Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

this is to derive a way to look at the global movement as the process of meaning-making and proliferation—not a way to bring about the convergence and standardization of identity representations.

For Chinese people, travel beyond the mainland can be traced to the Tang Dynasty; since then there have been constant interactions between China and Japan. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Chinese immigrants consisted mainly of traders who traveled to places including Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America under the influence of European colonial activities across the map. Besides trade immigrants, there were also coolies who were exported to different parts of the world as labor support for colonial expansions or nation-building projects, such as the construction of railroads in North America. What is derived from these experiences of leaving the familiar space of one’s homeland is often a strong sense of displacement and inadaptability. Even though most of these immigrants strove to assimilate in the host country, there were always some surplus emotions and cultural baggage.

In November 1992, Ling-chi Wang invited approximately three hundred scholars from around the world to San Francisco for the first international conference of the Chinese diaspora. For the first time, international scholars convened to share and exchange overseas Chinese experiences and to examine the knowledge production of the overseas Chinese as a transnational field of study and research. Wang discussed the theme of the conference in the edited volume, The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays (vol. 1), which he coedited with pioneer overseas Chinese scholar, Wang Gungwu. He promoted the theme of luodi-shenggen (落地生根), which he translated as “the planting of permanent roots in the soils of different countries,” by arguing that the concept urges one to explore the experience and the study of the overseas Chinese beyond two existing paradigms that are restrictive and essentialist in their treatment of the field and its subjects. The first paradigm adopts a China-centric approach that subsumes the identity and experience of the overseas Chinese into the larger discourse of Greater China, eroding the significance of the