more
achievable if she were no longer married in the Philippines (see Con-
stable, 2003, for further discussion of such negotiations among Filipina
transnational migrants). When I was carrying out my research in Korea,
I thought Eva was an unusual case since her intentions in using her
257
258 (Non-)Remittance and the Family in Crisis
paltry earnings were tied to the rupturing, rather than strengthening,

of familial relations at home and, indeed, the crafting of new trajec-
tories of familial intimacy and socioeconomic mobility that were not
immediately tied to loved ones in the Philippines.
This chapter emerges from my changing thinking about Eva’s
transnational remittance and salary use practices, and it retreats from
my easy dismissal of the singularity of her migration goals concern-
ing family. This change came through initial findings of a more recent
research project with Filipina entertainers3 and foreign domestic workers
(hereafter domestics) in Singapore which both confirmed and extended
the insights from Eva’s narrative. In interviewing Filipina migrant work-
ers in Singapore, three recurring themes concerning the interstices
between money/salaries, families and transnational (labour) migration
became particularly apparent. The first was that some women used
part or all of their salary to reconfigure family units in the Philippines
in ways that disrupted, rather than strengthened, these units. Second,
many Filipinas performing unskilled or low-skilled jobs in Singapore fail
to remit, even where this is both the intention and the expectation
from home. This failure to remit thus becomes a site of consider-
able tension and conflict between the migrant and her family. Third,
and closely tied to this second point, all of the women in my study,
without exception, were deployed in venues/houses where they were
debt-bonded and experienced oppressive working conditions, includ-
ing some that equated to trafficking. The pressure to remit, coupled
with the exploitative working environments in which they were posi-
tioned, negatively affected both their ability and their desire to maintain
communicative ties with loved ones transnationally, thus diluting these
same relationships. In the collective, these three concerns compel us to
reconsider some of the key assumptions that inform discussions around
remittances and transnationalism, including remittances as key devices
through which transnational relationships are maintained and strength-
ened, migrant labourers as remitters and/or having the ability to remit
(see also Hoang and Yeoh, Chapter 11, in this volume), transnational
families as sustained through communication and connectedness, and
“family” as a stable entity that women depart from and are able to work
towards strengthening through their migration.
Emotion is a constitutive locus that is employed in this chapter to
shed further light on the complex and discrepant means by which
remittances (or a lack thereof), the transnational family and labour
migration intersect. In particular, the chapter draws on recent work in
human geography within what might be dubbed “the emotional turn”
Sallie Yea 259
and in which “the extent to which the human world is constructed and
lived through emotions” (Anderson and Smith, 2001: 7) emerges as a
key thematic. Incipient work in this area tends to distinguish between
emotion and affect (Thrift, 2004; Pile, 2010; Woodward and Lea, 2009),
with emotions being the extant and enunciated outcomes of affect.
Although these discussions have prompted intense debate among geog-
raphers themselves, what is significant and worth emphasising for our
purposes is that geographical work on emotion and affect can tell us
much about the ways in which affective relations are played out across
(transnational) space, both virtually and physically. Recognising that
emotions as embodied and socially embedded articulations of affect
intersect with mobility projects and actors (migrants and non-migrants)
in significant ways provides a useful starting point for discussion in this
chapter.
In mobility studies, some recent scholarship has pointed out that
decisions/motivations to migrate are often influenced by emotions, par-
ticularly desire, sadness, boredom and loneliness, where repositioning
oneself transnationally can lead to a sort of “emotional distancing”
that works to overcome these “emotions of home” (see Yea, 2005).
Similarly, some scholarship on migrant’s experiences in destinations
has examined the “anxieties of mobility” (Lindquist, 2010) as migrants
negotiate complex emotional challenges of being in the destination
through sociocultural referents of home, which discipline behaviour
and continue to govern gendered norms and expectations. Specifi-
cally concerning remittances, Muller (2008: 403) also briefly describes
the “emotional dimension of the failure to fulfil responsibilities” for
male Afghan refugees in the Netherlands. Carling (2008) has perhaps
addressed these issues most directly, challenging researchers to pay more
attention to the human dynamics of migrant transnationalism, espe-
cially the relationships between migrants and non-migrants and the role
that remittances, including the failure to remit, play in (trans)forming
these relationships. In this chapter the workings of emotion can be
seen as having an influence on the ways in which migrant Filipinas in
Singapore direct and utilise income in relation to the family as both a
cause and an effect of these practices.
Brown and Pickerill (2009: 26) suggest that “Emotions involve both
meanings and feelings, thus straddling any clear-cut location in ‘culture’
or ‘the body’.” To the extent that emotions derive, in part, from their
location in social and cultural meanings and relations, in understand-
ing the ways in which emotion figures in Filipina women’s transnational
sojourns in Singapore, existing work on gender in that context is useful.
Filipino women are often constrained by the ways in which they are
positioned in relation to normative models of sexuality and femininity.
Filipino women are marked according to the dominant divide between
the virginal, family-centred woman and the sexually deviant women,
with the latter being symbolised by Mary Magdalene (Law, 1997; Roces,
2009). Following this division, as Espiritu (2003) and Tadiar (2004) both
suggest, sexuality and family can become markers of otherness. The fail-
ure to live up to standards of sexuality or femininity, or difficulty in
doing so because the normative family structure does not apply, offers
a partial explanation for the ways in which emotion figures in women’s
labour migration projects. Tyner (1996, 2004) and Suzuki (2004) have
both suggested that Filipino women must also negotiate these gendered
discourses in the migration context as well. Remittances can offer a way
to manoeuvre expectations because they embed women in normative
constructions of home, family and sexuality through material contribu-
tions to the domestic sphere. Thus the celebration of Filipino/Filipina
migrant workers as “modern day heroes and heroines” in popular and
governmental discourses in the Philippines is itself situated in broader
constructions of gender and family.
Discussion in this chapter is based on a two-and-a-half year study with
Filipina entertainers and domestics in Singapore from 2009 to 2011.
Some 52 Filipinas who were deployed as entertainers in Singapore, and
14 who work(ed) as domestics, were interviewed. The participants all
agreed to at least one in-depth interview and, where circumstances per-
mitted, some were met a second time for a follow-up interview. The
participants were aged between 17 and 45 years, with the majority
in their late 20s and early 30s. The women originated primarily from
Luzon (with virtually all provinces represented), with only five par-
ticipants originating from other regions of the Philippines. They were
uniformly from lower-income households, with the average earnings of
the household rarely exceeding USD 8 per day. Although all participants
had graduated from high school and some had gained college degrees,
none had been performing skilled work in the Philippines prior to their
migration to Singapore. The common jobs of those who worked were
sales ladies in department stores, waitresses and market vendors. Several
participants had previously worked as entertainers abroad, most com-
monly in Japan, while a few had previously migrated as paid domestic
workers. Other women were unemployed or were housewives who were
not actively seeking to work outside the home. The most striking char-
acteristic of the participants was the large number of women who were
single mothers at the time when they participated in the research. While
Sallie Yea 261
all women were vulnerable to embarking on volatile migration projects

due to their socioeconomic background, single motherhood appeared to
render them particularly vulnerable since there was a general absence of
fallback strategies in the case of domestic or personal crisis. For women
who were married, migration as a strategy was also often induced by
some immediate happenstance, such as a husband losing his job or a
serious illness in the family (see also Yea, 2011). While the motivations
for the participants to migrate to Singapore for work were normally tied
to their/their families’ economic marginality, in most cases the women
only consolidated this decision when such a crisis struck. This undoubt-
edly influenced the mode of their recruitment and the conditions of
their deployment in Singapore, which is discussed further in the follow-
ing section. It is perhaps these departures from the normative family,
or from the perception that women (particularly those who migrate as
domestics) undertake considerable prior planning for their labour migra-
tion, that mark the sojourns of these women as differing from those
that often appear in accounts of migrant Filipina workers performing
low-skilled functions.
Although I draw on a range of participant’s experiences, I delve
into the stories of Delores (37 years, domestic), Amy (37 years, enter-
tainer) and Flor (31 years, domestic) in most detail to illustrate the
three key themes of the chapter. In this narration I am guided by
Victoria Lawson’s (2000: 174) suggestion that “Migrant’s stories can
reveal the empirical disjuncture between expectations of migration,
produced though dominant and pervasive discourses of moderniza-
tion, and the actual experiences of migrants.” Dominant discourses
about remittances and the transnational family, as one such organis-
ing theme of the development-migration nexus (see Fan, Chapter 8;
MacKay, Chapter 5, in this volume), can thus be partially unsettled
through the narration of migrants’ stories themselves.
The chapter proceeds with a summative review of recent academic
treatments of remittances, in which I argue that a development per-
spective dominates the literature, but that recent attention to gender
and transnationalism opens discursive space for research that decentres
this developmental focus. This is followed by a brief overview of the
migration context of Singapore for women from the Philippines. The
main part of the chapter considers the experiences of three women in
more detail and suffuses analysis of the three key concerns of the chapter
with the empirical description of each woman’s narrative. Finally I make
some suggestions in the conclusion that reiterate the need to employ
conceptual lenses, such as emotion and affect, in extending work on
remittances beyond its developmental moorings and in ways that take

the dynamics relationships between transnational migrants and their
families as important sites for discussion in and of themselves.
Filipinas performing low-skilled work in Singapore
Women leaving the Philippines for work in Singapore fall primarily into
the labour category of paid domestic worker. There are currently over
500,000 migrant women who are working as domestics in Singapore,
with Filipinas making up the largest national group. These women
have legal working status in the country, conferred by a work per-
mit visa, which is normally issued for a two-year period. Employment
agencies in both the Philippines and Singapore are actively involved
in brokering employment arrangements, including placing a woman
with an employer, in whose house she would reside. There has been
a plethora of reports globally documenting the plight of migrant
domestics, as well as academic attention detailing the human rights and
social justice issues of these women. Some of these studies suggest that
trafficking is a common undercurrent of many of these women’s expe-
riences, and in this research in Singapore an array of violations to most
participants’ working rights were documented (both for those who left
their workplaces to seek assistance because of such concerns and for
those who were still working), whether this amounted to trafficking or
not. This is important to note since women experienced working and
living conditions that profoundly affected their salary use/remittance
practices. It is impossible to say how common my participants’ experi-
ences were, although several NGOs in Singapore suggest that practices
of debt bondage, no day off, surveillance of employees and below-
minimum wage payments are commonplace. Further, many domestics
whom I knew through the research did not run away to seek redress,
principally because of debt-bondage situations that provided them with
minimal ability to manoeuvre their employment relations (see HOME,
2013; Hoang and Yeoh, Chapter 11, in this volume).
Filipinas who enter Singapore as entertainers are a rather less cohesive
group in terms of their entry into the nightlife sex and entertain-
ment sector and in their expectations around work; though many of
their experiences – such as unpaid salaries, debt and excessive work-
ing hours and so on – approximate the experiences of those who
work as domestics. Women entering Singapore as entertainers were
mainly issued with a Social Visit Pass (SVP) visa, which does not in
fact confer working rights and thus already puts women in a precarious
Sallie Yea 263
legal/migration position in the country. Several participants were later

issued with a Performing Artists Visa (PAV), which allowed them to
work in clubs and bars as singers or dancers. All of my participants who
entered Singapore to work as entertainers had been deceptively recruited
and had not expected their duties there to entail sexual labour or sexual
labour under conditions that differed from those that they had agreed
to. In fact women had differing expectations of work: some believed that
they would be waitressing in a pub or restaurant, and some believed that
they would be hostessing in a bar or pub. Many women (though only
four in this study) are cognizant of the fact that they will be engaging in
prostitution or other forms of sexual labour. Without a more extensive
study it is impossible to reasonably estimate the breakdown between
these different groups.
Debt bondage is the key site through which migrant Filipinas in
both sectors remain without income for some time. Domestics must
pay agency fees (to both the Philippines agency and the Singaporean
agency), and the usual arrangement for repayment, both among par-
ticipants and more broadly, is to have a domestic forfeit her salary for
the first six to eight months of her employment (usually in the seventh
and eighth months she will receive a partial salary only). After this a
woman receives her full salary, which at the time of writing averaged
around USD 500 per month. While domestics are cognizant of their
debt arrangements, most entertainers are aware that they must repay
some money for their migration (to an agent and/or to the owner of
the establishment where they are to work), but the amount is normally
grossly inflated upon a woman’s arrival in Singapore. Women in this
study recalled that they were told by their boss that the only way to
repay their (arbitrarily imposed) debts was to see customers for sex. The
clearance of migration debt does not, of course, halt the imposition of
arbitrary fines by their bosses, which were commonly imposed among
both domestic worker and entertainer participants.
In the cases of both entertainers and domestics, debt bondage and
the resultant inability to leave exploitative employment situations were
key features and played directly into at least two of the three con-
cerns discussed in this chapter – namely, the inability to remit, and
severing communication due to oppressive and/or sexually “deviant”
working situations. Thus, while much recent scholarship on the fem-
inisation of unskilled/low-skilled migration takes individual categories
of work as it’s starting point, this chapter recognises that there is often
a degree of fluidity in transnational occupations of sex worker, enter-
tainer, hostess/waitress and domestic, among others, which suggests
that a simultaneous focus on different categories of occupation is

appropriate, particularly when discussing issues of work conditions,
migration motivations and, importantly for this chapter, remittance
practices and broader issues around money. By including female migrant
entertainers in this chapter’s discussion I also wish to make a case for
recognising that entertainers can also be active economic contributors
to remittance-receiving communities, although they face many of the
same constraints as domestics.4
Remittances, emotion and the transnational family
The three intersecting themes that have emerged to guide discussions of

remittances are development, gender and the family. Remittances are
seen to play a central role in the migration-development nexus and
research on this subject has been largely preoccupied with the ways
in which remittances (can be successfully harnessed to) contribute to
development on multiple scales (the household, community/locality
and nation). While this is not the place to undertake an exhaustive
review of the literature that addresses this question (which can in any
case be found in Datta, 2009), it is important to draw attention to the
related questions of who remits and whose remittances are more likely
to produce these developmental outcomes. This has led to a focus on
the practices of those who remit and the people who are involved in
remittance dynamics – that is, the senders and the receivers. Key ques-
tions in research on remittance practices invoke the normative discourse
of development and include the question of whether and to what extent
remittances contribute to national development and make a substan-
tial contribution to individual households, and whether remittances
“meaningfully differentiate non-poor from poor households” (King and
Vullnetari, 2009: 27). While the first of these questions appears to be
firmly resolved in the positive (although it is open to question in this
chapter), the second has proved to be more elusive to establish and
requires some critical and in-depth explorations into questions about
who receives remittances, how household welfare is measured, and what
the longer-term effects of remittances in providing social and economic
capital are.
Research focused on these questions has adopted a gender perspec-
tive, which is largely suggestive of a generalised pattern whereby men
remit more than women (see, e.g., Blue, 2004, though see Kusakabe and
Pearson, Chapter 3, in this volume). This is also true for the Philippines,
where Semyonov and Gorodzeisky (2005: 45) found that “men send
Sallie Yea 265
more money back home, even where taking into consideration earn-
ings differentials between the genders” (see also MacKay, Chapter 5, in
this volume). Research for other contexts has, however, highlighted the
narrow range of forms that are ascribed to remittances which are often
limited to financial flows which are large-scale and quantifiable, and do
not include what have traditionally been referred to as non-productive
remittances, including luxury household goods, housing investments or
money spent on food or everyday needs. Some research has nonetheless
recognised the symbolic functions, including “investing in relation-
ships”, of many of these so-called unproductive remittances (Smith and
Mazzucato, 2009). Others have noted the absence of deeper engage-
ments with the ways in which gender intersects with other axes of
identity, such as class, ethnicity and culture (including differences
between patriarchal and matrilineal systems), as well as the individual
biographies of migrants in understanding remittance practices among
and between men and women (e.g., King and Vullnetari, 2009).
This emphasis on gender has led to interesting questions that go
well beyond the developmental impulse of much of the mainstream
remittance literature and which have led Wong (2006: 536), for exam-
ple, to claim that there is a need for “more critical empirically grounded
research that investigates the social experiences and gendered particu-
larities of remittances”. Foremost among these are critical engagements
with the ways in which remittances intersect with gender roles and
identities, especially undermining men’s roles as breadwinners. The
ascendency of an era in which female migration for low-skilled employ-
ment exceeds that of men has offered women the opportunity to
attain a new status, with the possibility that traditional forms of gen-
der inequality can be challenged and reconfigured. This is also true
in the Philippines, where women can transcend subordinate gendered
positions that are ascribed locally and acquire new status and respect
through the migration process. However, studies that detail this process
for Filipinas (Asis et al., 2004) and other groups (King and Vullnetari,
2009) have noted that these new roles do not necessarily diminish pre-
existing gendered positions, and this may lead to women’s roles in the
household being reconfigured within transnational spaces. Women’s
traditional roles as care-givers, for example, can be reinscribed and even
intensified when they migrate, with attendant expectations that they
remit more or more often in order to take care of a range of familial pri-
orities, such as children’s education, medical costs and household items
(Parrenas, 2001 & 2005). It is easy to see why women’s remittances have
often been dismissed as largely invisible or considered unproductive
when narrow understandings of remittances are adopted that exclude

these other expenditures.
The intersection between the transnational family and remittances
provides a space through which some of the disruptions in gendered
roles can be more fully articulated. Remittances can provoke tensions,
negotiations and anxieties between husbands and wives and inter-
generationally. While early literature on the transnational family was
primarily focused on articulating why transnational social, including
familial relations, have emerged (Basch et al., 1994), much of the recent
literature is more precisely concerned with the ways in which families
are reconstituted and maintained across multiple sites transnationally,
in line with the recognition that transnational families required more
“work” to maintain (for a recent treatment, see Landolt and Da, 2005).
Remittances are a central element – both materially and symbolically –
of this work. Communications and connections enable these familial
relations to be (net)worked in ways that attend to the crafting of new
familial bonds and the strengthening of existing ones (see also Rao,
Tensions and anxieties – or what Landolt and Da label “spatial
ruptures” (2005) – are, however, not altogether absent in such projects.
Datta (2009: 109), for example, suggests that cleavages within fami-
lies often develop as “contradictory agendas” emerge when unrealistic
expectations and pressures are placed on migrants by those who are
left behind. The tensions between individual and familial projects and
goals require careful management and negotiation, again foregrounding
connection and communication as important elements in negotiat-
ing possible sites where the transnational family may become undone.
Carling (2008: 1462) also found that many Cape Verdean migrants to
Sweden were “unable or unwilling to remit enough money to satisfy
their relatives. Such non-compliance often results in moral condemna-
tion, which clearly adds to migrants’ feelings of frustration.” Taking this
finding further, Akesson (2009) found that in Cape Verde the location of
remittances in a singular and stable nuclear family/household is not ten-
able in practice where variations in family structures produce different
remittance practices. Wong (2006) extends this argument by suggesting
that research should begin recognising the plurality of family forms and
thus question “ethnocentric definitions of ‘family’ as the ‘natural unit’
of the conjugal family”. Indeed, this is a useful point to consider when
reviewing the family profiles of participants in my study. It is particu-
larly noteworthy that 90 per cent of the women who were deployed as
entertainers were either single mothers or had split from their husband,
Sallie Yea 267
with seven of the participants having two or more children from two
different fathers (a finding that was echoed in my earlier study with
migrant entertainers in Korea; see Yea, 2014). On the other hand, the
participants who were working as domestics were, with the exception of
one woman, all married with children. Although it is beyond the scope
of this chapter, future research would do well to consider the question of
why entertainers’ family profiles differ so markedly from those of other
migrant women and what this might imply for mobility aspirations and
motivations to migrate, as well as remittance practices.
For discussion in this chapter, the transnational family as the site for
disarticulation and discord, and the multiple ways in which families
are constituted beyond normative (Eurocentric) constructions in the
prevailing literature, are useful starting points. In particular, emerging
concerns about the multiple and discrepant agendas of migrants and
family members, as well as the tensions and anxieties that are often
embedded in the migration-family nexus, are further elaborated through
the case of Filipina migrant domestics and entertainers in Singapore.
In order to address these concerns in a more systematic manner, the
chapter draws on the concept of emotion as a constitutive locus in
both illuminating and challenging some of the received ideas about the
transnational family and the role of remittances in sustaining this entity.
Emotion has received some limited attention in studies of remittances
and the family, especially where qualitative, microlevel assessments
that involve migrants and other family members’ own narratives are
adopted. Wong (2006) recognises that “The conduct of remittances
is filled with emotional trappings” where “erroneous expectations for
money often engender feelings of frustration [in the migrant women]”.
Following this, emotion in this chapter is expressed as both a cause and
an effect of remittance practices as it intersects with affective and inti-
mate sites within the family. I now turn to the narratives of three of the
participants in my research to see how this (differentially) plays out in
their Singapore sojourns, so illuminating the three key themes of the
chapter.
Remittances and transnational Filipino families undone
Delores: A mother’s love and breaking up the family

