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Marriage migration does not end mobility; it often reorganises it. Based on 8 months of multi-sited ethnography in Ethiopia and China, supplemented by digital follow-up through WeChat, this article examines how marriage migration produced destination-country immobility for Ethiopian wives in rural China. After arrival, women often became isolated and dependent within multigenerational households, where language barriers, racialised visibility, and marriage-based residence constrained mobility and intensified surveillance. I argue that this immobilisation was maintained and unevenly reopened through a post-arrival infrastructure linking legal, domestic-relational, digital-technological, and practical-mobility arrangements. Extending Miller’s notion of the ‘death of proximity’, the article shows how physical co-residence with husbands and affinal kin did not guarantee intimacy or incorporation. Within this post-arrival infrastructure, smartphones provided access to a portable elsewhere: through WeChat, women located peers, exchanged practical and sometimes mistaken information, sustained mediated co-presence beyond the village household, and shared scripts for relocating to Chinese cities. These affordances reconfigured the limited and risky conditions under which endurance, planning, and re-mobility became possible.
Wei Wang (Sun,) studied this question.