ABSTRACT
As part of the disaporic strategies by Malaysian Chinese, transnational reversals are gendered, for by and large they are undertaken by men.11 Labor sojourning in Japan and Taiwan is almost exclusively the sphere of young working-class Chinese men, who thereby affirm the privileges of male mobility in contrast to the spatial constraints imposed on workingclass women in general and on the women they know and have relationships with in particular. Among the workingclass Chinese I knew in Penang, the familistic regime dictates that urban Chinese laboring women are to be confined to local spaces-to their natal residences while engaged in various forms of “homework” (such as sewing garments for piecework contractors) or to the nearby factories of local small-scale businesses or of the export-processing zones. Thus surveillance of them by older family members, if not continuous, takes place daily; this is true even when women move to other cities and towns for employment, for most live with older relatives already residing there (see Strauch 1984, 70). Younger working-class women not so confined because not under the control of families men or older women are “bad” women, and leave (or are ejected from) their families, typically moving to urban locales elsewhere. In contrast, some older women, no longer nubile and usually separated from husbands or widowed, have undertaken labor sojourns as domestics in Australia, but not in large numbers.
