Householding and split households: Examples and stories of Asian migrants to cities

Abstract

Given the central role of households in motivating and implementing migration, this paper argues that the “householding” and split-household approaches are fundamental and essential for migration research, by drawing from original research on rural-urban migrants in China and four published studies on Asian migrants. Translocality and household-splitting that enable the earning of remittances or help meet other family goals such as children's education, set in motion processes of gender and intergenerational divisions of labor that involve both the migrants and the left-behind, and have implications for urban development in large cities as well as cities near rural areas. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants in China circulate between their home villages and host cities, and large numbers of women from Southeast Asia work overseas. Likewise, skilled migrants from South Asia and East Asia maintain transnational households that straddle their home and host countries. Household biographies and interviewees' narratives from these examples highlight two strategies of migrants and their family members: their flexibility and frequent changes of location, work, activity, and household arrangement; and their reinventing women's and men's responsibilities without challenging traditional gender ideology. These stories underscore the importance of householding and split-households for informing contemporary migration theories and research.