We are pleased to discuss with Professor Lan her research on migrants, parenting, and second-generation children in Taiwan. 

Professor Lan is the Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Asia Research Center at National Taiwan University (NTU). Her research focuses on migration and globalization, the sociology of gender and the sociology of work. She is the author of Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (2006), which won the 2007 Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2007 ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars. She is also the author of Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the U.S. (2018).

The interview is published in three parts. Part 2 focuses on Professor Lan’s study on parenting. She shares her framework of transnational relational analysis, which overcomes the pitfall of methodological nationalism, and her experiences publishing her parenting study in English and Chinese.

The interview was conducted online in English and has been edited for clarity.

Interviewed and edited by P. Tsui and S. Chung
Cover Image:
Lan, P. C. (2018). Raising global families: Parenting, immigration, and class in Taiwan and the US. Stanford University Press.
藍佩嘉. (2019). 拚教養: 全球化, 親職焦慮與不平等童年. 春山出版.

Taiwan Gazette: In 2018 and 2019, you published two books, Raising Global Families (2018, Stanford University Press) and Struggling to Raise Children (Pin Jiao Yang《拚教養》) (2019, Spring Hill Publishing), one written in English and the other in Chinese. Can you share with us how you planned for these book projects?  

Pei-Chia Lan: These two books are positioned very differently. It is not just the language, English and Chinese. I also targeted these two books toward different audiences. Raising Global Families is written primarily for academic readers, and Pin Jiao Yang focuses more on lay readers. And in fact, they are not identical copies. Raising Global Families includes the study of immigrant families, which I conducted in Boston, U.S. Pin Jiao Yang focuses on Taiwan, which has a more detailed report about different groups of families in Taiwan.

I did not plan for this from the very beginning. As I mentioned earlier, research is really a journey that involves a lot of contingency and uncertainty. Initially, I had a very vague idea about what I was doing. I just wanted to do something very different from migration and care work, and the departure [from my earlier research focus] was very unthoughtful. I read Annette Lareau’s Unequal Childhood (2011). The situation in Taiwan seems different, and I want to know more about the similarities and differences. That was how I started the project.

In the beginning, it was very much a project that focuses on parenting and inequality. Later, I became aware that the transnational dimension of the globalization context is very significant in the research. I realized that that’s probably the selling point of this research, especially for the international audience. It’s not enough to talk about class inequality. You have to bring out your case’s unique and theoretically promising aspect.

Then I got a fellowship at Harvard and spent a year there. Again, I did not have the idea of conducting comparative research at all. It’s funny, like, when we read people’s work, it all seems like people have been very thoughtful about what they want to start with, but in most cases – at least in my case – it’s not like this. When I went to Harvard, I thought that, since I was there, I should probably make some site comparisons. I could talk to immigrant parents to see how their childrearing practice is similar to or different from people in Taiwan. I started conducting some research, and I found that fascinating. So, the comparison grew and became much more substantial.

In the beginning, the project was mainly about the middle class. But later I thought I also wanted to include the working class. I started approaching the NGO in Chinatown and also did observation in a parenting workshop in Chinatown for working-class immigrants, who were mostly from mainland China. That’s how the project evolved and became a complicated comparative one.

Taiwan Gazette: Can you share more about why you included a comparison between Chinese American families and Taiwanese families in Raising Global Families, but focused only on the Taiwan context in Pin Jiao Yang?

Pei-Chia Lan: When I wrote the English-language book, there was simply not enough space to present nuanced research findings about Taiwan. And international readers are probably not very interested in the empirical details of Taiwan’s case. But I do think that that is very important for the local readers. So, considering the conversation in Taiwan, especially with lay readers, I need to expand sufficiently on how class inequality and urban/rural inequality matter in childrearing practice in Taiwan. These are not very exciting academic points, but they are important for local readers, especially lay readers.

Also, in writing Pin Jiao Yang. I tried to make the book more accessible. I should first talk about the Chinese version of Global Cinderella, Kua Guo Hui Gu Niang 《跨國灰姑娘》 (2008, Flâneur Culture Lab / 2011, Jilin Publishing Group). The English and Chinese versions are almost equivalent. It was not the translation, but it’s very similar, right? I did not reorganize the chapters; I simply made them more readable, like putting more theoretical discussion or literature review in the footnotes. When I wrote that Chinese-language book, I was not expecting that the book would have a greater impact on the public.

So, the result was very surprising to me. Kua Guo Hui Gu Niang sold more than 10,000 copies, which is a lot in Taiwan and in the Chinese-speaking world. To be honest, that is pretty amazing for an academic book. I also got a lot of feedback from people outside of academia. I remember I read somewhere that a flight stewardess read the book and talked about how it changed her perception of migrant workers. She actually served many of them on flights.

That experience made me realize that academics could have an impact on society and the public. And I regret that I did not try harder to make Kua Guo Hui Gu Niang more accessible. That is why when I worked on the project on parenting, that was something I decided very early on. I decided that the Chinese version of the book would target the general public, and I should try harder this time to make it more accessible. When you read Pin Jiao Yang, you will see the narratives or people’s stories are put more forefront, and I want people to have a more empathetic understanding of different groups of parents. They are struggling with their anxiety. I have learned that from the previous project, and I hope I have done better this time. Pin Jiao Yang also is selling quite well. It has sold more than 10,000 copies as well, so far.

Taiwan Gazette: You also put forward a “transnational relational analysis” in your book Raising Global Families. Can you share what relational analysis means in your transnational research on the formation of global families?

Pei-Chia Lan: Even in Global Cinderellas, I have pretty much applied the framework of relational analysis. I talked about different kinds of employers, how they talked about boundary work, and how they situated themselves in relation to other employers and migrant workers. This is a theoretical framework that I have always enjoyed and find beneficial.

But I think in Raising Global Family, the transnational framework is even more important. Especially when you look at parenting studies in the U.S. or the West, they tend to see society as a given unit of analysis. They talk about class mobility and social mobility, mainly within the framework of nation-states. But in Asia, people’s discussion of their children’s future and social mobility is always situated in a transnational context. When parents think about how to raise their children, they always have a transnational reference group whose members do not have to be someone they actually know. The transnational reference group members could be someone they imagined to be the ideal parents or bad parents. I think that encapsulates the transnational relational analysis I mentioned. It is a reference framework that is situated in the broader context of globalization and transnationalism. Without this, we cannot understand parents and society properly today, especially parents in the Global South. To some extent, it is also applied to middle-class parents in the Global North.

Read Part 1 and Part 3 of the interview here.