‘A Woman to Warm My Heart’: Low-Wage Mainland Chinese Migrant Men, Thrift and Desires for Intimacy in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been discussed largely in relation to migration to the West. Discussions of low-wage Chinese masculinities have similarly been limited, with a focus on rural-urban migration within China. Empirically, this paper aims to contribute by investigating Chinese masculinities outside of China but in a non-Western setting. The arrival of low-wage migrants from China into Singapore’s majority-‘Chinese’ population not only enables an investigation of the hierarchies of Chinese masculinities but also unsettles the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category. I consider low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men’s raced, gendered and classed subjectivities and show that low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore encounter dilemmas in their desires to seek intimacies beyond paid sex. I show that their dilemmas are informed by the discourse of respectable manhood and thrift, a discourse that is extended through a juxtaposition against Singaporean men.