Transnational Lives in Global Cities

This book investigates the transnational experiences of Chinese Singaporeans in four global cities. The work argues that the current scholarship on the processes of transnationalization, of which the migrants become the agents when they move to live in different societies, fails to fully account for the complexity of these processes. The author conducts a multi-sited longitudinal study on Chinese Singaporean migrants to analyze their sense of (dis-)embeddedness in their respective transnational spaces. This (dis-)embeddedness is explained in terms of the Chinese Singaporeans' perceived access to resources in their respective transnational spaces, their (non-)integration in these spaces, as well as their changing views of self, others, places, and societies. This book's framework takes into account their relationships to their transnational contexts of education, work, family, and friendships/lifestyles. This work contributes to the scholarship on globalization, transnationalization, migration, and race and ethnicity by presenting and applying a new, and encompassing, analytical framework in order to account for the complexity of transnational (dis-)embeddedness.