Abstract: This dissertation aspires to engage with the politics of estrangement that underpin representations of migration in the poetry of Zakir Hossain Khokan and Shromik Monir and the novels Five Star Billionaire (2013) by Tash Aw and Pachinko (2017) by Min Jin Lee. Khokan and Monir are Bangladeshi poets working in Singapore’s construction sector, while Aw, a Malaysian, and Lee, a Korean-American, depict Malaysian migrants to Shanghai and Korean migrants to Osaka and Tokyo in their novels. The chief distinction of migratory flows within Asia is circularity, registered in these narratives as the estrangement that comes from constant movement between one’s “home” and “adopted” country. By examining the estrangement of commodified subjects along the lines of nationality, vocation, and ethnicity, this dissertation critiques the neoliberal economic imperatives that have riven Northeast and Southeast Asia but also aspires to expand the frames of reference for the unsettlement created by contemporary migration regimes.
I. Migration in East Asia
“Me migrant
Md Mukul Hossine, “Me Migrant”
Beyond borders
Mislaying smiles
Dawn to dusk then dawn again
Bearing sighs and a cry
Inner heart
Love, compassion, kindness
Lose their meaning
Be careful: no one here
And nobody
To see and know such pain.”
Over the second half of the 20th century, Northeast and Southeast Asia experienced dramatic economic growth galvanized by a leap forward in economic integration and interdependence. Spurred by deregulatory measures taken by individual nation-states and underpinned by the ideological and military presence of the United States, the influence of neoliberalism led to drastic changes in domestic politics within the region.[1] The consequent widening of differences among countries with regard to standards of living has transformed supply and demand for labour, leading to a rapid rise in migration both from and within the region. As of 2017, 80 million international migrants reside in Asia with over 63 million migrating within the continent.[2] The neoliberal imperatives for a borderless, free-trade world have not only accelerated and expanded the possibilities of free-flowing capital, goods, and services but have also intensified the creation of “commodified subjectivities.”[3] As Stuart Hall writes, it is inevitable that the mass migration unleashed by the forces of globalization would create new and pressing cultural and political questions, resulting in a “contemporary terrain of cultural conflict.”[4]
These socioeconomic currents are reconfiguring discourses of migration in Anglophone literatures. Reading literature enables us to move away from the false typicality that conventional works of anthropology and sociology tend to establish by means of oral testimonies. It is the interiority of a character or persona in which the psychological, geographical, and temporal ruptures created through migration are made apparent. My focus here is on literatures centred on intra-Asian migrations and the psychic schisms portrayed in their characters, specifically the poetry of Shromik Monir and Zakir Hossain Khokan, Bangladeshi poets living in Singapore; Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017), which depicts the migration of a Korean family to Japan; and Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire (2013), which traces the interweaving narratives of Malaysian migrants in Shanghai. Herein, the disaggregation of the subject along national, vocational, and ethnic lines is registered in the psyche, the whole conscious and unconscious mind.[5] There remains a paucity of scholarship on these movements in literature, notwithstanding the contributions of literary scholars such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, who tend to base themselves in institutions in the United States.
What is central to my argument, then, is not simply to acknowledge the distinctions of migration narratives within Asia, but to use Asia as an anchoring point such that these narratives can become one another’s points of reference. This is the approach proposed by Kuan-Hsing Chen, who asserts:
the historical processes of imperialization, colonization, and the Cold War have become mutually entangled structures, which have shaped and conditioned both intellectual and popular knowledge production. Through the use of Asia as method, a society in Asia may be inspired by how other Asian societies deal with problems similar to its own, and thus overcome unproductive anxieties and develop new paths of engagement. [6]
Chen’s project is to multiply frames of reference of analysis for scholars of Asia, such that anxiety over the West can be diluted and productive critical work can move forward. This eschews the impetus to reproduce Euro-American forms of civil society as normative points of referential analysis.[7] When thinking about narratives of migration, the inadequacies of drawing solely from British or American immigrant writing become apparent. It is not enough to say that the Bangladeshi labourers who migrate to Singapore like Khokan and Monir are dissimilar to the Caribbean migrants in London in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) or the Filipino migrants in California in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1943). Neither is it conclusive to say that the confrontations experienced by Min Jin Lee or Tash Aw’s characters are distinct from those of Gish Jen’s Chinese migrants in the suburbs of America in Typical American (1991) or Chang-rae Lee’s Korean migrants in New York City in Native Speaker (1995). The pain of assimilation characteristic to such narratives is largely absent in literatures centred in Asia, which are defined by a circularity between the adopted country and the home country. As Samir Dayal notes, “contemporary diasporas are more complexly articulated with forms of globalized circulations of capital and labour, but also with global flows of cultural images – imaginaries that furnish raw, and unpredictable, material for diasporic self-fashioning.”[8] The asymmetry characteristic of migratory discourse is being dismantled by its transnational articulations, especially within intra-Asian contexts.
The prevailing bifurcated labour migration system in Asian countries regulates the low-skilled by a “use-and-discard” contract labour system, which encourages transience, while encouraging the highly skilled to put down roots through more liberal immigration and permanent residency systems.[9] As Brenda Yeoh describes, “[t]he dislocating effect of border-crossing emerges not only through travel, but more importantly through a process of painstaking re-adjustments on learning different ways of self-conduct, becoming productive citizens, and renegotiating a sense of being that is all at once nationalized, ethnicized, gendered and classed.”[10] That these movements run in tandem brings into question the mutuality pertaining to both sets of migrants. Petra Weyland argues that the global, highly-paid corporate and managerial labour force, which sustains the “public” multinational business space, is reproduced by the presence of a female “privatized” global space, often shored up by unpaid corporate wives as well as lowly-paid foreign domestic workers.[11] One can extend this categorization to lowly-paid migrant construction and factory workers. The public-oriented face of global business is sustained by these invisible forms of labour, whether gendered as feminized domestic labour or masculinized physical labour, which are relegated to the management of the domestic spheres or the construction and sustaining of industrial infrastructure.
By understanding the mutually constitutive relationships of low-wage and high-wage workers, we find ourselves better equipped to understand the critical interactions between the writings of Monir, Khokan, Aw, and Lee. Monir and Khokan work in Singapore’s construction sector and help to bridge the imaginative and the material through their poetry, which has been translated from Bengali to English. Richard Whitehead notes that such worker-poets articulate feelings of homesickness for the mother country, as well as alienation from mainstream life in Singapore in their poetry.[12] Aw, who is Malaysian, and Lee, who is Korean American, write in English as upper middle class novelists with elite educational backgrounds. They fashion themselves as observers fastidiously recording migratory experiences. All four writers draw attention to the disruptive forces that have riven and shaped Northeast and Southeast Asia in the aftermath of war, poverty, decolonization, and economic development.
