Conclusion: through the Diasporic Looking-Glass

Abstract

Diasporic communities and their concomitant trajectories provide critical spaces to examine and come to terms with the dramatic migrations that have defined recent human history and appear to continue unabated in this century. Like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, movement is about constructing narratives of self and ‘home’. In Kondo’s (1996, p. 97) words, home ‘stands for a safe place, where there is no need to explain oneself to outsiders; it stands for community’. In this respect, memories as narrative and ‘things’ establish a bridge between the old and new life worlds, as well as provide a bond between the past, present and future. But migration is seldom a simple matter of undisturbed movement as Alice discovered when admonished by the Queen, ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards’, a point made in Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama, where Lok Siu explores how diasporic Chinese in Panama constructed a home and created a sense of belonging while inhabiting the interstices of multiple cultures.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room, thought Alice: warmer, in fact, because there’ll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it’ll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can’t get at me!

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1991)