Lai Wo is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. Her research focuses on gendered labor migration between Hong Kong and Indonesia. In her research, she follows migrant remittances from Hong Kong’s intimate economies of domestic, care, and entertainment work back to migrant-sending villages in rural East Java. Specifically, she is interested in the moral ambivalence of migrant remittances by tracking the decision-making process of how migrants evaluate, apportion, or convert their earnings. This project aims to understand the internal calculations and deferrals migrants must make amidst uncertainty and exclusion and the alternative futures they imagine to be possible.

While on the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, Lai is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at Universitas Gadjah Mada. Her research is also supported by a 2019 USINDO summer fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and various institutions at the University of Michigan, including the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, CEW+, and the President’s Advisory Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights.

Lai earned an MPhil in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she researched intimate labor migration, prolonged asylum-seeking, and postcolonial racial dynamics in Hong Kong. Before that, she received a bachelor’s in Anthropology and Gender Studies at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.