Yuk-Lin Renita Wong

Factors influencing attitudes towards seeking professional help among East and Southeast Asian immigrant and refugee women.

Background and aims: It has been recognized that Asian immigrants in North America have lower rates of mental health service utilization. From the perspective of cross-cultural psychiatry, one of the most important cultural factors may be differences in the explanatory model of illness. This article examines the relationship of causal beliefs, perceived service accessibility and attitudes towards seeking mental health care. Method: The sample consisted of 1000 immigrant and refugee women from five ethnic minority communities in Toronto, including three Chinese Canadian communities (Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan), Korean Canadians and Vietnamese Canadians. Data were acquired by a self-administered structured questionnaire. Quantitative data were analysed using MANOVA, ANOVA and stepwise multiple regression. Results: The five ethnic minority groups of women differed in their explanatory models about mental illness and distress. In the full model where other variables were controlled for, the most significant factor predicting attitudes towards seeking professional help was perceived access for all groups except the Hong Kong Chinese. In the last group, those subscribing more to a Western stress model of illness had a more positive attitude towards seeking professional help, while those subscribing more to supernatural beliefs had a more negative attitude. Age and education were not significant predictors. Conclusion: Perceived access is one of the main factors that influence attitudes toward seeking professional help. Explanatory models may predict help-seeking behaviours if perceived access to such services is available.

Rethinking Self-Awareness in Cultural Competence: Toward a Dialogic Self in Cross-Cultural Social Work

The cultural competence approach has grown significantly in the North American human service professions. The reliance of social workers on cultural awareness to block the influence of their own culture in the helping process entails three problematic and conflicting assumptions, namely, the notion of human being as cultural artifact, the use of self as a technique for transcending cultural bias, and the subject-object dichotomy as a defining structure of the worker-client relationship. The authors contend that there are conceptual incoherencies within the cultural competence models standard notion of self-awareness. The conceptualization of a dialogic self may unsettle the hierarchical worker-client relationship and de-essentialize the concept of culture. Cross-cultural social work thus becomes a site where client and worker negotiate and communicate to cocreate new meanings and relationships.

When Asian immigrant women speak: from mental health to strategies of being.

Immigrant women from 5 ethnic-cultural communities (Korean, Hong Kong Chinese, Mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada participated in a focus group study (13 focus groups of 102 participants) of Asian immigrant womens conceptions of mental health. Their responses challenge the predominant conceptualizations of mental health in North America, the popular characterization of Asian culture as collectivistic, and the stereotypic image of Asian women as defining themselves in family relations. In trying to live a life they desire and to quest for a better state of well-being, these women have asserted their agency to articulate multiple strategies of being.

When East Meets West: Nation, Colony, and Hong Kong Women’s Subjectivities in Gender and China Development

This article seeks to elucidate the intersecting processes of colonialism and nation formation in the subject formation of Hong Kong women. The analysis is drawn from a study of individual Hong Kong women who, from the early 1990s on, have launched development projects in China with a focus on gender. For these Hong Kong women, Mainland women represented both what they considered China to be lacking and what they envisioned a modern Chinese nation to be. By showing how these Hong Kong women inadvertently identified with the British colonial discourse of “East meets West” in representing themselves as liberated subjects uplifting the “oppressed” Mainland women following Hong Kong’s reunification, the article illuminates the different and differentiating effects of colonization on women under colonialism. It also shows how women are not simply objects acted on by the nation but are also subjects engaged in narrating the nation.

Reclaiming chinese women's subjectivities: Indigenizing “social work with women” in China through postcolonial ethnography

Abstract This article explores how ethnography and the postcolonial epistemology of location can contribute to indigenous theory building in social work with women in China. I argue that discussion about indigenization must go beyond the essentialist concern with what is indigenous to the question of how to indigenize. To address this question, I suggest that research methodology is crucial. Specifically, I show what ethnography can offer to this task. The postcolonial epistemology of location addresses the power relations entrenched in knowledge construction and asserts that all knowledge is situated. It speaks to the pursuit of indigenization, both on the global and local levels.

Time Bound: The Timescape of Secondary Trauma of the Surviving Teachers of the Wenchuan Earthquake

This article introduces a timescape perspective to enrich our understanding of postdisaster secondary trauma and social capital. Drawing upon a 2-year ethnographic study in 2008-2010 of a high school most devastated by the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan, China, this article discusses how the national future-oriented timescape of recovery produced the secondary trauma among the surviving teachers. In particular, this article elucidates the pervasiveness of the industrial linear and mechanical calendar and clock time in the state and societal response. This article proposes that human connectedness-the key component of social capital crucial to the restoration of self and community efficacy in postdisaster recovery-requires a temporal frame that allows multiple levels and rhythms of grieving and reconnecting with existing social relations. This article also highlights the critical role of teachers in the collective healing of students and the community efficacy of the school.

DISPERSING THE “PUBLIC” AND THE “PRIVATE” Gender and the State in the Birth Planning Policy of China

In examining the practice of power in the Birth Planning Policy of China, the author argues that the theorizing of the public-private frame and public patriarchy based on the welfare state in the West fails to capture the specific gender and state relations in the Chinese socialist context. With the convergence of the traditional familial order and the development of a modern nation-state, the “public” sphere of the Chinese socialist state is a disrupted space where the “state” still calls for its peoples sacrifice for the collective good and yet at the same time, a terrian where citizens can claim their rights. It is also a domain where Chinese womens reproduction is collectivized for the cause of socialist modernization and yet a realm where they claim their voices. In the conclusion, the author addresses the question of Chinese womens agency in maneuvering through the patriarchal system and using the policy as a springboard to effecting changes in it.

Behind the allure of gambling: A qualitative exploration of the existential yearnings of Chinese men with problem gambling in Hong Kong

Drawing on a qualitative exploratory study of the gambling narratives of a group of Chinese men with problem gambling in Hong Kong, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of problem gambling. Rather than identifying problem gambling as a personal deficit or pathology, a narrative analysis of these Chinese mens gambling stories reveals their existential yearnings behind problem gambling. Told from the perspectives of these men, their gambling narratives invite us as researchers and practitioners to explore the meanings gamblers ascribe to gambling which they derived from the interplay between the socioeconomic and cultural ethos of the society and their personal histories. This offers us new insights into their motivations of gambling. As an attempt to fill the methodological gap in gambling studies, this paper also shows how an in-depth narrative research method can contribute to expanding our understanding of problem gambling beyond pathology.

State, profession, and religion: Reflecting on spirituality and indigenous social work in China in the Yushu Earthquake Relief

ABSTRACT On April 14, 2010, a massive earthquake measuring 7.1Ms struck the Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, China. Its scale notwithstanding, it has received much less national and international attention than the also immense Wenchun quake of 2008 in Sichun Province. This field report discusses the contribution of religion and spirituality in postdisaster relief in Yushu. It also calls for critical reflection on the issue of homogenization in the discussion of indigenous social work in China, and perhaps in other multiethnic countries in the world.

Gender and Community Under British Colonialism: Emotion, Struggle, and Politics in a Chinese VillageGender and Community Under British Colonialism: Emotion, Struggle, and Politics in a Chinese Village, by CheungSiu Keung. New York, NY: Routledge: 2006. 199pp.

Muslim majority nations. It is, however, another manifestation of one of the most enduring social predicaments the Muslim world has faced for more than a century: the struggle between reformists who believe that teaching Muslims to be virtuous will bring about, ipso facto, a just polity and the revolutionaries who see the Islamic state as the precondition for the emergence of a virtuous society. That debate is not yet over.