Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

This paper explores how migration shapes men’s intimate relationships with their families over time and space. The global economy has attracted and forced massive flows of people across borders for work and profit. Many of those moving people either as labor or professional migrants are men who migrate solely and leave their families behind. Thousands of Taiwanese men as capital holders or managerial and technical professionals have gone to China to invest and work since the late 1980s when Taiwan went through economic restructuring. Most of these Taiwanese men are married with wives and children in Taiwan. Long-distance marriage and family for twenty or more years is very common among these families. Drawing primarily on over a decade of fieldwork in Taiwanese expatriate business communities in coastal Chinese cities with recent years of interviews of wives and children of transnational Taiwanese business families in Taiwan, this study finds that Taiwanese businessmen in China live in a state of “production space and time.” Their focus is predominately on their work and career and they give very little attention to their families in Taiwan. Being away from home for an extended period of time has reinforced their identity as an economic adventurer and kept their relations with their families mainly as an economic provider with limited emotional connection. However, the ways in which their families in Taiwan relate to them are primarily from a state of “reproduction space and time” in which those men are the absent spouses and fathers. This study finds that only in the late stage of their career development, many of the men have started to become interested in intimate relationships with their families. However, after years of detachment, many family members find it difficult to reconnect intimately. Migration shifts the men to being latecomers and into a state of “disjunctive intimacy” or “intimacy jet lag” found in many transnational Taiwanese families.