Recent scholarship has asserted the transnational nature of Chinese migration to countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[30] Transnational connections could be found in many aspects of society and culture in the home counties of Guangdong Province and in Chinese communities overseas, including in family life. Adam McKeown has suggested the idea of the transnational overseas Chinese family as a way of describing the influences that resulted from the significant numbers of Chinese men who travelled overseas for work during this period.^[31] The family of Lum Mow was typical in many regards.

When Lum Mow arrived in Australia in about 1896, it was not a one-way migration. He sent money home to China and returned himself on numerous occasions and fathered children. His wife remained in China, their sons were raised there and Lum Mow chose to return to China in his old age, taking a second wife, who bore him a daughter. As his sons grew up, Lum Mow arranged for them to come to Australia to be educated and to work in the family business. His second son, Norman, married in China, where his wife and children lived in the family home in Shekki until they later migrated to Australia. His youngest two sons married in Australia to Australian-born Chinese women, but they too continued the connection with China. The family of Lum Mow in Townsville was part of an extended network of kinsmen that stretched along Australia’s east coast.^[32]

The transnational nature of these families meant that they developed new patterns and strategies to support the family lineage. Among these were the taking of a younger wife to bear children or the adoption of sons to carry on the family line; coming and going to and from the Chinese home to father children (as Lum Mow did); the establishment of two or more households, and wives and families, in China and overseas; and in some cases, as Adam McKeown has noted, the formation of relationships with non-Chinese women overseas. This intermarriage could be thought of as one strategy through which Chinese men continued their family line where other factors did not allow a Chinese marriage.^[33] William’s decision to marry Agnes when he already had a wife in China was not without precedent then, nor was it perhaps as unusual an action as might otherwise be thought. Many before him had acted similarly, but in his case particular family dynamics meant that his father objected very strongly to the marriage. The precise reasons for his objections remain uncertain.

Often those writing about Chinese family life in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Australia have taken intermarriage between migrant Chinese men and white Australian women as an indicator of the ‘assimilation’ of Chinese men. Intermarriage and the formation of Australian families, particularly with white women, has been read as an abandonment of ideas of China as home and as a severance of ties to the extended Chinese family lineage, Chinese culture, customs and language—if not for the men themselves, then certainly for their children. Such a framework does not, however, help explain the actions of particular individuals and families who maintained strong family or business connections with the Chinese communities in Australia or with those in China itself. Thinking of interracial couples and the families they created as part of a transnational family system, however, provides a conceptual space in which to consider and perhaps understand more fully the complex dynamics operating within and around interracial relationships.^[34]