Ink of Nostalgia: A Review Article of Home is Not Here, Dear China, and Recent Scholarship on China and the Chinese Overseas

Abstract

Abstract This article reviews Wang Gungwu, Home is Not Here (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2018) and Gregor Benton and Hong Liu’s Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018) in terms of how they reflect and revisit recent scholarship on China and the Chinese overseas published in English. Adopting different approaches, both books feature family correspondence within Chinese migrant families. This new focus unpacks concepts between ethnicity and language, and between family and homeland in migrants’ identity-making. Beginning from these studies, the article defends “Chinese overseas” as an intellectual concept and as a framework that allows an examination and comparison of the connections between China and its migrants as well as their descendants worldwide. In conclusion, the article argues that diasporas are made up of those who have left home but who miss that home, touching on the concept of nostalgia. Passing down the sense of nostalgia through successive generations via narrating, writing, and verifying, both in Sinophone and other languages, is a way by which Chinese diasporas construct their heritage. The process of retelling, rewriting, and reworking family heritage keeps the idea of home alive, wherever it might be, and whether or not it still exists.