<p>This article is an exploration of the exigencies that migrant women confront as they labour in the affective economies of late capitalism. By focusing on Chinese women in Paris, it addresses how transnational migrants navigate the challenges of sustaining life wrought by the liberalization of economies in China and in France. To do this, the article revisits the work of a cadre of materialist feminists in anthropology whose analytic sensibilities are derived from the methodological and conceptual apparatus of “ethnographic realism”. I argue that their insights and this analytical orientation are particularly apposite in illuminating how the labour of migrant women in social reproduction is entangled within and also inextricable from the process of value production and accumulation. In the ethnographic cases that are presented, the analytical orientation of ethnographic realism is mobilised to explore the dynamics of how different cohorts of Chinese migrants that arrived in France contend with the challenges of sustaining people as social and sentient beings in the context of regime shifts that characterize late capitalism.</p>