Transnational Lives in Global Cities

This book investigates the transnational experiences of Chinese Singaporeans who lived in one of four global cities: Hong Kong, London, New York, or Singapore. Plss argues that these middle-class, well-educated, and often highly skilled migrants mostly experienced a sense of dis-embeddedness, and not cosmopolitanism, or hybridity, in their transnational lives. The authors multi-sited study intersects the Chinese Singaporeans highly varied perceptions of these global cities and their biographies to show that these migrantswho often were repeat migrantsforemost experienced ruptures and disjuncture in their education, work, family, and/or friendships/lifestyle contexts. Transnational (dis)embeddedness is explained in terms of the Chinese Singaporeans access to resources and their views of self, others, places, and societies. Plss recommends that research on these migrants should more fully account for the complexities of transnational processes, and contributes with such a knowledge to the scholarship on transnationalism, migration, race and ethnicity, and migrant non-integration.