Way Back Home: Reflection on the Relationship between Migrants and Home in Globalization Era

Abstract

In a more and more globalized and mobilized world, romantic and complete ”home” in the traditional sense has been replaced by a more vibrant and split ”home”. As for Chinese migrants, ”ancestor's home”, ”emotional home” and ”functional home” have become the three basic dimensionalities of ”home”. From the very moment of migrating, ”home” and its meaning have been splitting in these three dimensions. As more and more people migrated, splitting was further deepened, which thus caused serious anxiety and unsecured feeling of the migrants. In order to overcome this anxiety, the migrants, by creatively borrowing the organizing principles and traditional culture of traditional society, tried hard to close the internal crack within ”home”, which finally reconstructed a complete ”home” in a symbolic sense and finished transcending the tradition. Therefore, in this era of globalization, ”home” is a transmigrating process. It starts from ”complete home”, through ”split home”, and ends with ”symbolic home”, or, to be more accurate, ”complete home in symbolic sense”, which means finding the end from the starting point of the journey.

在日益全球化和充滿流動性的世界當中，傳統意義上的羅曼蒂克、完整的“家”已經被更加變動和分裂的“家”所代替。對華人移民而言，“祖先的家”、“情感的家”和“功能的家”構成了“家”的三個基本維度。從移民開始遷徙的那一刻起，“家”及其含義就沿著這三個維度不斷發生裂變。隨著移民進程的持續，裂變也不斷加深，從而在移民心中造成了深刻的焦慮和不安全感。為了克服這種焦慮，移民通過對傳統社會組織原則和文化傳統的創造性借用以及對集體記憶的選擇性營造，努力彌合“家”的內部所出現的裂痕，最終在像徵的意義上，重構了一個完整的“家”，同時也完成了對於傳統的“家”的超越。因此，在全球化的時代，“家”是一個輪迴的過程：始於“完整的家”，經過“分裂的家”，最後達致“象徵的家”，更確切地說，“象徵意義上的完整的家”，從而在旅行的起點找到了終點。