Diasporic Practices and Cultural Identifications of Shanghainese Seamen in Liverpool

Abstract

This article draws on the understudied oral testimonies collected by Guanbao Shen and Ling Li in 1997 and 1998 to discuss the diasporic practices and cultural identifications of Shanghainese seamen in Liverpool, a community that has received less scholarly attention than other overseas Chinese communities. The Shanghainese seafarers are marked by three important characteristics—provenance, profession, and intermarriage, adding to the diversity and uniqueness of their diasporic practices. The discussions revolve around the wider social meanings and purposes of Chinese food-centered practices, return to the home country and negotiation of multiple boundaries among the Shanghainese seafarers. It is argued that the prosaic and festive eating and cooking of Chinese food is employed to (re)create ethnicity, resume the state of relatedness and strengthen the intergenerational bond, and that the return to the origin of birth could potentially disrupt an idealized and imagined conception of the homeland. Shanghainese seamen’s individual and collective negotiation of ethnic boundaries features complicated entanglement and thus permeability and fluidity, which echoes Ien Ang’s call for moving beyond diaspora into hybridity.