An oral history study of mobility experience of Chinese educated immigrant women in Hong Kong

Abstract

Qualitative sociologists criticise that social mobility is conventionally defined as vertical mobility and researched with the perspectives of class and stratification. The method of origin-destination comparison also leaves the complicated process of social mobility unexplored. This oral history study produces insights different from these conventional approaches.

Based on the life histories collected, this paper focuses on the mobility experiences of the educated immigrant women who came from China to Hong Kong during the 1970s and 1990s. The findings complicate the picture of social mobility in Hong Kong as shown in local survey studies. Looking into the occupational trajectory of the women, I appreciate the complexity and women’s subjectivity in the process of occupational mobility. Rather than education, various forms of social capital and cultural capital in embodied form shape women’s mobility. When we study the women as active agents, subjective factors, such as emotions, motivations and wishes are equally important for their mobility. Women’s self evaluations illuminate the concept of subjective mobility, which radically broadens the conventional views of social mobility. Horizontal mobility has much meaning to the women: by displaying one’s capability of getting through disadvantages and finding improvements through job shifts, they develop identities of self, place and society.