Abstract
The Resilient Self is Chien-Juh Gu’s second book on Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. Building on the findings of her first book, Mental Health among Taiwanese Americans: Gender, Immigration, and Transnational Struggle (LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2006), The Resilient Self focuses on immigrant women from Taiwan. Gu bases her research on life history interviews with a snowball sample of 45 middle-class Taiwanese immigrant women and ethnographic observations, which took place over a seven-year period in the Chicago metropolitan area and western Michigan. Gu interviewed 33 Taiwanese immigrants who worked in a range of professional fields such as accounting and pharmaceuticals and 12 middle-class women who were working as homemakers in their own homes. About half of the participants had achieved a postgraduate degree, such as a MA or PhD. One participant had only a high school degree. All of the women except one, who was a permanent resident, had become U.S. citizens at the time Gu interviewed them.
Gu promises a novel theoretical perspective for migration studies by approaching her research participants with a lens on intersectionality and a sociology of self. Indeed, very few, if any, studies of women’s immigrant experience do either. By focusing on women’s lived experience, Gu draws out the tensions and contradictions these middle-class Taiwanese immigrants experience balancing Confucian cultural norms about gender roles and family with the women’s personal needs, their psychological health, and ultimately their sense of self. Gu uncovers a great deal of personal suffering—boredom, loneliness, lack of fulfillment, isolation, dissatisfaction, and abuse—that often also manifested into serious mental health problems, such as long-term depression, among many of the participants. Gu’s findings contrast with the common narrative in immigration research that women are freed from many of the obligations of their patriarchal home cultures after migration to the United States, for example, when women enter the workforce and can consequently assert some financial and social independence within their family lives. Gu finds the opposite among her study’s participants. The obligations of a patriarchal Confucian culture, in which women are taught to care for their families’ needs above their own, for the large majority of these women, increased as a result of the migration experience. Their middle-class status and initial inability to transfer their education, skills, and careers to the U.S. context meant that they did not need to become employed or that their employment was perceived by their husbands and parents-in-law as trivial or secondary at best. Gu names this experience “housewifelization,” an unfortunately awkward term. In this section, Gu misses the opportunity to theorize this point in intersectional terms that show how class and gender together shape this particular experience.
As Gu explores these women’s histories, experiences, and feelings, she identifies and names a multitude of selves represented in these women: the American self, domestic self, lost self, capable self, imagined self, and silenced self. For instance, chapter five highlights how a patriarchal Confucian culture binds the women to strict gender roles that silence them and render them invisible—the invisible self—in the face of their parents-in-law’s expectations. The pain, suffering, and mental illness the women experience owing to this Confucian family relation is one of the book’s most important contributions to immigration research. However, Gu never explains more than the appearance of these selves in the participants’ narratives, and we are left wondering how one might begin to theorize about them. Although Gu’s novel framing is compelling, unfortunately, the book often falls short of achieving its promise.
Gu also misses the opportunity to explore women’s experiences of gender discrimination in Taiwan and the United States. A number of participants reported that their hopes and expectations about American society had been shattered but also that Taiwanese society does not offer the kind of mobility that American society does. Gu’s interviews beg the question of how these women would respond to gender discrimination in Taiwan and to a patriarchal Confucian culture that exerts enormous control over the actions and lives of daughters-in-law.
The Resilient Self contains many fascinating vignettes about the experiences of Taiwanese immigrant women in the United States. It also highlights the effect immigration can have on the mental health of women. The book is worth reading for these aspects alone. Its theoretical framing as a sociology of self and study of intersectionality, while unfulfilled, holds promise for future work in migration studies. The book would appeal to undergraduate and graduate-level students and mental health practitioners working with immigrant populations.