With China's left-behind wives: Families of migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s–1950s, Huifen Shen introduces a long-overlooked gendered perspective to the history of Chinese overseas migration by focusing on fankeshen, the wives left behind in China when their husbands travelled to Southeast Asia. With this perspective, Shen writes against a long history of male scholarship on the subject. Shen points out that prevailing scholarship has emphasised the utilitarian function of these transnational split-families, in which the division of labour was between a male breadwinner abroad, without whose sacrifice through migration the family would not have the economic means to survive, and a female at home in China whose main responsibilities included taking care of the family and keeping track of household finances. Over long years of separation, many emigrant husbands established dual married lives by taking a second wife abroad. Shen notes that the established view has explained these second marriages as easily accepted by the wives left behind in China, as fankeshen understood that having a second family abroad served their husbands' social and economic needs.

Shen intervenes against these prevailing views. Drawing on oral history interviews with elderly fankeshen and on rich archival data (including letters sent between wives and their husbands abroad), Shen's historical account is both familiar and starkly different from previous works on the subject. Common themes, such as decades of separation between husbands and wives, have to be reevaluated as Shen describes these migrant marriages taking place during a historical period in which young Chinese women were becoming increasingly aware of the possibilities of companionate marriage. Despite this growing social awareness, Shen documents how many brides were pressured against their wishes to marry emigrants — with whom they often had only a few weeks' cohabitation throughout their lives.

Shen's data, which includes narrative accounts from her interviews that are interspersed throughout the text, highlight the tensions that resulted as fankeshen found they had little power in a system stacked against them. Their marriages benefited the Chinese state — through the inflow of remittances from abroad — and also the families of male emigrants through continuation of the family line, care-giving for aged parents, and maintenance of family land and homes in China. Moreover, the financial and social capital accrued by migrants' families made them a model for social emulation; recognition by the Chinese state further led to preferential treatment for these families on a national level. However, real life for fankeshen was much more fraught: the families' wealth made them targets for extortion by local governments, just as it made them targets of the post-1949 socialist campaigns. Moreover, most families were reduced to extreme impoverishment when wars and government policies abroad and in China disrupted communication services and prevented the delivery of remittances on which migrants' families depended for survival. Caught in the middle were fankeshen, who were left living in their in-laws' houses, often with so little social status that they were denied news or remittances sent to them by their husbands. Most difficult for fankeshen was the emotional distance from their husbands. Even when wives sought to establish or strengthen emotional ties with their husbands, they faced significant obstacles, including illiteracy, the frequent disruption of mail service from abroad, and the inability to enforce communication from husbands who chose not to respond to their letters.

Within this bleak portrait, there are nonetheless important indications that Shen aims to contribute to a growing body of academic work that portrays female migrants as agents — and not just victims — of the power structures that shaped their lives. With this goal in mind, Shen not only focuses attention on fankeshen as individuals with desires of their own; she also considers the creative means women employed to combat the difficulties they faced and documents the sheer hard work and enterprise that enabled fankeshen to ensure their families' survival through repeated political and economic crises. The book's final chapter focuses on fankeshen who travelled to Hong Kong, ostensibly to join their husbands (taking advantage of their special status that allowed them to exit the PRC during the 1950s and 1960s). Instead, the women Shen interviewed ended up living and working in Hong Kong on their own for decades to support themselves, their children, and family members left behind on the mainland. During this time, Shen's interviewees learned skills such as independence and autonomy as they laboured day and night in factories and made repeated sacrifices to provide for their families who would not have been able to survive without the economic support provided by fankeshen. In the process, these women's values changed: they learned to appreciate their self-sufficiency and to question their long-held traditional assumptions about filial support. One comes away from this account with a clear view of fankeshen not as ‘left-behind’ wives but as active participants in overseas migration processes.