Youna Kiminterviews and diaries. The interviews were conducted with sixty Asian women (twenty Koreans,
twenty Japanese, twenty Chinese) who had been living and studying in the UK/London for
three to seven years. The women’s ages were between twenty-six and thirty-three years, and
they were single women of middle-class and upper-class status. A panel of thirty diarists (ten
Koreans, ten Japanese, ten Chinese) was also recruited from the women interviewed; they were
asked to write/email diaries about their experiences and to express in detail key issues raised by
the interviews. This method was designed to generate biographical material accounts from the
women and to incorporate a reflexive biographical analysis.
This chapter further explores the lived and mediated experiences of relatively silent or invis-
ible groups of migrants—the educated and highly mobile generations of Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese women in London, a place that is characterized by super-diversity and representative of
the vernacular cosmopolitanism of European urban centers. How do digital media, the Internet
in particular, open up new ways of experiencing and imagining home? How do Asian women
migrants engage with digital media as home-making practices? Do they feel that they are at
home? What are the consequences of home-making practices on the formation of migratory
identity and belonging? This study shall demonstrate that the home-making practices through
the appropriation of diasporic ethnic media enable migrants to create a new state and feeling of
going global and simultaneously of going home; however, this may present a profound paradox
resulting from the double capacity of ethnic media use to produce and organize new space of
one’s own that enables the quotidian dwelling of “here” and the hyper connecting of “there.”
Asian women migrants in this study find themselves located neither quite here nor quite
there; indeed, neither place is desirable any longer. They do not feel at home anywhere. This
dilemma reflects their situation of never quite belonging anywhere (“feeling stuck in diaspora”),
crossing national borders without becoming part of them. As this study shall argue, the conse-
quences for transnational mobility, narratives of digital diaspora and the struggles at the heart of
the subject, paradoxically point back to mythical notions of home and nationalism, while at the
same time moving continually across national borders.
Diasporic daughters: “Willing to go anywhere for a while”
Transnational mobility of young people from Korea, Japan, and China has increased massively
since the 1990s, and women now constitute a considerable proportion of this cross-border
flow and diasporic population (Kelsky 2001; HESA 2006; IIE 2006; Kim 2011). Eighty percent
of Japanese people studying abroad are women, an estimated 60 percent of Koreans studying
abroad are women, and more than half of the Chinese entering higher education overseas are
women. Studying abroad has become a major vehicle of entry into Western countries, and
the region sending the largest amount of students continues to be East Asia. Every year, about
53,000 Koreans, 42,000 Japanese, and 62,000 Chinese move to U.S. institutions of higher edu-
cation, while 4,000 Koreans, 6,000 Japanese, and 53,000 Chinese move to UK institutions of
higher education. Whereas the majority of women make their way to the U.S., the UK is rapidly
becoming a popular destination.
“Diasporic daughters” are the new emblems of contemporary transnational mobility—
nomadic, transient, individualistic, networked, risk-taking, and multiple-displaced subjects (for
details, see Kim 2011). At the heart of this mobility is an emerging, precarious process of “female
individualization” that is limited in the gendered socioeconomic and cultural conditions of the
homelands (see Kim 2012). Women’s transnational mobility can be seen to some extent as a
gender-liberating act of resistance to the nation seeking alternatives and more inclusive life pol-
itics elsewhere, as they move on to a freer, creative, yet unknown, highly contingent, and much