DECENTERING WESTERN IMAGINARIES OF YOUTH MOBILITIES THROUGH THE HOPE AND ASPIRATIONS OF EAST ASIAN WORKING HOLIDAYMAKERS

To understand how EA and white WHMs imagine hope and aspirations, I collect transcripts with these WHMs from various journal articles and consolidate them into two elements of hope and aspiration: 1) prescribed and imagined opportunities for (im)mobility; and 2) imaginations about how a WHM experience can bridge a perceived gap between an imagined present and future. The point of this process is neither to make normative claims about what kind of hopes and aspirations EA and white WHMs have nor to draw distinctions between them along the lines of race. Rather, by comparing, contrasting, and juxtaposing narratives and lived experiences from WHMs from diverse backgrounds, this exercise reveals the elements of racial and socioeconomic privileges at work in facilitating, constructing, and perpetuating imagined narratives about youth mobility. 

Opportunities and constraints of mobility

Hope and aspirations about travelling can only exist when mobility is a viable opportunity. From a legal standpoint, depending on the agreement between partner nations, the WHS is not equally accessible among youth of different nationalities. For example, up until 2015 when Australia opened its doors to Chinese WHMs, NZ had been the only nation that accepted Chinese WHMs (Yang & Wen, 2016). In contrast, South Korea and Japan WHMs have access to many more countries across Europe, the Americas, and beyond. This accessibility is further dwarfed by the access of WHMs from European and other western nations like the UK, Australia, NZ, France, and Canada, who have a longer history and list of partner nations. The differential opportunity for mobility along the dimensions of history and legality also impacts the degree to which the WHS is integrated into a nation’s cultural norms. As interviewees of Haverig and Roberts’ (2011) study show, NZ youth perceive the WHS as a normal component in one’s course of life after graduating from post-secondary education (p. 597): 

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"It’s just another stage in your life. Part of it. School, uni, OE (overseas experience), then work. (…) It’s just normal" (Thomas). 

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Haverig and Roberts (2011) suggest that the OE has already been instituted and normalized as a stage of life between adolescence and adulthood such that not going on an OE would be considered abnormal and strange (p. 598): 

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"Oh, come on, who would really, in their right mind, not go and start working straight away? Without even contemplating travelling and doing something fun for a couple of years? I think they are crazy!" (Ruby)

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One of Clarke’s (2004b) British WHM interviewees in Australia also expresses a sense of pressure to travel in a certain way to become socially accepted (p. 502-503):

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"There is a kind of pressure that you feel you should go to certain places and locations, otherwise you haven’t seen the real Australia (…) If you don’t go to those, you go home and people say ‘you went all the way to Australia and you didn’t see Ayers Rock’" (Al). 

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In this sense, the prominence of WHS in NZ makes the opportunity for mobility is highly accessible and normal for its youth. However, contrary to Arnett, Haverig and Roberts (2011) suggest that NZ youth are not necessarily free to choose whether or not they will travel as WHM. Rather, they are imposed with and governed through discourses of “freedom”; they are compelled to conform to social norms and peer pressure to become “youth” who enjoy the “apex of freedom” (Arnett, 2011). Quoting Harvey (1978), Clarke (2004b) agrees that “a world of individuality and freedom on the surface conceals a world of conformity and coercion underneath” (p. 102). Thus, for NZ youth, mobility is not a rare opportunity, but a taken-for-granted norm. It is actually more difficult for a youth to remain immobile. 

This experience can be drastically different for EA WHMs, where taking a year off to travel and work abroad is often seen as “postponing” adulthood or disrupting a traditional life path (Yoon, 2014a; Zhu et al., 2019). Tsai and Collins (2017) note that WHMs from Asian nations tend to have an older age profile than WHMs from western nations and typically have had full-time work experience. This pattern suggests that EA youth may choose to participate in a WHS at a later phase of life compared to their NZ counterparts. In China, due to the limited annual quota of working holiday visas, many Chinese WHMs fight for this opportunity in hopes of escaping unsatisfactory situations in their current life (Zhu et al., 2019). Furthermore, Chinese WHMs often discuss the opportunity for mobility in conjunction with the fear of immobility. They express dread towards pressures from family to conform to a traditional life path of school, university, work, and marriage set out by societal norms (Zhu et al., 2019, p. 8-9): 

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"My parents would expect me to work for the bank since I have a degree in finance, but I was not willing to do that as I found it so boring. I felt that I could predict what my life would be like in my 30s, 40s or even 50s as soon as I graduated. That was pretty much it for my life, which was boring and terrifying. It would be somewhat interesting to live a life without foreseeing the future, so I decided to make a change by leaving home" (Peggie).

