Lai Wo

“The Intimate Risks of Agrarian Futures: Moral ambivalence within Gendered Labor Migration between Hong Kong and East Java”

Without infrastructural safeguards and viable employment opportunities in migrant-sending villages, rural Javanese women sojourn abroad in hopes to improve their family’s economic conditions. As many migrant women spend their most productive years abroad -- at times up to one or two decades -- their close family members and children bear the emotional and psychological costs of their absence, leading to fractured bonds at home. Two years of ethnographic research in Hong Kong and East Java with migrant women at different phases of their migratory trajectory -- those laboring abroad, returnees in sending villages, and aspirational migrants-to-be in training centers, revealed a range of seemingly impossible circumstances which demanded considerable moral calculation. In an ever-precarious world where economic opportunity often requires sacrifice across borders, my dissertation seeks to understand the competing internal, moral, economic, and existential deferrals one must make in order to sustain what is imagined to be a good life to come. In examining the decision-making process of choosing between staying home with family or laboring abroad for economic security, immediate expenditures or future-oriented savings, and personal expenses or charitable giving, my dissertation explores how Indonesian labor migrants navigate the ‘choiceless decisions’ (Aretxaga 1997) they face before departure, while abroad, and upon return.

Lai Wo is a PhD candidate in Anthropology.