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.”

Key Words:

• transnational migration
• diaspora
• Fujian
• China
• locality production of
• the built environment

Acknowledgments

Support for the ethnographic research of this article was provided by fellowships from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and from the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Additional writing support came from the American Anthropology Association’s Minority Dissertation Fellowship and the Department of Anthropology and Program in Culture and Media at New York University.

Notes

1. I am certainly not the first scholar studying Chinese migration and transnational processes to make this critique of the conceptual deployment of “home” as simply nostalgic or mythical site of return. A number of recent historical and anthropological projects have turned a critical eye to China as the “homeland” of dispersed and diasporic Chinese, making serious empirical engagement and analytic integration of home and settlement sites largely through a transnational framework (Ang 1992; Hsu 2000; Louie 2000, 2004; McKeown 1999; Ong 1999).

2. Historian Peter Kwong (1997, 2001) suggests that this distinct wave of illegal immigration from rural Fuzhou in Fujian Province began in the early 1970s, though it really picked up only after 1986 with the passage of the United States Immigration Reform and Control Act, which offered a blanket, one-time amnesty to all previously undocumented migrants and enabled subsequent and widespread chain migration among the Fuzhounese (cf. Chin 1999, 2001; Guest 2003; Kyle and Koslowski 2001). The extent of this new massive wave of emigration from Fuzhou has been documented by a number of researchers. For instance, Liang and Ye (2001) noted how by 1995, Fujian province ranked first in emigration flows out of China, sending 66,2000 people or 28 percent of China’s total emigrant population. Paul Smith (1994) suggested that between 1991–1994, an annual 25,000 Fuzhounese entered illegally into the United States (cf. Kwong 2001). Other estimates suggest anywhere between 10,000 to 100,000 enter every year (Smith 1997: x). New York has been a central destination of this flow. Einhorn (1994) estimated that by 1994, as many as 100,000 Fujianese were living in New York with an additional 10,000 entering each year (cf. Liang and Ye 2001).

3. I borrow Raymond Williams’ term, “structures of feeling” which he defines as “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (Williams 1977: 133–134; emphasis in original).

4. The term “spatial-temporal extension” is drawn from Nancy Munn’s analysis of value via the Kula system of exchange in Papua New Guinea. She notes that “extension means here the capacity to develop spatial temporal relations that go beyond the self, or that expand dimensions of the spatiotemporal control of an actor. I speak then of the capacities of acts and practices for yielding certain levels of spatiotemporal transformation” (1986: 11; emphasis in original).

5. The figures used in this article were provided by Longyan’s Office of the Party Secretary during my field research in 2001–2002. Although statistics in China are notorious for inaccuracies, they are still useful as normative, ideological constructs of empirical reality in Longyan and reflect both official self-promotion of the village as a qiaoxiang (overseas village) and critiques of certain kinds of ritual and housing expenditures among “peasant” subjects (nongmin).

6. The building of ostentatious houses in emigrant villages is not unique to Longyan as evident by the passing observations of Watson in rural Hong Kong (1975) and Brettell in Portugal among overseas-connected residents (1986, 2003). Here I offer to move beyond passing observations of this phenomenon to considered analysis of the built environment as a mediation of bodily mnemonics and embodied subjectivity.

7. Pierre Bourdieu used the term, habitus (via Marcel Mauss 1992 [1934]), to describe “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” (1977: 72) and to foreground the socially informed body as a non-discursive and inert source for the encoding of social memory and for the maintenance, affirmation and transformation of existing social orders. I am extending these meanings of habitus here to discuss particular social imaginations of embodied ways of being.

8. It is of interest that the old caretaker of the Monkey King temple who first told me this story on the bridge basically reenacted this whole scene as he traced its unfolding, dramatizing different actors’ performances in this scene on the stage and guiding me with the arcing movement of his index finger, as a witness then might have, to the flight of the Monkey King from one side of the river to the other. Through his performative storytelling, he highlighted the very affective dimensions of the built environment and particularly, the embodied form memories assumed as evoked by the actual temple standing before the old caretaker.

9. This term, “differentiated mobility,” is drawn from Doreen Massey’s work (1993). As Massey noted, “The point concerns not merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an important element of it; it is also about power in relation to flows and the movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this … some are more in charge of [mobility] than others; some indicate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it” (Massey 1993: 61; cited in Liu 1997: 96).

10. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s phrase, Ien Ang (1994) writes that “The experience of migration brings with it a shift in perspective: to paraphrase Gilroy, for the migrant it is no longer ‘where you’re from’, but ‘where you’re at’ which forms the point of anchorage.” Here I am arguing for an alternative “point of anchorage” for village residents which has to do more with “where you’re going” than either “where you’re from” or “at.”

11. This politics of pre-destination, as Weber noted, lead inadvertently to the collective valorization and channeling of human energies toward things like this-worldly asceticism, industriousness and calculative, rational investments of wealth—in other words, the lethal combination necessary for massive capitalist expansion and development ever since Ben Franklin’s time.