Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Asian scientists who train in the West may settle down overseas or may choose to return to Asia at some point in their careers. For returning scientists who are married, this return decision will also impact their spouse. Drawing from fifty interviews with Western-trained, Asian academic bioscientists and/or their spouses who returned to China, India, Singapore, or Taiwan as a result of husband-directed or joint-directed decision-making, we examine the return experiences of trailing wives. We find significant variations in these experiences across the group of trailing wives as a whole, as well as within any given wife’s post-return experience. A typology of supportive and unsupportive “contexts of return” is proposed to highlight how social, cultural, legal, and economic factors influence the post-return experience of trailing wives, independent of husbands’ gender role attitudes.