This slender volume draws on interviews with forty-five Taiwanese women living in the Chicago area who immigrated through their husbands’ employment. Twenty-three of the women have graduate degrees, four have “professional diplomas,” seventeen have college degrees, and one has a high school diploma (pp. 165–66). Of these, eleven are full- or part-time housewives with the others engaged in full-time employment. Through their experiences, Chien-Juh Gu, a sociologist, proposes to “examine the multifaceted connections of immigrant adaptation” with a “focus not only on gender but also on its association with the interplay of work, family, and other structural factors” that Gu argues are “interconnected institutions through which gender inequality is constituted” (p. 5). Confucian cultural values constitute the ideological villain compelling the subjugation of these immigrant women to their marriages, their husbands, and their in-laws. Gu's chief conceptual contribution concerns the ways in which “immigration ties Taiwanese women closer to the domestic sphere and intensifies the work-family division” as “housewifelization” leads her interviewees to forego, delay, or track into new careers (p. 6).

In five substantive chapters, Gu charts various aspects of her interviewees’ lives and the structural forces compelling their domestication. “Immigration, Culture, Gender, and the Self” explores the leading role usually taken by men in immigrating for employment motives, followed by their wives who more or less willingly give up their Taiwanese lives and careers for the sake of family. “Searching for Self in the New Land” details struggles to adapt and the “housewifelization” that occurs as the women become tasked with childcare and face difficulties finding jobs, even if permitted by the H-4 visas allotted to spouses of employment immigrants. In “Negotiating Egalitarianism,” Gu explores wife-husband dynamics and alienation. Visits by in-laws produce the stresses and high familial demands dissected in “Performing Confucian Patriarchy.” The women's resistance strategies, which include dismantling their marriages, finding employment, and building friendships, constitute the topics of “Fighting for Dignity and Respect.” The book ends on a celebratory note, as Gu evokes the “resilience” of her interview subjects in adjusting to their lives in the United States.

As a scholar of migration, I was frustrated by the limited scope of Gu's presentation of her research findings. It is difficult to derive broader meanings and potential implications from such a small and narrow group of research subjects without some sense of how their key attributes compare with those of other women. To make arguments about the impact of immigration on her subjects’ lives, Gu would need to provide comparative data for Taiwanese women's lives in Taiwan and in other parts of the United States. For example, although Gu stresses the patriarchal and deeply disruptive visits by in-laws, during which her subjects endured considerable criticism and performed extra domestic work, the in-laws were still by-and-large visitors rather than the more constant presence they would have been before immigration. Gu notes that six of her interview subjects ended up divorcing their spouses. However, this seems low compared to the approximately 25–30 percent rates in Taiwan. The oppressiveness of Confucian social systems and values would be more persuasive if the attributes of Taiwanese American families were compared against general statistics about American families and gender roles, including divorce rates, women's employment, domestic labor distribution, and so forth. Gu also does not explore how immigration and adaptation experiences compare between Taiwanese and other ethnic Chinese, dismissing the overlaps and intersections between them by simply stating that since the 1992 and 1995 social studies by Hsiang-shui Chen and Yen-Fen Tseng, “scholars no longer mistake the Taiwanese for the Chinese” (p. 18).Footnote ¹

The limits of Gu's discussion are partially explained on the final page, where Gu reveals that when beginning this project, her “focus was to document Taiwanese American women's suffering in their immigration journeys. Several dozen interviews later, what [she] found in their life stories was resilience” (p. 162). This account is intended to empathize with these women's experiences and to celebrate their adaptation to and acceptance of their new lives and circumstances. Readers seeking these kinds of narratives and microstudy data will be the best served by The Resilient Self.