Youna KimI don’t know where I stand, feeling stuck somewhere in the middle, though I now feel
strongly Korean.
Finally I’ve got a job, even though it is for a short period. It is not a suitable posi-
tion for my degree (in London), but I will work at a trading company overseas for a
2-year project ... After that, just have to move for another job whether that is in Japan
or elsewhere ... I am very alone, very free in London; commitment to myself with
no responsibility for anybody else, which was never like this in Japan. It’s not real life.
I feel more comfortable being back home ... But I do not feel completely comfortable
anywhere. There is no comfortable home. Don’t know when I will go back home
completely. After 5 years of study overseas I feel I cannot go back, but don’t know
where to go forward ... Many Japanese men say work is life. I might look like a career-
ist travelling with a laptop Internet but I want to marry, definitely.
My priority is to find a job after this study (in London). I am shocked to realize
that I will not be afraid wherever I go to live ... I talk with family in China via online
video calls. It gives me strength to stay here longer as I can regularly see my parents
on my screen ... Though my parents want me to marry, marriage is not the solution.
I cannot make home here, cannot make home there ... feeling stuck, I am a bit too
Western in China and too Chinese in Western culture. I often have the feeling that
I don’t belong here. Everything seems temporary, not real to me. Don’t care anymore
whether this society accepts me or not, even though I have a British boyfriend and
might marry. Deep inside, I am becoming more Chinese.Women may construct multiple-displaced diasporic subjects or become historical drifters, who
are constantly on the move, mentally and physically, yet without knowing in which direction,
and to which place, they can turn. The question of where exactly they are going can be an
existential dilemma for mobile transnationals who can end up anywhere in the travelling world.
Many of them are not particularly keen to remain in the current place, yet this does not mean
either that they have any clear idea of when they will go home. Even if they go home, typically
due to visa and economic reasons, this return migration or the meaning of “going home” today
can be thought of as open-ended and possibly continuous, since going home does not necessar-
ily imply the same sense of closure and completion as with the conventional modes of ultimate
return by previous generations.
Women come to feel most significantly that they are not any longer completely at home
anywhere. For many women who are acutely aware of the reality of foreignness and exclu-
sion, and how much they differ from the majority, their transnational lives do not easily result
in emancipation. An evident paradox is that the more physically close they are, the more
they try to remain different, distinct. To resist a Western influence is a quality that manifests
itself in the lived relations of difference, often as a reaction to hegemonic racial order and
denigration, as a conscious way of reclaiming status (“respect for who we are”). Although
some aspect of lifestyle change can make women feel incompatible with lives back home,
there is a strong denial of association or influence from the Western host society, as they find
themselves located neither “quite here” nor “quite there”; indeed, neither place is desirable
any longer. They cannot go backwards and cannot go forwards (“feeling stuck in diaspora”).
The nowhere women.
A resulting consequence of transnational mobility is therefore imperfect belonging, both the
limits of integrating “here” and the limits of going home “there”; belonging nowhere “neither
here nor there” in a certain sense that is not felt to be a form of liberation or empowerment. The
assumed idea of home-as-familiarity, what “going home” actually feels like, can be questioned