Abstract
Reality is a mercurial construct, fixed by what a person knows and, perhaps more importantly, by what they believe. In a world that is constantly changing, people are confronted with the social events, occurrences and circumstances of quotidian life that demand to be situated, made sense of. Whatever people experience is given signification and representation that prises a play ‘between objective givenness and subjective meanings … constituted by the reciprocal interaction of what is experienced as outside reality … and what is experienced as being within the consciousness of the individual’ (Berger et al. 1974, p. 12). It is in this sense that migration is powerfully evocative of the ambiguities and contradictions of beginnings and ends, the fixity and efflorescence of cultural identities, and sense of belonging and dislocation. Migration is strategically interruptive, decentring the boundaries and borders of place and identity. The capricious swirl of movement is what defines the migrant while masking an elusive paradox of being and becoming, polysemy and multivocality, alterity and mimesis. Nevertheless, locally defined contexts produce a range of strategic choices and attendant pragmatic frameworks by which subject-actors — migrants — make sense of the world around them as well as their fit in that locally defined world (Chun 1996). In other words, migrants negotiate a feeling of belonging based on their perceptions and memories of their social situations.
I think in my heart, I know I will never live there (Shanghai) permanently, but it is still in my dreams, in my memories. But Australia, I feel like I am just living here. That is a very strange feeling.
Interview with Mai (2003)
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Davidson, A.P. (2008). The Play of Identity, Memory and Belonging: Chinese Migrants in Sydney. In: Eng, KP.K., Davidson, A.P. (eds) At Home in the Chinese Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591622_2
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