Digital diaspora, mobility, and homefound in China. I never used an oven in China. I tried Western food, but after one year,
returned to Chinese food, my stomach is Chinese!Along with the Korean Wave pop culture, the Chinese media, via the de-territorializing Inter-
net, are viable sociocultural resources for opening up channels of information and pleasure,
self-expression and communicative encounter, to be sustained in the routinized activities of
daily life. Media consumption becomes a ritualistic cultural practice in securing a character of
communal life from home and abroad through rich, eclectic, and multifaceted content, whether
news, online forums with the Chinese diaspora, or dramas from the national homeland, affirm-
ing a sense of connection through habituation. The Chinese language Internet is a regularly
shared resource for diasporic difficulties and the expressive emotional repertoire—from anxi-
eties about interracial relationships, Visa troubles, and food interests, to the meanings of home
in the midst of displacement. Home is constantly invented in the diasporic imagination and is
sometimes secured (“I am home!”) through its familiar sounds (“yeng yeng yeng”) and familiar
smells (“Chinese dinner”) as mediated and experienced by the diasporic media in the humdrum
of everyday lived culture. For mobile women, the simultaneous absence and presence of home
are in the making. The sites of media consumption remain central to the home-making project
and the pursuit of livelihood (“feeling good”), identity, and status.
The nowhere women: Feeling stuck in diaspora
This sense of inclusion, self-enclosing retreat into an ethnic enclave and the imaginative spatial-
ization of belonging, as enabled by the ethnic media space, is usually strategic and creative, but
also highly contradictory in its consequences. Self-exclusion, by choice or not, may operate on a
daily basis when globally mobile migrants choose to engage with alternative spaces of belonging
through their own ethnic media as coping mechanisms, not merely to cope with loneliness, but
also to stay out of the subtle social exclusion in operation and out of the local social structures
of the host society. The diasporic ethnic media space can present new dynamics and significance
into the management of estrangement and dislocation, while reproducing discursive distinctions
between “us” and “them” at the internal level in relation to differential power and domination.
The search for uniqueness or unique identity becomes intense and dependent on the ethnic
media space where the symbolic construction of internal and external boundaries is regularly
sustained. Such mediated engagement can seek a dream of belonging in the continuity of cul-
tural specificity and differentiation that, in turn, makes it ever more difficult to connect and share
minority experiences with the mainstream culture of the host society. Migrants caught up in
this contradictory situation may remain ethnically distinct, socially constrained, and perpetually
excluded, while constituting and inhabiting a new imaginary symbolic home that is mythical yet
temporarily meaningful. This imaginary connection with home is ambiguous and paradoxical
in its effects on their everyday transnational lives, both facilitating and constraining the develop-
ment of a felt sense of belonging and of their subsequent actions “here” or “there.”
I might go back to Korea when my student visa expires, but might come out again.
The employment situation in Korea is not good. I read news, search job information
on Internet. I feel more motivated knowing that Internet is available on the go, easy
to keep in touch with family and friends. I am willing to go anywhere for a good
job opportunity ... Life in London is lonely. Sometimes I am totally alone and feel
that nobody knows and understands me ... Going home is not the same. I do not
feel comfortable there. I do not fit there, do not fit here ... There is no going back.