Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

The familiar couplet “luo-di-sen-gen [sic], luo-ye-gui-gen” (落地生根，落葉歸根) captures the key essence of diaspora, in that, indeed, migrating Chinese do put down new roots where they land but prefer to return to the original roots when life ends, even if many do not do so in fact. But much of what happens between and afterwards is left unsaid.… And concomitantly, the necessarily transnational approach to diaspora is played out against the background of China as perceived, experienced and imagined, and always implicitly if not explicitly, as one of the nodes in the circuit of interaction.…
We recognize that, fundamentally, diaspora argues for a comparative perspective on the experience of those who have left the homeland and settled elsewhere to work, live, build communities and even entire societies and new nations; to procreate and reproduce themselves as collectivities while forming and redefining relationships as well as confirming and re-articulating identities… we are also mindful that diasporas transcend national histories while always interacting with them.³¹

Instead of perceiving luo-di-sheng-gen, luo-ye-gui-gen as the “key essence” of diaspora, as Kuah-Pearce and Hu Dehart suggested, it might be more productive to appropriate the meaning behind this couplet as a point of departure for exploring the reality of the Chinese in diaspora. This reality cannot simply be circumscribed by the assumption of a preference for the myth of return (the nostalgia for a lost origin) over the urgency of assimilating into the host society. To treat this reality of the Chinese diaspora as a point of departure for overseas Chinese studies is to understand that the Chinese diasporic identity involves the struggle between identifying with the ancestral homeland and identifying with the local society. Taking for granted the concept of luo-di-sheng-gen as an “essence” risks reducing identity to a fixed entity. However, Kuah-Pearce and Hu-Dehart acknowledged and reminded readers that the study of the Chinese diaspora is a project that continues its mission to define and redefine its boundaries and characteristics, and it involves subjects who continue “to procreate and reproduce themselves as collectivities