TO BE “EMPLACED”: FUZHOUNESE MIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF DESTINATION

Abstract

This article offers an exploration of what it means to be “emplaced” amidst the various spatial and temporal streams currently flowing through an emigrant village in the Fuzhou countryside along the southeast coast of China. These flows include both transnational currents resulting from two decades of mass emigration via human smuggling networks to the United States and other foreign destinations as well as national and translocal currents driven in part by Post-Mao reforms for market liberalization and China’s “opening up” (kaifang). Particularly, I aim to provide a corrective to the overemphasis of displacement as an experience outside of “home” and moreover, to the mystification of “home” sites as imaginary places simply of longing and belonging. My goal is not to dismiss symbolic understandings of mythical homelands but rather to better contextualize and refine assumptions of migrant displacement in relation to imaginations of locality and belonging from the empirical and phenomenological grounds of those who remained behind. Significantly, approaching issues of migrant identities and social formations from the location of dispersion rather than arrival enabled me to critically examine and situate existing analytic assumptions of displacement (e.g., as migrant nostalgia for “home”) alongside local theorizations of emplacement made by those who stayed put as others moved around them. As I will show for my Fuzhounese subjects, the ultimate form of displacement was seen and experienced as the result of immobility, rather than physical departure from a “home.”