Delores, much like Eva (discussed at the outset of the chapter), wished
to escape the “emotions of home” and this propelled her abroad. She
decided to try to migrate to Singapore as a domestic (though she had
never engaged in paid domestic work previously) since she had relatives
in Singapore who agreed to help her. She had suffered severe anxiety
attacks prior to her departure from the Philippines after her estranged
husband put a gun to her head and threatened to “blow her brains out”.
Her 13-year-old son went to live with his father, who lavished expen-
sive gifts on him, and her son subsequently shunned all but the most
minimal of contact with Delores. Her persistent but failed efforts to win
back her son’s affections caused her constant stress to the point where
she disclosed that she felt her “life was not worth living”. Going abroad
appeared to be the only way to resolve this destructive situation with
her husband and son.
Once in Singapore, Delores regained some sense of clarity in her
thinking but was unable to recover her peace of mind, and so she
began to strategise about her situation back home in the Philippines.
She decided that she would play the same game as her husband: as she
said, “If he can get my son with money, then I will get him back with
more money.” This idea gained more appeal to Delores each time she
tried to call her son, who sometimes refused to talk to her and other
times talked to her “with no respect”. Nearly every time she ended the
telephone conversation in tears and would retreat to her room to imag-
ine how her strategy for winning him back would crystallise. Delores
also discovered that the girlfriend of her husband was cohabiting with
her husband and son, driving a further wedge in her own relationship
with her son.
Over several weeks she further contemplated her plan and decided to
use her salary in Singapore to remove her son from the father and place
him with her older sister in Batangas Province, where she thought he
could attend high school and be under the watchful eye of her sister as
guardian. The father, of course, refused and so Delores was faced with
the prospect of having to utilise some legal mechanism to remove her
son from his care. This, of course, would cost money.
Delores decided to return to the Philippines after three months of
her contract in Singapore to put her plan into action. She had earned a
reasonable amount of money in Singapore as she had a very generous
employer.5 Although some of her Filipina friends in Singapore advised
her not to waste her money on buying expensive things for her son, the
day prior to her departure for Manila she went to Lucky Plaza – a popular
hangout for Filipino workers in Singapore – to purchase a PlayStation
for him and had prepared SGD 200 (Singapore dollars) for that purpose
(which was one-fifth of the total money she had managed to save in
her three months in Singapore). However, she discovered that she was
SGD 100 short of the purchase price and returned to the Philippines
Sallie Yea 269
without a “big gift” for him.6 Her son refused to travel to visit Delores
when she arrived back in Batangas Province and it was more than a
week after she returned that she met with him at his father’s house. She
inquired about the cost of legal proceedings to remove her son from his
father’s care and found that her savings from Singapore were inadequate
to proceed. Delores’ plan had completely failed. She decided to return to
Singapore and “not think too much about my son”. She is now back in
Singapore and left Manila without telling either her son or her husband
of her impending departure. In Singapore she returned to her previous
employer but they could no longer pay her the high salary that she
first received. She said she did not mind: “I just want to be out of the
Philippines. Even no salary is okay as long as I can stay here and not
have to think about my life and my son every day back there.”
Delores’ case offers insights which both extend and challenge some
of our received understandings concerning the notion of the norma-
tive transnational family. First, Delores – like Eva – came from a family
situation in the Philippines which was already characterised by insta-
bility, turmoil and, indeed, violence, and it certainly didn’t conform
to the stable, cohesive familial environment that is assumed by much
of the transnationalism literature. She was therefore not motivated to
go abroad to support or strengthen this family arrangement through
regular remittances but rather to disrupt and reconfigure the current
arrangement. Further, she did not need to go abroad to experience the
anxieties of separation from her son, but the experience of this at home
was what propelled her there initially (see also Yea, 2005). Money fig-
ured as a central cause (her estranged husband’s ability to win over their
son with expensive gifts) and probable “cure” (her own ability to com-
pete for his attentions using the same technique as her husband) for her
dilemma with her son.
Yeoh and Huang (2000: 418) have identified the importance of
Filipina and Indonesian domestics’ personal agendas and desires in
migrating to Singapore but suggest that these do not necessarily con-
flict with family goals, such as to “support elderly parents, put their
younger siblings and children through school and university, or to
save up enough to give their children a better head start in life”. Sim-
ilarly, Asis et al. (2004) suggest that in Filipino culture, family is the
paramount and most enduring social institution. We must, however,
caution against reifying the family as a motivation for migration for all
Filipinas, and this is certainly the case for Delores. Elsewhere (Yea, 2005)
I have noted that personal desires (e.g., personal freedom, adventure,
romance or, indeed, escaping “sadness” at home) are also important (see
also Kofman, 2006). Here I wish to highlight the personal and family
disruptions at home that propel women abroad which have more causal
emotional dimensions and which deeply affect the use of salaries that
work to disrupt family relationships and result in emotionally driven
expenditures (in Delores’ case, various toys, clothes and an attempted
PlayStation). In this sense, emotion drives alternative agendas in the
use of salaries in the migration destination. While family has been dis-
cussed as a site of conflict in some recent literature on remittances, this
is usually limited to conflicts, negotiations and disagreements around
the extent and use of remittances, leaving the experiences of women
like Delores (and Eva) who use their salaries to disrupt existing family
configurations entirely unaccounted for.
Amy: Shame, disconnection and lies to preserve the family

If Delores’ story tells us to be careful in assuming that sustaining family
is a key goal of remittance practices, then Amy’s (37 years) tells us that
the maintenance of the family unit is a paramount concern but involves
practices that depart from assumptions about the importance of con-
nection and communication in transnational family life. Rather, Amy’s
narrative speaks most clearly of issues of (dis)connection in transnation-
ality. Amy is from Bulacan in Central Luzon, has four children and
is still with her husband. She went to Singapore to work as a wait-
ress in a restaurant but found upon arrival that she was debt-bonded
to a bar and had to sell sex and perform other types of sexual labour,
such as lap dancing, in order to pay her debt so that she could osten-
sibly be “free” (meaning free to earn money for herself and without
someone else controlling her working conditions or earnings). Amy was
no doubt trafficked to Singapore,7 but that status was irrelevant except
to a researcher like me since there is currently no legal recognition
of trafficking in Singaporean law and therefore no redress, including
compensation.
Amy ran away from the pub to which she had been trafficked after just
two weeks of working in Singapore. In the typical scenario for migrant
entertainers in Singapore described above, her migration debt was the
vehicle by which she was coerced into prostitution. However, it was
another debt that concerned her more. In order to finance her migration
to Singapore she was asked by her recruiter in the Philippines to pay a fee
of PHP 18,000 (SGD 540), which her husband borrowed on her behalf
from a friend of his using the “five/six” informal interest arrangement
that is common among Filipinos who do not meet the requirements
to borrow from formal financial institutions. A five/six arrangement
Sallie Yea 271
effectively means that if, for example, PHP 5,000 is borrowed, PHP 6,000
must be repaid. The terms vary and in some cases the PHP 1,000 inter-
est would be charged monthly, thus encouraging borrowers to repay the
money as quickly as possible. Amy recalled asking the recruiter: “Really?
I can pay off PHP 18,000 quickly and earn money?” The recruiter appar-
ently replied: “Yes, it’s very easy to make money in Singapore and what is
more you can leave in two days to go there.” Impressed by this thought
of quick debt repayment and the opportunity to earn easy money, Amy
readily agreed to pay the recruiter’s fee. After three days in Singapore,
where it had become clear that the only way to repay the debt was
to go out with customers for sex, she telephoned her recruiter back in
the Philippines who asked her: “What are you doing? You need to go
to the hotel with customers for boom-boom or you don’t have money
there.” She decided then that she must try to leave the bar where she
was deployed.
Upon running away and seeking the assistance of the Philippine
Embassy, Amy faced further anxiety because she had no means by which
to send money back to her husband to pay off the migration debt. She
asked the embassy if she could work for two weeks in another job (paid
domestic work) to earn enough money to pay off her debt since she
still had two weeks left on her SVP visa. The embassy refused to allow
her to do this since it was illegal for her to work on such a visa. She
subsequently returned to Manila with no money and the debt that her
husband had incurred on her behalf still hanging over her head. She
disclosed to me:
My husband doesn’t know that I came to the Embassy for help and
he doesn’t know the work I am doing here. I am very worried about
the utang [debt] in the Philippines. How can I explain to my husband
about the job and the money? When I call him just one time a week,
I tell him everything is fine and I need to pay expenses before I send
money back. Of course this is a lie so better not to talk and then I can
avoid the lies.
As a trafficked person according to Philippine law (if not Singaporean

law), Amy was required to be met by the Philippines National Police
(PNP) upon her return to Manila, which had to occur quickly because
her visa was almost due to expire. Amy did not want to avail of the
PNP task force’s “assistance” – even though the Philippine Embassy had
insisted that she should be met at the airport by members of the task
force – because she feared that her husband might discover that she had
been “sex trafficked” to Singapore and might be angry with her on a

number of counts. These included incurring a debt to their friend with
no way to repay; being fooled by a false offer of work abroad; undertak-
ing commercial sexual labour (albeit not of her own volition); and lying
about her situation in Singapore to her husband when they talked over
the phone. Amy felt that the involvement of the task force would defi-
nitely entail the disclosure of her trafficking experience to her husband –
one of its duties would be to accompany her back home – even though
she had hitherto managed to keep this experience from her husband
while still in Singapore. In particular, she said that when she phoned
him she told him she was fine and “still working in the restaurant”.
Further, even with the assistance of the task force, she could not be guar-
anteed justice, compensation or, at a minimum, the fee money that she
paid to the recruiter being recovered. As the vice consul of the Philippine
Embassy lamented,
Even if the Task Force investigate and file a case, it could be several
months before the case is settled. Even then Amy may not get the
money she paid because it is quite likely the recruiter will have spent
it already and she (recruiter) probably doesn’t have a bank account to
trace the money.
(personal communication, 30 June 2009)
Thus, even in the unlikely event that the money could be recovered
after a delay of several months, Amy and her husband would still be
burdened with the five/six interest accruing monthly. As Amy’s husband
was working as a casual labourer at the time and bringing home a salary
of only around PHP 600 (SGD 18) per week, and with four children to
feed, there was no way they could even meet the interest repayments,
let alone the principal amount.8
Of the 52 Filipinas interviewed who found themselves in similar types
of deceptive and debt-bonded employment arrangements in Singapore’s
nightlife entertainment sector, none could remit any money unless
they engaged in prostitution, and only then once their arbitrary and
inflated debts had been paid off.9 The literature on remittances has
been rather slow to engage with the recognition that many migrant
workers do not experience work (or living) conditions that they had
hoped for, whether this means that they were trafficked or experi-
enced some other type of exploitative labouring arrangement. Although
Wong (2006: 361) points out that “different socio-economic contexts in
transnational spaces produce complex and contradictory experiences”,
Sallie Yea 273
it then becomes necessary to explore these different contexts and

their consequences for migrant remittance practices in far more depth.
In Singapore this means that for women like Amy, questions should be
raised concerning what it means for remittance practices and intrafam-
ily relationships when expectations around work and remuneration in
Singapore are unfulfilled. It also means appreciating the additional bur-
den that many women must consequently shoulder of being pushed
into performing sexual labour and how they believe these circumstances
could have the potential to undermine or compromise their positions
as mothers and wives. Emotion (shame, anxiety, fear, sadness) emerges
as an effect of these trajectories and, as the case of Amy demonstrates,
shame in particular crystallises as the dominant emotional trope that
creates considerable anxiety and trepidation about returning home and,
significantly, about communicating with family while still abroad, thus
acting to undermine, rather than strengthen, the transnational family
(see also Lindquist, 2010).
Flor: Lies and suffering in silence in Singapore

Entertainers were not the only ones to have found themselves in sit-
uations where the terms of their contracts/agreements were broken
and where they faced debt bondage in their employment situations in
Singapore. Flor (31 years old) from Ilocos Sur Province in north Luzon
left her farmer husband and two young children of two and four years
when she went to Singapore in early 2008 as a domestic. She was pro-
pelled there by poor financial circumstances in her family and she stated
that the decision was taken suddenly – she was still breastfeeding her
youngest child when she left the Philippines. She was with her employer
for 15 months before she decided to run away and seek assistance from
an NGO in Singapore. Apart from daily scoldings and surveillance, Flor
was very concerned about her financial situation and said:
If I misplace things she [employer] deducts my salary; if I can’t cook

the food I don’t eat but if I eat without her permission I must pay
back the cost of the food. She wants me to cut my hair short and I say
my hair is not part of my job. But she forces me and another deduc-
tion [for the cost of the haircut]. My salary is SG$ 350 per month
but SG$ 340 goes to the agent. So I only get SG$ 10 and deduct and
deduct . . . I’m looking after my family only [meaning she is the bread-
winner] and I cannot send anything for eight months. I cannot take
the scoldings and so in the end I’m begging her for a transfer [to
another employer].
On the one hand, Flor’s case illustrates the classic story of the sacrifi-
cial mother and wife who works abroad to support her family at home,
even though she misses them terribly and must endure the trials of
“mothering from a distance” (Parrenas, 2001). But her circumstances
also contest this commonly depicted migrant persona. Debt-bonded
and subject to arbitrary deductions, Flor – much like Amy in the pub
situation – could not remit as she had hoped. Even after her first full
salary after eight months in Singapore, she was still subject to arbitrary
deductions. In all, Flor’s salary deductions amounted to SGD 340 for six-
and-a-half months and then SGD 270 for the following month. Only in
the eighth month of her employment did she receive her full salary.
These types of experience were common to all of the domestics and
entertainers who were interviewed in my research.10 Like Amy, Flor’s
circumstances demonstrate that, without income and in situations of
debt bondage and arbitrary impositions of further debt, it is impossible
to remit any money to family members in the Philippines.
Despite her pleadings, Flor’s employer would not release her unless
she paid for her own ticket back to the Philippines, which was, of course,
impossible given her debt situation and remittance obligations, which
had become magnified as a result of her postponement of remittances
during the eight-month period when she was without a salary. Nor was
she able to request a transfer to another employer from her agency in
Singapore since she would have been the one to bear the full cost of
the transfer: a further three months salary deduction where she would
again receive only SGD 10 per month. Flor was caught in a bind of no
income followed by low income (and therefore a reduced ability to remit
the amount that was necessary to support her family), and the need to
remain with an abusive and unfair employer for the sake of being able to
continue to remit to her family in the longer term. Thus remitters’ work-
ing and living circumstances in the destination country often impact
on their ability to remit, and often force them to remit under circum-
stances where they must undergo great personal sacrifice in order to
meet family responsibilities. This is especially true in Flor’s (and Amy’s)
case since she had become the main breadwinner of the family. Her life
and working conditions in Singapore intensified her desire to return to
her family, but also simultaneously forced her to “try and forget them
because I have to work here”. She minimised her communication with
her family because she “could not endure hearing their voices and pre-
tending to my son especially that everything was fine and I am happy
here”. Even when I interviewed Flor she had maintained the illusion of
her happiness to her husband, mother and children and had not told
Sallie Yea 275
them that she had run away from her employer and was staying in a
shelter.11
Some recent discussions about remittances have alluded to situa-
tions where migrants have endured much hardship in order to fulfil
remittance obligations and responsibilities. Datta (2007) found also that
the often poor conditions in which migrants generate remittances must
also be acknowledged, including the stress that this induces among
migrants and the ways in which this affects their communication prac-
tices with family members and others at home (see also Muller, 2008).
Other Filipinas in this study faced a similar situation as Flor, and other
academic and NGO commentaries have raised similar concerns with
regard to Singapore (Rahman et al., 2004; HOME and TWC2, 2010).
As with Amy, Flor attempted to deal with the anxiety of her situation by
disrupting communications with her family in the Philippines so that
they could, somewhat paradoxically, remain emotionally proximate to
her. This type of situation challenges assumptions that are central to
the literature on the transnational family that communication creates
or maintains intimacy (as in Vertovec, 2004b). Indeed, for both Flor
and Amy the reverse held true: disconnection worked to maintain emo-
tional proximity while connection primarily through phone calls – at
least in Flor’s mind – would have worked to inadvertently undermine
these relationships by incurring stress and anxiety back home.
Discussion and conclusions
This chapter has introduced the theme of emotion into discussions

about the relationship between remittances and transnational fam-
ily in Philippines low-skilled female labour migration, focusing on
the case of Filipina domestics and entertainers who were deployed in
Singapore. Very little attention has been paid to issues of remittance
practices of Filipinas who are deployed as entertainers in the context
of transnational labour migration. Considerably more has been written
about paid domestic workers but rarely have different categories of occu-
pation been considered together in discussions, despite the common
aspirations, and often working and living conditions in the context of
migration, of these different groups of women. This chapter has demon-
strated that, despite the different occupations of these women (and
their differing family situations back in the Philippines), some of the
issues that they negotiate in the context of their transnational working
lives present commonalities where questions of remittance practices and
transnational family are concerned.
Foremost, as Anderson and Smith (2001: 7) have lamented, “emo-

tional relations tend to be regarded as something apart from the
economic and/or as something that is essentially private, and does not
substantially infuse the public/policy sphere”. Discussion in this chapter
has contested this separation by invoking emotion as a heuristic con-
struct to help to understand remittance and salary use practices of
female migrants in low-valued jobs in Singapore. Spaces (motivations,
departures, arrivals, deployments, home) and affective relations (fam-
ily, friends, lovers) of/in migration are intensely emotional sites. They
are publicly (and policy) relevant in multiple ways, and this chapter has
attended specifically to the aspect of remittances and salary use, which
has become a new mantra in the migration-development nexus of many
migrant source countries in the third world.
The narratives that have been offered by participants in this research
challenge some of the key assumptions that sustain discussions of
remittances and national development, and remittances as “family
strategy”. This allows us to extend our conceptualisations of the
transnational family itself, communication and connection within
such families, and developmental discourses that assume certain out-
comes within much of the remittances literature. Specifically regarding
the remittance–development relationship, I suggest that many labour
migrants in fact fail, for various reasons, to remit at all (see also IOM,
2006), or use salaries to pay for legal processes that work to reconfigure
and break up the family. This produces different kinds of negotia-
tion, tension, relationship and communicative practice of transnational
migrants with their families.
As such, discussion in the chapter aims to extend incipient scholar-
ship which suggests that (transnational) families take multiple forms
(Akesson, 2009), and that they are often sites of conflict and disjuncture
(Hernandez and Coutin, 2006; Datta, 2009) in migration. If, as Vertovec
(2004a, in Smith and Mazzucato, 2009: 663) argues, remittances are the
most visible form of interaction between migrants and those whom
they relate to in their country of origin, then the stories in this chapter
suggest that these interactions can break down in ways that are both
deliberately crafted (as in Delores’ case, as well as that of Eva intro-
duced at the outset) and unexpected (as in the cases of Amy and Flor).
This recognition allows us to consider the “effect of remittances on the
lives of migrants in countries of destination” (Kofman, 2006: 1), partic-
ularly where they endure otherwise difficult and exploitative working
and living conditions to be able to send money back home.
Also focusing on the remittance senders and receivers, while impor-
tant questions have been raised about the misuse of remittances by
Sallie Yea 277
receivers, and the anxieties and tensions that this can create within
families, the use of salaries to purchase luxury consumer goods which
constitute symbolic consumption has only been fleetingly discussed
(e.g., Wong, 2006; see also Rao, Chapter 2, in this volume). These prac-
tices, as exemplified by Delores’ case, supposedly work towards the
fulfilling of goals besides the material welfare of the family (although
they may not necessarily undermine this). Indeed, other Filipinas in this
study shared the sentiment that they felt guilty about leaving their chil-
dren in another’s care so that the purchase of luxury items to send them
in part satiated their own guilt and worked towards the acceptance by
their children of them being abroad. Several Filipina migrant support
groups in Singapore conduct seminars and short courses for Filipina
domestics about how they might better harness their salaries in ways
that steer them away from these emotive impulses.
Finally, the cases discussed in this chapter reveal something novel
about the connections and communications that have been viewed
as pivotal in sustaining transnational families in a global era. While
some (Vertovec, 2004b) see these connections through telephone calls
and email as crucial both in maintaining affective ties and in negoti-
ating and directing use of remittances, Filipinas in marginal positions
as domestics and entertainers in Singapore often deliberately break or
limit communications with families at home when they have failed to
live up to their promises of remitting money. Shame, a sense of failure,
disappointment and sadness rupture the communicative geographies of
these transnational families. Both Flor and Amy discussed how they had
restricted contact with their families back in the Philippines and the
ways in which they concealed the most shameful and stressful elements
of their failed migrations to their husbands and other family members.
This finding has been echoed by Muller (2008: 403), who found that
“The distance provided an opportunity to conceal certain aspects” of
experiences in the destination and thus “remittances not only symbol-
ize connection to the country of origin . . . they could become a symbol
of disconnection as well.”
I believe that the narratives of women in this study offer some use-
ful directions for further discussions about the intersections between
money, transnational families and emotion. By focusing on women who
have run away or otherwise left their employment situations and are
residing in shelters or safe houses (e.g., Amy and Flor), as well as women
who still remain with their employer (e.g., Delores), we can gain a better
sense of some of the ways in which remittance practices can be disrupted
and what this can mean for (transnational) family life. By also recog-
nising that women leave situations in their home countries which are
fraught with undesirable and fragmented family arrangements, such as

