Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora: Transnational Students Between Hong Kong and Canada
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The acquisition of academic credentials is only one aspect of cultural capital, however. This form of capital also presupposes embodiment, involving a process of incorporation that ‘implies a labor of inculcation and assimilation, [and] costs time, time which must be invested personally by the investor’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 244). Recent scholarship on the spatial strategies of elite cosmopolitan Chinese families has made reference to the deliberate and self-conscious fashioning of embodied competences. Individuals perceive themselves as ‘body capital’ that can be ‘constantly improved to meet new and shifting criteria of symbolic power’ (Ong, 1999, p. 91). Providing an illuminating example, Ong (1999) discussed the meaning of body capital by describing a party in a wealthy neighbourhood of San Francisco:

Though everyone there was fluent in English, practically all spoke Cantonese, and we could have been at an exclusive gathering in Hong Kong. I spoke to one of the younger people at the party. Like many teenage émigrés, she was actively taking lessons—piano, tennis, singing, and dancing—to be able to participate in the social activities of upper-class life […] she and her Chinese American classmates […] were intent on learning how to dress, walk, and generally comport themselves in ways that would make themselves “more acceptable to the Americans.” Chinese parents frequently encourage their children to display social poise and public confidence by urging them to perform before guests after dinner. Indeed, the young woman I spoke with was very well groomed and was determinedly presenting herself to each guest, as if to practice her lessons in social mixing among this cosmopolitan crowd. Propitious location, the trappings of wealth, and appropriate body language are the cultural forms immigrants must gain mastery over if they are to convert mere economic power into social prestige… (pp. 87–88)

As this example shows, cultural capital can involve the deliberate manipulation of embodied cultural traits.

In addition to their concern with accumulating cultural capital, middle-class families also seek to renew and develop their existing stock of social capital. Social capital, as I show, has an important role to play in the evaluation and the recognition of overseas credentials. Bourdieu (1986) defined social capital as