Dreams of Flight : The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women's motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women. "In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women's motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women"-- Provided by publisher Contents Preface: After Mobility? Acknowledgments Introduction: Worlds in Motion 1. Before Study: Dreams of Flight 2. Place: Welcome to Melvillage 3. Media: Connection and Encapsulation 4. Work: Emplacement, Mobility, and Value 5. Sexuality: Liminal Times 6. Faith: Spirits of Movement 7. Patriotism: Feeling Global Chineseness 8. After Study: Moving On, Moving Up, Moving Out Conclusion: Unsettled Dreams Notes References "Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad, between expectations of fulfilling traditional roles as wife and mother versus becoming highly educated and cosmopolitan career-oriented individuals."-- Provided by publisher