separation from a violent husband or being a single mother, we can then
begin to ask fruitful questions about what these family arrangements
mean for remittance and salary use practices. A heightened emotional
sensibility thus makes possible a more considered understanding of the
multiple dimensions of these women’s lives in migration. Such a focus
rests on a disruption of the Cartesian binary between the “rational” eco-
nomic actor who remits to contribute to family welfare goals and the
“emotional” woman whose practices concerning money in migration
are excluded from such discussions. Shame, stigma, longing, hope and
desire are important socially embedded emotional loci through which
migration scholars can extend understandings of remittance practices,
use of money in migration and lack of money resulting from failed
migration.
Notes
1. I am grateful to Delores, Amy and Flor for sharing their stories in inti-
mate (and emotional) detail with me, as well as the other participants
in this research. I also wish to thank Humanitarian Organisation for
Migrant Economies (HOME), Franciscan Missionaries of Mary (FMM) and
the Philippine Embassy for providing access to potential participants and for
sharing information about specific women’s cases with me. Thanks to one
anonymous reviewer for their useful comments which helped to strengthen
the chapter. Finally, this chapter has benefited from insightful comments
from Jorgen Carling and Yi En Cheng.
2. Pseudonyms are used whenever referring to research participants.
3. This term is a euphemism for women who are deployed either knowingly
or by the use of deceptive recruitment to work in bars, clubs and pubs
where they are expected to perform varying types of sexual labour. The term
“entertainer” derives from the fact that many such women enter destination
countries under the guise of an entertainer’s visa or PAV, which confers a
working status as a singer or dancer.
4. As Rhacel Parrenas (2006) rightly points out, “Of the three occupations most
commonly held by migrant Filipino women, entertainers is the least studied
group.” The other occupations she identifies are services and nursing.
5. Delores was training as a masseuse in the Philippines prior to going to
Singapore and had earned some “side money” providing massages to some
paying clients where she resided in Singapore.
6. Many of the women in my research utilised salaries to engage in what
I term “emotional purchases” of luxury items for family members, mean-
ing that the intent of the purchase was to contribute in some way to the
easing or fulfilling of emotional needs of both themselves and their fam-
ily members (usually children). This was particularly evident for women
who spent large proportions of their often very small salaries – sometimes
more than 50 per cent of their salary in one month – on toys and electronic
Sallie Yea 279
games, or brandname trainers and clothes to give their children who often
“demanded” such gifts to make up for their absence (see also Parrenas, 2005).
This discussion could be extended to comprise a fourth concern in its own
right, and further research could delve more deeply into the connection
between emotional purchases and remittances.
7. For discussion in this chapter I take the UN Trafficking Protocol’s defini-
tion as the point of reference, since it is the most widely accepted definition
and is that used to frame a large number of countries’ responses to traf-
ficking, including legislation. According to the definition, human trafficking
comprises three elements: (a) recruitment by force or deceptive means;
(b) facilitated movement and transfer to the destination; and (c) exploitation
at the destination.
8. As it transpired, Amy was so uncontrollably distraught when I interviewed
her that I felt that she might benefit from some social support from Catholic
sisters who conducted support work with migrant women in the sex industry
in both Singapore and Manila. She readily agreed to this suggestion and
upon her arrival in Manila an FMM Catholic sister met her at the airport and
took her to a retreat where she was provided with space to think through her
situation. After talking over the problem of her debt and the anxiety that it
might cause her husband, she agreed for her husband to come to Manila
to meet her, with the sister nearby for support. After the sister gave a long
and detailed explanation of what had happened to Amy in Singapore, the
husband showed sympathy and concern.
9. I also believe that many of the Filipinas whom I interviewed and who fell
into the same category as Amy were deliberately targeted by recruiters, since
almost all were single mothers and in extremely fragile financial circum-
stances. Mothers, I believe, are easy to recruit because they will do almost
anything for their children, but that is another story.
10. Despite the fact that the number of domestics interviewed for the study
has been much smaller to date, during the month when the interviews
were undertaken there were approximately 75 women staying at the HOME
shelter in Singapore. The experiences of most of them revealed strong
commonalities with those who were interviewed.
11. It is also important to consider the emotional impact of staying at a shel-
ter. Shelters can intensify the emotional and material costs of migration
since migrant workers staying in these spaces usually cannot remedy their
financial situations quickly either by seeking compensation or by obtaining
alternative employment. Many of the participants in my research com-
mented that the only resource that they had was time, which was used
to think about their situations. These protracted periods of reflection only
brought further anxieties to many of them.
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11
Transnational Labour Migration,
Debts and Family Economics
in Vietnam
Introduction
A report commissioned by the World Bank in 2006 suggests that large

parts of international remittances, which increased by 58 per cent to
USD 232 billion between 2001 and 2005, were associated with the
unprecedented rise in international migration from developing coun-
tries (Yeoh et al., 2005: 88). The need for foreign exchange earnings
together with the pressure to relieve domestic unemployment are two
principal reasons for the promotion of transnational labour migration
by labour-sending countries (Wickramasekera, 2002: 8). The potential
of reaping positive economic benefits from international migration is
immense for poorer countries. However, a more important question aris-
ing from these facts and figures is whether increased remittances are
automatically translated into enhanced wellbeing for migrant families
and, if not, why and in what way migration fails to lead to development
in its broadest sense.
In this chapter we seek to enhance our understanding of the
migration–development nexus by exploring an important, albeit usu-
ally overlooked, link in the migration chain – how debts incurred
to finance transnational labour migration affect individuals and fam-
ilies. Much of transnational labour migration in Asia is arranged by
brokers, legal or illegal, who are known to charge exorbitant fees,
thereby driving migrant families into debt (ILO, 2006; Castles and
Miller, 2009; Lindquist, 2010). Compounding the situation, the deci-
sion to migrate is sometimes made based on inaccurate information,
and as a result migrants run a high risk of being cheated, exploited or
283
repatriated prematurely. Various studies suggest that large amounts of

debts incurred through migration push migrant workers to go to great
lengths to hang on to work in host countries, such as overstaying their
visas, running away from legal employers or resorting to crime (Jones
and Findlay, 1998; Wickramasekera, 2002: 21; Tran, 2007). A World Bank
study, for example, estimates that 30,000 Indonesian domestic work-
ers in Malaysia run away each year to escape the debt that would be
deducted from their salaries over a period of six months (Hernández-
Coss et al., 2008). Indebtedness is an important factor that explains
why international remittances fail to convert to upward socioeconomic
mobility for many migrant families. In the worse scenario of “failed”
migration, the burden of debt has dire consequences on the wellbeing
of those individuals involved, especially children and the elderly.
The existing migration literature has paid an inordinate amount of
attention to the developmental aspect of remittances – that is, how
the economic fruits of labour migration improve household, commu-
nity and national economies. In general, the scholarship on migration,
remittances and development is divided into two camps. On the one
hand, the “optimists”, largely informed by functionalist paradigms in
social theory, celebrate remittances as a safety net for relatively poor
areas, a crucial source of foreign exchange for the national economy and
a leveller of both rural-urban and regional income disparities (cf. Keely
and Tran, 1989; Durand et al., 1996; Taylor, 1999; Ratha, 2003; World
Bank, 2006). The “pessimists”, inspired by the structuralist paradigm
and dependency theory, on the other hand, see remittances as foment-
ing migration dependency, income inequality and social deterioration
(cf. Lipton, 1980; Reichert, 1981; Rubenstein, 1992). Migration is there-
fore one of the causes of further underdevelopment rather than devel-
opment. Notwithstanding their divisiveness, both approaches appear
to take remittances for granted while being oblivious to the fact that
labour migration is not always a successful economic venture (see also
Yea, Chapter 10, in this volume).
It is our aim in this chapter to enhance the understanding of pro-
cesses that lead to overseas labour migration which, as noted by Massey
et al. (1998) and Goss and Lindquist (1995: 317), have often been over-
looked due to the developmentalist orientation of the field. Because
the investment that families plough into transnational labour migra-
tion is often substantial, understanding the contexts and pathways
that lead to indebtedness and its effects on the family is of great
importance, not only for policy-making but also for future migra-
tion research. To begin with, we provide an overview of the political
economy of Asian transnational labour migration with a particular

emphasis on the Vietnamese context, highlighting the roles of the state
and market actors, including licensed recruitment agencies and infor-
mal brokers in the migration process. In the second part of the chapter
we examine the case study of Vietnam to explore how migrant families
cope with the debts that are incurred to finance migration, as well as the
implications of the economic stress that is caused by debts for individual
and family wellbeing.
State and market in Asian transnational labour migration
In the race to increase the supply of labour and expand markets for
labour exports, the state in labour-sending countries is often complicit
in lending a helping hand to the “migration industry” while failing
to pay due attention to the protection of migrants’ rights (Asis, 2005;
Hugo, 2005; Yeoh et al., 2005). In Asia, with the exception of the
Philippines, where important measures have been taken to govern and
monitor labour export processes, such as setting minimum wages or pro-
viding support to migrants and their families, a laissez-faire approach –
accompanied by, at most piecemeal, measures – has been adopted with
regard to the question of the protection of migrants’ rights. When faced
with the escalation of abuse and exploitation incidents, some states
resort to kneejerk measures, such as imposing restrictions on certain
groups, as seen in the pronouncements of bans on women migrat-
ing to work in domestic service in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam
in previous decades. More sustained measures to regulate and control
the “migration industry” have not been given adequate weight in the
state-led labour exports agenda.
Commercial migration brokers constitute one of the most important
channels of transnational labour migration in Asia1 (Jones and Findlay,
1998: 100; Massey et al., 1998; Lindquist, 2010: 123). Frequent media
reports of abuse and exploitation at the destination have often over-
shadowed the fact that many migrant workers may be exploited even
before they leave home. By providing misleading or incomplete infor-
mation and charging excessive fees, unscrupulous migration brokers
push migrants and their families into massive debt (cf. Hugo, 2005: 73).
Brokers in sending countries often link up with agents in receiving coun-
tries to recruit labour and send them abroad, sometimes without any
firm job offers. As a result, many workers enter destination countries to
find no jobs waiting for them and immediately fall into the irregular
status (Wickramasekera, 2002: 23–24).
Recruitment agencies in many Asian countries operate through exten-

sive networks of agents and subagents, who are most likely unregistered
(Gamburd, 2000; Kaur, 2004; Afsar, 2005; Tran, 2007; Rahman and
Lian, 2009). Weak state control over the labour exports market cou-
pled with the fact that the supply of labour always exceeds demand
puts migrant workers at the mercy of exploitative brokers. In the early
days of transnational labour migration in Asia from the 1970s to the
1980s, brokerage fees and relocation costs for the migrant were borne by
employers who were “desperate for labour”, but the subsequent surge
in labour supply has gradually shifted all or large parts of the costs to
migrant workers (Jones and Findlay, 1998: 95). In the face of stiff com-
petition, agencies in destination countries bargain away workers’ rights,
privileges and salaries in order to secure scarce jobs and reduce fees to a
minimum for employers, thus transferring the costs to migrant workers
(Gamburd, 2000; Rahman et al., 2005: 241). In Taiwan, the employer
is even offered commission for using a particular agency, which further
increases the financial burden on migrant workers (Jones and Findlay,
1998: 101). The recruitment of migrant workers has become a lucrative
business in many labour-receiving countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan
and Singapore. To bypass the legally sanctioned cap on placement fees,
employment agencies invent “service fees” to cover the actual charge of
placement fees and they require workers to sign a receipt before their
departure to disguise wage deductions as money that the workers have
“borrowed” (Lan, 2005: 218).
Migration brokers thrive on the increasingly restrictive immigra-
tion and border-control measures that are imposed by labour-receiving
countries. As migration regimes become more restrictive, migration
management becomes more formalised, decentralised and fragmented
at the same time (Lindquist et al., 2012: 11). Recent scholarly interven-
tions alert us to the fact that the state and the market should not be
treated as independent entities. As Xiang (2012) observes in the con-
text of China, broker networks are integral to new forms of governance
and governmentality rather than external to state power. Market agents
operate under the implicit or explicit sanction of the state (Lindquist
et al., 2012: 7). The neoliberal state, in its vehement pursuit of economic
goals, sees open markets as “the optimal mechanism for economic devel-
opment” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 350). In many labour-sending
societies it is not easy to discern the boundaries between the state and
the market at times when individuals act in the capacity of government
officials in certain contexts and as informal brokers in others (Goss and
Lindquist, 1995; Lindquist et al., 2012: 8).
It is the rule in most source and destination countries that recruitment

agencies should be legally licensed or even state-owned, as in the case of
Vietnam. The Department of Overseas Labour (DOLAB) under Vietnam’s
Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs (MOLISA) is responsible
for governing, monitoring and regulating state-owned companies that
are licensed to export labour under bilateral agreements. By 2011, some
167 state-owned enterprises in Vietnam had been legally licensed to
export labour overseas. The network of actors involved in labour exports
is, nevertheless, much more complicated and extensive than it appears.
Many enterprises, though uninterested in or ill equipped for the labour-
exporting business, acquire licences, capitalising on their state-owned
status, and then “sell” them to private businesses which are expected
to offer “kick-backs” to the former (cf. Tran, 2007). In 2010, Madame
Nguyễn Thi. Kim Ngân, MOLISA minister, admitted that only 30 per cent
of the 167 licensed enterprises managed labour exports satisfactorily.2
Major issues in the industry were identified as (a) the poor management
of recruitment and deployment processes; (b) a lack of commitment
to ensuring the quality of recruited labour and protecting their rights
and interests; and (c) the rapid expansion of an informal migration
brokerage “market” that had increasingly been spiralling out of state
control.
An article dated 9 June 2010 in the Vietnamese newspaper Người
lao đô.ng (The Worker)3 summarises the “Three Nos” that characterise
the Vietnamese labour exports industry: (a) no registration – recruit-
ment enterprises do not register manpower supply contracts to DOLAB –
a prerequisite for labour deployment; (b) no reporting – numbers of
deployed workers are under- or unreported to DOLAB; and (c) no direct
recruitment – licensed enterprises source labour through unregistered
agencies and individuals against the law. In 2009, DOLAB imposed a
“collective penalty” on 77 enterprises for not reporting their deployed
workers. The penalty was, however, rather light, varying from VND 10
million to VND 15 million (Vietnamese dong)4 – not a sufficient deter-
rent to future violations. The fact that labour deployment goes unre-
ported and unregistered leads to multiple difficulties in the protection of
workers’ rights and hampers a timely response to situations of conflict
or abuse. The practice of recruiting labour indirectly through brokers
contributes to the inflation of migration costs that is borne by work-
ers and aids the proliferation of con agents. It is estimated that around
70–80 per cent of Vietnamese migrant workers are recruited through
middlemen.5 DOLAB has been inundated with grievances from migrant
workers and their families – during 2007–2010, nearly 2,000 formal
complaints were made.6 Most of the prosecuted cases were related to

defraudation by licensed or unlicensed brokers, involving gaps between
reality and what is promised to workers before they leave Vietnam, as
well as phony deployment arrangements and the misappropriation of
recruitment fees.
The major legal framework for labour exports – the 2003 Law on
Vietnamese Labour Working Abroad under Labour Contract – is more
concerned with the management of the industry than the protection of
Vietnamese workers’ rights. Very little support is available and/or acces-
sible to workers who are in crisis. The only formal source of support
for migrant workers is the Fund for Overseas Workers Support (Quỹ Hỗ
trơ. viê.c làm ngoài nước), which was established in 2007 and is man-
aged by MOLISA. The fund amasses its resources from fees that are paid
by labour export enterprises and migrant workers. However, it has been
criticised as largely inefficient, giving limited financial support to only
serious cases that involve death rather than where labour migration has
been prematurely terminated. By 2010 the fund had disbursed only VND
5 billion out of the total reserve of VND 114 billion.7 In response to
criticisms from the media, MOLISA has recently become more generous
in dispensing the fund – migrant workers returning prematurely from
Libya due to the 2011 civil war received VND 1 million8 in cash and an
additional amount varying from VND 2 million to 8 million depending
on the remaining length of their contracts.9
The price to pay at the bottom end of the migration chain
Because of the pervasive problem of discrepancies between promised

wages and entitlements on the one hand and actual benefits received
on the other, many migrant workers find themselves caught in a debt
trap that takes them years to repay. Indebtedness is a widespread prob-
lem among transnational migrant workers across Asia (Pertierra, 1992;
Jones and Findlay, 1998: 95; Gamburd, 2000; Afsar, 2005; Hugo, 2005:
73). Family and friends represent an important source of funding, partic-
ularly because such loans are often interest free, but this source is often
limited unless aspiring migrants are connected to migrant networks
with access to remittances (Pertierra, 1992; Rahman and Fee, 2005). The
lack of easily accessible low-interest loans (bank loans often require col-
lateral) means that many have to turn to moneylenders for loans at
exploitative interest rates. Migrants in some parts of Sri Lanka, Indonesia
and the Philippines reportedly borrow money at 100–120 per cent inter-
est to finance their migration (Gamburd, 2000: 81; Dizon-Anonuevo
and Anonuevo, 2002; Valerio, 2002; Lindquist, 2010: 128). In the

