Gendered Investments in Marriage Migration

This chapter discusses how Chinese women in the town of Xinghai navigated their marriageability. In doing so, it offers a picture of cross-border matchmaking practices that, due to differences in the local context, is distinct in a number of ways from Dongyang. In a community where it was socially expected that one should go to Japan, marriage migration to Japan had become a strategy and gendered site of investment for women. By paying expensive brokerage fees, many women actively produced the circumstances of their marriageability and commodified their marriage. But despite their active efforts, their sense of subjectivity within these processes remained unstable. This was due to the unequal and dependent nature of the mobility they engaged in, namely, marriage.

Crafting Legitimate Marital Relations

This chapter examines suspended and declined visa cases, analyzing how marital relations became sites of regulation. Some forms of migration depend on relatives as sponsors. Others rely on employers, an applicant's “skills,” or specific qualifications. Marriage migration, however, rests on a different manner of validating a legitimate entry. Certificates of residency and spousal visas are not simply issued based on an individual's status or attributes. To gain a spousal visa, what is important for the immigration officers is to inspect the kind of relationship presented in the paperwork. The chapter then illuminates the ways cross-border marriages came under suspicion and participants were forced to perform marital relationships that were more “ideal” and “normatively acceptable” than those expected of couples in Japan. Even if partners have chosen married life with one another, they still require the approval of the state.

Yen Or En?

This concluding chapter addresses the question of how have and do cross-border marriage practices come to be. In examining local–transnational dynamics, this question has revealed itself to be deeply intertwined with a second one: What makes others marriageable? For those involved in the processes of marriage migration between China and Japan, it was the tactical deployment of socially and historically created conceptions of proximity that rendered their partners marriageable. Such notions of proximity were locally created and shaped by deeper regional histories, but they also played important roles in mobilizing individuals to further partake in transnational flows. The chapter then offers some “afterward stories.” As these stories reveal, the issue of marriageability remained something with which participants continued to grapple, even within so-called happy marriages. Finally, the chapter discusses how shifting perceptions of global power dynamics have subsequently influenced the meanings associated with cross-border marriages and migration from China to Japan.