DCHP-2

astronaut DCHP-2 (May 2016)

• n. — also used attributively; at times used derogatorily

  a resident or new Canadian who travels back and forth to their home country for work, while leaving their families in Canada.

  The term comes from the large amount of time spent in the air travelling (see the 1990 quotation). Usually, the astronaut is the family's father, who lets his wife and children settle in the new country and visits as his work schedule allows. Though the term is also used elsewhere (see Chart 1), it has no particular claim to being Canadian. See also Waters (2003).
  See also COD-2, s.v. "astronaut" (2), which is marked "Cdn (BC) informal", and OED-3, s.v. "astronaut" (3).

  • Common attributive phrases include astronaut father and astronaut family.

  • 1990  She and their three teenaged children moved to Toronto while he remained in Hong Kong at his practice, turning into one of the so-called astronauts who spend much of their time in airplanes maintaining lives on both sides of the Pacific and who worry about the stress on their distant families. 
  • 1993  These intercontinental commuters are the so-called "astronauts," Hong Kong immigrants to Canada who have established a residence here, but for one reason or another, work in Hong Kong. Most have taken up the "astronaut" lifestyle out of economic necessity and that means leaving family members in a Canadian residence and flying back and forth to Hong Kong - for as many as a dozen times a year. 
  • 1996  Across the Lower Mainland, behind the impassive stucco facades of grand new houses and the balconies of urban apartments, hundreds -- and perhaps even thousands -- of Asian teenagers live alone. These young people may belong to immigrant families, in which at least one parent is an "astronaut'' who flies back to Hong Kong or Taiwan regularly to do business. 
  • 1997  Yiu was referring to the so-called astronaut phenomenon, where an investor immigrant sets his family up in Canada. One or both parents then return to Hong Kong to carry on business, punctuated every now and again by quick flying visits across the Pacific. 
  • 2003  Under new regulations, so-called "astronauts" -- immigrants who commuted between businesses they continued to run in Asia and homes established in Canada -- will be ineligible for permanent residency unless they have spent two of the last five years in Canada. 
  • 2013  The geographers, however, cite an estimate suggesting anywhere from 40 to 66 per cent of all Hong Kong-raised Canadians have lived in "transnational family arrangements." (That's out of 210,000 Hong Kong-born residents living in Canada, with 70,000 in Metro Vancouver.) Many of the young Hong Kong-Canadians interviewed by Tse and Waters lived in arrangements that the migrant youth refer to as "the Pacific Shuttle." The young people talked about their "astronaut fathers" and their own status as "parachute kids." Even though their East Asian parents had been given Canadian passports, some sons and daughters described their distant dad's occasional visits to Canada as his "holiday."