Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches family letter writing for migrants as an individual yet universal human practice of homing, which aims at challenging the dominant epistemological assumptions about ‘bitter’ migrant experiences, therefore to de-label and to emancipate ‘suffering subject’ in migration research.

Paper long abstract:

During the 19th- and 20th-centuries, there were large-scale waves of Chinese migration—stimulated by hunger and the search for paid work—that moved from South China to Southeast Asia. The enormous amount of remittances sent from those migrants to their families in China were accompanied by qiaopi family letters. The uniqueness of its genre, the sizeable collection (over 160,000 pieces), and the rich content (ranging from personal emotions to political concerns), prompted UNESCO to recognise qiaopi as documentary heritage—‘Memory of the World’. In most recent qiaopi related research, those labour migrants are often labelled as ‘fanke’ (foreign guests) in a predetermined manner embedded with stylised discourses, being placed in the position of a kind of ‘victim’, suffering their 'bitterness' for the sake of their home, their homeland, or their patriotism. Differently, grounded in existential anthropology (e.g. Jackson 1995, 2005) and cosmopolitan anthropology (e.g. Rapport 2014, 2018), and based on a joint-method of archival, ethnographical, and phenomenological study for over 3000 pieces of qiaopi, I propose to examine migrant letters as a process in the marking that inscribes their authors’ individual consciousness—the way in which migrants ‘write’ their lives and ‘author’ their identities through family letter writing, a mental yet bodily state of feeling at home within oneself. ‘Homing as de-labelling’, therefore, aims at recognising the individual yet universal human practice of homing, to disrupt the dominant narratives of ‘bitter’ migrant experiences, and to challenge the epistemological assumptions about them, thus to de-label and to emancipate ‘suffering subject’ in migration research.