Paper short abstract:

This paper is an ethnography of how intimate relationships with local Chinese women become key to African asylum-seeking men's transgressive struggles in crafting a plausible alternative present and future in Hong Kong.

Paper long abstract:

Asylum-seekers are, by definition, people who are neither here nor there, suspended in between citizenship regimes, waiting for a future with uncertainty. The asylum regime in Hong Kong ensures enforced destitution for these displaced populations. The small population of African asylum-seekers in Hong Kong, therefore, has been targets of not only institutional exclusion but social marginalization. Many of them have been stuck in an immigration limbo in Hong Kong for over a decade. Since 2010s, intimate relationships and marriages between African asylum-seeking men and local Chinese women have been increasing. In defiance of the delegitimization of their lives and self-worth, asylum-seekers engage in intimate relationships to reconstitute their livelihood and selfhood in displacement. These intimate bonds thereby constitute part of the transgressive struggles in crafting a plausible alternative present and future for asylum-seekers. Their intimacy with local women subvert the asylum regime that was designed for their exclusion - the very exclusion that renders suspicious their relationships with local women. Marriage, however, provides no easy exit from these men's limbo. These married couples often come to be conjoined in not only matrimony but also in their subjection to state scrutiny, as the Hong Kong government seeks to defend its legitimacy and powers as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. This paper is an ethnography of how intimate relationships become an integral part of asylum-seeking men's "counter-topographies" (Mountz 2011) in their pursuit of a plausible future in the Chinese city of Hong Kong.