Philippines, it was found that almost 90 per cent of migrant work-
ers covered their fees and other pre-departure expenses using loans
with interest (Valerio, 2002: 41). In areas with a high incidence of
migration, moneylending has become an extremely profitable busi-
ness (Pertierra, 1992; Gamburd, 2000). In Bangladesh, Afsar (2005: 120)
found that 69 per cent of the domestic workers borrowed money from
moneylenders at excessively high interest rates.
Fees often reflect the expected earnings at the destination rather than
the actual recruitment and relocation costs, and those with limited
access to migrant networks are particularly susceptible to exploitation
by brokers. Domestic workers pay less but also earn less than other
workers. Sri Lankan domestic workers, for example, pay USD 300–600
to migrate to the Middle East and earn about USD 100 a month, a wage
that has held steady for the past 20 years (Gamburd, 2004: 171). Filipina
domestic workers pay approximately USD 850–1,700 in fees for a job
placement in Hong Kong and around USD 1,700–6,800 or even up to
USD 12,000 to illegal brokers for a trip to Italy (Parreñas, 2001: 43;
Valerio, 2002: 37). Typically, migrants take six months to over a year to
repay the debt in full if everything goes well (Jones and Findlay, 1998:
95; Gamburd, 2000). Many Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong and
Italy are unable to break even because the cycle of debt turns them into
regular clients of usurers and pawnbrokers. The repayment of debt fea-
tures prominently in accounts of remittance usage in the contexts of
Bangladesh and Indonesia (cf. Afsar, 2005; Lindquist, 2010). High finan-
cial costs mean that migrants have to work abroad for longer periods
or are compelled to put up with difficult working and living conditions
to be able to pay off their debts (Anonuevo, 2002: 130; Asis, 2005: 35).
Debt bondage, as Yea (Chapter 10, in this volume) observes, constrains
workers’ ability to manoeuvre their employment relations. It ensures
that a worker remains “in her place” since it is the employer who holds
the power to terminate their contracts and return them, in debt, to the
home country (Constable, 2007: 78–79).
Vietnam is arguably the most extreme case of migration debts. A
recent survey conducted in 2010 by the Institute of Labour Science
and Social Affairs revealed that all of the surveyed migrant workers
funded their migration with loans from different sources, including
the bank and private moneylenders.10 Placement fees alone accounted
for 80 per cent of the total costs, while the rest went to training,
travel documents and commission for “middlemen”. Taking the view
that labour migration is an important poverty-alleviation strategy, in
2009 the Vietnamese government launched a labour export promo-

tion programme (known as Programme 71)11 that targeted 62 poor
districts in 20 provinces. Poor households in these districts (mostly eth-
nic minorities) are eligible to borrow low-interest loans from banks and
to access state-funded training. However, the programme has not been
very successful, hitting only 45 per cent of the original target of 10,000
deployments by the end of 2010. Reasons for this underachievement,
according to “The Worker” newspaper, include the fact that recruitment
is restricted to only 30 out of 167 labour export enterprises, and that
the recruitment processes are non-transparent, involving only agencies
that have “connections” with local authorities.12 As a result, the options
offered to aspiring workers are limited (e.g., only the less desirable place-
ments in the low-pay Malaysian market are available). The burden of
debts is examined further in the case study of Vietnamese workers in
the following section of the chapter.
Vietnamese migrant contract workers
The collapse of the Communist bloc in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe – the major destination for Vietnamese contract workers in the
1970s and 1980s – compelled Vietnam to establish new markets for its
labour in East Asia and the Middle East. The volume of Vietnam’s labour
exports has been increasing rapidly since the early 1990s. During 2005–
2009, over 70,000 Vietnamese workers were deployed overseas annually
(Figure 11.1). Nearly 76,000 workers were deployed overseas in 2010,
with Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea and the Middle East being the top
destinations.13 It is important to note that these official figures exclude
significant numbers of workers who migrated through irregular chan-
nels. Most of Vietnamese workers were on two- or three-year contracts,
with men working on construction sites, farms or industrial estates and
women in manufacturing industries, and personal and social services.
The proportion of female workers has been increasing steadily during
the past decade, from 21.1 per cent in 2001 to 32.9 per cent in 2008, but
it dropped to 30.1 per cent in 2009.
Recent studies on migration and remittances in Vietnam found that,
despite impressive increases in the total volume of remittances in the
past two decades (from USD 35 million or 0.5 per cent of GDP in
1991 to approximately USD 5 billion or about 8 per cent of GDP in
2006),14 they have had a minimal impact on poverty because most of
the money is funnelled to big cities (Ho Chi Minh City alone receives
60 per cent of the total amount), benefiting better-off households in
100,000
90,000
80,000
70,000
60,000
50,000
40,000
30,000
20,000
10,000
0
00
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
total Malaysia Taiwan
South Korea Japan
Figure 11.1 Number of Vietnamese workers deployed overseas (2000–2009)

Source: MOLISA.
urban areas (Nguyen, 2008: 8, 2009: 22). Remittance flows to Ho Chi

Minh largely originate from the Vietnamese diaspora in the USA (Viet
kieu), who are responsible for more than 50 per cent of all remittances
to Vietnam (Thai 2014: 23). The estimated 500,000 migrant contract
workers accounted for USD 1.6 billion in remittances in 2008 (Dang
et al., 2010: 12), which obscures the fact that much of money goes to
debt repayment. A recent survey found that the amount of money used
to pay debts in migrant households is three times as large as in non-
migrant households (Dang et al., 2010: 39). To make matters worse,
Vietnamese workers’ main destinations – Malaysia, Taiwan and South
Korea – have been badly hit by the recent economic recession, leading
to rising unemployment and income stagnation. This had an imme-
diate impact on remittances and increased the repatriation of workers
(HealthBridge Canada, 2008). Global economic uncertainties have thus
accentuated the economic vulnerability of migrant workers.
Table 11.1 shows that income of Vietnamese workers varies widely
across countries, with the UK and the USA topping the table. How-
ever, these countries have been reluctant to increase labour imports
from Vietnam, fearing that this could give rise to irregular migration
and people-smuggling. Known to Vietnamese workers as the “cheap-
est” destination, Malaysia was consistently one of the largest markets
Table 11.1 Average incomes of Vietnamese migrant workers and the legal
recruitment fees for selected countries
Destination Number of Average income Legally

workers present per month (USD) sanctioned
in 2006 recruitment fee
(USD)15
Malaysia > 100, 000 150–200 300–350

Taiwan (China) 90, 000 300–500 300–500
Republic of Korea 50, 000 450–1,000 –
Japan 19, 000 1,000–1,500 1,500 (two-year
contract)
5,000 (five-year
contract)
UK 400 1,300–2,500 –
USA 10 1,250–1,600 –
UAE > 1, 000 400–1,000 400–550
Saudi Arabia 200 160–300 400–500
(>1,000 for an
engineer)
Source: MOLISA, 2006.16
in the early 2000s with deployments peaking at 39,624 in 2003, but it

has been becoming less popular in recent years, primarily due to low
wages. In 2009, only 2,792 workers were sent to Malaysia.17 Most of
the Vietnamese workers in Malaysia are unskilled migrants from the
lower rungs of the economic ladder. The Malaysian government’s recent
decision to shift the management of guest workers from employers to
recruitment agencies has resulted in a growing number of labour dis-
putes and has further discouraged Vietnamese workers from entering
this market. Japan and South Korea are the most desirable but also more
exclusive destinations because of their higher wages and placement fees.
By law, Vietnamese workers should pay no more than one month’s
basic salary per year as a recruitment fee (DOLAB, 2006) (Table 11.1).
However, because labour supply always exceeds demand and the infor-
mation available to workers is not always accurate, it is common to find
them paying much more than the legal cap. On average, migrant fac-
tory workers to Taiwan pay USD 6,000 for a two-year contract. Many
workers pay up to USD 10,000 for deployment to South Korea (Tran,
2007). Under the “trainees scheme” in Japan, the employer is bound to
pay for workers’ one-way airfare, language training courses and lodging,
but until recently Vietnamese workers were still known to pay VND 90
million (USD 4,800) in fees plus a deposit of USD 7,000–12,000.18 Place-

ment in Australia, Canada and the USA requires staggering amounts,
varying from USD 5,000 to USD 15,000, of which two-thirds goes to bro-
kerage fees (ibid). Chances to reclaim fees in the event of a premature
return are slim.
Since most workers are offered only two- or three-year contracts, the
pressure to repay high-interest debts has been associated with problems
of “running away” and overstaying visas in Taiwan, South Korea and
Japan (Jones and Findlay, 1998; Wickramasekera, 2002: 24; Tran, 2007;
Angsuthanasombat, 2008: 4). It is believed that 11,000 out of 71,000
Vietnamese workers in Taiwan in 2006 were illegal migrants and on
average the proportion of “runaway” and overstaying Vietnamese work-
ers in Japan and South Korea was 27–30 per cent and 20–25 per cent,
respectively (Nguyen, 2009: 26). Workers are tempted to desert their
contracted jobs by the prospect of not having to pay agents another
enormous sum for a rehire. By early 2011, the Vietnamese topped the list
of irregular migrants in South Korea, accounting for 15,000 out of the
total 50,000 irregular foreign workers in the country. Most of them leave
their contracted jobs near the end of the contract but some “run away”
as soon as they arrived in South Korea.19 This has led to the decision
of the South Korean Ministry of Employment and Labour to cancel the
once-a-year Korean language test20 in the same year. Vietnam faces the
risk of having its quota reduced or even suffering a ban on labour exports
to South Korea if no adequate measures are taken to curb this “runaway”
tendency among its workers. In Qatar, the fact that Vietnamese workers
have to pay much more for their placements (compared with workers
from other countries) has been associated with their higher rates of law
violations, including alcohol-brewing, gambling, theft and robbery.21
An investment or a gamble? Financial costs of transnational

labour migration
This study is part of the research project entitled Transnational Migra-

tion in South-East Asia and the Health of Children Left Behind
(CHAMPSEA), which is a mixed-method study in four countries:
Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. We surveyed around
1,000 migrant and non-migrant households in each country in 2008
and returned a year later to conduct in-depth interviews with a smaller
sample of around 50 households in each country. Since the primary
aim of the CHAMPSEA study was to understand the effects of parental
migration on left-behind children, all of the migrants in our study were
parents in marital relationships. This chapter draws primarily on the

qualitative study conducted in Thai Binh Province in the Red River Delta
(RRD) of Vietnam. The RRD, characterised by a high population density
(over 1,200 persons per square kilometre) and limited land resources,
finds labour exports an excellent outlet for the redundant labour in the
region. During 2000–2005, Thai Binh sent nearly 3,000 workers abroad
every year, 81.5 per cent of whom were female (HealthBridge_Canada,
2008: 27). Taiwan was the most popular destination (46 per cent of the
workers), followed by Malaysia (43 per cent). The majority of female
workers from Thai Binh (88 per cent) migrated to Taiwan to work
as domestic workers, while male workers were concentrated in light
industry and construction (ibid: 47).
Findings from the quantitative survey alerted us to the fact that
not every family was benefiting from transnational labour migration
and many of them were actually struggling financially with or without
remittances. Although the survey did not contain conclusive data about
the magnitude of fees and debts, it underscored the role of commer-
cial brokers in the migration process and the economic burden that the
family took on as a result. Approximately 82 per cent or 550 migrant
households in our Vietnam survey reportedly paid fees to commercial
brokers to migrate. The majority of those who did not pay fees were
rehires. While overseas remittances were the only source of finance for
debt repayment in most cases, not all migrants managed to remit money
home, at least on a regular basis: over 20 per cent of migrants in our
Vietnam study did not remit any money home in the six months pre-
ceding the fieldwork. Because the quantitative survey was conducted at
the onset of the economic recession in 2008, this finding could have
reflected some immediate impacts of the ongoing crisis and not neces-
sarily the usual situation. In any case, the absence of remittances would
have had severe implications for the wellbeing of left-behind family
members who were heavily dependent on this source of income for their
daily subsistence, not to mention debt service and repayment. One-
third of the surveyed Vietnamese migrant households reported debt
settlement as being the first priority when it came to remittance usage.
These inter-related issues remind us of the precarious nature of heavily
invested transnational labour migration and the hardship that it may
cause should migration as a family livelihood project fails.
The survey findings suggest that debt is an important part of life in
migrant families and, without understanding the context and nature of
migration-related debt as well as the way in which the family copes with
it, we cannot comprehend the changes effected by transnational labour
Table 11.2 CHAMPSEA’s sample for the qualitative study in Vietnam by migrant
worker’s destination and occupation
Male Female Total
Destination country Taiwan 1 18 19

South Korea 5 0 5
Malaysia 3 1 4
Japan 2 2 4
Other 3 2 5
Occupation Domestic worker 0 13 13
Factory worker 7 7 14
Other semiskilled worker 3 0 3
Other unskilled worker 4 3 7
Total 14 23 37
migration on the family. We therefore decided to explore further issues

around brokerage fees, debts and remittances in the qualitative study
with 37 migrant households in Vietnam. Some 23 of the 37 migrants
in the qualitative study were female, 18 of whom were working in
Taiwan, mostly as domestic workers (Table 11.2). The fact that all of
the migrants in our study were in low-wage and low-skilled occupations
reflects the occupational composition of national labour export flows
from Vietnam.22 With the exception of two “runaway” cases in South
Korea and two people on five-year contracts in Japan, the rest were on
two- or three-year contracts. Only one person didn’t have to pay broker-
age fees to migrate, thanks to the sponsorship of a former employer. The
rest paid money to either recruitment companies (89 per cent) or their
personal networks (9 per cent) to migrate.
Figure 11.2 shows the substantial financial costs of migration and the
equally impressive debts that families take on as a result. The costs
include brokerage fees paid to agents and/or the recruitment com-
pany, which took up around 80–90 per cent of the total amount, and
other predeparture expenses, such as fees for orientation and language
courses, paperwork and travel expenses. The graph shows a hierarchy
in the labour exports market defined by the “price” of the placement,
which largely reflects expected earnings and not the actual expenses of
recruitment, placement and relocation. Unsurprisingly, Japan is the top
destination for Vietnamese workers in terms of both costs and bene-
fits. Migrant workers in our study paid VND 220 million (USD 13,000)
on average to secure a job in Japan, but two of them paid up to VND
300 million (USD 17,800) to recruitment companies in order to migrate.
250
200
150
100
50
0
Japan Malaysia South Taiwan other
Korea
migration financial costs debt incurred to fund
(million VND) migration (million VND)
Figure 11.2 Comparison of average migration financial costs and debts incurred
to fund migration (million VND)23
The investment, which included a deposit of around USD 9,000 that

would not be refunded in the event of contract violation, is an enor-
mous amount of money given the fact that the average monthly income
in the RRD in 2006 was only VND 653.300 (USD 39) per person (GSO,
2008: 197). Huge differences between local incomes and the financial
investment that families put into their labour migration enterprises
explains the massive debts that they get into to send a family member
overseas for work.
South Korea came after Japan in the hierarchy, and Taiwan took the
third place. Taiwan is the only destination where the gap between costs
and debts is visible – VND 82.2 million and 54.6 million, respectively –
which is possibly due to the fact that many migrants to Taiwan (13
out of 19 people) were working as domestic workers, who were more
likely to be rehired than factory workers. Rehired workers tend to pay a
smaller fee than first-time migrant workers and are more likely to be
able to fund new placements with their own resources. Though not
necessarily offering the best salaries, Taiwan is a favourite destination
for Vietnamese workers because incomes in this country are stable and
fairly even across different sectors. Our result concurs with a survey of
298 return migrants in Thai Binh in 2006, which found South Korea to
be the largest source of remittances flowing into the province – 29 per

cent of people who remitted over VND 100 million/year – which was fol-
lowed by Taiwan, from where migrants remitted VND 30–100 million a
year (HealthBridge_Canada, 2008: 52). Workers in Malaysia sent home
the least – VND 24 million a year on average (ibid).
Migration to Malaysia costs the least, but this market has fallen out
of favour with Vietnamese workers due to low wages and placement
agencies’ records of deception, mistreatment and neglect of workers’
rights. The total cost of migration to Malaysia has never exceeded VND
30 million (USD 1,800) – a seemingly affordable amount. However, since
workers who were drawn to the Malaysian labour market came from
poorer families with limited financial resources, it was not uncommon
for them to fund their migration with loans from family networks and
banks. A low migration cost, nevertheless, does not necessarily mean
fewer risks – the incidence of labour disputes and premature return in
the Malaysian market is higher than for other Asian destinations. Our
qualitative study of 37 migrant households re-emphasises the impor-
tance of debt payment in remittance usage that was suggested by the
survey (Figure 11.3). In what follows, we examine how debts affect the
lives of those who stay behind in Vietnam and the implications that
they have for transnational relationships over time.
Living with debts
Debts are particularly burdensome in the months immediately follow-

ing the migrant’s departure when remittances tend to be insignificant
Debt settlement
20
Healthcare Education
15
10
Other 5 Housing
0
Business General savings
Land investment Basic necessities

Luxury goods
frequency
Figure 11.3 Use of remittances

or even absent. As mentioned earlier, our fieldwork was conducted in

May–June 2009 when the global economic crisis was at its peak. The
loss or stagnation of income at the migrant’s end was a key concern in
interviews with left-behind families. Except for domestic workers and
care workers in Taiwan, all of the migrants in our study were affected by
the crisis to some extent. In at least 11 cases, migrants’ working hours
were reportedly cut down to between zero and two hours a day, and
their incomes were barely sufficient to cover their living costs. Factory
and construction workers in Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan
were hit the hardest, and several of them had had no work for six to
eight months. Yet they tried to hang on, hoping that the situation would
improve soon because a premature return would mean bankruptcy. In
the story of Loan told by her mother-in-law below, she was stranded in
Malaysia without work but could not afford to return home because she
neither had earned enough to pay back the debt in full nor had money
to pay the penalty should she decide to break the contract:
She told me that she didn’t have much work there. She earned
enough to cover her living costs and couldn’t save much money to
send home. She has a three-year contract and she still has another
one year and a half to go. I told her if she didn’t have work there she
should come back to look after her child because I was getting older
now, and I didn’t feel as strong as before. She explained that there
was an economic crisis now and she would like to wait for another
six months. If things didn’t improve, she would return home . . . The
other day she told me that she would like to come back but she didn’t
have any money to pay the penalty. She called her sisters and broth-
ers to borrow the money but we could not send it there . . . They told
her that they didn’t have an agent here so there was no way to send
money there to her. They just said so and we didn’t know if it was
true . . . She needed nearly 10 million dong. She borrowed two million
from her brother. I added another three million and one million came
from her father. She wants to come back but she can’t borrow money
over there so she has to stay there to work until she earns enough
money.
(Mrs Sứ, a 58-year-old farmer)
Migrants’ vulnerability due to debts is exacerbated by misfortunes

such as sickness and accidents. Although most migrant workers have
medical insurance cover, they still have to bear parts of the medical
treatment costs in the event of hospitalisation. Loan had an emergency
appendix operation just a few months before our visit, which exhausted
the little savings that she had. Facing one crisis after another, tensions
between Loan and her husband built up when he became impatient
with the impasse in her situation and repeatedly called to berate her
about the failure to send money home and to ask her to return. He had
been attending a local vocational school and had only recently started
to work for the first time in his life. The couple had been totally depen-
dent on his ageing mother for both financial support and care for Hà,
their four-year-old daughter.
Like Loan, many other workers in our study faced the dilemma of
either returning prematurely at their own cost before debts were fully
paid or staying on without an income, waiting for the crisis to be
over. For example, Quang, a 35-year-old father of three, was extremely
frustrated by the deadlock that his family was in. His wife had been in
Taiwan for two years, yet they had not been able to settle the USD 7,000
debt that they had taken to finance her trip. She was caught in the mid-
dle of the recession and had been “sitting idle” for six months but did
not have enough courage to return prematurely before her debts had
been settled. She migrated only after Quang had failed to migrate four
times. He was swindled by rogue brokers who kept his deposit and fees
for a long time without any firm arrangement for the departure. Though
he managed to claim back the deposit, the interest that had accumulated
during the waiting period plus preparation expenses amounted to over
USD 4,000. Moreover, because he was told that he could leave Vietnam
for an overseas job anytime, Quang had stopped working for some time
and the family’s financial situation had already deteriorated given the
loss of his income.
Migration brokers’ promises of high incomes at the destination were
the key factor motivating the family to take large loans to send someone
overseas. In the story of Giang cited below, her husband borrowed VND
50 million from the bank and his siblings to pay an acquaintance who
helped him to migrate to Russia to work in construction. Together with
an outstanding debt of VND 50 million that they took to finance house
construction, the couple had a VND 100 million debt to settle. However,
on his arrival in Russia, Giang’s husband realised that the reality was
different from what was promised to him before he left home:
He wants to come back home but he doesn’t have money to pay for
the trip. He is doing construction work over there but because of the
economic crisis he does not . . . He has work to do but not enough
to get by. He earns about 300–400 dollars a month at most. He said
that he had not been earning enough for his subsistence in the past
few months. He earns several millions dong (a month) which is not
even as good as in Vietnam . . . (Giang’s mother-in-law interrupted:
“I would like to tell you that all the remittances he sent home have
been used to pay debts. He didn’t have any money when he left.”) He
did not know that the income would be that low when he decided to
migrate. They said (he would earn) 700–800 dollars a month. Nobody
would go there if they knew (the truth). The contract said 700–800 a
month but it isn’t like that.
(Giang, a 32-year-old mother of two)
Before the recession, Giang’s husband had enough work to do and

