The Uncanny Homely and Unhomely Feeling: Gender and Generation Politics in Return Migrant Families in Hong Kong

Abstract

This chapter reports on a study of the return migrants in Hong Kong which throws up some deep, critical questions about the family, the Chinese family, Chineseness, being and doing Chinese, marriage, being sons and daughters, wives and husbands. The returnees have been elsewhere. While sojourning in societies in the west, they have both knowingly and unknowingly transformed themselves. In the context of the family and marriage, these transformations bear significantly on values and attitudes toward all things familial and Chinese, which have consequences for relations within and outside the family and marriage, between self and others, family and work, private and public. Lesions and fault lines make their repeated appearances in just about each and every interpersonal transaction and encounter because the “elsewhere man and woman” no longer enjoy their former closeness of fit with the locals who have also changed not on their own volition. One does not step into the same river twice. The uncanny feeling of home but not homely, unhomely, continues. A moving family, or a family in motion, provides the existentialist philosopher and the methodologist, even the poet, an ideal occasion to meditate on the malleability of culture, social structure, world views, values. The pragmatist sociologist would work toward change for the better for himself or herself, and for all.

Last year today at this door

the face and peach flowers

were in bright red mutual reflection.

This year the face

has vanished into an unknown place

while the peach flowers

smile as always in the spring breeze.

Translation by Chan Kwok-bun of a Tang Dynasty poem

titled “The Southern Village” by Cui Hu;

16 June, 2012 at the Changi Airport waiting room, Singapore.

Home No More Home to Me

Home no more home to me, whither must I wander?

Hunger my driver, I go where I must.

Cold blows the winter wind over hill and heather;

Thick drives the rain, and my roof is in the dust.

Loved of wise men was the shade of my roof-tree.

The true word of welcome was spoken in the door ---

Dear days of old, with the faces in the firelight

Kind folks of old, you come again no more.

Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces

Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child

Fire and the windows bright glittered on the moorland;

Song, tuneful song, built a palace in the wild.

Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland

Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold.

Lone let it stand, now the friends are all departed

The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old.

Spring shall come, come again, calling up the moor-fowl

Spring shall bring the sun and rain, bring the bees and flowers;

Red shall the heather bloom over hill and valley

Soft flow the stream through the even-flowing hours;

Fair the day shine as it shone on my childhood ---

Fair shine the day on the house with open door;

Birds come and cry there and twitter in the chimney ---

But I go for ever and come again no more.

Robert Louise Stevenson