Building the Babel with Knowledge

This article examines how New Taiwanese Hakka immigrants in California negotiate ethnic identity amid intergenerational language decline. While much scholarship on the Chinese diaspora has focused on Cantonese-dominated migration, the Hakka, long recognized as a minority within a minority, remain underexplored. Drawing on interviews and participant observation with 20 families across three generations, this study explores how first-generation immigrants navigate social integration and language practices, and how cultural traditions such as language, cuisine, and festivals are transmitted or reconfigured among descendants. Findings show that while Hakka language use has diminished, situational and symbolic use persists as a marker of belonging. This enactment of new ethnicities, for instance, expressing Hakka identity through food, festivals, and community participation rather than fluent speech which illustrates how cultural identity is redefined in everyday life. Intra-ethnic relations further reveal divergent experiences of inclusion and exclusion shaped by migration timing and community dynamics. The study contributes to assimilation and diaspora theory by challenging deterministic models of language loss, demonstrating how hybrid ethnic identities are enacted through everyday cultural practices, and highlighting the heterogeneity of Chinese diasporic formations.

Female leadership and women's career development have been widely discussed in academic studies, business schools, organisational management philosophy, and daily societal topics. Despite significant endeavours to improve gender diversity and parity in managerial roles, especially senior to executive ones, in the corporate workplace, women still face more challenges and difficulties in achieving their higher goals along their career paths. As a fundamental part of the industry sector, women with senior and higher positions in the furniture manufacturing field are rare. The need for more women leadership is against the field's shared interests in attracting more talent, accelerating industrial transformation, and achieving a new leadership model in the post-COVID era.

Applying a qualitative in-depth interview approach, the research collates data from 16 practitioners from 14 Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese furniture manufacturing SMEs with purposive sampling. The study discloses that the key impediments that lead to women's strenuous career growth in senior and executive management teams in furniture manufacturing SMEs encompass promotion mechanisms, professional expertise, gender bias, family-related responsibilities, social networking, and age; the secondary obstacles that rank closely behind include resource distribution, self-doubt, low ambition, and marital status; along with the minor barriers that consist of "Queen Bee" syndrome, maternity leave and lactation, sexual harassment, and workplace gaslighting.

The study contributes to conducting first-hand empirical research in Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese furniture manufacturing SMEs, specifying the career-development barriers to female managers in those SMEs, concentrating on figuring out how to overcome those obstacles for female practitioners' career development in those SMEs, implementing simultaneous research in China and Vietnam; and supplementing relevant research in women's career development in the furniture manufacturing industry.