Digital diaspora, mobility, and homenot essentially as a diasporic option, but rather as a new predicament. Even if the problems of
social exclusion and secondary status (“secondary world citizen,” “becoming nobody”) persist
in diaspora, women are not likely to return home immediately, nor can they possibly adapt in
an unproblematic sense, on account of being caught in the complex relation of familiarity and
new strangeness to their home culture (“a bit too Western in China and too Chinese in Western
culture”). A nomadic sensibility may continue, as they simultaneously desire the very “real”
meanings of home for stability and security of identity in the middle of all the movement and
intense cultural alienation, when paradoxically a place called home is nowhere.
transnational mobility and national identity
The present “hyper-connectivity” facilitated by the rapid development of the digital media
and communication systems may allow hyper mobile transnationals, such as women in this
study, to sustain stronger, more intimate and emotionally close relationships, however par-
tial or mythical, with their home and nation than ever before. Engagement with a diverse
range of transnational practices is often grounded in the self-sustaining and reflexive use of
the ethnic media space to maintain more regular, more familiar, and more intense forms of
connections to homelands than the earlier forms of long-distance relationships attempted by
past diasporic generations. This home-in-the-making, which is different from the lived-
experience-back-home, can be imagined and experienced, or to a large extent reified with
a difference outside its national space, in very immediate and quotidian or idealized ways.
Long-distance identification with the mythical homeland, rather than the homeland such as
a physical place, could become stronger rather than weaker over time by means of virtual and
ritualistic re- creation and idealization of home. Diasporas’ home-making potentiality, and to
the extent they incorporate it into everyday life, is contingent upon the ways in which dias-
poric conditions and disturbing social relations are actually experienced in specific contexts
of locality. It is also shaped by how forms of imagined belonging amidst the sense of aliena-
tion are expressed, performed, or concretized over time through habitual practices drawing
on the ethnic media and cultural resources. The national home left behind, or sometimes
escaped from by women in this study, is being revisited and reproduced through the embodied
practices of the displaced, as an embodied pleasure by a certain degree of creativity, and para-
doxically as a defining feature of travelling narratives as a predominant marker of subjectivity,
allowing the validation of sociocultural distinction and status in renewed national terms in a
transnational world of mobility.
An unintended consequence of the new connectivity and meaning of being in the world
is therefore a revitalization of national subjectivity, perhaps more than ever (“becoming more
Korean,” “solid Japanese,” “feeling deeply Chinese”), often expressing nationalized differences
and uniqueness in the midst of massive transnational flows and reconfigurations. This mode of
experience points to a seeming irony, but perhaps an ineluctable consequence that the intersect-
ing experiences, both lived and mediated, of social exclusion, marginality, and constant emo-
tional struggles lead to heightened diasporic consciousness (“come to know us better”) that
strengthens, rather than weakens, nationalism. The ethnic media are at the center of the process
of national identification, reclaiming a bounded yet vital identity in the wired transnational
world by assuming unbounded, spatially extended relations. The experiential consciousness of
difference, de-centered social position and foreignness, is deployed to articulate conceptions of
long-distance nationalism that grows stronger in response to the predicaments and difficulties
of inhabiting transnational spaces. The ritualized and habituated, mediated cultural space via the
Internet can produce and sustain a new mode of highly individualized, seemingly floating and