The reified subjectivities produced under circular migration are apparent in the poetry of Monir and Khokan. Governed by Singapore’s transient worker regime, both poets are alienated from Singaporean civic life along the discrete lines of nationality; instead, they recreate a romanticized Bangladesh in their poetry. As Sherwin Mendoza describes, they are “meant to be as pliant, disposable, and bereft of subjectivity as any other commodity.”[13] This portends the impossibility of naturalization wherein the adoption of local languages and customs is compromised by a recognition of the workers’ transience in Singapore. Their poetry traces the psychic schisms enacted on the basis of nationality; a perennial sense of unsettlement underwritten by their separation from civil society.
Aw and Lee, meanwhile, engage with the overlapping tensions between circular and linear modes of migration and the estrangements that emerge from them. In Five Star Billionaire, Aw depicts the interweaving narratives of characters across the socioeconomic spectrum, with Justin Lin, a Malaysian real estate developer, representing the managerial face of global capitalism and Phoebe Chen, a Malaysian factory worker turned savvy businesswoman, refracting the precarious conditions of low-wage work. Being of ethnic Chinese descent, their movement from Malaysia to Shanghai is demarcated by the possibilities of “passing” as mainland Chinese.
In contrast, Lee sketches a teleology of socioeconomic advancement for the Zainichi Korean migrants in Pachinko,[14] from the low-wage work of matriarch Baek Sunja to the high-wage work of her grandson Solomon Baek. The history of the Zainichi Korean minority in Japan is fraught with uncertainty toward the possibilities of assimilation, one that traces its origin to colonial Japan’s attempts to integrate Korea as a “mimesis” of western imperialism.[15] This multi-ethnic ethos was repudiated under the establishment of the Alien Registration Law of 1947 in the aftermath of World War 2, which constructed Koreans migrants in Japan as ‘undesirable foreigners’ who could be forcibly repatriated.[16] While Sunja is forced into hawking under precarious conditions in Osaka, her grandson Solomon becomes an investment banker in Tokyo. Solomon’s positioning as a high-wage migrant worker is intended by his father, pachinko tycoon Mozasu,[17] to buttress against the Japanese discrimination against its Korean minority. Sunja arrives in Osaka under the force of colonial assimilation while her grandson Solomon is seen to have escaped as an economically mobile technocrat.
Sunja, the matriarch of Pachinko’s Baek family, and Phoebe, the ambitious migrant to Shanghai, experience migrations defined by a schism of the vocational identity, one represented by an enterprising capacity for reinvention. While Sunja responds to the contingencies of movement by finding culinary work, Phoebe moves from factory to secretarial work under the guise of a businesswoman persona. This is set in contrast to Justin, the Malaysian real estate developer, and Solomon, the Zainichi Korean investment banker, whose identities are stabilized by consistent transnational work, expatriate packages, and cultural fluidity. It is only under the pressure of their systems of work that their vocational identities begin to unravel, leading to a return of the difficulties of ethnic stability and assimilability. Herein, the interpolations between low-wage and high-wage migrants demonstrate the structural factors that enable geographical mobility.
As Zygmunt Bauman argues, “vagabonds” become “strangers” wherever they are; through constant movements, everywhere they go becomes their place, but eventually nowhere becomes their real place.[18] This estrangement from place, a habitat inscribed with a stable set of individual and familial affinities, serves as an extension of the Marxian alienation from the act of production, the self, and other workers.[19] While Zygman’s formulation pertains to forced migration, we may extend this categorization to the alienation encountered by all workers driven toward migration by economic imperatives. This sensation of estrangement is exacerbated under the disaggregation of the commodified subject, the precise moment of the psychic schism that creates an unraveling along discrete lines: nationality, vocation, and ethnicity.Through close analysis of these texts, I will examine the psychic ruptures embedded in these depictions of migration, which are fraught and inextricable from economic reality.
II. Reading Nationality
To begin to understand the paradigm of circular migration and the limitations it imposes on the naturalization of low-wage labourers, it is instructive to turn to the poetry of Shromik Monir and Zakir Hossain Khokan. Not only do their works demonstrate an awareness of a stultified subjectivity, but they make apparent the consequent sense of a geographical rupture along national lines. Defined as “the temporary, recurrent movement of people between two or more countries mainly for purposes of work or study,” circular migration clearly delineates the “home” country and the “work” destination as the places that the subject can or cannot feel “at home.”[20] The imposition of circular schemes on migrant labourers’ movements forces them to develop transnational identities, which contradicts a core principle of traditional nation-states.[21] Yet, amidst the paucity of economic opportunity at home, migrant workers persist, for as John Berger asserts,
It is not poverty alone that forces him to emigrate. Through his own individual effort he tries to achieve the dynamism that is lacking in the situation into which he was born.[22]
As transient workers from Bangladesh entrusted with work permits, Khokan and Monir are constructed by Singaporean labour policy as a flexible workforce that can be admitted or expelled based on the needs of the Singaporean economy. They are deprived of the right to seek permanent residency, marry a local citizen, or bear a child in Singapore.[23] The state’s enactment of biopower is penetrative, one that enters and regulates the body through the regulation of reproductive rights. Any awareness of the subjectivity of such migrant workers is submerged beneath the material work that they perform, whether in construction, in shipyards, or as domestic labour. This is worsened by the precariousness of their working conditions: many arrive in the country indebted to recruitment agents, injuries hinder the ability to work and create pressure to downplay their severity, and food is sometimes insufficient.[24] Singapore offers no minimum wage for its migrant population, little in the way of legislative protection, and union representation is limited.[25] The 2013 Little India Riot in Singapore, wherein 300 Indian and Bangladeshi labourers rioted in response to a fatal accident involving construction worker Sakthivel Kumaravelu, led to a vicious social media backlash.[26] The segregation of these migrant workers, whether physically in dormitories far from residential areas or discursively in the Singaporean cultural imaginary, has entrenched the vulnerability of the community. This was made evident by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, with workers affected disproportionately by viral transmission. As Singaporean writer Sudhir Vadaketh attests,
We create a parallel universe for them to inhabit, exclude them from official statistics (e.g. measurements of the Gini coefficient, or inequality), and just generally shut off any attempt to integrate them into society. We treat them at best as guests and at worst as expendable widgets.[27]
The establishment of the annual Migrant Worker Poetry Competition in 2014 has opened up avenues for workers to bear testament to the predatory capitalism, whose costs they suffer physically, and to resist and dismantle xenophobic sentiments. It is in their poetry that we find inscribed in the urban topography of Singapore the possibility of a contrapuntal reading: a discourse that pushes back against that of the state.
