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Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork working with migrant workers in a toy factory in Shantou city, China for fourteen months, this paper explores the rural migrants' floating mind-set of homeawayness in urban China and its social implications for future policymaking while designing urban SDGs.

Paper long abstract:

To leave home in order to make a home, the movement of labour migration itself may become one's quest for home. In China, most rural-urban migrants return home only once a year, usually during the Chinese New Year. How does one experience home when being-at-home becomes one's 'annual holiday' while being away-from-home comes to stand for everyday life? Based on ethnographic fieldwork studying internal migration in China (living and working with migrant workers in a toy factory in Shantou city for fourteen months), this paper explores the migrants' floating mind-set of 'homeawayness'—that is, one has a rooted home somewhere else, whether concrete or imagined, while having one's everyday life uprooted from that home, one possesses or are possessed by an alternative sense of being-in-the-world, a liminal sense of being not at home but also not homeless. In particular, this paper scrutinises moments of being among the migrants' daily lives in the toy factory, arguing that these seemly trivial moments capture something significant of their home-making practices, both behavioural and ideational—aching with love, with missing home, with tiredness, with frustration for a wage, with anger or with existential crisis, the migrants' longing for home, for love, for success was expressed explicitly momentarily. The paper ends with a discussion on the social implications of homeawayness, especially how future policymaking should also take into account rural situations while designing urban SDGs: making future cities stay-able as well as making rural areas return-able for migrants.