Generational Identities through Time: Identities and Homelands of the ABCs

Abstract

Diaspora usually presupposes connections between multiple communities of a dispersed population who feel, maintain, revive or reinvent a connection with a prior home in various ways. Members of Chinese diasporic communities dispersed throughout the world often make gradual transitions from a migrant to becoming a fully integrated member of the host society as they take root in a land away from the original home. Scholars such as Phizacklea (2000), Ryan (2002) and Waters (2002) have given much attention to the notion of coexisting homes that link the homeland with the host country. As Clifford (1994, p. 311) highlights, the discourse of diasporas reflect ‘the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland, not as something simply left behind, but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity’. As such, ties to homeland play a crucial, ongoing and often central role in informing not only notions of ethnicity but also of one’s relationship to society. An important aspect of such connections are the ways migrants and their descendants construct notions of ‘home’ whereby a sense of self, place and belonging are shaped, articulated and contested. ‘Home’ is embedded with meanings, emotions, experience and relationships that create a sense of belongingness, vital to the well-being of human life.