This legalized, enforced estrangement foregrounds Bauman’s conception of the vagabond as stranger. Mahbub Hasan Dipu expresses this in his poem “In Exile,” lamenting, “I am confined in a cell at- / 31, Street 2, Sungei Kadut.”[28] Monir and Khokan find an affinity with this notion of the “exile,” a familiar trope in the writing of such figures as Mahmoud Darwish and Adunis, detailing the anguish of a forced separation engendered by economic necessity. In his poem “I Am Sorry” (2015), Khokan transfigures himself as a painting “hanging on your spotless wall.”[29] He writes:
The subject of this painting:
Life in exile
Name:
The happy bird
(A beloved’s endearment
For a migrant worker)[30]
Khokan infuses his sense of distance with the melancholy of a fugitive, masked with the façade of a migrating bird’s freedom. This interplay of melancholic fatigue and outward ennoblement persists throughout the poem, particularly as the speaker cannot help but locate his lover in the images of the Singaporean cityscape: “and there you are at the cluster of households / the fun-filled playgrounds of the child.” [31] The limitations of translation into English from Bengali are apparent with his lines rendered, “To the left lies diffused the abir-covered evening / standing still at the doors of the stars.”[32] “Abir” is a Bengali word describing a particular reddish hue of the sky at dusk, rendering the unfamiliar in familiar terms. This artifice of aestheticization is punctured by the “old man” who describes of the painting, “The whole canvas dyed / in the tired eyes / of innumerable workers.”[33] The image of a gleaming cityscape that Singapore projects cannot mask the transient labour on which it was built. Though a migrant worker may find himself praised as a “Craftsman of civilization,” Khokan undercuts this by describing his persona as “Embarrassed,” “removing the picture,” saying “I am very sorry.”[34] The relationship between the stalwart migrant worker and the lover-in-exile attests to the ruptures in the migrant imagination, the clear imaginary bifurcation between home and elsewhere figured in terms of physical separation. Khokan describes this succinctly in the opening lines of “Pocket 2” (2014): “Still in the same world, we belong to different spheres / You on that side and me on this.”[35] Khokan’s estrangement, underwritten by a nostalgic yearning for home, simmers as a critique of the transient labour regime that governs his movements.
Where Khokan dwells on the melancholic ramifications of this psychic schism, Monir takes a more belligerent stance, envisioning a solidarity amongst Bangladeshi workers against the mythologizing of their labour. The cultural alienation that these workers experience is where Monir formulates an imagined, transnational singularity, albeit along the lines of nationality. In “Shromik (The Labourer)” (2015), Monir asserts:
the touch of your sweat has been erased
from the bricks of these mansions […] your image
will never surface in the cities crafted
like weaver birds’ nests.[36]
Like Khokan, Monir ironizes the impeccable image of Singapore by identifying its emergence as cognate with the erasure of migrant labour. The image of “weaver birds’ nests” alludes to a sense of intricacy in the construction of Singapore’s buildings and landmarks. Yet, this creative labour is swiftly undercut as Monir proclaims:
In this empire of pleasure
you will live in the dense loveless forest
with your inherited hunger[37]
Monir identifies the gross contrasts of the city, a bald juxtaposition of hedonism and isolation, of fullness and physical anguish. Monir presses on his critique of labour commodification by referring to the abuses suffered by other workers from Bangladesh, whether domestic or international. It is this linkage that points to the larger structures that endanger and dehumanize – that of a vicious capitalism he constructs as inimical to a patriotic subjectivity. He refers to “Aminul,” an organizer of garment workers in Dhaka who was killed and left “an unclaimed corpse by the lake.”[38] He alludes to “Ruhul Amin,” a naval engineer in Bangladesh killed during the 1971 war for independence, who lost “the right to touch the soil of your land.”[39] He refers to “Rana plaza.” a building that collapsed in 2013, and “Tazreen.” where a fire burned down a fashion factory in 2012.[40] In both instances, garment workers were killed because of their poor working conditions. To Monir, this feeling of the unhomely is engendered by the internal displacements caused by the demands of the global economy. Monir, nevertheless, couches this history of violence in the language of martyrdom, proclaiming “Ignoring your sweat and blood / the earth will shine in rainbow colours.”[41] Monir posits a redemptive possibility through the beauty that the sacrifices of the workers will yield.
For Monir and Khokan, a migrant subjectivity is characterized not only by the sensation of exile and displacement, but also by dispossession. The migrant worker’s labour will never be recognized, their positions erased in the grand scheme of Singaporean mythologizing, and a legitimized psychic amalgamation of Bangladesh and Singapore remains difficult to achieve.
III. Reading Vocation
Under the regime of circular migration, Monir and Khokan are attentive to the psychic schism between their home, Bangladesh, and their workplace, Singapore. The constraints imposed upon their identities, ones limited to their labour, result in a paralysis of the subjectivity. For Tash Aw and Min Jin Lee, however, their depictions of low-wage work resist the logics of circularity. This in part postures to the loose regulations faced by migrant workers in Japan in the early 20th century and China in the 21st century. What Aw and Lee identify is the meagre space in which their characters can partake in a vocational reinvention, driven by the exigencies of economic reality. Gender proves a helpful mode of analyzing the depiction of migrants whose labour remains situated in the market, the factory, or the spa, particularly owing to the preponderance of female workers in these sectors. Cultural assimilation is presented as being of pressing urgency amidst the precarity of these working conditions. While Malaysian Phoebe and Korean Sunja are initially intent on assimilation, their narratives conclude differently: Phoebe returns to Malaysia from Shanghai at the end of Five Star Billionaire while in Pachinko Phoebe stays on in Japan, her children becoming enmeshed in systemic discrimination.
