In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women's motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Preface: After Mobility?  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction: Worlds in Motion  1
1. Before Study: Dreams of Flight  35
2. Place: Welcome to Melvillage  57
3. Media: Connection and Encapsulation  97
4. Work: Emplacement, Mobility, and Value  128
5. Sexuality: Liminal Times  161
6. Faith: Spirits of Movement  190
7. Patriotism: Feeling Global Chineseness  215
8. After Study: Moving On, Moving Up, Moving Out  247
Conclusion: Unsettled Dreams  279
Notes  297
Works Cited  311
Index  347

Fran Martin is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, author of Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary, and coauthor of Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia, both also published by Duke University Press.