Becoming a WHM is seen as an act of rebellion that disrupts the normal course of life and postpones family obligations for Chinese WHMs (Tsai & Collins, 2017). Far from being a normative part of life, embarking on a WHS is not generally accepted or understood by the WHM’s parents and peers (Yang & Wen, 2016, p. 355):

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"My mum is not supportive at first, what she can’t understand is that I quit a decent job and go to so far. That made her very mad."

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Similarly, a Taiwanese WHM in NZ faced similar opposition (Tsai & Collins, 2017, p. 135): 

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"My parents were against the idea of me doing a working holiday from the very beginning. They asked “why must I quit my good job with a good salary?” Their concern was that I would not find a good job in NZ and would “have to” work on a farm."

As a result, the opportunity to work while travelling in a WHS helps Chinese WHMs justify their decision as they would not have to seek their parents’ approval (Zhu et al., 2019, p. 10):

"It [working holiday] provides me with a way to go to NZ without asking for financial support from my parents. I can earn money to cover my travel expenses, which would not pose any economic burden to my family."

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As illustrated through these narratives, for many Chinese and Taiwanese WHMs, this particular opportunity for transnational mobility is not only legally limited but can also met with cultural and familial resistance. In this sense, through their struggles for transnational mobility and defiance against social expectations about their life course that constrain them to remain immobile, Chinese WHMs aspire for the “freedom” that is more readily available to NZ WHMs. 

The EA WHM experience is not uniform across the region; the Japanese and South Korean political and socioeconomic contexts illustrate a slightly different story for their WHMs. Japan and Korea have significantly more partner nations in their WHS agreement and a longer history of transnational mobility. For example, Japan signed its first WHS agreement with Australia in 1980, and more than 160,000 Japanese youth have entered Australia by 2008 (JAWHM, 2008; Kawashima, 2010). By 2014, South Korea had sixteen partner nations in its WHS (Yoon, 2014a). Notably, there is little mention of social obstructions to mobility in analyses about Japanese and Korean WHMs. In fact, I struggled to find a suitable quote from a Japanese or Korean WHM that addresses this point. Most texts depict the socioeconomic and political push factors that promote WHM migration under the assumption that mobility is readily available (Kawashima, 2010; Yoon, 2014b). Furthermore, Yoon also (2014b) notes that her Korean WHM interviewees assume that their parents should be able to afford to support them financially abroad should they need it, which seems to imply that Korean youth have more familial support than their Chinese counterparts. Ultimately, this lack of attention towards the potential for “immobility” reflects the political and cultural accessibility of mobility for Japanese and Korean WHMs. 

Interestingly, in one of the earlier studies about British WHMs in Australia, Clarke (2004a) briefly notes sentiments of being “haunted” by ideas of fixity and immobility (p. 414):

"I search for a new job. When I find a new job I’ll buy a house next to the new job. Before you know it you have a house, a wife, children."

Another British WHM notes that her peers’ attachment to fixity and security act as psychological barriers to mobile imaginations (p. 414): 

"People at work just didn’t get it at all. They couldn’t understand why I’d leave a Council job, which is supposed to be secure and quite easy, and go away and perhaps give up that security."

These British WHMs’ sentiments demonstrate parallels with that of Chinese WHMs and contrasts with that of NZ WHMs. Clarke’s (2004b) attention to immobility also differs from the lack thereof in Japanese and Korean texts. This observation suggests that “western” and “EA” WHMs are incoherent cultural groups who receive inconsistent academic attention. Thus, I suggest that an intersectional approach – examining how sociocultural, political, and economic forces dynamically produce opportunities and constraints to mobility – can offer a more nuanced analysis about WHMs beyond categories of race and region. 

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The gap between an imagined “now” and “future”

How WHMs and scholars narrate opportunities for mobility sets the uneven stages upon which different WHMs imagine the gap between their present/immobile self and future/mobile self. This gap represents their hope and aspiration about the WHS. Although, in the EA context, discourse about mobility is often imagined to be associated with upward social mobility and acquiring cultural capital (Heath, 2007; Simpson, 2005), scholars are increasingly paying attention to the role of WHMs’ ideological and emotional desires for freedom, self-development, and self-identity as powerful motivators for travel (Yoon, 2014a; Robertson et al., 2018). Importantly, these notions are not normative or autonomous; they are imaginations facilitated and moderated by broader political and cultural discourses that frames the ideal WHM as a youthful, transnational, culturally aware, cosmopolitan, liberal, and self-improving subject (Abelmann, Park & Kim, 2009; Wilson et al., 2010; Yoon, 2014b). In this way, imaginations of mobile hopes and aspirations reproduce and obscure “the way mobility serves to reinscribe enduring patterns of social division” and exclude those who are immobile (Robertson et al., 2018, p. 616). 