Phoebe’s migration is linear, initially occurring within Malaysia before she moves to China. Her hometown is described as part of “a region that is poor and remote, so she is used to people thinking of her as inferior, even in her own country.”[42] She seems destined to replicate the trajectory of her fellow “young boys and girls” who “left school at sixteen: they travelled across the mountain range that cut [Malaysia] in two to find work on the west coast, moving slowly southward until they reached the capital city.”[43] Aw describes this in his novel We, The Survivors (2019) as “the restlessness that affects boys and girls alike when they reach a certain age and can’t stop thinking about being somewhere else.”[44] The assemblage of jobs available is enumerated: “Trainee waiter. Assistant fake-watch stall-holder. Karaoke hostess. Assembly line worker in a semiconductor factory. Bar girl. Shampoo girl. Water-cooler delivery man. Seafood-restaurant cleaner.”[45] The affixation of industry and commodity onto individual identity bespeaks the commodification of labour, as subjects are amalgamated with the goods and services they sell. The precarity of itinerant work accelerates the processes of readjustment. Each job demands a new set of skills and a new set of outward-facing behaviours, a constant remaking of the vocational identity.
The prospect of reinvention is exacerbated as Phoebe is enticed by her online contacts to move to China. “New China” is described as a place where “[n]o one asks too many questions, no one cares where you are from. All that counts is your ability. If you can do a job you’re hired.”[46] Where Malaysia’s New Economic Policy entrenches a material disenfranchisement for its underprivileged Chinese citizens in favour of the country’s Malay majority, the meritocratic artifice of Chinese capitalism presents an opportunity for mobility and reinvention. This expansive possibility, one that obscures national or racial origin, spurs Phoebe’s move to Guangdong, though she is left isolated and desperate upon realizing she has been swindled. The rupture in her conception of China is spatialized in the setting of the worker’s dormitory, where she finds herself after working at the “Guangdong Bigfaith Quality Garment Company.”[47] In a dormitory for female factory workers, Phoebe is described as seeing “their underwear strung up on washing lines in every room, even in the corridors, drying in the damp air.”[48] The cramped conditions of the dormitory confine the emotional tensions of the workers, creating a sense of physical and psychic claustrophobia. Aw fills out the aural dimensions of frustration by describing the “arguing and crying” and “night-time sobbing.”[49] In doing so, Aw captures the material difficulties that accompany the phenomenon of “maiden workers” in China, in which many young women flee their homes to evade arranged marriages, gain experience, save for dowries, or finance their educations.[50] Confronted by these desires, as well as long working hours and densely populated living conditions, it is evident that Phoebe’s ambitions surpass a continuation of menial work. This spurs a desire to “get away” as “she was not like them” and to make a clean break from the vocational identity of a garment worker.[51]
The final stage of Phoebe’s migratory telos, a reinvention as a businesswoman, occurs as she begins managing a spa in Shanghai. Her fixation with thriving in the China she envisions is facilitated by the guidance of crass self-help books, such as Why Men Love Bitches.[52] After fruitless hours spent on online dating platforms, she is finally courted by eponymous Five Star Billionaire Walter Chao. Despite “sharing a tiny room for so many months” with her roommate Yanyan, Phoebe fashions herself as an enterprising professional with Yanyan’s help, wearing “a long-sleeved shirt buttoned close to her neck for a demure look, balanced by a short skirt to suggest sexual availability.”[53] The intentional curation of appearance, one that carefully manipulates the gaze of the male viewer, is crucial to Phoebe’s construction of her desirability as a professional Shanghainese woman. The completeness of her charade is such that “she did not even have to pretend anymore; it felt as if it truly belonged to her,” allowing her to insist on being a “university graduate” of economics from “Guangdong who owns a whole chain of beauty spas.”[54] Herein Phoebe accedes to the archetype of the “can-do Shanghainese,” who Aihwa Ong describes as “constantly tweaking her individual talents in order to maximize her capacity to proliferate connections and access to power,” ready to “hustle, fix, and massage relationships among the worlds of global capital, communist politics, and guanxi ethics.”[55] [56] Her ruse is temporarily broken as they eat, with Walter remarking softly, “You’re guzzling your food just like the poor village girls where I grew up.”[57] By masking her Malaysian origins, Phoebe’s acculturation grants her the privilege of indigeneity, the ability to insist on her domestic wealth accumulation, and ascension on the social ladder.
To Phoebe, Walter represents the promise of the social etiquette that wealth provides as a Malaysian tycoon fluent in the norms of Eurocentric prestige. His ability to “[study] the wine list with attention” indicates to Phoebe his wealth and “foreign education.”[58] She exploits their relationship to absorb his social capital, accepting “his gifts of luxury handbags and Italian shoes and British raincoats and jewels from Hong Kong” and “offers of evenings at the opera and the ballet.”[59] She listens “carefully to his stories about getting lost in Rome and his description of the view from the Eiffel Tower” to “store them away for use one day when she was with […] her true soulmate.”[60] Coloniality haunts Phoebe’s conceptions of prestige, with European travel accounts, art forms, and luxury goods emblematizing material success. Phoebe enacts behaviours that Ong identifies of Shanghainese professionals: “self-cultivation and self-reflexivity,” as well as a “nimbleness in relation to globalized milieus, people, and knowledge.”[61]
Through Phoebe, Aw presents assimilation as crucial not only for economic subsistence, but also for social ascension. Though depicted as an “illegal worker,”[62] the lack of stringent regulation over migrants in China allows Phoebe to exploit her ethnic commonality with the mainland Chinese. In doing so, she denies not only her overseas Chinese subjectivity but also the shame of association with an unknown, backward town. The schism between her labouring Malaysian identity and glamourous Shanghainese identity must be maintained to satisfy her ambitions to accrue social capital, an amalgamation of mainland Chinese wealth and Eurocentric etiquette. It is an enterprise that the narrator regards with quiet bemusement and compassion, especially as its artifice begins to unravel. By the novel’s conclusion, Phoebe abandons the imperatives of reinvention after a drunken night spent with Walter. Aw writes:
Not only was she ashamed at her nonclassy behavior (all her books were clear that excessive consumption of alcohol was a huge barrier to attaining feminine elegance), she was also worried about what she had revealed about herself. She had not only lost face, she had lost control. That was the most worrying aspect of the evening—maybe she had given away too many clues that she was a liar and a fake, an illegal immigrant from a poor background and not the sophisticated girl he thought she was. It was so embarrassing to think that she might have divulged her secrets by accident […] Therefore, she no longer knew how she should behave with him, whether she should be shy or forthright, seductive and sexually wanton, or cool and educated.[63]
The puncturing of her businesswoman persona by her uncertainty toward her inebriated behaviour is enough to disturb her composure. The spectre of dishonesty lingers in the passage: “liar,” “fake,” and “secrets” are markers that limit the possibilities of her performative femininity. Aw returns Phoebe to her initial intention to “find someone who will love [her] and look after [her],” one that her acquisition of material and social capital was meant to serve.[64] The constant influx of migrants to Shanghai allows her to recognize that even upon quitting her job at the spa, “in Shanghai everyone is replaceable in an instant” and “[p]eople come here like explorers, but soon they disappear and no one remembers them.”[65] The anonymity enacted by the constancy of labour flows and the seeming dishonesty of her ruse leads her to sell “all her expensive clothes and handbags and shoes on the Internet and [use] the money to buy herself a plane ticket back to Malaysia.”[66] In Phoebe, Aw presents the reinvention demanded by naturalization, but also delineates the limits of its possibility, alluding to the incessant pressure enacted by the performance of vocational identity.
