ABSTRACT
Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo has received great acclaim for portraying the social suffering and alienation that accompanies the Singapore Story of material economic success through a domestic soap opera plot about a boy growing up in a middle-class nuclear family. Whereas the Bildungsroman privileges the bourgeois conjugal family as the site for the cultivation of the universal ideals of humanity, Chen’s film suggests that a new familial structure created by transnational labor migration can cultivate ideals that transcend the exploitation of socioeconomic class in global capitalism. This chapter argues that the film’s sentimental portrayal of a transnational conjugal family structure is an ideological mystification that prevents a more searching examination of the economic inequalities of the international division of labor.