The opportunity for self-development is a central attraction of the WHS and is a revolving theme in both western and EA WHM literature. Improvement is often framed as “self-discovery” and “self-exploration” among all WHMs, who believe that going overseas is about taking on challenges and becoming a better person. A British WHM reflects (Clarke, 2004b, p. 504): 

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"It's about the challenge. It's about being told this is the shittest job you can do. But I can do it (Shirley)."

Similarly, Kawashima (2010) observes that many of her Japanese WHM respondents discuss their experience along the lines of challenge and self-actualization: 

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"I think everyone has unlimited potentials hidden inside. Seeing and experiencing different things, meeting and talking to different people broaden one’s horizons… by taking challenges of living in Australia and improving myself, I want to extend my future possibilities (p. 273)."

From a western-centric perspective, these quotes paint WHMs as liberal subjects who have the agency to decide to live and work in challenging situations as means of self-exploration and improvement. However, an EA perspective can help destabilize the notion of agency for self-improvement by examining how global, regional, and social forces intersect to produce an imagined gap between youths’ domestic/immobile self and potentially transnational/mobile self. This gap subsequently compel youth to exercise their agency within the constraints of overlapping social processes to formulate their individual and collective mobile aspirations. 

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While transnational mobility is generally normalized for western youth as an obvious stage of life, it is often seen as a route of escape for many EA WHMs who feel dissatisfied and suffocated in life. To illustrate, many of Zhu and colleagues’ (2019) Chinese WHMs are educated young people who had secured stable job positions after graduation. Many decide to become WHMs because they feel burnt out and overworked (p. 8): 

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"I worked overtime every day, and my office did not even have a window. Every day I could only see the sun in the morning since when I was off work, the sun had already set, that is, I did not even have a chance to see the outside world during the daytime. Moreover, the pressure was immense, and basically, I had to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., then I could go home and have dinner" (Ivy).

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The Chinese experience is not representative of WHMs from other EA nations. Although Kawashima’s (2010) Japanese WHM interviewees also express lack of life satisfaction, she situates their frustrations in the “lost generation” phenomenon in Japan where around 20 million young people suffered particularly difficult socioeconomic conditions following the economic downturn in 1989. The term “Employment Ice Age” is used to depict the virtual freezing of traditional recruitment of new graduates and the increase of precarious work under neoliberalization (Nishitani, 2003). As Tetsuya expresses, he was forced to accept a permanent secure position, but did not foresee satisfaction in his career trajectory (Kawashima, 2010, p. 272): 

"The only company that accepted me [as a graduate jobseeker] was not somewhere I wanted to work for the rest of my life. That was when I thought of going overseas."

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In contrast to the China case, “traditional paths to success seemed to have vanished” in Japan and youth had to formulate their own alternative life paths (Kawashima, 2010, p. 272). Alternatively, Korean WHMs express that they are eager to escape immense pressure and intrusive inquisitions from family, friends, and society to have a plan for the future despite increasing social insecurity under Korea’s neoliberal economic conditions (Yoon, 2014b, p. 1019): 

"Well, it was too difficult to think about what I wanted in Korea. Because of pressure… parents at home kept asking, ‘Are you doing okay?’, ‘How’s your job hunting going?’ and so on. Not a minor stress at all. Once you run away from Korea, you can finally be free from all those things and can think about yourself from a distance" (Na-Jin).

Rather than self-improvement and self-exploration in the liberal sense, many EA WHMs imagine their destination to provide escape and healing for their perceived intense pressure and anxiety at home. A Korean WHM in Canada expresses this sense of relief (Yoon, 2014b, p. 1019):

"[In Korea] people around me always talked a lot about me, as if they were living my life on my behalf. They were extremely intrusive, which made me feel stressed out […] I don’t have to be aware of my age here, but it will matter so much in Korea. People [in Korea] would keep saying ‘You should hurry and get married, given your age’" (Won-mi).

Other WHMs find peace and change of character in other ways. A Chinese WHMs who returned from NZ eloquently reflects that he had cultivated the ability to heal himself so that he can face the pressures at work back in China with a better mindset (Yang & Wen, p. 353; text adjusted for grammatical errors from translation): 



"I think I now have the courage to face the world alone in the future. I took two hundred dollars to an entirely strange country, I has withstood the test of survival. This to me is a great encouragement.

Another gain is the understanding of work. I used to think that it is a serious problem for work to not have freshness, but now I do not think so. Hating a job does not mean you love life. Loving life requires that we are able to find interest in the ordinary. If you can succeed that, you should be able to spend eight hours of work calmly, because you can do something interesting in the third of your lifetime.

Those who think working holiday is very interesting have a misunderstanding that it can change your life. But in fact, life does not change, the change of life derives from the change of yourself" (Wu). 

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Ultimately, the ways in which EA WHMs narrate their perceived gap between “now” and “future” really contest western-centric and liberal conceptions of agency and mobility. They illuminate a more nuanced theoretical understanding that situates individual agency and mobility within the constraints of intersecting social forces.