Lee’s depiction of feminized migrant labour in Pachinko similarly emphasizes an entrepreneurial process of reinvention. The circumstances under which Sunja, the novel’s matriarch, migrates are not informed by the rabid ambition of Phoebe. Rather, she is taken to be the wife of Baek Isak, a Zainichi Korean Christian minister, with marriage providing a means of protecting Sunja from social scorn. He explains, “[Sunja] is pregnant, and she has been abandoned by the father of the child. […] I think I should ask her to marry me, and if she says yes, I will take her to Japan as my wife.”[67] Their marriage functions as a sacrificial act of piety, a recognition of the patriarchal conditions of Korea and Japan. Their move to Osaka is rendered unstable after Isak is imprisoned for his insubordination to the Japanese government, leading Sunja to work to supplement her family’s income while living with Isak’s brother Yoseb and sister-in-law Kyunghee. It is here that a comment made by a market ajumma to Sunja proves prescient:[68]
Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. […] A good man is a decent life, and a bad man is a cursed life–but no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard. No one will take care of a poor woman–just ourselves.[69]
While working in her mother’s boardinghouse in 1932 before moving to Japan, Sunja is “put in charge of shopping,” following a familiar route to purchase “soup bones from the butcher,” and a few items from the market ajummas’ such as“cutlass fish, or plump sea bream.”[70] Upon moving to Osaka in 1939, Sunja’s vocational remaking as a hawker is governed by the desire to provide for her children. Amidst the precarious working conditions of a market, her sales tactics blend her simple Japanese with an overt ingratiation to her customers: “The most delicious kimchi in Ikaino! [71] More tasty than your grandmother’s! Oishi desu, oishi!”[72] Sunja is forced to satisfy a Japanese customer base, developing an “ability to sell” that “had given her a kind of strength.”[73] Herein, Lee links an entrepreneurial savvy to moral rectitude, portending the escalating accession to market demands across East Asia. The precarity of Sunja’s labour emerges from the volatility of raw ingredients and preparation processes, with “fermenting [taking] time” and cabbage spiking in price or being completely unavailable.[74] Sunja’s flexibility leads her to pickle “radishes, cucumbers, garlic, or chives” without “garlic or chili paste” because “the Japanese preferred those kinds of pickles.”[75] With garlic and chili being essential ingredients in Korean cuisine, this adjustment to local tastes signals an incipient hybridization. The physical danger presented by Sunja’s work is emphasized via descriptions of food preparation—the depletion of fresh produce by wartime scarcity leads her to prepare candy by using a “steel box” as a makeshift store and “[rolling] up her sleeves and [moving] the live coals around to circulate the air and reuse the heat.”[76]
Sunja’s eventual escape from these labour conditions comes in the form of employment at a yakiniku restaurant preparing banchan and kimchi.[77] This portends an unfavourable mode of assimilation, not into Japanese culture but into the marginality of Zainichi Korean culture. Sunja’s brother-in-law Yoseb laments:
First you make food to sell under a bridge by a train station, and now both of you want to work in a restaurant where men drink and gamble? Do you know what kind of women go into such places? What, next you’ll be pouring drinks for-?[78]
Within this axis of marginality, Koreans are constructed as “whores, drunks, or thieves,” stereotypes engendered by their exclusion from legal employment as “resident aliens.” Lee illustrates this through the character Yumi, whose family members fall within these stereotypes. Her mother is described as “a prostitute and alcoholic [who] had slept with men for money or drinks,” her father is referred to as “a pimp and violent drunk [who] had been imprisoned for his criminality,” and her half-sisters are “as sexually indiscriminate and common as barn animals.” To Sunja, for whom survival as a migrant is paramount, these identarian concerns remain peripheral. Their assimilation is driven by necessity, with a greater focus on the ruptures from a vocational past of domestic labour. While Phoebe’s narrative concludes with a return to Malaysia, Sunja is trapped by economic paralysis, a sharp distinction between circular and linear migration. It is a reality that Yoseb articulates:
If the Korean nationalists couldn’t get their country back, then let your kids learn Japanese and try to get ahead. Adapt. Wasn’t it as simple as that?[79]
IV. Reading Ethnicity
By understanding the overlaps between “foreignness,” race, ethnicity, and gender in relation to these depictions of low-wage migrant workers, [80] we are better positioned to unpick the ways in which high-wage workers remain insulated from their pressures. Their ethnic identities are necessarily submerged in favour of their stable vocational identities, a response to the demands of a globalized economy. Yet, these low-wage and high-wage workers remain mutually constitutive. As Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong observe,
Juxtaposed—in time, but not in space—to the rise of these unskilled and semiskilled laborers are the new transnational functionaries associated with the globalization of capitalist production, distribution, marketing, finance, and consumption. […] These transnational professionals and technocrats provide the managerial and other integrative competencies called forth by the organizational and technical innovations of flexibility. They have evolved new, distinctive lifestyles grounded in high mobility (both spatial and in terms of careers), new patterns of urban residence, and new kinds of social interaction defined by a consumerist ethic.[81]
This class of mobile professionals is represented by Justin in Five Star Billionaire and Solomon in Pachinko. Their ability to operate across contexts makes them ideal workers, capable of adjusting to varying market demands as governed by corporate imperatives. They move seamlessly from home to foreign market and back. This situates them within broader anxieties surrounding rampant wealth accumulation, one served by their cultural adaptability. Yet, there can be no understanding Justin, the Malaysian real estate tycoon, without an acknowledgment that his developments are brought to fruition by imported construction workers such as Shromik Monir and Zakir Hossain Khokan. Nor can we recognize Solomon, the banker, as separate from the feminized labour of his grandmother Sunja, both as hawker and his caretaker. Tash Aw asserts that the new Asian narrative of success is handy for westerners and Asians “because it gives us a sense of self-confidence that we are no longer these poor repressed people.”[82] Yet, Aw observes that this has created a society in which “to be anything but rich is in some way shameful.”[83] Justin must contend with the pressure of maintaining his family’s fortune by exercising financial acumen in a new city; Solomon’s ascension to a global elite after employment in an investment bank reflects his father Mozasu’s desire for his son to escape the strictures of Korean marginality in Japan. Solomon can make money in a way that is bereft of shame, unlike the wealth his father has accumulated from his pachinko empire. It is only in the crumbling of their white-collar jobs that the attendant vulnerabilities of migration are exposed in both characters.
