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Volume 89 – No. 1

BORN OUT OF PLACE: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor | By Nicole Constable

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xvii, 259 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28202-5.


Nicole Constable has produced another compelling ethnography about gender and migration. Her 1997 classic Maid to Order in Hong Kong explores domination and resistance of foreign domestic workers (FDW). Romance on a Global Stage (2003) examines the landscape of desire and power in women’s and men’s pursuit of cross-border marriage. Born Out of Place is a sequel that weaves the critical threads of her previous studies to look into the experience of Filipina and Indonesian FDWs who became pregnant, gave birth and struggled to mother in Hong Kong.

FDWs in Hong Kong are granted local residency on the condition of a labour contract, and are deprived of the right to family unification. Although they may stay in Hong Kong for as long as decades, they are not entitled to permanent residency, and their Hong Kong-born babies are rarely given the right of abode, either.

Born Out of Place demonstrates a range of experiences: some women chose abortion or gave the baby away for adoption, while others struggled to raise the child by themselves or with their partners. Their migratory status and tactics of survival also vary, from those who sought legal residency through marriage or employment, to those on the less privileged spectrum who filed refugee or torture claims but mostly failed in their applications eventually. During their extended period of stay in Hong Kong, they made ends meet by locating low-paying illegal work, including camping in line for the release of iPhones.

The thousands of migrant babies are numerically limited, compared to the total number of FDWs in Hong Kong (about 300,000 in 2012). Some activists have therefore dismissed this as a “tiny little problem.” And yet, Constable has successfully argued that this small problem can speak to large theoretical questions and reveal wider structural paradoxes.

First, this book poignantly reveals the human costs and social injustice of temporary labour migration. The “guest worker” regime places migrant workers in a condition of what Agamben calls “bare life”: they are denied the needs to fulfill their sexual lives and union with family members. Some migrant women desire children to gain some stability in their transitional life, but their pregnancy paradoxically pushes them into a more precarious condition. Although they are legally entitled to maternal leave, their employers tend to terminate the contract, leaving many jobless and undocumented.

Second, Constable vividly demonstrates that the intimate life hidden in the glamorous global city is shadowed by power inequality and moral ambivalence. Although the book focuses on the experiences of migrant women, Constable made a concerted effort to hear the voice of men. Hong Kong is a meeting place for Western tourists, African traders, and South Asian asylum seekers and undocumented workers. Many of these men, as well as local Chinese residents, become “boyfriends” to the FDWs, a term blurring into “a sort of customer, client, or benefactor relationship” (129). Migrant women seek what they call “Hong Kong happy” to escape the patriarchal constraints at home, but they still aspire to the moral legitimacy of marriage. Some bear the consequence of pregnancy because “not using contraception is associated with trust, hope and intimacy” (133).

Finally, the book shows the bitter reality of family alienation and circular migration as an unfortunate and unexpected consequence of labour migration. Constable revisited these women in Indonesia and found that many had become alienated from their natal family and left their children to work overseas again. She coins the concept “the migratory cycle of atonement” to describe how the moral stigma associated with single motherhood and foreign-born children, coupled with the difficulty of earning sufficient wages back home, tends to push women to reenter the migratory cycle. They hope to redeem themselves by converting their earlier moral failure to a steady flow of remittance, which is nevertheless earned in the face of bare, stripped-down lives.

Constable made a conscious decision to write in an accessible, story-telling manner. She is not shy about her passion and sympathy for these migrant women, or her position as a politically engaged feminist-ethnographer-activist. This helps her to delve into migrant women’s underground lives and unsettled feelings, and also enriches this book with touching life stories with telling details. Such a format, however, leaves academic readers like me hungry for further theoretical analysis. Perhaps the expansion of a concluding chapter can tease out issues such as the circuit between paid and unpaid reproductive labour across multiple spheres, the intersecting inequalities of race, gender, and class in multiracial intimacy, and the research implications for policy and activism.

This book is an ideal assignment for courses about gender, migration, citizenship or globalization in anthropology, sociology, and Asian studies. It would also interest lay readers who are concerned about the vulnerability of disposable labour and the persistence of humanistic values in an era of global migration.


Pei-chia Lan
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan


Last Revised: May 30, 2018
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