THESIS
1996
Abstract
This thesis explores the concept of home in the migratory process. It began with a simple research question: Why do I and other returned migrants in Hong Kong not feel at home in a place where we were born and raised? The question seems purely personal, but it is not. At a theoretical level, it requires a careful consideration of the close and complex relationship between the concept of home and migration. Home is customarily associated with feelings of stability, comfort, and familiarity, while migrancy is often associated with "homelessness"-- a state of uprootedness and changing circumstances leading to misery and cognitive dissonance. Therefore, the question of home is central to the migratory experience as well as a useful analytical tool with which to study migration. It is also a...[
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This thesis explores the concept of home in the migratory process. It began with a simple research question: Why do I and other returned migrants in Hong Kong not feel at home in a place where we were born and raised? The question seems purely personal, but it is not. At a theoretical level, it requires a careful consideration of the close and complex relationship between the concept of home and migration. Home is customarily associated with feelings of stability, comfort, and familiarity, while migrancy is often associated with "homelessness"-- a state of uprootedness and changing circumstances leading to misery and cognitive dissonance. Therefore, the question of home is central to the migratory experience as well as a useful analytical tool with which to study migration. It is also an important consideration in relation to the recent phenomenon of large numbers of returned migrants working and living in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong scholars describe these returned migrants as "modern sojourners," while others see them as "refugees." However, the inadequacy of the typologies is apparent if we accept that the study of migration is fundamentally concerned with the concept of home consciously beheld by the migrant as he or she leaves home, moves between homes, and searches for home. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 returned migrants from Canada concerning their experience of migration and feeling of at-homeness. The results of my study suggest that the returned migrants were "reluctant exiles" in the first place, and they are now living in a state of migrancy and "homelessness." However, while my subjects have failed to find home in the rationalist sense of the term, they still cannot accept homelessness as celebrated in the postmodernist view, and, hence, the search for home continues. For they are "home but not home."
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