Aging & Society: Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

The transition to retirement signifies a time of affirmed ideals for members of the host country as well as long-time migrants. These ideals are realised in different ways within the culturally embedded group of Thai-Americans, whose everyday lives are influenced by their sentiments for the homeland, homemaking efforts, family relations, spirituality, and negotiations of self-identities in later life. This paper explores these aspects in the lives of retired and highly skilled Thai-Americans and their family members, with whom in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2017 in the United States and Thailand. Findings from fifty-two interviews show that most participants pursue back and forth lifestyles between Thailand and the United States, either to honour obligations to older relatives in Thailand or visit their homeland as tourists. As such they live as birds of passage, optimising different elements in the two environments. This study provides new contributions on the movements and identities of less-affluent non-Western retirees to complement studies on international retirement migration (IRM) and present a comparative study on those with different residential strategies. Ultimately, the study aspires to inform policymakers in both home and host countries about this particular response to aging among the often-overlooked migrant component of the aged.