Research on the impacts of transnational
movement for families and particularly for
women is also a growing area of research.
Yeoh and Willis (1999), for example, examine
the ways in which transnational business net-
works and the regionalization process in Singa-
pore draw on gendered ideologies and have
major implications for the ongoing construc-
tions of women’s and men’s identities in Asia.
As it is men who are usually involved in busi-
nesses that span national borders, it is generally
the women in the family who are left ‘at home’
to protect the family and the meanings of
hearth and home. Drawing from extensive
interviews of economic migrants, Yeoh and
Willis found that ‘male and female family
members often attempt to resolve the ten-
sions of being “home” and “away” through a
transnational gender division of labour: while
male labour is deployed in spearheading and
driving the external economy and lubricating
its wings abroad, privatised female labour
shores up the home front and nourishes the
nation’s “heartware”’.
This pattern is reversed in interesting ways in
the case of Hong Kong business migrants to
Vancouver, where it is generally the woman who
is left in the ‘new’ home of Canada, while the
man continues to conduct business transnation-
ally, often retaining both a home and a mistress
in Hong Kong. This pattern became so common
in the 1980s that the term tai kong renwas
coined to describe the phenomenon. Tellingly,
the term carries a double entendre, meaning both
‘astronaut’ and ‘empty wife’ in Mandarin
(Mitchell, 1993; Ong, 1993). In both of these
cases, the woman serves as the bridge between a
home/family life and the economically produc-
tive world of the high-flying transnational male.
The highly gendered split between public and
private and between productive and reproductive
is made even stronger and deeper through the
literal spatial separation of international borders
(Yeoh and Willis, 1999).
One major focus of inquiry over the past
decade has been the impact of transnational
migration and capital flows on the cultural poli-
tics of the nation. Anthropologists such as Ong
(1999), Basch et al. (1995) and Appadurai
(1996) examine the ways in which cross-border
flows deeply transform the meaning of belong-
ing, creating imagined communities at large.
Mitchell (1993; 1997c) also traces the shifting
discourses around national narratives such as
multiculturalism, the public sphere and democ-
racy in the context of global restructuring andincreasing transnational flows. In all of these
works there is an interest in connecting economic
and cultural processes, especially the shift from
mass industrial production to the flexible accu-
mulation regime of late capitalism, with shifts in
the cultural construction of both the nation and
its citizens in motion.
In work on the wealthy Hong Kong Chinese
transnational migrants to Vancouver, for exam-
ple, Mitchell (2002) shows the ways in which
this migrant class has disrupted long-standing
assumptions of community and made manifest
the tensions in the hyphen between nationand
state. As the nation is primarily concerned with
the formation of an affective community, the
narratives associated with this formation are
those of place, rootedness, values, communitari-
anism, territory, etc. These narratives are shown
to be contradictory with the actual practices of
the Canadian state, which seeks to entrench a
neoliberal agenda of laissez-faire capitalism and
the attrition of governance. The cultural narra-
tives of the nation are those of settled places and
consciousness of place (genius loci), while state
practices in the 1980s encouraged circulation,
speed and penetration of place (through the entry
of fast capital). Wealthy transnational migrants
entering the country within the ‘business’ cate-
gory of immigration make manifest this contra-
diction via their literal embodiment of capital. As
capitalist ‘trans’-migrants, perceived to be riding
into the city of Vancouver and the country at
large on a ‘tidal wave of capital’,^5 and frequently
represented as sojourners moving back and forth
across the Asia–Pacific with little or no alle-
giance to ‘place’, these migrants make manifest
the contradiction between the discourse of nation
and the actions of the state in an extremely strik-
ing manner.
Global communication, especially media
dissemination, has become so pervasive and so
persuasive that many now postulate the forma-
tion of either a global monoculture or a ‘global
ecumene’ (Hannerz, 1996). Most cultural
geographers, however, eschew either apocalyptic
thinking or epistemological celebrations abstracted
from economic history and the everyday prac-
tices of social and cultural reproduction. Although
the concept of transnational cultural spaces was
initially the provenance of cultural studies critics
and anthropologists, cultural geographers have
begun to investigate the implications of trans-
national networks on the form and meaning of
house and home (Mitchell, 1998; Vasile, 1997), on
the spaces of neighbourhood and culture (Feather-
stone and Lash, 1999; Walton-Roberts, 1999) andCULTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF TRANSNATIONALITY 833029-ch03.qxd 03-10-02 4:50 PM Page 83