The Chinese Face in Australia: Multi-generational Ethnicity among Australian-born Chinese

Lucille Lok-Sun Ngan · Chan Kwok-bun

Jun 2012 · Springer Science & Business Media

About this ebook

The book explains how multi-generational Australian-born Chinese (ABC) negotiate the balance of two cultures. It explores both the philosophical and theoretical levels, focusing on deconstructing and re-evaluating the concept of ‘Chineseness.’ At a social and experiential level, it concentrates on how successive generations of early migrants experience, negotiate and express their Chinese identity.
The diasporic literature has taken up the idea of hybrid identity construction largely in relation to first- and second-generation migrants and to the sojourner’s sense of roots in a diasporic setting somewhat lost in the debate over Chinese diasporas and identities are the experiences of long-term migrant communities. Their experiences are usually discussed in terms of the melting-pot concepts of assimilation and integration that assume ethnic identification decreases and eventually disappears over successive generations. Based on ethnography, fieldwork and participant observation on multi-generational Australian-born Chinese whose families have resided in Australia from three to six generations, this study reveals a contrasting picture of ethnic identification.

About the author

Lucille Lok-Sun NGAN is Honorary Lecturer of Sociology, University of Hong Kong and University of Macau; and Affiliated Research Fellow, Department of Social Sciences, Hong Kong Institute of Education. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Australia. After receiving her doctorate degree in sociology from the University of New South Wales, she moved to Hong Kong with her family. Her research focuses on migration, Chinese diaspora, transnationalism, ethnic and race relations, identities, life course, gender and family. Her recent publications include 'Decentered transnational linkages: Chinese Returned Migrants in Hong Kong', in Transnational Migration Identifications in Asia: Living Intersections, edited by C. Pluss and K. B. Chan (Springer, 2012); 'An Outsider is Always an Outsider: Migration, Social Policy and Social Exclusion in East Asia.' with K. W. Chan, Journal of Comparative Asian Development (forthcoming); 'Chineseness: The Influence of Family and Marriage on the Identity of Long-established Australian-born Chinese', in International Handbook of Chinese Families, edited by K. B. Chan (Springer 2012); 'Generational Identities Through Time: Memories and Homelands of the ABCs’, in At Home in the Chinese Diaspora: Memories, Identity and Belonging, edited by A. Davidson and K. E. Kuah-Pearce (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 74-93); and ‘Living In-between’, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies Journal (Vol. 2 No.1, 2008, 127-135).

Chan Kwok-bun is Founder and Chairman, Chan Institute of Social Studies (CISS). He is former Chair Professor and Head of Department of Sociology, and Director of David C Lam Institute of East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. Also former Head of Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Author of 25 books and about 100 essays in Chinese and English, Chan recently focusses on migration, identities, hybridity, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, the family, and race and ethnic relations. Founded and edited Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, an official journal of the Hong Kong Sociological Association, of which he was President. Collects art and antiques, does public art exhibitions, and writes poetry. His Chan Institute has two arms: a think-tank of social studies and public policy, and an art gallery specializing in Southeast and Chinese art and antiques—all in an attempt to work with other like-minded people toward his goal of “Good Society, Good Life”.