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. Reflecting on her academic journey, in Part 1, Professor Lan discusses how her research on migrant workers has evolved over the years. She also offers insightful analysis of how migrant workers navigate the changing landscape of Taiwanese society during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The interview was conducted online in English and has been edited for clarity.

Interviewed and edited by P. Tsui and S. Chung

Taiwan Gazette: You obtained your bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology at National Taiwan University before completing your Ph.D. at Northwestern University. Then, you returned to Taiwan upon finishing your postdoc at UC Berkeley. How does this transnational academic journey impact your interests and approach as a sociologist?

Pei-Chia Lan: In general, the experience of moving back and forth helped me to see each part of the world with a perspective of what Patricia Hill Collins calls the “outsider within.”[1] Before I went to the U.S., I didn’t really know anything about migration or race. At that time, these topics were not in everyday or academic conversation in Taiwan. I didn’t have much personal experience with these topics either. But after moving to the U.S., I became a migrant myself, and I encountered experiences like microaggression on an everyday basis. For example, random people on the street would make fun of my Asian eyes. And Northwestern was a predominantly white campus. I remember once I was taking a class on feminist theory. I was one of the few minority students in the class, and probably the only international student in that class. So, whenever we talked about Third World feminism,[2] everybody would look at me and expect me to say something brilliant. It was a shocking experience for me. For the first time, I realized I am a “Third World woman.”

These visceral experiences prepared me to research and made me want to understand further the issues related to race and migration, especially in global and transnational contexts. While I studied racial theories in the U.S., I also found them alienating from my own experience. So, I think the problems are what migration scholars call “methodological nationalism.”[3] This reflection has always been a very important standpoint of mine. I wanted to bring in the global or transnational sociology framework to look at whatever topics I study.

In general, I am grateful that I received training in Taiwan before moving to the U.S. I finished my master’s degree and wrote a master’s thesis before I went to the U.S. It prepared me with basic sociological knowledge. So, I had the confidence to converse with American sociology. But I also learned a lot in the U.S., and after I moved back to Taiwan, those experiences also prepared me to bring a global and transnational perspective to look at Taiwanese society.

Taiwan Gazette: Since your Ph.D. study on migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, you have engaged in the studies of gender, family, migration, and work for more than 20 years. Can you share what has motivated and kept you passionate about studying these topics for over two decades?

Pei-Chai Lan: It took me almost a decade to finish researching, writing a dissertation and publishing the book, that is, Global Cinderellas (2006, Duke University Press). After that, I was tired of the topic (laugh). I wanted to move on to something different. That is why I started research on parenting. But later, I realized that I could bring a refreshing perspective to the study of families, parenting, and class inequality by emphasizing globalization and transnationalism. So, that’s how I wanted to depart from my previous research, but in some way, the topic also brought me back to the direction of theoretical continuity. Overall, I would describe my academic interest as the micro-politics of everyday life of social inequality, which could be gender and racial inequality. That’s the most salient in Global Cinderellas. But in my recent work on parenting, class inequality is probably more salient. Despite all these different empirical topics, I think there is a continuity in my research direction, concerns, and interests.

Lan, P. C. (2006). *Global Cinderellas: Migrant domestics and newly rich employers in Taiwan*. Duke University Press.

Taiwan Gazette: It has been 16 years since the award-winning Global Cinderellas was published. You revisited the book in the new preface when the book was reprinted in 2018, in which you critique the linear models of “global care chains” and “filial care chains” and propose to replace them with the concept of “global care circuits.” Four more years have passed now. Do you have any more renewed thoughts on the book?

Pei-Chai Lan: When I look back at Global Cinderellas, I think I was much younger and probably more critical. I think some arguments I made there are still quite valid today, but at that time, I saw the world in a much more black-and-white way than I do now. For example, those concepts I used imply a linear process of emotional exploitation. But now, I will see more interdependence or inter-exchange with the acknowledgment of power dynamics and inequality between employers and workers.

So, after writing Raising Global Families, I decided to revisit the topic of migrant care workers. Recently, I published two articles from that project. One article (in Comparative Migration Studies) compares Taiwan’s policy regime with Japan, which recently opened channels for care migration. The other article (in Asian and Pacific Migration Journal) focuses more on the condition of migrant workers in Taiwan during the pandemic. I think these recent studies have demonstrated the changing situation in Taiwan and partly in Asia in general.

Let me start by talking about the comparison with Japan. I think it is interesting to do comparative research because it brings a refreshing perspective to push you to reconsider what you may have taken for granted. For example, most care workers in Taiwan are hired as live-in workers. They live together with employers in private households. And people tend to see that as an ideal arrangement from the employers’ perspective. They could provide standby service. They played the role of surrogate family and helped employers, the adult children, to subcontract filial piety. That’s what I talked about in Global Cinderellas. But when I look at Japan, things are different.

Japan’s policy prohibits migrant care workers from working in private households. They could only be hired in institutions such as hospitals or nursing facilities. And for them, it is unthinkable to have a foreigner living together in a private home. And they also have a lot of consideration about whether a migrant woman can adequately perform the duty of care, which they consider a cultural practice. That’s something very different from the situation in Taiwan.

