ABSTRACT
Studies on ethnic minorities in Hong Kong have focused either on their cultural traditions or more recently on their plight as victims of social exclusion. This chapter departs from both approaches but instead stresses the internal complexity of the minority community, as well as the multi-determined structure of migrant experience and its interface with individual agency. Specifically this chapter examines the experience of Indian women migrants as they struggled with the simultaneity and liminality of being Indian in contemporary Hong Kong society. The discussion focuses on how women migrants engaged with transnationalism through everyday practices in doing marriage and family duties, in particular through the reproduction and adaptation of traditional resources such as ethnic foodways and religious practices. The chapter analyzes how these factors contributed to the process of reconciling identity anxieties both as individual women and as members of a minority group in a predominantly Chinese society.