The technocrat’s skills are meant to insulate them from xenophobia: Aw adroitly skewers this archetype through Justin’s real estate instincts. Justin assumes that ‘‘Shanghai would consist solely of shopping walls and plastic reproductions of its history, its traditional life preserved in aspic as it was in Singapore, where he went to school, or inherently Third World, like Malaysia, where he grew up,” or might be like “Hong Kong, where he had begun his career.”[84] In drawing similarities across these “overcrowded, overbuilt Asian cities,” Justin’s migratory imagination adheres to a financial structure, governed by the banality of homogenous property development.[85] Justin’s arrival in Shanghai situates him as a modern Chinese transnational subject, described by Ien Ang as “jetsetting businessmen criss-crossing the Asia-Pacific to enhance their commercial powers,” enticed by Beijing’s authorities to establish a “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”[86] Within the overlapping demands of wealth acquisition and familial obligation, Justin is positioned as the ideal worker, trained to see “a set of figures that represented income and expenditure” when looking at “a tower block” in order to thread together “disparate considerations such as location, purpose, and yield.”[87] Furthermore, Justin’s cultural fluency enables him to curate his image as he is interviewed by real estate magazines and is “invited to the best parties.” [88] These are taken in service of his ability to cut deals with his contacts and cultivate guanxi. Justin’s work ethic staves off broader considerations of his migrancy – his physical condition suffers as his “limbs ached, his mouth was dry all the time, and his head felt cloudy, as if set in thick fog on a muggy day.”[89] These somatic markers of exhaustion attest to the ideal of a neoliberal subject, with a capitalist logic automating bodily functions and vocational obligations. Aw writes, “Whenever he worked too much he got sick. But still he got up every morning, put on his shirt, went to meetings, studied site plans and financial models.”[90] Justin is constructed as the embodiment of instrumentalized labour, a pliant subject whose cultural fluency enables his transnational functionality and resists the diegetic ruptures induced by migration.
Similarly, Solomon is constructed by the needs of a globalized labour market as a culturally malleable subject in Pachinko. Growing up as a Zainichi Korean in Japan, he takes on a job as a banker in Travis Brothers, the “Japanese subsidiary of a British investment bank” working alongside “Brits, Americans, Aussies, Kiwis, […] South [Africans] and Western-educated locals.”[91] Solomon is the culmination of his father’s efforts to loosen the strictures of racialized shame. Earlier segments of Pachinko depict the discrimination experienced by his father Mozasu and uncle Noa because of their Korean origins. Their construction under Japanese law as resident aliens excludes them from stable employment, leading to their participation in either gangster activity or pachinko parlours, the latter being where Mozasu accrues his fortune. This shame is exacerbated by the pachinko industry’s links to organized crime, shady cash transactions, and the social stigma associated with gambling.[92] It is the assurance of capital that allows Mozasu to pursue Solomon’s liberation from domestic discrimination via his entry into a global corporate labour force. Mozasu determines that his son
should speak perfect English as well as perfect Japanese; he should grow up among worldly, upper-class people; and ultimately he should work for an American company in Tokyo or New York – a city Mozasu had never been to but imagined as a place where everyone was given a fair shot. He wanted his son to be an international man of the world.[93]
To Mozasu, multilingualism, an American university education, an idealized meritocracy, and the comforts of a banking career are insulating forces against an imbibed racial inferiority. The characteristics he envisions for his son are markers of a future-oriented cosmopolitanism, a refusal of the Japanese perception of Koreans as “an underdeveloped people trapped in the distant past.”[94] Cultural fluidity is tied directly to the ability to function within a system of global capitalism. Solomon’s commercial advantage redeems his racial hybridity: “[a]s a Korean Japanese educated in the States, Solomon was both a local and a foreigner, with the useful knowledge of the native and the financial privileges of an expatriate.”[95] Herein, Solomon’s flexibility across ethnic communities within Japan attains currency with his employers for its utility. Solomon’s industriousness is demonstrated through his “careful” taking of notes during a “strong presentation about the beneficial ways of structuring the mortgage” delivered by two banking directors seeking to help “heavyweight banking clients” purchase land to build a “world-class golf course” in Yokohama.[96] Solomon and Justin share an ability to operate within and without the cultural logics of the cities they subsist in as “migrants.” Their vocational stability and familiarity with Western etiquette underpins a stable subjectivity that resists commodification and racialization.
The failure of their real estate deals punctures the insulation of their stable vocations, exposing the fragility of the ethnic self. Their “foreignness” is emphasized in their failures, stressing a fundamental inclination toward xenophobia that ruptures their sense of cultural malleability. It is a return to the fundamental difficulty of migration: finding acceptance in a new “home.” The dismantling of Justin’s public persona is enacted by the castigation of his position as a Malaysian capitalist by online trolls. Seeking to preserve a heritage building his company plans to demolish, they emerge under a blog site “entitled DEFENDERS OF OLD SHANGHAI” and his secretaries show him “pages of angry commentary under the discussion thread: Save 969 Weihai Lu from destruction from foreign companies!!”[97] In a damning stream of comments, his critics write:
Justin Lim has been trained by his family to be uncaring and ruthless. From a young age he was already displaying these tendencies. Justin Lim is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, he smiles to your face but is ready to eat you up whole. […] Justin Lim will stop at nothing to fulfil his aims, he will crush you like he crushes insects.[98]
Justin’s real estate strengths are quickly subverted as avaricious and disingenuous. As Aihwa Ong describes, overseas Chinese businessmen like Justin are regarded by mainland Chinese as “opportunists and parvenus eager to enrich themselves while incidentally benefitting China.”[99] Confronted with these pressures, Justin disengages entirely, refusing to answer phone calls and emails, and retreats into his apartment. This sudden estrangement from China causes the spectre of home to emerge in his psyche. He imagines his parents “at the old house by the seaside at Port Dickson, where the breeze and the darkness would make the silence more tolerable, and the foamy hush of the waves could calm Mother’s nerves.”[100] It is an imaginary return to a literal home that provides comfort, a puncturing of the illusion of assimilation, and a reminder of the transitory and ethnically separate status of the migrant.