had managed to repay the loan that was taken to finance his migration,
but he had not been able to remit any more money after that. Without
financial support from her husband, Giang found it increasingly diffi-
cult to pay for the household upkeep with her income from farming
alone and so she considered taking on a factory job in the nearby city of
Thai Binh. It would have been a major move for Giang because she had
never held any off-farm job before, but it was met with her husband’s
resistance, who was concerned that her involvement in paid work would
lead to the neglect of their children. Migration had not pushed Giang’s
family up the economic ladder as they had hoped. Even though they
managed to break even in financial terms, the emotional and psycho-
logical costs were considerable given that separation was likely to be
prolonged until Giang’s husband could save some money to pay for his
trip back home.
This situation was not unique. After the migrants’ departure, some
left-behind spouses had to seek off-farm work in order to pay for the
household expenses and to service debts. Cuong, a 34-year-old father
of two, for example, started to work off farm for the first time after his
wife migrated to Taiwan. Rotating day and night shifts in a nearby fac-
tory, with only a day off per month plus childcare responsibilities, took
its toll on both the father’s health and the children’s wellbeing, but
he felt that he had no alternative. Finding it difficult to cope, he sent
the older son to his sister in Daklak – a province in Central Vietnam –
and the boy stayed under his aunt’s care until his mother returned.
Though he did not decline to be interviewed, Cuong kept dozing off
during the conversation and appeared to be so exhausted that we had
to cut our interview short. Luckily he had his mother to turn to for
some help with childcare but she was not always available or able to
do so.
Marginal profits from migration ventures did not allow some migrants
and their families to accommodate any misfortunes at either end.
Because large parts of the remittances went to debt payment, rarely
would the little money that the family managed to save help to trans-
form their lives as was often expected, especially when personal disasters
struck. The loan that Thong and his wife, who migrated to Macau to do
domestic work, took was not large – VND 30 million – yet debt repay-
ment had eaten up most of their remittances by the time of our visit.
To make matters worse, the only VND 10 million that they could put
aside went to Thong’s recent gall duct surgery, a problem that recurred
every few years. Thong’s wife had only seven months left in her two-
year-contract but they had not been able to save any money or to
purchase any new assets. Thong had been resting at home since his
operation and, together with his two children, was totally dependent
on his wife’s remittances to cover the family’s daily expenses:
We are not getting any better. We have managed to pay off the debt
only . . . At the beginning we borrowed money from a high-interest
source but managed to secure a 20 million bank loan later (to pay
to the high-interest source). It took her a year to pay back the debt
in full . . . She sent money for the first time only after six months
because she waited for a month to be allocated a job and then used
all her income in the first three working months to pay brokerage
fees (laughing). She earned only three million (a month) from the
fifth month (laughing). Now she earns about five million dong . . . She
may have sent home over fifty million dong but we paid very high
interest. We have not been able to buy anything. You see, we have
nothing in the house . . . If she had not been working abroad we could
have sold our land – this land where we are living (to cover medi-
cal costs) . . . I had the same surgery two years ago. We also borrowed
money but could not pay back the debt because we were earning just
enough to buy food for the family. So she decided to migrate after
the first surgery. The debt we had at that time was 10 million dong.
(Thong, a 37-year-old father of two)
When asked how Thong and his wife made decisions about
remittance usage, he bluntly said that there had been no decisions to
make so far because all of the money had gone to debt payment, his
surgery and the family’s living expenses. Neither did they have any
financial plans for the future. Money shortage was the main reason for
the infrequent phone communication between Thong’s wife and her
family – she called home only once or twice a month at five minutes
a time. Financial hardship compelled many migrants to be extremely
frugal in their lifestyle, which largely affected their ability to maintain
regular contact with home. Like Thong’s wife, the parents of ten-year-
old Ha, who were both working in South Korea, called home less when
their working hours and incomes were reduced. They phoned their
daughter twice a month when things went well but managed to get
in touch only once a month or even less when they were not allocated
sufficient work.
Under the pressure of debt repayment, especially when remuneration
from work was less than promised or expected, some migrants resorted
to deserting their contracted jobs and entering the “black” labour mar-
ket. Often referred to by our interviewees as “moving out”,24 this move
tended to be better in financial terms but also meant that they could not
visit home for many years unless they decided to return for good. The
chances of arrest and deportation were great, as illustrated by Thanh’s
story:
He [Thanh’s husband] was in Taiwan for two years and a half from
2004 to 2007. Then he returned home to build this house and left
again for Malaysia. (In Taiwan) he did not have much work to do and
quit the job to move out. That hotel did not do well and his wage
was low – only two millions dong a month after food expenses were
deducted. Then he was arrested and deported. Now he is earning the
same amount in Malaysia. He earns four millions dong but puts aside
only 2 millions dong after paying all his bills.
(Thanh, a 31-year-old mother of two)
Due to the substantial initial investment in transnational labour

migration, many workers, especially those migrating for the first time,
barely had any “surplus” by the end of the contract and had no choice
but to remigrate, stretching their separation from the family for years.
Some interviewees believed that migration had done them more harm
than good. Unable to access accurate information from trustworthy
sources, not every aspiring migrant was able to work out the costs and
benefits of migration before leaving home. It was not uncommon to
find members of migrant families unable to recall the contents of their
labour migration contract or even to locate its hard copy. Some even
reported that they were given contracts in foreign languages to sign and
therefore had no knowledge of the specific terms of their deployment,
save for what was communicated verbally through the middleman. The
fact that migrant families took the contract lightly is attributable to

their lack of experience with the formal labour market, coupled with
acute problems of under- and unemployment in our studied communi-
ties. Transnational labour migration, as Thinh – a 30-year-old father of
two – put it, is a “gamble”, the outcomes of which depend largely on
“luck”. The only information that he and his wife was provided with
by the broker before she left was that she would have a good job in
Taiwan’s health sector. On arrival she was sent to work as a care worker
in a nursing home with a monthly salary of VND 3.5 million. Taking
the brokerage fee and other expenses into account, the returns on their
investment were much lower than if she had stayed in Vietnam, not
to mention that Thinh’s wife had been earning very little in the six
months preceding the interview because of the crisis and was unable to
remit any money home. The Vietnamese government’s original aim in
restricting labour exports to the state sector was to make transnational
labour migration better regulated and more secure for migrant work-
ers. The examples in our study seem to prove a different outcome. The
ability to operate under the auspices of the state only affords agencies
greater leeway in dealing with workers’ rights, effectively turning what
is intended to be a secure investment into a “gamble”.
Conclusion
The perception of the migration venture as a gamble was pervasive

in our Vietnam study site, which appears to contradict the analogy
between international migration and an “insurance policy” drawn by
some earlier studies under the assumption that migrants can bail the
family out in the case of income failures in source areas by send-
ing remittances (Stark and Levhari, 1982; Stark, 1991; Taylor, 1999,
2006). This new economics of labour migration view takes remittances
for granted because, we argue, it fails to recognise the importance of
“migration institutions” that help people to move. In general, this
oversight stems from the fact that theories that deal with the migration–
development nexus have largely been built on transnational labour
migration flows of a different nature in Latin America, where work-
ers are primarily dependent on informal social networks to migrate
(cf. Massey et al., 1987; Massey, 1990; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Curran
and Saguy, 2001; Davis and Winters, 2001; Curran and Rivero-Fuentes,
2003). While we do not deny the value of the migrant networks
approach (cf. Massey, 1990) in researching international migration, it is
not particularly useful in Southeast Asian contexts where transnational
mobility is mostly in the short-term fixed-contract form and is organ-

ised by commercial migration brokers. For this reason, neither the
conventional economic models nor the migrant networks approach
provide us with an adequate framework to analyse the migration–
(under)development nexus in Asia. Analyses of issues around migration
and development in this region would have little value if meso-level
actors such as the state, migration brokers and labour smugglers were
unaccounted for.
By discussing the issue of indebtedness in transnational families, our
chapter cautions against the tendency to take remittances for granted.
Although our findings may not be representative of migrants’ expe-
riences in general, the fact that our fieldwork coincided with the
economic crisis provided us with an excellent opportunity to show how
precarious and vulnerable the situation of migrants and their families
is due to the multiple structural barriers and loopholes in the migra-
tion industry. These barriers and the economic baggage that they entail
not only prevent migrant families from reaping economic benefits of
their migratory endeavours but might also jeopardise family relation-
ships. High migration costs in Vietnam seem to be related to the fact
that Vietnamese left-behind spouses are more economically active – our
quantitative surveys found that 97.4 per cent of them were employed
during the migrant’s absence while the equivalent figures for Indonesia,
the Philippines and Thailand were 72.5 per cent, 47 per cent and
67 per cent, respectively. A recent study in Vietnam suggests that depen-
dency is not a significant phenomenon in migrant families because
remittances that are sent by absent migrants are not large enough to
enable the recipients to stop working (Dang et al., 2010: 47). However,
we argue that the key factor does not lie in the volume of remittances
but in the debts–remittances balance. Withdrawal from the labour mar-
ket is clearly not an option for many Vietnamese people who stay
behind.
The effects of debts on the family are not restricted to the eco-
nomic realm but extend to the wellbeing of individual members of
the transnational family. While there has been a lot of scholarly atten-
tion to the so-called feminisation of migration as a response to the
increasing global demand for domestic and care work and the gender
politics of the sending, receiving, management and use of remittances
(Wong, 2006; Yeoh et al., 2013), much less has been written about
the gender-differentiated implications of vulnerability resulting from
migration-related indebtedness. While our data here are not sufficiently
robust to tease out the differential impact of indebtedness on men and
women, we note that prevailing gender norms do feature in the nego-

tiations between transnationally split family members as they struggle
to cope with significant debt. Giang, for example, was prevented by her
migrant husband from seeking factory work to ease financial circum-
stances because he feared that she would then neglect their children,
while Loan faced harsh words and immense pressure to return home
from her left-behind husband who contributed only minimally to the
financial upkeep of the family and the care of their daughter (see
Hoang et al., 2012, for further discussion of the changing patriarchal
norms around childcare in the context of increased female migration in
Vietnam). In coping with debt, it would seem that women – even those
who have become the principal breadwinners for their families – face
fewer degrees of freedom in manoeuvring around gender structures that
continue to link them umbilically to the home.
Though this chapter has mostly been focused on how the burden of
debts affected the migrant and their left-behind spouse, it also touches
on the wellbeing of another important group – the children who are left
behind by migrant parents. As illustrated by the stories of Loan, Quang,
Giang, Cuong and Thong, migration had neither helped to improve the
children’s living standards nor enhanced their wellbeing. Worse still,
the pressure to pay debts and also to make some “profit” out of migra-
tion prolonged migrant parents’ absence from home, and at the same
time required left-behind parents to spend more hours at work and less
time with the children. Some migrant parents couldn’t even afford to
maintain regular communication with their children to offer them their
much-needed emotional and psychological support from afar. The study
poses important questions about the effects of migration debts on chil-
dren that have not received much attention in the global migration
literature.
The chapter also draws out the relation between class and migration
outcomes – migrant workers from lower socioeconomic strata are often
not connected to more reliable information sources, and neither are
they well resourced enough to place themselves in more secure path-
ways, hence they are more likely to fail due to loopholes and glitches in
the “migration industry”. This echoes Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill’s
(Chapter 7, in this volume) observation in Indonesia that those in
the higher strata generally remain in a better position to capitalise on
the potential advantages that migration creates. Although migrants are
often not the poorest of the poor (cf. Skeldon, 1997; Taylor, 2006: 4),
the substantial financial investment that families put into the migration
project renders them vulnerable to sliding down the economic ladder.
Unless appropriate policy packages combined with strong political will

to make migration a secure livelihood are in place, social inequalities in
the developing South are likely to continue to deepen in the future.
Notes
1. Exceptions are India and the Philippines, where there is a greater possibility
for aspiring migrants to find overseas jobs as direct hires through their exten-
sive migrant networks due to their relatively longer history of transnational
migration.
2. http://nld.com.vn/2010090412391344p1010c1051/quan-ly-xkld-chua-tot
.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
3. http://nld.com.vn/20100608110014536p1010c1051/xuat-khau-lao-dong-ba
-khong.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
4. Equivalent to USD 500–750.
5. http://nld.com.vn/20100812104528258p1010c1051/7080-lao-dong-xuat
-khau-thong-qua-moi-gioi.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
6. Id., Note 2.
7. http://nld.com.vn/2010090412391344p1010c1051/quan-ly-xkld-chua-tot
.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
8. Around USD 47, calculated based on the 2011 exchange rate of USD 1 =
VND 21.
9. http://www.phapluatvn.vn/doi-song/viec-lam/201108/Lao-dong-tu-Libya-ve
-duoc-ho-tro-den-9-trieu-dongnguoi-2056795/, accessed on 7 November
2011.
10. http://nld.com.vn/20110316113255499p1010c1011/di-xuat-khau-lao-dong
-kho-giau.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
11. Decision 71 issued on 19 April 2009 by the prime minister.
12. http://nld.com.vn/2011021810120386p1010c1011/chua-dat-muc-tieu.htm,
accessed on 2 November 2011.
13. http://laodong.com.vn/Tin-Tuc/75850-LDVN-di-lam-viec-o-nuoc-ngoai/23
376, accessed on 8 November 2011.
14. World Bank (2006) World Development Indicators. Washington DC: World
Bank.
15. Government’s regulation number 59/2006 on labour placement fees in
labour export.
16. http://www.molisa.gov.vn/Default.aspx?tabid=193&temidclicked=96.
17. http://nld.com.vn/20110425090339480p1010c1011/giam-dan-lao-dong-sang
-malaysia.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
18. Effective from 1 July 2010, Japan has abolished the requirement for
“trainees” to pay compulsory deposits, thus removing an important barrier
to labour migration for the poor but at the same time intensifying concerns
about placement agencies’ ability to control their labour.
19. http://nld.com.vn/2011061309278845p1010c1051/huy-kiem-tra-tieng-han
-16500-lao-dong-mat-co-hoi.htm, accessed on 2 November 2011.
20. Passing the Korean language test is a prerequisite for foreign workers to be
considered for job placements in South Korea.
21. http://www.vamas.com.vn/home/detail.php?iCat=64&iNew=456&module=
news, accessed on 7 November 2011.
22. According to the aforementioned survey conducted in 2010 by the Institute
of Labour Science and Social Affairs (Note 9), most Vietnamese migrant work-
ers engage in unskilled jobs overseas: 82 per cent in Malaysia, 100 per cent
in Japan and 89 per cent in South Korea. Some 61 per cent of Vietnamese
workers in Taiwan do domestic work. Source: http://nld.com.vn/2011
0316113255499p1010c1011/di-xuat-khau-lao-dong-kho-giau.htm, accessed
on 2 November 2011.
23. At the time of the fieldwork in May 2009 the exchange rate was USD 1 =
VND 16,800.
24. Ra ngoài or làm bên ngoài in Vietnamese.
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Index
Abella, M., 89 Ahmad, A., 159

Abrar, C.R., 27, 46 Ahmed, M., 46
Abrego, L., 6 Ahmed, Z., 28
abuse, 35, 115, 119, 257, 274, Akesson, L., 6, 266, 276
285, 287 Albania, patriarchal tradition, 4
acceptance, 9, 37, 38, 41, 67, 72, 101, alcohol, 9, 89, 238
107, 116, 242, 277 -brewing, 293
accidents, 298 Aleman, C., 196
accommodation, 53, 60, 68 alienation, 70
accumulation Alipio, C., 12–14, 179, 227–49
of debt interest, 299 allottees/allotment, 115–16, 124, 126,
of religious merit, 42–3 128–9, 249
of wealth/status, 29–31, 35–8, 42, altruism, 4, 6–8, 108, 228, 233, 235
82, 187, 228 Amante, M., 120–1, 124, 196
Adams, R.H. Jr., 195, 228 ancestral property, 166, 184
adolescence, 36 Anderson, K., 257, 259, 276
adoption Ang, A.P., 111, 228, 230, 234
child, 96, 99, 171, 176, 182, 222 Angeles, L.C., 233, 249
lifestyle/customs, 9, 11, 30, 32, Angsuthanasombat, K., 293
43–4, 103, 228, 264, 266–7, 285 animal husbandry, 201, 216
adulthood, 36 annulment, 257
adventure, 107, 112, 117, 269 see also divorce
advertisements, 121 Anonuevo, A. T, 289
Afghan refugees, 259 anxieties of mobility, 259, 266–9, 271,
Afsar, R., 16, 286, 288–9 273, 275, 277, 279
age Appadurai, A., 31, 229
-differentiated patterns, 31, 33, 40, appliances, 88, 100, 126
45–6, 140–1, 161, 201, apprenticeships, 31, 34, 40
206–7, 212 Appuhamilage, U., 158
and gender, 40–1, 45, 151, 154 Aquino, Cory, 230
retirement, 144 Arango, J., 284–5
agency, notion of, 31–2, 39, 45 Archavanitkul, K., 88–9
agents and carriers, 62–4, 77 armed services, 141
age-structural transition, 175–6 Arnold, D., 57
“age waves,” 175 arrest, 57, 108, 302
aggression, 114, 118 Arroyo, Gloria Macapagal, 230
agricultural machinery, 94, 210, 216, Artico, C.I., 15
219–21 Asian Development Bank (ADB), 111
agricultural water supply, 95, 100 Asian financial crisis, 65–6
agriculture, 31–4, 36, 39, 57, 77, 91–2, Asian labour migration
100, 103, 105, 166, 169, 173, salient features, 1–2
177–8, 185–6, 197–8, 201, 205, state and market actors, role of,
207–8, 210–11, 215–16, 224 285–8
311
312 Index
“Asian values” 17 remittances and social

Asia-Pacific region, 227 reproduction, 29–32, 37–44;
Asis, M.M.B., 11, 53–4, 132, 230, 234, changing aspirations, 36–7,
237, 265, 269, 285, 289 44–5; gendered differences in
aspiration, 31–3, 35–7, 40–1, 43–5, remittance use, 35–7; impact of
160, 267, 275, 288, 290, remittances, 37–44
302, 306 revenues from remittances, 27
assets, 7, 31, 52, 145, 157, 167, 174, temporary migration pattern, 31
189, 216, 228, 301 vocational skills, 34
Athauda, T., 139 worker classification, 34
ATM card, 62, 77 working conditions of migrants,
Aung, S.L., 66 35, 41
Australia, 160, 227, 293 Bangladesh Nationalist Party, 46
authorised migrants/migration/ Bangladesh Rural Advancement
recruitment, see legal migrants/ Committee (BRAC), 33, 46
migration/recruitment bank(s), 93–4, 96, 111, 114–15, 124,
autonomy, 17, 32, 241 179, 228, 239
Azama, J.-P., 195 account, 62, 77, 105, 116, 240, 272
loans, 288–90, 297, 299, 301
transfers, 62–5, 77, 228
Bahrain, 2, 35, 39
bankruptcy, 186, 298
Bakewell, O., 28
bar, 87, 101, 103, 106, 257, 263, 270–1
Ball, R., 15
Barcelona, 6
Bandhumedha, N., 90
Basa, C., 233
Bangkok, 58, 62–4, 77, 96, 101
Basch, L., 5, 266
Bangladesh, 2, 5, 7–8, 27–46, 145 Basheer, K.P.M., 29, 36, 38
Achingaon, Dhaka (case study), Batnitzky, A., 123
32–7, 40–2, 46 Battistella, G., 237
biological reproduction, fertility and Bayangos, V., 228
care, 38–9 beauty salons, 103
education and skills, 34, 39–41, beer, 98, 103
46 beerhouses, see pubs
family planning programme, 38 Bello, W., 88
female migrants, 32, 35–6, 39 belonging, sense of, 28–9, 37, 53, 198
gender norms, 40–1, 43–4 below-minimum wage payments, 262
household census, 33, 46 Benjamin, W., 243
Jamaat-e-Islami, 42, 46 Bey, M., 31
left-behind families, 38–9, 46 billiard business, 126
male migrants, 30, 36, 38–43 Binford, L., 3
Manikganj district, 32, 46 black labour market, 302
migrants’ social status, 42–4 blindness, 148
Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare Blue, S.A., 6, 264
and Overseas Employment, Boehm, D.A., 36, 44
28 Boomgaard, P., 190
poverty, 34, 38, 46 Booth, S.S., 160
primary and secondary education, border-control measures, 286
33–4 borrowing money, 35, 61, 69, 74–5,
reasons for migration, 34–5 85, 92, 141, 210, 218, 270–1, 286,
religious practice, 42–3 288–90, 298–9, 301
Index 313
Botswana, 4 gender norms, 51–3, 61–2, 67–8,

