Stories from the City: Contemporary Chinese Senior Migrants and Boston’s Chinatown
CHSNE’s inaugural seminar for the Tunney Lee lecture Series
Over the past several decades, increasing numbers of Chinese-born senior citizens have left China to migrate to the U.S. for the first time as older adults. For many of these seniors, their recent moves are tied to long histories of emigrant pathways from Guangdong Province to the U.S.—echoing similar kinds of influences that affected Tunney Lee to come to Boston in 1938 when he was 7 years old. In this talk, I take inspiration from Tunney Lee’s belief that to understand a city, it’s necessary to know stories about the people who live there: Who are they? What are their lives like? What’s brought them there? I focus on stories I heard while doing 7 years of ethnographic research among seniors who hail from Guangdong Province and have relocated in their 60s and 70s to Boston, where they work in restaurants, as caregivers for children or infirm adults, as janitors and hotel cleaners, and, in a handful of cases, as administrative help in Boston Chinatown offices. Through these stories, I trace the historical pathways that have led to seniors’ later-life migration trajectories and explore the continuities and changes that have animated some typical Chinese immigrant experiences to the U.S. over the past 100+ years.
September 26th, 2:00 PM EST
Nicole Newendorp is a Lecturer and the Assistant Director of Studies at Harvard University’s Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, where she has been a faculty member since 2004. Her new book, Chinese Senior Migrants and the Globalization of Retirement (Stanford University Press, 2020), explores how Chinese-born senior migrants make sense of their later-life relocation to the Boston area, with a particular focus on how seniors’ memories and subjective experiences of movement within and beyond China over past decades continue to influence their 21st century migration trajectories and their aspirations for well-being in both China and the U.S. Her previous ethnography, Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong (Stanford University Press, 2008), was awarded the 2009 Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize by the American Association of Anthropology’s Society for East Asian Anthropology.