This question of an originary return is complicated in the case of Solomon, for whom Korea can never be his homeland, while Japan can only remain precariously so. He is forced to straddle the boundary of resident alien and migrant worker when his Korean Japanese malleability is turned against him. He enlists the help of family friend Goro to secure the property where “the eleventh hole [of the golf course] would be,” as its elderly Korean owner “didn’t mind selling it to a Korean.”[101] The revelation that “Matsuda-san, the old lady, is dead” leads his Japanese supervisor Kazu to accuse Goro of being involved “with the yaks.”[102] Kazu’s dismissal of Solomon is couched in the lexis of finance and objectivity. He remarks, “This comes as a great financial cost to the client, and it looks poorly for us as a premier banking company”, asserting that Solomon is not “being discriminated against.”[103] While Justin is repudiated over his alleged insensitivities toward local heritage as a foreigner, Solomon’s dismissal is stained by a discursive construction of Korean criminality in Japan. His return, ironically, is to the world of pachinko, the material identity his father sought for him to shed. Solomon’s insistence on remaining in the pachinko industry functions as a symbol of Korean Japanese hybridity, a cultural node wherein the Zainichi continue to survive. Spurned by the protections of the corporate labour market, both characters are forced to return to some conception of the homely, defeated by the psychic ruptures of their vocational and ethnic selves. Estrangement remains an inescapable reality.
V. Toward a cultural politics of estrangement
Construction worker, hawker, receptionist, real estate developer, banker. Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo. What we find consistent through these narratives is the inescapability of estrangement, of the vagabond made stranger, benchmarked against the exigencies of economic development. In retaining Asia as a point of anchorage, it becomes quickly apparent that the economic imperatives of Asia’s migratory regimes enforce an unravelling down to the most fundamental nodes of self-identification: nationality, vocation, gender, and ethnicity. Any attempt to describe a migrant reality is inextricable from economic reality, the basis on which circularity rests. What Khokan, Monir, Lee, and Aw demonstrate is the necessity of renegotiation in any new place, the articulation that comes from the process of self-definition within an itinerant scheme of movement. Herein, we are able to bridge the imagined spaces between menial and highly paid labour and critique their mutually constitutive positions, the inequalities that uphold the gleam of a capitalist Asian modernity, and the nervous conditions created by circular, unstable movement. It is in learning to read the inescapable feeling of estrangement beyond the discursive constraints of Euro-American immigrant narratives that we can understand the operations of “painstaking re-adjustments.”[104] To seek rebuttals to the discursive strains that condemn migrants as dirty, parasitic, and opportunistic, we must learn to expand our imaginative frames of reference and ultimately, engage productively with a cultural politics of estrangement.
Jonathan Chan graduated with a BA in English from the University of Cambridge in 2020. He will begin an MA in East Asian Studies at Yale University in 2021. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. This dissertation was prepared for Part II of the English Tripos under the supervision of Dr Christopher Warnes.
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[1] Jung Bong Choi, “Of the East Asian Cultural Sphere: Theorizing Cultural Regionalization,” The China Review 10, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 125.
[2] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, International Migration Report 2017: Highlights (New York: United Nations, 2017), 5, https://www.un.org/development/desa/publications/international-migration-report-2017.html.
[3] Choi, “Of the East Asian Cultural Sphere,” 127.
[4] Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 125.
[5] “psyche, n.”, OED Online, September 2007, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/entry/153848.
[6] Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 212.
[7] Chen, Asia as Method, 243.
[8] Samir Dayal, “Whose Asias?” in The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, ed. Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 342.
[9] Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Engendering International Migration: Perspectives from within Asia,” in Global and Asian Perspectives on International Migration, ed. Graziano Battistella (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014), 145-146.
[10] Yeoh, “Engendering International Migration, 149.
[11] Petra Weyland, “Gendered lives in global spaces” in Space, culture and power: New identities in globalizing cities, ed. Ayshe Öncü and Petra Weyland (London; Atlantic Highlands: Zed Books, 1997).
[12] Richard Angus Whitehead, ““this migrant soul enriches this earth”: Encounters with Migrant Bengali Poetry in Singapore,” Singapore Unbound, June 13, 2017, https://singaporeunbound.org/blog/2017/6/10/l8j7o5n9rdw6qbci6i0kkkpk0inf8r.
[13] Sherwin Mendoza, “Singapore’s Migrant Worker Poetry, Worker Resistance, and International Solidarity,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 14, no. 3 (2019): 2.
[14] Zainichi: Roughly translated to resident aliens.
[15] Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 425.
[16] Chikako Kashiwazaki, “The politics of legal status: the equation of nationality with ethnonational identity” in Koreans in Japan: Critical Voices from the Margin, ed. by Sonia Ryang (New York: Routledge, 2000; repr. 2006), 21.
[17] Pachinko: A form of pinball originating in Japan and played on an upright machine (OED); “pachinko, n.”, OED Online, March 2005, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/entry/135790.
[18] Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press. 1997), 92.
[19] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959).
[20] Workshop organizers, the European Commission and the Government of Mauritius, “Workshop on Creating Development Benefits through Circular Migration,” Global Forum on Migration and Development, 2008, 2, https://gfmd.org/files/documents/gfmd_manila08_contribution_to_rt2-1_workshop_mauritius_2008_en.pdf.
[21] Stephen Castles and Derya Ozkul, “Circular Migration: Triple Win, or a New Label for Temporary Migration?” in Global and Asian Perspectives on International Migration, ed. Graziano Battistella (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014), 40.
[22] John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experiences of Migrant Workers in Europe (London: Pelican Press, 1975; repr. 2010), 36.
