Pei-Chia Lan

The influx of marriage migrants and their children of mixed heritages has transformed the ethnic landscape and multicultural policies in East Asia. In Taiwan, the evolving policy regime—what Lan terms “geopolitical multiculturalism”—has linked Southeast Asian immigrants and their children to geopolitical interests and multicultural recognition, while PRC immigrants and their children are entangled in the rising geopolitical tensions across the Taiwan Strait and the contestation of national identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with sixty adult children from cross-border marriages in Taiwan, Lan's research examines how the second generation—a diverse group with intersecting social differences—manage their identities to access multicultural dividends and circumvent geopolitical stigma. She identifies four major strategies of identity work: majority identity, biculturalism, rescaling, and differentiation.

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University and also a 2024-25 Stanford-Taiwan Social Science Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Her major publications include Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006, won a Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender Section of the American Sociological Association and ICAS Book Prize: Best Study in Social Science from the International Convention of Asian Scholars) and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).