Migrant Intimacies in the “Land of Opportunity”: Navigating Race, Class, and Status in Hong Kong’s Entertainment District
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1970s, Southeast Asia women have turned to outward labour migration to Hong Kong to enhance their economic livelihoods. However, while their overseas work afforded the possibility of improved material conditions back home, migrants face an array of ethnic, classed, and gendered subjugations during their temporary placements abroad. Hopeful for futures beyond domestic labour, some migrant workers engage in intimate exchanges with Euro-American expatriate men in Hong Kong’s entertainment district in Wanchai. Indeed, these relations do not entirely offset their ethnic and classed minoritization. But, becoming short-term partners, long-term girlfriends, or eventual wives provide alternative pathways for navigating their disenfranchisement as racialized labourers relegated to the city’s spatial and legal peripheries. Comparably, their expatriate male partners also conveyed their own subjective experiences of dislocation and suffering due to employment redundancy, aging, and past separations. Ethnographic research examining the intimacies forged between these two groups of foreigners in Hong Kong—Southeast Asian migrants seeking better futures, and Euro- American men healing from past employment and emotional traumas—reveal opportunities for expanded aspirational capacities, broadened orientations to the future, and alternative gendered subjectivities. This article explores how the intimacies fostered in Wanchai carve out opportunity to re-envision what might be affectively and materially possible in their futures beyond domestic labour, aging alone, and prolonged economic precarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".