[23] Mendoza, “Singapore’s Migrant Worker Poetry, Worker Resistance, and International Solidarity,” 2.
[24] Global-is-Asian Staff, “Safeguarding foreign workers in Singapore,” Global-is-Asian, July 4, 2019, https://lkyspp.nus.edu.sg/gia/article/foreign-domestic-workers.
[25] Michael Malay, “Singapore needs to address its treatment of migrant workers,” The Guardian, April 21, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2014/apr/21/singapore-address-treatment-migrant-workers.
[26] Devirupa Mitra, “India Appeals for Calm in Singapore,” The New Indian Express, December 10, 2013, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2013/dec/10/India-Appeals-for-Calm-in-Singapore-548234.html.
[27] Sudhir Vadaketh, “Singapore: Let’s not ignore the downtrodden; nor those who speak up for them,” New Naratif, April 9, 2020, https://newnaratif.com/journalism/singapore-lets-not-ignore-the-downtrodden-nor-those-who-speak-up-for-them.
[28] Sungei Kadut: the location of a number of worker’s dormitories in Singapore where, even in the best dorms, as many as 16 men are cramped into one room. Mahbub Hasan Dipu, “In Exile” in Migrant Tales: An Anthology of Poems by Migrant Bengali Poets in Singapore, ed. Zakir Hossain Khokan and Monir Ahmod, trans. Debabrota Basu (Dhaka: Morshed alam readoy, Babui Prokashoni, 2017), 49.
[29] Zakir Hossain Khokan, “I Am Sorry,” Migrant Worker Poetry Competition 2015, trans. Gopika Jadeja, Debobrata Basu, and Souradip Bhattacharya, https://www.singaporeworkerpoetry.com/copy-of-poets.
[30] Khokan, “I Am Sorry”.
[31] Khokan, “I Am Sorry”.
[32] Khokan, “I Am Sorry”.
[33] Khokan, “I Am Sorry”.
[34] Khokan, “I Am Sorry”.
[35] Zakir Hossain Khokan, “Pocket 2,” Migrant Worker Poetry Competition 2014, trans. Gopika Jadeja, Debabrata Basu, Shivaji Das, and Souradip Bhattacharya, https://www.singaporeworkerpoetry.com/2014-results.
[36] Shromik Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer),” Migrant Worker Poetry Competition 2015, trans. Gopika Jadeja, Debobrata Basu, and Souradip Bhattacharya, https://www.singaporeworkerpoetry.com/copy- of-poets.
[37] Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer)”.
[38] Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer)”.
[39] Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer)”.
[40] Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer)”.
[41] Monir, “Shromik (The Labourer)”.
[42] Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), 9.
[43] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 9.
[44] Tash Aw, We the Survivors (London: Fourth Estate, 2019), 74.
[45] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 9.
[46] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 11.
[47] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 13.
[48] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 13.
[49] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 13.
[50] Ching Kwan Lee, “Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control” in Ungrounded Empires The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 125.
[51] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 13.
[52] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 135.
[53] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 251-252.
[54] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 257.
[55] Aihwa Ong, “Self-fashioning Shanghainese: Dancing across Spheres of Value” in Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar, ed. Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 187; Guanxi: In Chinese contexts: a network of personal connections and social relationships one can use for professional or other advantage. (OED) “guanxi, n.”, OED Online, June 2016, Oxford University Press, http://www.oed.com/view/entry/47070883.
[57] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 259.
[58] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 256.
[59] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 261.
[60] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 261.
[61] Ong, “Self-fashioning Shanghainese,” 185.
[62] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 257.
[63] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 373-374.
[64] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 373.
[65] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 381.
[66] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 423.
[67] Min Jin Lee, Pachinko (London: Head of Zeus, 2017), 72.
[68] Ajumma (Korean: 아줌마), sometimes spelled ajoomma, is a respectful Korean word for a married or marriage aged woman.
[69] Lee, Pachinko, 30.
[70] Lee, Pachinko, 28-29.
[71] Kimchi: A Korean dish made of vegetables, such as cabbage or radishes, that are salted, seasoned, and stored in sealed containers to undergo lactic acid fermentation.
[72] ‘Oishu desu, oishi’ roughly translates to ‘It’s delicious.’ Lee, Pachinko, 179.
[73] Lee, Pachinko, 179.
[74] Lee, Pachinko, 179.
[75] Lee, Pachinko, 179.
[76] Lee, Pachinko, 180.
[77] Yakiniku: Meat grilled on a barbecue. Banchan: Small dishes of food served with cooked rice in Korean cuisine.
[78] Lee, Pachinko, 190.
[79] Lee, Pachinko, 192.
[80] Where race and ethnicity are typically used interchangeably, the distinction between the former as a biological construct and the latter as a descriptor of cultural identity is sharpened given the porosity of movement within Asia. For example, there remains an ethnic difference between the racially similar mainland and Malaysian Chinese, just as there is one between peninsular and Zainichi Koreans, or Bangladeshi migrant workers and South Asian Singaporeans.
[81] Donald M. Nonini, and Aihwa Ong, “Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity” in Ungrounded Empires The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
[82] Lisa Allardice, “Tash Aw: ‘It used to be that Asia was poor. “Asians are rich” is the new cliché’,” The Guardian, April 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/13/tash-aw-malaysian-author-shining-light-on-immigration-stories.
[83] Allardice, “Tash Aw: ‘It used to be that Asia was poor.’”
[84] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 23.
[85] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 23.
[86] Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2005), 78.
[87] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 23-24.
[88] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 25.
[89] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 30.
[90] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 30.
[91] Lee, Pachinko, 481-482.
[92] Simon Scott, “Ball and chain: gambling’s darker side,” The Japan Times, May 24, 2014,
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/05/24/lifestyle/ball-chain-gamblings-darker-side.
[93] Lee, Pachinko, 446.
[94] Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910-1945, 1st edn. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 89.
[95] Lee, Pachinko, 482.
[96] Lee, Pachinko, 493.
[97] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 34.
[98] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 36.
[99] Aihwa Ong, “Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism” in Ungrounded Empires The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 177.
[100] Aw, Five Star Billionaire, 153.
[101] Lee, Pachinko, 508.
[102] Yaks being short for yakuza. Lee, Pachinko, 508-509.
[103] Lee, Pachinko, 508-509.
[104] Yeoh, “Engendering International Migration”, 149.
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