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This paper offers a critical review of the study of masculinity among overseas Chinese. Rather than turning to Confucianism which has been deployed as the "deep structure" for explaining Chinese masculinity, this paper argues that attention should be directed to the Chinese kinship ideology, which will prove to be a more helpful tool in conceptualizing Chinese masculinity. Through ethnographic cases in Taiwan and Hong Kong, I will show how Chinese masculinity has derived from the Chinese kinship system, on the one hand, and how men in Taiwan and Hong Kong ended up expressing Chinese masculinity differently because of the different geopolitics on the other. This paper concludes that the nature and character of Chinese masculinity overseas, after all, hinges upon another two contexts: geopolitics and its relationship with femininity. It follows that Chinese masculinity cannot be studied in isolation but must be considered in relation to contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, when Carol Hanisch proposes that "the personal is political," she emphasizes how all personal issues—including challenges, choices, and behaviors—carry their political imports. Therefore, while we examine individual experiences, we can expect to understand the historical and political contexts of the public, and seek for solutions to problems if there is any. In the studies of Oversea Chinese, we observe how Shirley Geok-lin Lim, a Chinese Malaysian who has become naturalized in the United States, represents an untypical diasporic prototype as she is often traveling from one place to another and in an "in-between" position, different from traditional paradigms of settlement or diaspora. This essay focuses the analysis on the usage of English and the concept about homeland to read poetry written by Shirley Lim in Hong Kong, so as to investigate how her personal experience could bespeak the political and cultural identifications for people in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]