So, it pushed me to reconsider what care work is and how different host societies reconcile the contradiction between ethnic differences and care work as a cultural practice. Taiwan and Japan have offered very different policy solutions to this conundrum. The comparison is empirical in nature, but it also brings out theoretical questions about care work, especially the global outsourcing of care work we see in contemporary times.

Another significant change in migrant workers’ conditions in Taiwan right now is that the power dynamic, especially in the labor market, has shifted. If you look at Global Cinderellas, the employers had much more bargaining power. But right now, partly because of the labor shortage, which started before the pandemic, and partly because of the opening up of labor markets in South Korea and Japan, people can go to other places for higher salaries. The pandemic further increases the labor shortage in Taiwan, as new hires cannot enter because of the border closure.

At the same time, the manufacturing sector faces a severe labor shortage, partly because of the rising global demand for chips and related products. The I.T. industry is open to getting workers from the care industry, something they would not consider before. But right now, they will be happy with whoever can fill the labor shortage. So, during the pandemic, a significant number of migrant care workers tried to transfer to the manufacturing sector, which offers a better salary and better working and living conditions. Some care workers also bargained with their employers. They would say, “oh, if you don’t raise the salary, we will seek a transfer.”

Overall, the working conditions have been improved to some extent, and you can see that the power dynamics between employers and workers have become quite different. It was a buyer’s market before, but now you can almost say it’s a seller’s market. Migrant workers have increased their bargaining power in the process. I think the situation will continue even though the border has opened. Now, they can bring in more new hires. But in the long run, I see that a labor shortage in the migrant worker market is unavoidable. That being said, the whole society, Taiwan and elsewhere, cannot assume that they can always rely on cheap migrant labor to provide live-in care to the problems of the deficit of elderly care. Seriously, the current system is not sustainable. We need to reconsider or redesign the whole system of long-term care.

Luodong Night Market during the pandemic. Image credit: Lisanto on Unsplash

Taiwan Gazette: Your recent publications discuss how the COVID-19 control measures have shifted the borders and impacted the mobilities of migrants in Taiwan. Can you tell us what the “politics of sanitization” is, and how you think it might affect foreign workers in Taiwan?

Pei-Chia Lan: In a special issue I co-edited with Yuk Wah Chan at the City University of Hong Kong, we discuss four dimensions of the theoretical framework of “the politics of sanitization.” The first dimension is about sanitizing space and borders, which is related to border control measures during the pandemic. The second one is the stigmatization and sanitizing of migrants’ bodies. It focuses on health checks and intensified surveillance of domestic and care workers.

The third dimension refers to sanitizing ethnic borders and national bodies. One of the good examples in our special issue is Vogt and Qin’s article on Japan.[4] In Japan, they didn’t have intensive measures regarding COVID-19 prevention and sanitization. But they did mark a clear boundary between the native and the foreigner. They imagined that the Japanese would be much better at self-discipline and follow all the sanitizing protocols. In contrast, foreigners were imagined as being incapable of acquiring a similar disposition to clean and sanitize themselves.

The last dimension, which is the most interesting dimension from my perspective, is reorganizing the borders of sanitization and social membership. Like the migrant workers in Taiwan, despite the surveillance during the peak of Taiwan’s COVID outbreak, that is, the semi-lockdown we had for around three months, migrant workers were subjected to more limitations in terms of their physical movements. However, we also see some silver lining in the whole condition, such as the improved working condition and the possibility of a transfer to better jobs that I mentioned earlier.

The pandemic brings people to realize that no matter what skin color, migration status, or citizenship status you have, we are all part of the community. Effective public health governance must include all residents if a sanitary whole is to be maintained. That is why migrant workers, including the undocumented ones, were offered masks, vaccines, and medical care for COVID-19. This brings us to realize how much migrant workers serve as essential workers in maintaining the reproduction of the whole society.

[1] “Outsider within” is a core concept of Black feminist thought. African American sociologist Patricia Hill Collins explains that Black women in domestic work traditionally occupied an “outsider within” location, as they have profound knowledge of the white families they cared for, while they would never become a part of the white families. This peculiar marginality offers Black women a unique standpoint to understand the dominant ideologies in America. Similarly, Collins finds Black women intellectuals are “outsiders within” in academia, and their marginality allows them to have unique insight into intellectual, social, and political issues.

[2] Third World feminism emerged in the 1990s as a response to mainstream second-wave feminism, which assumed that all women everywhere are oppressed in the same way. Third World feminism rejects this false universalism and emphasizes the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression and resistance.

[3] In the article “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration” (2003), Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller define methodological nationalism as “the naturalization of the global regime of nation-states by the social sciences” (p.576). The concept refers to how researchers uncritically treat nation-states as natural units of society and cut off any social life beyond state borders from their analyses.

[4] Vogt, G., & Qin, S. (2022). Sanitizing the national body: COVID-19 and the revival of Japan’s “Closed Country” strategy. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 31(3), 247-269. https://doi.org/10.1177/01171968221125482

Read Part 2 and Part 3 of the interview here.