Beyond Tears and Laughter

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 1-28

3. Gendered Subjectivities in a Patriarchal China

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 29-46

4. Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical Workplace

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 47-71

5. The Short-Lived Jobs: From Beginning to End

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 73-94

6. Negotiating Intimacy: Obedience, Compromise and Resistance

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 95-126

7. Crafting a Modern Person via Consumption? Women and Men in Leisure Activities

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 127-149

8. Unpacking the Complexity of Gender, Class and Hukou

   • Yang Shen

   Pages 151-162

9. Back Matter

   Pages 163-215

   PDF

This book explores the experience of China's migrant labourers in Shanghai from anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the big cities in search of fame, fortune, or just a living. The author also examines the gender dynamics at work, in intimacy and leisure of this marginalized, yet huge population. With an in-depth and multidisciplinary examination of the experience of restaurant workers in Shanghai, this book sheds humanising new light on the experience of the megacity from the inside and will be of direct value to policymakers, demographers, feminist scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and responsible citizens. 

• Migration Studies
• Gender Studies
• Labor Relations
• Globalization
• Labor economics

“The book provides a good example of nuanced fieldwork observations and ethnographic details based on a longitudinal field investigation … . Readers will appreciate the rich details of daily interactions and benefit from the grassroots knowledge about migrant workers in China’s metropolitan service sector. With its in-depth analysis of migrant workers’ life and subjectivity, this is an excellent book for people who are interested in gender, migration, work and China studies more generally.” (Jing Song, The China Quarterly, February 21, 2022)

• Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

  Yang Shen

Yang Shen, with a PhD from the London School of Economics, is an assistant professor at School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her work explores individual experiences of Chinese migrant workers within the contemporary globalized economy. Her current research focuses on housing and intimacy, online dating, and women's fertility practices under the changing family planning policy in China.

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