Vanessa Fong has compiled a data set of young Chinese “singletons,” many of whom went abroad over the last ten years to study, to work, advance their careers and gain access to “flexible citizenship” in the developed world. The youth she interviewed had three goals: gain foreign citizenship (from the West or Japan), gain an education in the advanced world that would allow for a Western standard of living either in the advanced world or back in China, or earn sufficient money to be able to return to China to start a successful business.

Several things make this study unique. First, Fong has tracked these people for over a decade. As a language teacher in Dalian, in 1999, she surveyed thousands and interviewed hundreds of young people who were studying in less-than-prestigious universities in the city. Fong had planned to follow their lives in Dalian; but by mid-decade, a majority of working class kids she befriended had gone overseas, hoping to earn enough money and academic credits to get into and pay for a good university overseas. She spent several years travelling around Australia, Britain, Ireland and Canada to see if they were meeting their goals. The extended time span of her interactions, and her ability to track these people, meeting some of them first in China, then abroad, and then back in China after their return, makes this book a model of migration studies. We hear their motivations for going abroad before they do so (chapter three); we learn of their difficulties abroad while they face them (chapter four); and finally, we meet them again back in China and learn of their difficulties in adjustment (chapter six). Any scholar with the drive and skill to carry off such a remarkable research design deserves our applause.

What also makes this book special is that Fong is studying how working class youth in China sought access to global citizenship. This cohort differs greatly from the talented “returning sea turtles” (hai gui) who are the focus of most studies of China's “reverse brain drain.” Yet, tens of thousands of Chinese who began returning after gaining only an undergraduate or Master's degree, faced difficulty finding work. Their nickname, “hai dai,” reflects the fact that these “returnees from overseas (hai) who are waiting for work (dai),” have actually transformed from valuable “sea turtles” (haigui) to little more than “seaweed” (haidai), which is afloat in the Chinese economy. Many in this group, despite several years working long hours in low quality service sector jobs, as well as attending language colleges, never earned enough money to pay for graduate school. So they limp home, allowing Fong to shine a light on a hard-to-find, yet not so rare, group in migration studies – the failed migrants.

While I strongly recommend this book to everyone interested in overseas study, migration, or the current young generation in China, I have several issues with the book. First, the question of social class needed to be addressed more directly to help us understand why this cohort is less successful than the overseas Chinese students who are happily working abroad or are holding good jobs back in China. Unlike the “sea turtles” who are lionized in China, many of whom came from middle class or academic families, Fong's cohort are mostly from working or lower-middle-class families who, without overseas fellowships, started on their overseas sojourn at a distinct disadvantage. They are also mostly single, without a spouse whose work pays the bills while they attend graduate school. They also were often mediocre students in China who went abroad because they could not get into good universities at home. Given all these disadvantages, why should we expect them to succeed?

Second, is their experience so different from other migrants worldwide? Most migrants to the West 100 years ago underwent very difficult times, all in the name of improving the lives of their progeny. They did not necessarily expect to be so successful themselves, and certainly not in a short period of time. Fong's cohort, however – this generation of single children – proved less than willing to accept the hard work that lower class migrants from the developing world confront in the developed world all the time. This cohort proved impatient, overly optimistic, and somehow convinced that going abroad with little education and little money could still lead to success in a few, short years.

Finally, the book might have been enhanced with a more quantitative presentation and analysis of the data. Fong carried out surveys over many years but we see nothing of this data. Even descriptive statistics in tabular form, outlining the social class of her sample, their marital status, how many actually made it into graduate school, the length of time they had stayed abroad, how many returned and to what kind of jobs, and how many actually failed, would have greatly enhanced our knowledge. Simple statistics might have helped explain success or failure. While the ethnographic nature of this study is very rich – Fong is a professor of education and a cultural anthropologist – more systematic data, even in an appendix, would have improved the study of this unique group of young Mainlanders who have been swept up by the study abroad wave and China's internationalization.