Aspiring Arab women, investment in Chinese language learning, and the imagination of futures ‘away from home’

Aims and objectives: This article concerns the interdisciplinary scholarship on language, migration, and gender in a trading community in Yiwu, China. Approach: I adopt a poststructuralist approach and draw on stories of two Arab women – Nadeen and Yiyi – to consider L2 investment as a way to negotiate different identities, of gender and of being a migrant, in a new country away from home. Data and analysis: The ethnographic data, including observation, fieldnotes, casual chats, in-depth interviews, and artefacts, were analysed thematically. Findings/conclusion: The results show that Chinese was imagined as a means to pursue personal fulfilments and resist feminised roles imposed by the mainstream society, as both participants agentively invested in Chinese language learning. Importantly, the findings reveal gendered access to L2 resources beyond the home, which led women’s limited opportunities to practice Chinese and the reproduction of unequal gender relations within family. Originality: This study brings a nuanced understanding of gender into gender-blindness Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education research. Significance: The significance and contribution of this article centre on extending our understanding of the relationship between gender, migration and L2 learning in an under-research context. It also throws light on how language can empower migrant women to resist the domination that stems from unequal gender and social relations in South-South migration.