bounded solidarity, 53–4, 69–72 71–3, 76–7
Bourdieu, P., 30–1, 38, 44 governments’ registration policies,
Bourdillon, M., 228 56–7
bowling alleys, 104 illegal workers, 56–7
boxing, 117 intrahousehold decision-making
breadwinners, 9, 42, 119, 146, 150, power, 51, 73–4, 76–7
233, 265, 273–4, 305 managing networks of obligations,
Bredl, S., 31 52–3, 73–5
Breman, J., 178 methods of remittance transfers,
Brenner, N., 286 62–5, 77
Brickell, K., 142 minimum wage and working
brideprice, 9, 36, 89, 199, 209, 212, conditions, 57, 60, 70–1, 77
215–16, 218–19, 221 obligation to remit, 66–73
brokers, labour, 16, 62, 239, 262, 283, parents’ policing behaviours of
285–9, 293–5, 299, 301, 303–4 migrant children, 54, 71–2
brothel-based prostitution, 92–3, 103 relations with families back home,
Brown, B., 160 51–6, 70–2
Brown, C., 117 religious and social activities, 51, 55,
Brown, G., 259 70, 77
Brown, R.P.C., 228 remittance behaviour during crisis,
Bruijn, B.J., 7 65–6
Brunei, 86, 92 remittance behaviours and gender,
Bryceson, D.F., 3, 14–15, 30, 54 51–6, 58–73
Buddhism, 51, 55, 89, 101, 141, remittance use, 64–5, 67–8, 73
151, 154 temporary status, 56–7, 70–1, 76
Myanmar traditional gender roles and
amount of remittances to, 50–78 responsibilities, 55–6, 77
economic failure, 50 business investment/own business,
foreign direct investment, 50 36, 42, 44, 52, 55, 65, 71, 74,
hpoun, Buddhism and status of 94–6, 100, 105, 125–7, 129–30,
women, 55–6, 77 155, 186, 211–12, 219, 297
military government, 55, 76–7 Bustamante, J.J., 196
mixed marriages, castigation of,
55–6 Cai, H., 198
name change, 76 Cai, L., 198
State Peace and Development Cai, Q., 4
Council, 55 Cai, Y., 199
Myanmar migrant workers in Caldwell, J., 172
Thailand, 50–78 Cameroon, 36
annual remittances, 58–9, 65 Canada, 5, 227, 236, 293
antagonism towards Cannell, F., 231–2
government, 70 Cape Verde, 17, 266
childcare arrangements, 61–2, 68–9, capitalism, 177, 228, 231, 238, 241,
71–4 248–9
dual income sources, 69 care work, 12, 140, 146–54, 157–60,
employed in various sectors, 57 237, 243, 298, 303–4
ethnicities, 58, 70 Carling, J., 17, 259, 266, 278
factory workers, 52, 55–8, 77 Carrasco, L.N., 28–9, 39
314 Index
caste, 7, 31, 56, 152 gender roles, patriarchal ideology,

castigation/punishment, 53, 55–6, 273 household traditions, 4, 6,
Castillo, N., 6 198–200; fenjia or household
Castles, S., 283 division, 199–200;
Catholicism, 238, 241 inside–outside dichotomy,
Catholic sisters, FMM, 279 198–9, 208–10, 215; patrilocal
cell phones, 36, 46, 212, 215, 219, 221 exogamy, 199
ceremonies and rituals, 8, 46, 186, 246 households’ social and spatial
Chan, K.W., 194 organisation, impact of
Chang, G., 159 remittances on, 195–216,
Chant, S., 6, 98 218–21
charitable funds, 36 hukou system (household
charity, 8, 36–7, 42, 45, 171, 179, registration), 194–5, 198,
181, 189 200, 205
Charsley, K., 28 intergenerational relations,
Chawla, S., 144–5 197–200, 211–12
Chen, W., 197–8 migrant–left-behind family
Cheng, J., 197 relations, 195–6, 208, 213–14
Child and Youth Finance poverty and starvation, 194,
International (CYFI), Philippines, 210, 213
240–1 Village G (case study of Anhui and
childbearing, 38, 143, 171, 179 Sichuan provinces), 200–16;
childcare, 8–10, 58, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 76, increasingly prevalent migrant
130–1, 140, 142–3, 147, 151–2, work, 204–5; remittances and
154, 160, 208, 234, 300, 305 household behaviour, 207–16,
childlessness, 171, 179, 186 218–21; two-generation and
children replacement households,
allowance, 130 205–7
and Atikha’s BASC activities in Choy, C.C., 111
Philippines, 235–48 Christ, 231, 237, 241
education, 31–2, 40, 126 Christian values, 13, 37, 238,
identity, 38 241, 248
illegitimate, 71, 92–3 cigarettes, 183, 210
rights, 38, 241, 245 cinnamon peelers, 141, 148, 155
strained relations with, 122–3, circular migration, 2, 177–8, 198
267–70 Citibank Philippines, 240, 249
work routines, 40 civil service, 141
China, rural–urban migration and class
remittances, 2, 5, 13, categories, 44, 167, 170–2, 181, 265
194–222, 292 differences, 173–6, 178, 187
birth-control policy and imbalanced gender and, 45, 84
sex ratio, 199 high, 12, 93, 171, 188, 305
broker networks, 286 identity, 36, 265
economic growth and lower, 12, 56, 104, 118, 170–1, 174,
urbanisation, 194 176, 180–2, 187, 305
education, 199, 201, 212 middle, 30, 108, 132
extended family ties, 196–7 race and, 84
famine, 194 social, 30–1
floating population, 194 transformation of identity, 36–7
Index 315
upper, 173, 176 contracts, labour

working, 44, 117, 124, 132, 139, agreements, 4, 273
141–3 completion, 149
clothing, 35, 46, 98–9, 103–4, 126, renewal, 149
186, 219, 236, 243, 270, 279 short-term, 1, 31, 88, 98, 107, 152,
cloth trade, 168 173, 197, 206, 210, 290, 292–3,
clubs, 95, 103–4, 262–3, 278 295, 301, 304
coalmines, 209–11, 213, 218, 220 termination, 16, 288–9
coconut/fibre, 141, 151 violation, 149, 273, 293, 296, 298
cohabitation, 268 contributions, 42, 56, 73, 119, 142,
Cohen, J., 6 170, 179, 183–5, 187–8, 228,
co-insurance, 69 260, 264
Cole, J., 139 Conway, D., 6
Cole, J.E., 160 cooperation, 3, 142
“collaborative parenting,” 248 coping strategies, 1, 11, 55, 120, 140,
collateral, 85, 92, 94, 97, 102, 288 176, 285, 294, 300, 305
colonialism, 55, 113, 178, 231 couple migration, 107, 208–9, 211–17,
commission, recruitment, 85, 92, 102, 219–21
286, 289 Coutin, S.B., 276
communication, 32, 128, 132, 248, Craske, N., 6
258, 263, 266, 270, 273–7, Cribb, R., 178
301–2, 305 crime, 284
Communist bloc, collapse of, 290 Cronk, L., 142
community care services, 143 crops, 91, 95, 100, 201
compassion, 39 cross-border trade, 62, 117
compensation, 42, 74, 171, 176, 199, Cuba, 6
242–3, 270, 272, 279 Cuecuecha, A., 195
computer, 93, 212, 219, 236 cultural capital, 30, 44, 117
Conaco, Ma. C.G., 237 cultural production, 28, 42–4
confinement of women, 29, 32, 38, cultural values, 2, 4, 239, 247–8
43, 98 culture, 32, 42–4, 55–6, 91, 103–4,
confiscation of registration cards, 57 117, 168, 233, 259, 265, 269
conflict, 3, 7, 35, 52, 90, 101, 140, cumulative causation of migration,
142, 145, 160, 196, 207, 214, 258, 52–3
269–70, 276, 287 Curran, S.R., 4, 7–8, 46, 51–4, 76, 89,
Connell, R.W., 116–17, 132, 231 233, 303
conspicuous absence, 127–8 currency, 62, 107, 115, 230
conspicuous consumption, 37, 117, customs, 43, 156, 177, 184, 232
127, 187, 238 Cyprus, 139, 149
Constable, N., 16, 111, 257, 289
construction industry, 34, 70, 77, 118, Da, W.W., 52, 266
206, 210–11, 218–19, 230, 290, daily expenses, 3, 64, 143, 241, 265,
294, 298–9 294, 301
consumer goods, 36–7, 43–5, 91–2, 94, daily wage work, 33, 39, 60, 74, 100–1,
99, 101–3, 105–6, 126–7, 201, 107, 115, 141, 144, 216, 234
214, 217, 277 dancers, 263, 278
consumerism, 10, 90–1, 238, 243 Dang, N.A., 291, 304
Contemplacion, Flor, 237 Datta, K., 117, 123, 264, 266, 275–6
contraception, 143 Davis, B., 303
316 Index
daycare, 96, 246 279, 284, 289, 294–6, 298,

debt(s) 301, 307
bondage, 15, 85–8, 92–3, 100–2, domination, 31, 70, 112, 118,
104, 107–8, 209, 229, 232, 258, 120–1, 129
262–3, 273–4, 289 Dominican Republic, 4
coping with, 305 donations, 9, 35–7, 42, 45, 73,
due to exorbitant fees, 283, 285 101, 106
filial, 89, 93, 95, 154, 160, 227–49 Donato, K.M., 84
and loss of property, 100 Douglass, M., 1, 11, 140, 196
migration, 283–306 dowry, 8, 32, 36–9, 45, 145, 155
poverty and, 149 see also brideprice
repayment, 17, 61, 74, 85, 87–8, Dreby, J., 6
92, 99, 108, 141, 263, 270–3, drinking, 7, 98, 103–4, 115, 125
288–9, 291, 294, 296, 297–9, drug addiction/drug dealing, 238, 257
301–2 Du, Y., 200
running away from, 284, 293 Duan, C., 98, 198
decision-making, 6, 10, 28, 45, 50–1, Dube, L., 38
73, 76–7, 107, 128–9, 150–1, 154, Durand, J., 284
167, 195–6, 206, 214–15, 217, Durham, D., 139
241, 248, 259, 301 Durkheim, E., 244
Deelan, L., 59, 63, 77 Dutch colonialism, 178
de Haas, H., 29
de la Briere, B., 4
de la Cruz, B.E., 6 East Asia, 2, 290
del Rosario, K.M., 246 Eastern Europe, 290
dementia, 148, 151 “eating and playing,” 9, 89, 94,
dependency theory, 284 105, 234
deportation, 302 economic capital, 8, 38, 42, 44, 264
Deshingkar, P., 4 Edholm, F., 28–30, 38
de Silva, W.I., 140, 143, 161 education
developed countries, 140 attainment, 88, 96, 113, 121,
developing countries, 50, 139–40, 143, 124–5, 139
145, 227, 283 basic/formal, 4, 30, 33, 56
diet, see food dropouts, 34, 40
Di Leonardo, M., 15 female, 32, 37, 41, 56, 95, 97, 99,
direct-pay unauthorised migrants, 85, 102, 108, 143, 159, 199
88, 91–2, 94–6, 100, 107 gender gaps in, 45–6, 212
discrimination, 52 as “human capital,” 30
division of labour, 131, 171, 179, 189, investments in, 10, 30–2, 36–7, 41,
198, 208, 211, 222 45, 52, 65, 67, 126–7, 129, 152,
divorce, 58, 96, 167–8, 182–3, 160, 171, 174, 180, 184–5, 187,
185–6, 214 195, 197, 199, 201, 217, 219,
Dizon-Añonuevo, E., 242–3, 288 228, 241, 245–8, 265, 297
dollar, 7, 107, 125, 268, 299–300 levels of, 33–4, 40–1, 46, 93, 96–7,
domestic work(er), 9–10, 16, 35, 57, 102, 158, 234, 241
77, 87, 92, 103, 111, 115–16, 120, as a mobility strategy, 31, 33, 41
132, 139–41, 149–53, 159–60, primary and secondary, 33–4, 40,
199, 230, 234, 237, 241, 258, 46, 121
260–4, 267, 269, 271, 274–5, 277, quality of, 31, 41
Index 317
skills and employment, 31, 39–40, ethnicities, 7, 58, 70, 166, 168, 174–5,
46, 88, 96–7, 121, 159 265, 290
Eelens, F., 141 Eurocentrism, 267
Ehrenreich, B., 11, 159 European Union, 159
Eid festival, 42, 185 exchange, social, 83–4, 106, 142, 146,
elders 151, 160, 183, 188, 231–3, 237,
as an asset to the family, 145 243–4, 248
care for, 140, 144, 146–54, 158–61, exchange rate, see foreign exchange
214, 243 exploitation, 15–16, 28, 117–18, 180,
and childlessness, 171, 179 258, 263, 272, 276, 279, 283–6,
economic activity, 144–5, 147, 159 288–9
labour force participation, exports, revenues from, 3, 27
143–5, 212 extended families, 17, 73, 94, 141–5,
support to, 93, 99, 142–4, 157–8, 150, 157–60, 166, 196, 199–200,
160, 166–7, 170, 173–6, 180–4, 210, 232
187–9, 233, 269, 284 extramarital affairs, 39, 121–2, 257–8
vulnerability, 151–4, 179
electric water heaters, 92, 107 factory work, 33, 52, 57, 77, 92, 95,
elites, 32, 44, 160 97–9, 103, 177–8, 206, 211–12,
Elmhirst, R., 6 214, 219–21, 292, 295–6, 298,
emotions 300, 305
“failed” migrants/migration, 118, 149,
and affect, 259, 261–2, 264–75
277–8, 284
emotional attachment, 14–15,
Falicov, C., 17
119–20
family
emotional distancing, 132, 259
as an imagined community, 3,
emotional economies, 5, 232
14–15
employment
definitions of, 208, 266
agencies, 115, 262–3, 286, 292
extended, 17, 73, 94, 141–5, 150,
local, 34, 149
157–60, 166, 196, 199–200,
long-term, 148 210, 232
paid, 32, 39–40, 45, 234, 300 and household, 208
sectors/opportunities, 57, 141, 155 migrant remittances and, 3–5
self-, 44, 120 nuclear, 7, 89, 151, 166–7, 208, 266
temporary, 88 transnational, 1, 5, 14, 16–17, 30,
endurance, 39, 117–18, 269, 274–6 111, 119, 196, 235, 246–7,
enforceable trust, 53–4, 71–3 257–79, 304
Engels, F., 29 family planning, 143
entertainment (leisure), 9, 89, 94, family reunification, 10
98, 105 family status, 32, 152
entertainment industry, 95, 101, 104 family structure, 2, 140, 151, 185, 196,
entertainers, 16, 95, 101, 111, 118, 260, 266
132, 257–8, 260–4, 266–7, 270, Fan, C.C., 12–14, 176, 194–222,
272–5, 277–8 239, 261
see also sex work farm/farming, 40, 67, 91, 95, 100, 105,
Entwisle, B., 198, 222 120, 124, 194, 198–9, 201, 204,
equality, 55, 141 206–7, 212–17, 220, 273, 290,
Espana-Maram, L., 112 298, 300
Espiritu, Y.L., 260 fashions, 98–9, 103–5
318 Index
fatherhood, 9, 39, 111, 119, 122, management and distribution of

130, 234 remittances, 6–7
fear, 7, 54, 57, 90, 102, 117–18, 122, norms and ideologies, 6
145–6, 233, 238, 271–3, 291, 305 in Philippines, 111–32
Fee, L.K., 123, 131 in Thailand, 82–108
femininity, 90–1, 231, 260 gender relations, 6, 51, 76, 111, 118,
feminisation of migration, 12, 111–12, 129, 153, 172, 229
118, 123, 230–1, 239, 263, 304 gender roles, 8, 10, 12, 32, 38, 56, 77,
fertility issues, 38–9, 42, 45, 143, 113, 119, 126, 128–32, 158–9,
158, 175 196, 198, 229, 234–5, 265
Feuron, G., 32 gender stereotypes, 77, 97, 130, 172
filial piety, 9, 13, 53, 76, 231, 247 genocide, 46
financial crisis, 34, 60, 65–6, 75, Ghana, 5, 52, 233
298–300, 303–4 Ghosh, B., 51
Findlay, A., 16, 284–6, 288–9, 293 Ghosh, J., 234
Firman, T., 178 Gibson, K., 230–1
first-generation migrants, 205–6 gifts, 14, 29, 43, 62, 74, 77, 87, 91, 95,
fisheries/fishing, 57, 77, 120, 124 105, 127–8, 180–1, 186, 210, 229,
Fithry, T.S., 172, 185, 189 232, 235–40, 242–7, 268–9, 279
floating population, 194 global economic crisis, 65, 291, 298
food, 4, 29, 46, 64, 67–8, 75, 91, 103, global economy, 1, 41, 111, 139–40
144–5, 151, 156, 171, 180, 183, global householding, 1, 5, 11, 30, 41,
186, 201, 209–10, 218–20, 232, 140, 196
245–6, 265, 273, 301 globalisation, 1, 10, 32, 39, 160
food industry, 77 global production chain, 57
Ford, M., 117 gold, 73, 93
foreign aid, 3 Gold, A.G., 152
foreign direct investment, 3, 50, 227 Goldring, L., 28, 53–4, 89
foreign exchange, 3, 27, 62–3, 107, Goodkind, D., 194
111, 114–16, 118, 140, 283–4 goods, 44, 58, 62, 64–5, 92, 94, 103,
forestry, 77 106, 123, 128, 139, 165, 201, 212,
France, 236 214, 217, 236, 244, 265, 277, 297
“frontiering,” 14 ‘good’ sons vs. daughters in rural
furniture, 37, 92, 219 Thailand, 82–108
Gooszen, H., 178
Gamaniratne, N., 140, 143–4, 158 Gorodzeisky, A., 6, 51, 123, 131, 228,
gambling, 7, 94, 115, 117, 293, 303 234, 264
Gamburd, M.R., 7, 10, 11–13, 16, Goss, J. B., 284, 286
139–61, 171, 176, 179, 198, 233, gossip, 98
239, 286, 288–9 Graham, E., 196
Gammeltoft, P., 3 Green, R.-J, 112, 114, 118
Gardner, K., 28 gross domestic product (GDP)
garment factories, 32–3, 57–8, 66, Burma, 50
77, 141 Philippines, 111, 227
Geertz, H., 167 Vietnam, 290
gender differences in remittance Guatemala, 5
behaviours, 6–10 Gubertb, F., 195
in Bangladesh, 27–46 Guest, P., 178
in Burma, 50–78 Guevarra, A., 111, 118, 230–1, 237
Index 319
Gulf Cooperation Council, 2 126–7, 139, 173, 197, 199, 212,

Gultiano, S., 3 213–16, 299
Gutmann, M., 112, 117 housemaid, see domestic work(er)
Guzman, J.C, 52 Howard, J.A., 83, 84
Huang, S., 269
Haas, H.D., 3 Hugo, G., 4, 16, 88, 175, 178, 196,
Hadi, A., 195 285, 288
hafezia, 33, 46 Huguet, J.W., 88
Hage, G., 232 Huijsmans, R., 142, 145, 153
hajj pilgrimage, 42–3 Hull, T., 167
Hajnal, J., 179 Hull, V., 167
Hanks, L.M. Jr., 108 human capital, 30, 45, 113, 228
Harriden, J., 55–6, 78 human geography, 258–9
Havanon, N., 107 human rights, see rights
health humiliation, 118
crises, 29, 150, 156–7, 167, 171, 179, hundi system, method of remittance in
300–1 Burma, 62–5
expenses, 36, 52, 65, 145, 173, 184,
187, 210, 216, 218, 265, Ibarra, M. de la Luz, 159
297, 301 ID cards (registration cards), 57, 70
insurance cover, 298–9 identities
services, 4, 143, 167, 195, 303 of children, 31, 38
hegemonic masculinity, 112, 116–17, class, 36, 265
131, 231 collective, 17
Henderson, G.E., 198, 222 communal and family, 12, 28, 70,
Hernandez, E., 234, 276 74, 82–3, 89, 105, 142, 185
Hernández-Coss, R., 284 gender, 31, 43–5, 89, 105–6, 142,
Hershatter, G., 198 159, 265
Hetler, C., 178 male, 9, 36, 117–18, 125, 132
Hill, P.S., 4 new/modern, 37, 98, 106, 108
Hindu minority, 56, 166 self-concept and, 28, 83–4, 142
Hoang, L.A., 1–18, 36, 94, 99, 108, social, 213, 265
142, 172, 195, 258, 262, 283–307 Idul Fithry, see Eid festival
Hochschild, A., 11, 159, 196, 237 Ikeya, C., 55–6, 77
Hochstadt, S., 177 Ileto, R.C., 231–2
home-makers, 33, 41, 220 illegal
HOME shelter, 279 migrants/migration/recruitment,
Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., 159, 303 50, 56–7, 85–6, 92–3, 95, 97,
Hong Kong, 2, 86–8, 115, 173, 230, 104–7, 271, 283, 289–91, 293
236, 286, 289 illness, 69, 147–8, 150, 153, 179, 182,
hospitalisation, 186–7, 298–9 186, 261, 298
Hossai, M.I., 34, 39, 41 imams, 34
hostessing, 87, 95, 103, 106, 263–4 India, 2, 38, 55–6, 158, 306
hotel industry, 34, 77, 243, 302 “Indo-Burmese” marriages, 55–6
chef, 94 Indonesia, transnational migration
workers, 57, 77, 87, 98, 104, 260, and elderly support, 52, 127,
263, 270, 272 165–90
house construction/renovation, 35–7, Bandung, 168–9
42, 46, 67, 92–3, 99–100, 102–3, case studies, 182–6
320 Index
Citengah, West Java, 166, 169–70, Jacka, T., 199, 207–8

