Paper short abstract:

Through archival research of overseas Chinese qiaopi remittance letters, this paper examines how Chinese migrants made sense of their tumultuous lives in sojourning while making their ideas of 'home' manifest through the practice of writing family letters and sending remittances home.

Paper long abstract:

In the world of movement, the practice of displacing oneself—away from home—requires one to make sense of the distance, the strangeness, or the suffering that accompanies migrancy. Through archival research of thousands of qiaopi—qiaopi are remittance attached with family letters, sent by overseas Chinese fanke (foreign guests) to their families in South China, this paper examines how fanke made sense of their tumultuous lives while making their ideas of 'home' manifest through the practice of writing family letters and sending remittances home. Many of the lives expressed through qiaopi are often about suffering for the self and for the family, for an everlasting nostalgia and an ever-coming future. In particular, this paper investigates: 1) representations of the lives of fanke through the textual genres represented in qiaopi archive—how home was written into fanke's sojourning life. It is, I argue, not the central issue to define home and to find out how home is represented in certain forms but how home is experienced, how it interacts with one's subjectivity through those representations; 2) their inner turbulence of lived experience (such as disappointment, family strife, and dissipating love) beneath the neat and civilised representation of qiaopi genre—a form of folk letter writing; 3) the political significance in studying the mobile subjects' 'interior experience of home'—to disrupt the dominant narratives of their experience, to challenge the epistemological assumptions about them, and to recognise the centrality of home in all of our lives, thus to anthropological studies.