Thai daughters, English wives: A critical ethnography of transnational lives

Abstract

By the year 2000, significant numbers of Thai women had begun to migrate to England as wives of Englishmen. The chapter tells their story and reveals how their life trajectories have been deeply structured by a number of interconnecting forces beyond their control. However, at each stage in these trajectories, key qualities of the women's characters have played a pivotal role: characteristics of discipline, skill and deep loyalty. The research traces the interplay between the powerful structuring influences and impressive forms of agency. The research is informed by the meta-theory of strong structuration theory combined with more substantive, subject-specific, theoretical perspectives in the spheres of poverty, gender and class; domestic and international migration; and transnationalism in the age of globalisation. The empirical research is framed by the secondary literature and, more directly, by fieldwork data collected in semi-structured interviews and 3 years of participant observation with 40 Thai wives of Englishmen. All the research participants live in a single, medium-sized, English town of around 200,000 inhabitants. The explication of the women's lives is presented in two main parts. The first part looks at the wives' lives prior to marriage migration. The focus here is on their structured experiences as poor rural Thai women and the decisions of many to enter sex work. The second part focuses on the limited assimilation of the Thai wives in England. Two sets of practices are paramount here. The first concerns the relative narrowness and confinement, or compression, of their lives in the UK. The second concerns their participation in a stretched transnational community. The mobilisation and deployment of their status as -English wives' gives them respectability among their networks in Thailand and serves to counter their limited assimilation in the UK.