The Road Less Travelled—Negotiating ‘Change’

Abstract

While most of the marriage migrants opted for domesticity and most of the professional migrants retained their professional careers after marriage and migration, some families beat the odds and opted for domestic and social arrangements atypical to their distinctive immigration pathways. This chapter focuses on the subset of ‘off-tracker’ families composed of homemaking professional migrant wives and working marriage-migrant wives who redirected their gender-role orientations throughout marriage and migration. It reveals the difficulties encountered by and reasons for Chinese-British inter-ethnic couples to re-orientate their family and social arrangements. The chapter also explores the strategies adopted by the ‘off-tracker’ families to overcome the confines of their baseline immigration pathways and change their life-course orientations at individual, familial and social levels.