Double Handshake

The always-admirable Danwei.org just published a good piece on the Chinese diaspora in Argentina, by guest writer Nancy Liu, a health researcher and NIH/Fogarty Scholar in Buenos Aires. Liu describes the scene in the city’s Barrio Chino (Chinatown) during the Olympics and goes on to write about the differences between the three waves of Chinese immigration to the country: The first arriving from Taiwan in the 1980s with dashed hopes of reaching the US, the second coming from Fujian province in the 1990s, and the third and most recent – educated, middle-class workers working two-year contracts for Chinese companies operating in Latin America.

While the first wave has largely acculturated after 20-some years in the Argentina, Liu notes that many arrivals from the second wave are still working to pay off their immigration debts. A few years ago, The New Yorker published a fantastic article by Patrick Radden Keefe on the underworld of human (largely Fujianese) trafficking to Chinatowns in the US in the 1990s. Both “Snakeheads” and Danwei’s “Chinese in Argentina” are well worth the time.