Astronaut family Astronaut family An astronaut family is a family unit where the members reside in different countries across the world—in contrast to a "nuclear family". The astronaut family represents the growing transnationalism of peoples' identities that accompanies the growing globalization. The term was coined by Aihwa Ong in her publication "Flexible Citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality" in 1999. The term is especially used to describe Chinese families, who have spread across the globe. Astronaut families was a new economic source started in the early 80s for Chinese to migrate abroad and work under contracts or settle down and then send
Chinese as a foreign language (one year and about 8 months), to learn Mandarin. A quote attributed to William Milne, Morrison's colleague, goes that learning Chinese is Several major difficulties stand out: While English uses an alphabet, Chinese uses "hanzi", or Chinese characters, as its writing system. The "Kangxi dictionary" contains 47,035 characters (). However, most of the characters contained there are archaic and obscure. The Chart of Common Characters of Modern Chinese (), promulgated in People's Republic of China, lists 2,500 common characters and 1,000 less-than-common characters, while the Chart of Generally Utilized Characters of Modern Chinese () lists 7,000 characters, including the 3,500