172–3, 180–2, 188, 190 Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, 42, 46
demography, 166–8 Jansen, K., 228
education, 171, 174, 180, Japan
184–5, 187 debt-bondage recruitment, 100
escaping debts, 284 demand for elder care, 159
European history/colonial period, migrant workers in, 2, 86, 94, 96,
176–9 107, 227, 236, 291–3, 295–6,
Jakarta, 168–9 298, 307
Kidul, East Java, 166, 169–70, 172–3, sex workers, 94, 100–3, 132, 260
180–6, 188, 190 “trainees scheme,” 292–3, 306
Koto Kayo, West Sumatra, 166, unauthorised migration to, 89, 93–6
168–73, 180–2, 184–5, 187–90 Jarvis, H., 207
local languages, 166 Jayaweera, S., 141
micro- and macrolevel impacts, Jeffery, P., 38
174–6 jewelry, 67, 73
migration patterns, impact of local Jha, S., 27
vs. distance, 168–79; historical joblessness, see unemployment
patterns, 176–9 Jones, G., 168
old-age vulnerability, 167, 171, Jones, H., 16, 284–6, 288–9, 293
173–4, 179, 181, 183–7
poverty, 174, 179, 186 Kabeer, N., 7
runaway migrants, 284 Kaimowitz, D., 51
rural communities, 166–8, 182–6 Kaiser, M.A., 144–5
strata, remittances, networks, Kandiyoti, D., 42
168–86, 189 Kapadia, K., 152
Sumedang, 169 Kapur, D., 4
Surabaya, 168, 182, 185 karaoke machines, 92, 98, 103
Indrizal, E., 168, 189 Kaur, A., 286
industrial park, 91, 95–6, 100 Kaut, C., 231, 243, 249
inequality, 3, 11–12, 15, 30, 198, 234, Keely, C.B., 284
247, 265, 284, 306 Kerala, India
inheritance, 36, 38, 151, 186, 190, 199 community identities, 37
inheritance rights, 55 young, left-behind wives, 38–9
insecurities, 10, 38, 54, 76, 120, Kertzer, D., 179
122, 179 Khaing, M.M., 51, 55, 75, 77
Integrated Regional Information Kimmel, M., 117
Networks (IRIN), 50 King, R., 4, 7, 51–2, 264–5
interest rates, 35, 69, 75, 85, 92, 99, kinship, 15, 38, 53, 140–1, 143, 145–6,
102, 239–40, 244–5, 248, 270–2, 150, 154, 159–60, 198, 200,
288–90, 293, 299, 301 217, 232
International Labour Organization Kirsch, A.T., 44
(ILO), 57 Koc, I., 4
International Seafarer Action Center Kofman, E., 11, 52, 270, 276
(ISAC), 116 Kothari, U., 195
Irish women, in Britain, 53 Kreager, P., 11–14, 127, 144, 165–90,
Islam, 32, 36–8, 42–4, 46, 56, 166, 235 198, 235, 239, 305
Israel, 139 Kuhn, R., 145
Italy, 139, 159–60, 227, 236, 243, 289 Kunz, R., 28
Index 321
Kurien, P.A., 37 lifecycle, household’s, 8, 36–7, 151,

Kusakabe, K., 7–9, 17, 37, 50–78, 108, 195, 197–8, 204, 211, 217
125, 139, 142, 172, 179, 197, lifestyle, urban, 31, 44, 90–1, 93, 95,
233, 264 98–101, 102–5, 126, 214, 234,
Kussmaul, A., 179 238, 302
Kuwait, 2, 159 Lim, L., 89
Lindisfarne, N., 30
Labor Code, Philippines, 114 Lindquist, J., 259, 273, 283–6, 289
Lamb, S., 139–40, 158 linked lives, 140, 150
Lamvik, G., 127 Lipton, M., 3, 284
Lan, P.-C, 111 Liu, C., 197
land Liu, J., 140, 142, 155
agricultural, 35, 124, 169, 186, 194, livestock, 35–6
201, 209, 213, 216 Lloyd-Sherlock, P., 140, 145, 152–3
as collateral/mortgaging of, 35, 85, loans, 35–6, 46, 85, 92, 94, 97, 99,
92, 97, 100, 102 102, 105, 209–10, 228, 232–3,
disposal, 35–6, 301 288–90, 297–301, 305
holdings, 46 Locke, C., 9, 30, 61, 140, 142, 145,
inheritance, 36, 55, 186 148, 151–4
poverty and a lack of, 102, 213 London, 4
purchase, 35–7, 42, 46, 65, 67, 70, loneliness, 36, 38–9, 259
93, 96, 126, 139, 155, 215, 297 “long-distance parenting,” 248
rights, 55 longevity, 143–4, 158
Landale, N.S., 16 long-term care, 148, 150–1, 154
Landolt, P., 52, 266 long-term employment/migration, 1,
lap dancing, 270 148, 150, 166, 173, 182, 197, 213
Latin America, 5–6, 303 Lopez-Cordova, E., 31
Lavely, W., 199 Lou, S., 211
Law, L., 260 Louie, K., 117
Lea, J., 259 Low, M., 117
leather factories, 58 low-skilled workers, 230, 258, 261–5,
Lee, R., 172 275–6, 295
legal migrants/migration/recruitment, low-wage migrants, 2, 5, 10, 16–17,
84–6, 88–9, 91–2, 95–7, 100, 102, 41, 57, 107, 115, 117–18, 179,
104–7, 116, 262–3, 276, 283–5, 195, 290, 292, 295, 297
287–8, 292 loyalty, 38–9
leisure, 94, 105 Lu, L., 199
Levhari, D., 303 Lucas, R.E.B., 4, 196
Levine, D., 177 Lucassen, J., 177
Levitt, P., 28 Lucero-Prisno III, D.E., 132
Li, L., 199 Lynch, C., 159
Lian, K.F., 7, 286 Lyons, L., 117
Liang, H., 197
Libya, 288 Ma, X., 198
licensed recruitment agencies, see legal Macao, 2, 86–7, 95, 100, 102–3,
migrants/migration/recruitment 230, 301
life course, 7–9, 12, 27–46, 58, 61, 72, madrasas, 33–4, 41–2, 46
76, 125, 142, 151–4, 167, 172, Madura, 166
174, 190 Maglipon, J.-A, 230
322 Index
Mahler, S.J., 52, 112, 229 Mazzucato, V., 265, 276

malaria, 143 McHugh, K.E., 207
Malaysia, 2, 86, 139, 173, 183, 185, McKay, S., 111–32, 139, 230–1,
227, 284, 290–2, 294–8, 302, 307 233–5, 249
Malkin, V., 82, 94, 108 McKenzie, D., 31
Mallee, H., 194 Mecca, 42–3, 185
management and use of remittances, media
6–7, 32–3, 247, 304 mass, 44, 91, 104, 288
Mann, S., 198 new, 43
manning agencies, see recruitment social, 248
agencies medical costs, see health, expenses
Marcos, Ferdinand, 114 Meillasoux, C., 29–30
Marecek, J., 158 Mexico
Margold, J., 112, 118 migrant households in, 31
maritime sector, 111–32 migrants in USA, 94, 108
market Michinobu, R., 90
global, 45, 113 microwaves, 92
labour, 13, 15, 52, 112–13, 121, 145, Middle East, migrant workforce, 2, 27,
166, 188, 195, 206, 297, 302–4 32, 36–7, 42–3, 88, 96, 100, 115,
marriage, 99, 102 118, 173, 186, 230, 289–90
age of, 38, 46, 143 migrants
annulment, 257 Bangladeshi, 2, 5, 7–8, 27–46,
arranged, 152, 167 285, 289
early, 32, 38, 199 Burmese, 7–8, 50–78
with foreigners, 103–6 Chinese, 13, 194–222
funding, 212 Filipino, 7, 9–10, 15–16, 111–32,
material capacity for, 215–16 227–79
mixed, 56, 168 Indonesian, 52, 165–90, 269, 284
split, 266–7 Mexican, 31, 94, 108
troubled, 16, 267–8 Sri Lankan, 5, 11–12, 139–61, 227,
see also brideprice 233, 288–9
Martin, P.L., 3, 56, 89 Thai, 4–9, 82–108, 233, 293–4, 296,
masculinity, 7, 10 300, 304
class models of, 132 Vietnamese, 5, 15–16, 283–307
fashioning of men’s own, 117–18 migration
Filipino, 112–14, 116–32, 233–4 feminisation of, 12, 111–12, 118,
general constructions of, 30, 117 123, 230–1, 239, 263, 304
hegemonic, 112, 116–17, 131, 231 illegal, 50, 56–7, 85–6, 92–3, 95, 97,
marginal, 114, 117 104–7, 271, 283, 289–91, 293
“transnational business industry, 285, 304–5
masculinity,” 117 legal, 84–6, 88–9, 91–2, 95–7, 100,
Western ideals, 117–18 102, 104–7, 116, 262–3, 276,
masons, 34 283–5, 287–8, 292
mass culture, 44 long-term, 1, 148, 150, 166, 173,
masseuse, 102–3, 106, 278 182, 197, 213
Massey, D., 175, 195, 227, 284–5, 303 remittances and development,
matrilineal society, 5, 55, 166, 184–5, 51, 284
189–90, 265 short-term, 1, 31, 88, 100, 173, 197,
Mauss, M., 232, 243 206, 210, 304
Index 323
temporary, 31, 56–7, 70, 76, 88, 96, “network of obligations” notion, 7–9,
101, 104–5, 107, 118, 141, 53–4, 60, 73–6, 108
174–5, 177–8 new economics of migration theory,
Miller, M., 283 196, 303
Mills, M.B., 89–91, 107–8 new media and technology, 43
minority ethnic groups, 70, 116, 151, Nguyen, M., 291, 293
166, 290 Người lao đ ô.ng, 287
Moch, L., 177 Nicholson, M., 140
modernity/modernisation, 55, 90–2, nightclubs, see clubs
98–100, 103–6, 158, 167, 261 Nobel Prize, 55
modesty, 77, 90, 98–9, 105, 158, 173, non-governmental organisations
180, 183, 186–7 (NGOs), 13, 33, 42, 46, 76, 229,
Mohammad, Prophet, 43 235–40, 247–8, 262, 273, 275
Moldenhawer, B., 31 non-migrant households, 8, 17, 28–9,
Momsen, J.H., 6 32, 40–1, 199–201, 204–5, 211,
moneylenders, 35, 85, 88, 92, 97, 102, 220, 247, 259, 293
141, 288–9 education, 41
monks, 89, 107, 151, 154 non-remittance, impact of, 14–16, 59,
Moran-Taylor, M., 5, 15 257–307
Morocco, 6 nurses/nursing, 111, 118, 121, 230,
Morrison, B.M., 143, 160 278, 303
mosque, 34–5, 37, 42 nutrition, 143
motherhood, 38–9, 119, 261 see also food
motivations, migrants’ remittance, Nwe, T.T., 55, 61, 68–9
3–4, 29, 33, 53, 71, 83, 85, 206,
209, 211, 213, 216, 228, 259, 261, obligations, social/moral, 6–11, 17,
264, 267, 269, 276, 299 50–78, 89–90, 101–2, 104, 108,
motorcycles, 37, 91, 99, 102–3, 212, 117, 139–61, 231–4, 238, 243,
215, 219, 221 249, 274–5
Muecke, M., 89, 101 Ochs, E., 247
Muller, P., 259, 275, 277 Ogena, N.B., 16
Murphy, M., 190 oil, 27, 75, 113, 230
Murphy, R., 4, 6 Oishi, N., 16, 229
Murshid, K.A.S., 29 Okuhira, R., 55
Muslims, see Islam Oman, 2, 157
Onan, I., 4
Nagar, R., 207 Oo, Z.M., 54, 58, 67, 71
Naim, M., 178 Orellana, M., 228
Näre, L., 159–60 Orozco, M., 6, 27
nationality verification, 56–7 Ortner, S.B., 159
National Seaman’s Board (NSB), Osaki, K., 6, 8, 51–2, 89, 108, 233
Philippines, 114 Osella, C., 28, 36–7, 42, 117
nation-states, 1, 4, 11, 231 Osella, F., 28, 36–7, 42, 117
Naufal, G., 160 otherness, 260
Negros islands, 120 Overseas Employment and
neoliberalism, 15, 30, 159, 231, 235, Development Board, Philippines,
240, 248, 286 114
Netherlands, 178, 259 overstay, visa, 107, 284, 293
324 Index
ownership of property, 31, 35–6, Batangas Province, 268–9

167–8 Bicol region, 232
Ozden, C., 51 categories of migrant occupations,
111, 230, 260, 263–4
Paap, K., 112 colonial history, 113–14, 231
pagoda, 73 Department of Labor, 114
Pakistan, 2 economic and political crises,
Panay islands, 120 114, 118
Papademetriou, D.G., 3 economy, 111, 230
parental control, 31, 46, 104 Embassy in Singapore, 271
parent–child relationship, 238 government agencies, 114
Parrado, E.A., 284 labour export policy, 114–16, 118
Parreñas, R., 6, 10–11, 15, 52, 111–12, labour market, 112
119, 123, 126, 130, 139, 229, Luzon, 260, 270, 273
232–3, 237, 265, 274, 278–9, 289 Manila, 121, 268–9, 271, 279
parties, 98, 114 Migrant Workers and Overseas
Passeron, J.-C, 30 Filipinos Act of 1995, 237
passport, 56–7, 107 Overseas Employment
paternity, 38, 98, 248 Programme, 230
patience, 39, 41, 243 overseas Filipino worker (OFW)
patriarchal system, 4, 29, 32, 38, 198, population, 111–13
209–10, 212, 215–16, 234, Republic Act 8042, 237
265, 305 uprisings against Spain, 231
patrilocal tradition, 4, 198–9, 204, Philippines, migrants’ remittance
209, 216 behaviours, 111–32
Pearson, R., 7–9, 17, 37, 50–78, 108, associations and unions, 115–16
125, 139, 142, 172, 179, 197, debt-laden bonds, 229–35
233, 264 economies of affect, 235–48
peddlers, 141 education, 120–1, 124, 127, 228,
Peebles, G., 229 234, 244–6, 260, 268–9
pension, 147, 149–50, 158 entertainers and domestics in
Performing Artists Visa (PAV), 263, 278 Singapore, 257–79; case studies,
permanent settlement, 31, 37, 40, 139, 267–75; deceptive, debt
174, 178, 187–8, 198, 200, 213 bondage and exploitative
Perrenas, R.S., 53–4 employment situations, 262–4,
personal safety, 97–8 270–5; family tensions and
personhood, 7, 10, 82 anxieties, 257–8, 266–75;
Pessar, P.R., 112, 229 motivations to migrate, 261,
Peter, K.B., 28–9 269–70; remittances,
petty trade, 105, 178 development, emotions and
Pfeiffer, L., 51 transnational family, 264–75;
Pham, B.N., 4 visa and working rights issues,
Philippine Daily Inquirer, 242, 245–6 262–3
Philippine Navy, 114 ethics of reciprocity and
Philippines, 2 responsibility, 229–35
amount of remittances to, 111–13, gender roles and cultural norms,
118, 227 120–1, 128–9, 229–35, 264–6
Bagong Bayani awards, 119, 230 growth rate of remittances, 113,
banking services, 114–16, 228 118, 227
Index 325
historical background, 113–16 Piper, N., 15, 51

land-based OFWs, 113, 115–16, PlayStation, 268, 270
228–9, 249 police, 40, 108, 271
left-behind children and Atikha’s policing behaviours, parents’, 54,
BASC activities, 235–48; 71–2, 104
Atikha–Citibank partnership, policy-making, 3, 83, 284
240, 249; BASC Congress political economy, 15
(2006), 241–4; case studies Pollock, J., 66
(Rachel and Nielice), 241–6; population ageing, 139–61
Modelong Batang Atikha award, Portes, A., 7, 53–4, 58, 66, 68–9, 71, 75
244–6; vs. Child and Youth “positive”/“negative” agency, 6, 31,
Finance International (CYFI), 32, 38–9, 42, 45, 143, 147, 187–8,
240–1, 249 230, 264, 283
mandatory remittance policy, postmodernism, 30
114–16, 230; Executive Order post-structuralism, 30
859, 115–16; organised poverty (financial crisis), 3, 34–5, 38,
resistance against, 115–16, 46, 100–2, 104, 149, 174, 179,
118–19 186, 194–5, 197, 209–10, 213,
masculinity and migration, 116–31, 217, 227–8, 240, 289–90
233–4, 264–5; “family precariousness, 5, 8, 15, 54, 57, 72, 76,
orientedness,” 118; Western 112, 121, 262, 294, 304
ideals, 117–18 premarital sex, 90
OFWs honoured as nation’s "new prestige and renown, 37–8, 42–3,
heroes," 119, 230–1, 260 147, 187
and poverty, 228, 240, 260 private/privatisation, 30, 33, 126, 159,
seafarers, 120–31, 233, 236; 287, 289
community status, 123–6; professionals/professions, 34, 56, 87,
earnings and remittances, 101, 120–1, 124–5, 132, 230
123–5, 249; "family prostitutes, 9, 89, 92, 97, 101–3,
orientedness,” 125–31; negative 106–8, 122, 263, 270, 272
image of, 125; profile, 120–1; protest, 60, 115
spending and remitting Protestantism, 238, 241
patterns, 126–31, 234; strain on providership, 113, 118–20, 123, 125,
family relations, 121–3; vs. 127, 129, 234
other professions, 124–5 psychological issues, 16, 42, 118, 237,
women migrants, 4, 111–12, 115, 300, 305
118–21, 123, 131–2, 229–31, puberty, 152
233–4, 257–79 public health, 4, 143
Philippines National Police (PNP), 271 pubs, 125, 263, 270, 274, 278
phone calls, 29, 54, 62, 127, 246, 268, Punpuing, S., 88–9
271, 275, 277, 301–2
Phongpaichit, P., 101, 107 Qatar, 2, 227, 243, 293
physical abuse, 257, 285 quality of life, 105
physical capital, 113, 195 quarrying, 77
Pickerill, J., 259 Quomi madrasa, 46
pigsties, 201 Quran, 33, 46
Pile, S., 259
Pingol, A.T., 112, 117–18 Radcliffe, S.A., 98
Pinnawala, M., 6, 51 radio, 103
326 Index
Rafael, V.L., 230–2, 238 reverse remittances/co-insurance, 69,

