Searching for Sweetness: Women’s Mobile Lives in China and Lesotho

An ethnography linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Traversing the rapidly urbanizing county-level city of Fuqing to the remote mountainous kingdom of Lesotho in Southern Africa, Searching for Sweetness is one of the first and most extensive ethnographies linking rural-to-urban migration in China with Chinese migration to Africa. Against the backdrop of China’s national struggle for modernity and globalization, Sarah Hanisch examines Chinese migrant women’s complex struggles for upward social mobility across different generations and localities in China and Lesotho. Embedding the women’s portraits into larger historical contexts, Hanisch illustrates how these women interpret and narrate their migratory and everyday experiences through powerful metanarratives on sweetness and bitterness. In her exploration of migratory identities and projects, Hanisch brings uniquely gendered, multi-sited, and intergenerational perspectives to existing scholarship on Chinese internal and international migration.