Female Expatriates in Hong Kong – Negotiating a Transnational Life and Identity in a Global City

Abstract

This paper draws on the preliminary findings of a two-year qualitative research study 'Home and Away: Female Transnational Professionals in Hong Kong' funded by the HK Central Policy Unit under its 'Public Policy Research' Programme. The paper is based on interviews with forty highly-skilled, highly-educated women ‘on the move’ and considers the multiple meanings and strategies of living and working as global elites for different types of transnational female professionals (for example, Western and non-Western women, single women as ‘lead’ migrants, those who migrate with their spouses). Their personal narratives offer important insights into the cultural imaginings of Hong Kong as the ‘West’s kind of East’ (Knowles, 2005), the power geometries of global mobilities, and the way that hypermobile female professionals manage a transnational lifestyle and negotiate their identity through everyday encounters with different categories of migrants and local Chinese communities and through their social and familial relationships across mobile locations.