Raghuram, P., 11, 52 72, 149
Rahman, M.M., 7, 123, 131 rice, 69, 75, 95, 151, 156, 169
Rahman, N.A., 275 rice milling, 129
Ramos, Fidel, 230 Richard, A., 235, 239, 248
Rao, N., 7–8, 27–46, 107, 125, 139, 197 Rigg, J., 196–7, 207
Rapoport, H., 31 rights
Ratha, D., 3, 284 child, 38, 241, 245
recession, 291, 294, 298–300, 303–4 inheritance, 55
reciprocity, 14, 17, 42, 53, 67–9, 72–3, intergenerational, 141
75–6, 142, 147, 155, 158, 186, migrants’/workers’, 54, 237, 240,
229–35, 238, 244, 247 247, 262–3, 285–8, 297, 303
recruitment agencies, 96, 100, 102, property, 55
107–8, 113, 115–16, 121, 141, residential, 54
262, 270–1, 279, 285–7, 292 transfer of, 199
illegal, see illegal women’s, 56
migrants/migration/recruitment Rivero-Fuente, E., 303
legal, see legal Rizal, Jose, 231–2, 237
migrants/migration/recruitment robbery, 293
see also brokers, labour Roces, M., 260
recruitment expenses, 85–7, 92–4, Rodriguez, R.M., 119, 135, 230, 239
141, 149, 270–2, 287, 292–306 Rome, 233
see also loans Rose, N., 238
redress, 262, 270 Rosewarne, S., 227–8, 231, 234
refrigerators, 37, 91, 102–3, Rubenstein, H., 3, 284
211–12, 219 Rubio, R., 112, 114, 118
regional economic development, 57 Rudnyckyj, D., 229, 235, 239, 248
registration of migrants, 56–7, 70 rural areas
regression, 34, 45 Bangladesh, 27–46
Reichert, J., 284 China, 194–222
relativising, 14–16 Indonesia, 165–75, 177–8
religion, 7, 9, 33, 36, 42–3, 51, 55, 70, Philippines, 120, 124, 240
101, 106, 151, 158, 231, 237, 247 Sri Lanka, 158
remittances, see under individual Thailand, 88–91, 95, 98, 103–4, 107
countries Vietnam, 284
Renmin University of China, 200 Russell, S.S., 195
renovation, 73, 197, 212, 216 Russia, 299
repatriation, 108, 284, 291 Ryan, L., 51, 53
reputation, 41, 54, 71–2, 99–101, 105,
112, 122, 152–3, 167–8, 174, 189 sacrifice, 6, 14, 29, 32, 38–9, 41–2,
resilience, 1, 140 44–5, 67–9, 73, 83, 127, 231, 233,
restrictive immigration, 1, 15, 235, 237, 239, 242–3, 246, 274
97–8, 286 sadness, 259, 269, 273, 277
retail trade, 77, 129 Saguy, A.C., 4, 7–8, 51–4, 76, 233, 303
returned migrants, 36, 84, 93, 96–100, Saipan Island, 88
106–8, 123, 149–50, 153, 159, Salamanca, A., 196–7, 207
186, 206, 210, 213, 219–21, Salvador, 6
268–9, 271, 293, 300, 302 Sana, M., 195
Index 327
sandwich generation, 140, 151, 154–5, Shafiq, M.N., 46

157–8, 160 shame, 14, 185, 232–3, 235, 247,
Saptari, R., 178 270–3, 277–8
Sassen, S., 159 Sharma, K., 31
Saudi Arabia, 2, 27, 36, 42–3, 94, 96, Shehabuddin, E., 38
186, 227, 229, 236, 241, 243–4, shelter, 32, 216, 232, 275, 277, 279
246, 292 shopping malls, 103
savings, 13, 36, 52, 64–6, 71, 73–5, short-term care, 147–8
88–9, 92–4, 96–7, 99, 103, 105, short-term migration, 1, 31, 88, 100,
108, 114, 116, 125, 129, 142, 145, 173, 197, 206, 210, 304
149, 210, 214–17, 228, 234–5, sickness, see illness
238–40, 243–5, 247–9, 257, Siddiqui, T., 27, 34, 45–6
268–9, 297–302 “side money”/tips, 257, 278
Schiff, M., 51 Simmel, G., 237
Schiller, N.G., 5, 10, 32 Singapore, 2, 286
Schofield, R., 177 construction boom in, 230
schools, see education Filipino migrants in, 16, 237,
Schröder-Butterfill, E., 11–14, 127, 257–79
144, 165–90, 198, 235, 239, 305 law on trafficking, 270–1
scoldings, 273 Thai migrants in, 86, 92–3, 103
seasonal migration, 175, 177–8 singers, 103–4, 263, 278
seclusion, 37 Skeldon, R., 195–6, 305
second-generation migrants, 201, skilled workers, 87, 260
206, 211 Smith, L., 265, 276
self-employment, 44, 120, 141 Smith, S.J., 257, 259, 276
self-interest, 4, 83, 108, 228, 232 Sobieszczyk, T., 7–9, 12, 14, 17, 44, 51,
self-protection, see personal safety 67, 82–108, 141, 179, 233–5, 239
semiskilled workers, 30, 34, 45, 295 social activities, 7, 70
Semyonov, M., 6, 51, 123, 131, 228, social actors, 77, 82–3
234, 264 social capital, 37–8, 243–4
Sensenbrenner, J., 7, 53–4, 58, 66, four-point concept, 53–4, 58, 66–76
68–9, 71, 75 “social death,” 28
separation, physical social exchange theory, 83, 106
anxieties of, 56, 120, 122, 153, 196, social hierarchy, 43
237, 269, 276, 278, 300 social justice, 262
and everyday activities, 28, 188 social networks, 31, 37, 52, 89, 102,
for extended periods of time, 13, 107–8, 121, 150–1, 179, 303
195, 197, 302 social obligations, 10, 53, 117
managing, 41 social recognition, 42
servants, see domestic work(er) “social remittances,” 28, 76–7
services, public, 141, 166 social security, 8, 143, 148
sexual deprivation, 38–9 social services, 159, 290
sexual freedom, 103–4 social support, 42, 145, 160, 279
sexuality, 38, 90–1, 101, 104, 111, social theory, 284
153, 260 Social Visit Pass (SVP) visa, 262, 271
sexual purity, see virginity solidarity, 11–12, 17, 53, 69–72,
sex work, 9, 87, 89, 93, 95, 100–4, 165–7, 172, 182, 185, 187–8
107–8, 111, 118, 132, 257–8, Sørensen, N.N., 52
260–4, 266–7, 270–5, 277–9 South Asia, 2, 36, 38, 144, 152
328 Index
Southeast Asia, 2, 6, 27, 82, 84, 86, 88, the state, role of, 15, 38, 46, 55, 77,
131, 166, 168, 173, 175, 227, 111, 159, 285–8, 303–4
303–4 status, 1, 6, 8–10, 16, 27–46, 55–6,
South Korea, 2, 139, 157, 160, 257, 67–8, 70, 82, 84, 90–3, 95–7,
290–3, 295–6, 298, 302, 306–7 100–2, 104–8, 117–18, 124, 126,
language test is a prerequisite, 293 132, 139–40, 145–6, 152, 167,
South–South remittances, 50 174, 178, 184–7, 199, 231–2, 238,
Soviet Union, 290 244, 262, 265, 270, 278, 285, 287
Spaan, E., 178 stereo systems, 92, 107
Spanish colonialism, 231 Stichter, S., 36
spas, 104 stigma, 6, 9, 82, 101, 104, 106,
split households, 195, 198, 208, 217 108, 278
sponsors, 121, 159, 295 Stockman, N., 199
SPSS, 33 Stone, L., 141
Sri Lanka, 139–61 strata, see class
civil war, 160 Stratham, A., 7, 83
Colombo, 160 Stryker, S., 7, 83–4
earnings and remittances, 141–3 student visa, 107
education, 139, 143, 152 Suksomboon, P., 6
elder care and kinship duties, Sunanta, S., 233, 249
140–61; childcare, 143–5, 147, support from family, see reverse
150–4; filial duties, 146–7; remittances/co-insurance
financial resources, 148–50; surveillance, 98, 262, 273
gender norms and values, Suu Kyi, Aung San, 55
146–7, 151, 158–9; Suzuki, N., 260
grandchild–grandparent Sweden, 266
obligations, 154–7; hired care, symbolic interactionism, 82–108
148, 150–3; Naeaegama village, application of, 84–108
141–60; remittances and, strengths and weaknesses, 83–4
146–57; research technique, symbolic value, 9–10, 12, 108, 235
145–6; social networks, 150–1; Syrian Christians, 37
traditional norms, 144;
vulnerability, 145, 151–4 Tacoli, C., 4, 233
elders’ economic activity, 144–5 Tadiar, N.X., 228, 260
employment opportunities, 141 tailors, 34
female migration/migrants, impact Taiwan, 86, 92–3, 95–100, 107, 286,
of, 141–57 290–300, 302–3, 307
male workers, 141, 150, 158, Tanedo, Benjamin, 114–15
159, 161 Taylor, E.J., 3, 195
migration patterns, 139, 141–3 Taylor, J.E., 51, 284, 303, 305
penury/poverty, 145, 149 tea, 210
population, 139–40; ageing, 143–5; telecommunication technologies, 248
demographic shift, 143–5; telephones, 92
structural change, 140, 143; television, 90–1, 212
UN/World Bank report, 144 temporary migration, 31, 56–7, 70, 76,
public health system, 143 88, 96, 101, 104–5, 107, 118, 141,
standard of living, 44, 88, 93, 104, 174–5, 177–8
124, 143, 194, 211–12, 217 Termos, A., 160
Stark, O., 4, 196, 303 Thai, H., 5, 36, 291
Index 329
Thailand Tilly, C., 177

agents or carriers, 62–3, 77 Tonga, 6, 228
Baan Yipun (Japanese houses), 94, tourism industry, 141
96, 100, 107 tourist visa, 107
Bangkok, 58, 62–4, 77, 96, 101 Toyota, M., 196
Burmese migrants in, 50–78 trafficking, 107, 258, 262, 270–2
economic crisis, 65–6, 94 UN Trafficking Protocol’s
economy, 56, 88–90 definition, 279
Mae Sot, Tak Province, 57–8, 61–4, see also sex work
66–7, 69–73, 75 Trager, L., 4, 160, 232–3
migrant remittances from, 50–78 Tran, B., 284, 286–7, 292–3
minimum wage, 57 transit visa, 107
Pattaya, 101 transnational family, 1, 5, 14, 16–17,
poverty, 100–2, 104 30, 111, 119, 196, 235, 246–7,
registration policies for migrants, 257–79, 304
56–7 transportation business, 130, 166,
Samut Prakan Province, 58, 62, 210–12, 218–19
66–70, 74 transportation industry, 63, 211–12
Three Pagoda Pass, 58, 63–4, 77 transport facilities, 32, 63
Yaung Chi Oo Burmese Workers travel (entertainment), 89, 94, 107
Association, Bangkok, 58 travel documents, 50, 97, 289, 295
Thai migrants’ remittance behaviours, travel expenses, 61, 85, 87–8, 92,
82–108 99–100, 102, 295
bun khun obligations, 89–91
Treiman, D.J., 194
education, 96–7, 102, 108
truck, 99, 102–3, 210–11, 218–19
gender and remittances,
trust, 53–4, 71–2, 76, 122, 129,
91–105, 233
150, 302
gender and type of migrants, 85–8
T-tests, 40
international labour migration,
Tuljapurkar, S., 175
88–9
Turnell, S., 58, 62–3, 77
Lamphun village, 95–100, 104
Tyner, J., 111, 118, 232, 260
married migrants, 92–4
meaning and significance of
remittances, 95–105 UAE (United Arab Emirates), 2, 27,
Phayao village, 100–5 227, 292
recruitment and migration, 84–8 UK, 53, 227, 291–2
remittance use, 92–105 UN
single migrants, 92–105 study on role of elderly (1990), 144
sociocultural norms, 89–91, 101 Trafficking Protocol, 279
surveillance and protection of unauthorised labour migration, see
migrants, 97–8 illegal
Thangarajah, C.Y., 43 migrants/migration/recruitment
theft, 293 underemployment, 119, 155, 229,
Theodore, N., 286 234, 303
Theravada Buddhism, 89, 101 unemployment, 66, 77, 119, 121, 155,
Thiranagama, S., 160 160, 186, 229, 234, 260, 283,
Thomson, D., 179 291, 303
Thwin, A., 61 Union of Myanmar, see Myanmar
tickets, travel, 149, 274 unions/associations, 58, 113, 116
330 Index
unskilled workers, 30–1, 34, 45, 85, childcare, 300–1

258, 263, 292, 295, 307 contract workers and remittances,
urban culture, 103–4 290–3
urbanisation, 168, 194, 198 debts incurred by recruitment,
USA placement and relocation,
bounded solidarity in, 69 288–90, 293–303
demand for elder care, 159 Department of Overseas Labour
migrants in, 5–6, 10, 54, 94, 108, (DOLAB), 287–8
114, 117, 160, 227, 236, 291–2 Fund for Overseas Workers
and Philippine maritime Support, 288
education, 113 global economic crisis, impact of,
placement fees to the, 293 298–300
US Merchant Marine Academy, 114 government regulation, 286–8,
290, 303
vacation, 122–3, 125, 130, 149 Labour Contract, 288
Valerio, R.L.F., 289 Law on Vietnamese Labour Working
value introjections, 53, 66–8, 72 Abroad, 2003, 288
values law violations, 293
Asian, 17 left-behind families, debts and
Christian, 13 crisis, 297–303
cultural, 239, 247–9
migration venture as a gamble,
economic, 9
293–303
family, 7, 14, 199, 242
Ministry of Labour, Invalids and
of female domesticity, 95
Social Affairs (MOLISA), 287–8
of filial duties, 147, 154, 157,
Programme 73, 290
160, 231
recruitment/placement fees, 292–3,
formation of, 240
295–7
material, 189, 237
remittance usage, 297
of patience and sacrifice, 41
“running away” and overstaying,
positive/negative, 32
problems of, 293
of remittances, 62, 95, 146, 154,
157, 160, 172, 180–2, 185, 188, state and market actors, role of,
227, 239, 243 287–8
social, 2, 4, 10, 14, 28, 43, 73, Thai Binh Province (case study),
189, 248 293–7
symbolic, 9–10, 12, 91, 108, 235 “Three Nos” of labour exports
Van Esterik, P., 104 industry, 287
Vanwey, L.K., 6, 69 Vietnam War, 101
Vasuprasat, P., 59, 63, 77 violence against women, 46, 269
vehicles, 92, 94, 96, 100, 102, 126 virginity, 38, 71, 90, 101, 107,
Vertovec, S., 5, 275–7 152, 159
Vete, M.F., 6 visas, 107, 262–3, 271, 278, 284, 293
video players, 90, 102 Visayan islands, 120
Vietnam, transnational labour Vullnetari, J., 51–2, 264–5
migration, 5, 283–307 vulnerability, 15, 71–2, 145, 151–4,
amount of remittances, 283 167, 171, 173–4, 179, 181, 183,
Asian transnational labour 185–7, 195, 237, 261, 291, 298,
migration, 285–6 304–5
CHAMPSEA study, 293 Vuorela, U., 3, 14–15, 30, 54
Index 331
wages Woodward, K., 259

below-minimum, 262 Worker, The (Vietnamese newspaper),
daily, 33, 39, 100–1, 107, 115, 144, 287, 290
216, 234 working rights, 54, 237, 240, 247,
equal, 141 262–3, 285–8, 297, 303
higher, 57, 107, 292 work permits, 28, 57, 107, 262
low, 2, 5, 10, 16–17, 41, 57, 107, workplace/working environments
115, 117–18, 179, 195, 290, exploitative, 117, 258, 276
292, 295, 297 high-risk conditions, 35
minimum, 57–8, 60, 70–1, 77, 285 oppressive, 258
unpaid, 262 poor/harsh, 32, 39, 41, 60, 117, 195,
Wakefield, D., 199 262, 275, 289
Walzer, M., 15 World Bank, 50, 143–4, 158, 160,
Wanasundera, L., 160 283–4
Wang, C., 197 world economies, 241
Wang, D., 197 “worshipping worker,” 235
Wang, F.-L, 194 Wrightson, K., 177
Wang, J., 198 Wrigley, E.A., 177
Wang, W.W., 196, 198–9 Wu, X., 194
wars, 46, 101, 160, 288
washing machines, 92, 99, 107, 197, Xenos, P., 3
211–12, 217, 219, 221
Xiang, B., 196, 208, 286
Waters, J.L., 30, 196
Xu, C., 198
Waxler-Morrison, N., 160
Weekley, K., 230
Yang, D., 195, 228
Weerakoon, N., 141
Weiner, A.B., 243–4 Yea, S., 15–17, 142, 235, 257–79,
welding/welders, 32, 40–1, 43, 93 284, 289
welfare, 1, 28–9, 240, 247, 264, 277–8 Yeates, N., 11
West, C., 112, 117 Yeoh, B., 1–18, 36, 85, 94, 99, 108,
West, L.A., 194 142, 195–6, 258, 262, 269,
Western Europe, 179 283–307
Western norms, 112, 118 youth, 33, 44–5, 94, 153–5, 168, 171,
Western Samoa, 228 174, 179, 240–1, 244
White, B., 178 Yue, Z., 197
Whitehead, A., 7, 142, 160
Whittaker, A., 89 Zarate-Hoyos, G.A., 37
Wickramasekera, P., 283–5, 293 Zelizer, V., 9–10
Willis, K. D., 17, 196 Zhang, H.X., 30
Winters, P., 303 Zhou, H., 208
Wiradi, G., 178 Zhu, Y., 197–8
Wolf, D., 52, 178 Zia, Khaleda, 46
Women in Development Foundation Zimmerman, D., 112, 117
(NGO), 237 Zimmerman, M., 11
Wong, M., 5, 52–4, 76, 229, 233, 246, Zlotnik, H., 16
265–7, 272, 277, 304 Zontini, E., 6

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Transnational

Elizabeth Cooper and David Pratten (editors)

Anthropology, Change and Development Series

Lan Anh Hoang

1. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Congresses. 2. Labor

List of Figures and Tables vii

Series Editors’ Preface ix

Notes on Contributors xiii

1 Introduction: Migration, Remittances and the Family 1

Part I Remittances as Gendered Processes

3 Remittances and Women’s Agency: Managing Networks of

4 “Good” Sons and “Dutiful” Daughters: A Structural

5 “So They Remember Me When I’m Gone”: Remittances,

Part II Remittances and Generational Dynamics of

7 Differential Impacts of Migration on the Family Networks

8 Migration, Remittances and Social and Spatial

9 Filipino Children and the Affective Economy of Saving

Part III (Non-)Remittance and the Family in Crisis

11 Transnational Labour Migration, Debts and Family

3.1 Average annual remittances and percentage of those

2.1 Education levels of migrants 34

7.4 Mean values of annual monetary gifts by adult children

This book series fosters engagement between critical anthropology and

as well as deeper approaches to experiences of time, and related emo-

in transnational labour migration in and from Asia, focusing on their

Earlier versions of chapters in this volume were presented at the Inter-

Cheryll Alipio is Lecturer in Anthropology in the School of Social Sci-

C. Cindy Fan is Interim Vice Provost for International Studies, Professor

Michele Ruth Gamburd is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at

Lan Anh Hoang is Lecturer in Development Studies at the School of

in Moscow, Russia, with a focus on transnational networks, identity and

Philip Kreager is Senior Research Fellow in Human Sciences, Somerville

Kyoko Kusakabe is Associate Professor in Gender and Development

Steven McKay is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of

Ruth Pearson is a feminist economist who has researched and writ-

Nitya Rao is Professor of Gender and Development at the University

Elisabeth Schröder-Butterﬁll is Lecturer in Gerontology at the Centre

Teresa Sobieszczyk is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of

Sallie Yea is Assistant Professor in Humanities and Social Studies

projects, one focusing on human trafﬁcking and the anti-trafﬁcking

Brenda S. A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) of Geography, as well

The unprecedented rise in both the volume and the velocity of

gender/generational norms and ideologies. In examining practices and

Migrant remittances and the family

Remittance as both an antecedent and an outcome of migration

levels of investment and economic development (Hugo, 2002; Kapur,

as “on-going social processes linking together countries of origin and

Remittances as gendered processes

As mentioned earlier, it is well established that remittance behaviours

resources is more likely to result in the enhancement of the collective

In her ethnographic research in rural Bangladesh, Nitya Rao

research on migration, social reproduction and social provisioning.

mother-migrant families also in the Philippines (Parreñas, 2005) and

Remittances and generational dynamics of change

Schiller et al. (1992: 12) argue that the maintenance of transnational

the maintenance of transnational ties, especially through remittances,

The tensions surrounding female labour migration in Sri Lanka go to

The interest in the generational dynamics of change in Gamburd’s

as a reciprocal form of gift exchange that is associated with the cul-

(Non-)remittances and the family in crisis

In their edited volume The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers

varying degrees of intensity with certain kinsmen while opting out of

Yea’s chapter on Filipina domestics and entertainers in Singapore