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Paper short abstract:

Chinese immigrants’ nostalgia is promoted both by their individual hardships and by the ethnic memory of suffering. As “eating bitterness” and “speaking bitterness” become collective narration, a community consensus is built and suffering is transformed into an essential nostalgia mechanism.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my fieldwork finding at Birmingham Chinatown in 2021, which shows that suffering works as an important nostalgia mechanism among Chinese immigrants, this paper discusses the mutual reinforcement between immigrants’ nostalgia for the suffering era and their individual experiences. Specifically, the experience of smuggling, illegal working, the upheaval during the COVID-19, and even the cultural dilemma shape the memory of hardship, and the consciousness of eating bitterness (Chiku 吃苦) and speaking bitterness (Suku 诉苦), which developed during the Mao era, encourage them to share their stories, and construct the same narrative for and arouse nostalgia for suffering. Therefore, on the one hand, their immigrant experiences are expressed as hardships; and promote empathy as well as further nostalgia for the historical suffering times; on the other hand, drawing on narrative analysis, immigrants’ narratives of individual experiences are also influenced by the memory and narration rooted in their ethnic identity, in turn, it strengthens their understanding and nostalgia of “the hard but worth remembering time”. While existing studies have shown that nostalgia can promote the continuity of identity (Davis 1979; Todorova & Gille 2010; Wilson 2014), this paper depicts how nostalgia connects Chinese immigrants’ memory with present lives, and how it constructs the immigrant community identity. It might be tempting to regard nostalgia as blissful memory, however, this research argues that suffering narration works as the essential mechanism for Chinese immigrants’ nostalgia, to enable them to “eat bitterness” and gather community consensus.