What if "home" isn't a place you return to, but something you build along the way? In this solo episode, me, a bilingual writer born in Jinan, shaped in Auckland, London, and Lisbon, and now back in China, revisits the classic story of diaspora. Drawing on William Safran, James Clifford, and Avtar Brah, and on the Portuguese idea of saudade, she explores why returning to the homeland can feel like a second diaspora, and why writing may be the truest way of belonging.
What we covered:
The classic diaspora story: collective memory, the homeland myth, and the dream of return
Roots vs. routes: a life told as a chain of cities (Jinan, Auckland, London, Lisbon)
The new self-initiated, third-culture writer, and how this differs from older diaspora literature
Saudade in Lisbon, and how it differs from East Asian homesickness tied to family duty
"Homing desire" vs. desire for a homeland
6. The return: becoming a "stranger in my hometown"
References
Diaspora (classic model): a dispersed community that keeps a shared memory of an idealized homeland and aspires to return (Safran).
Saudade: a Portuguese term for a deep longing for something lost, or something that may never have existed.
Third culture: a personal space built from several cultures, belonging fully to none of them.
Secondary diaspora: the feeling of being displaced even after physically returning.
Digital diaspora: scattered communities formed through blogs, podcasts, and self-publishing.
Safran, William. "Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return." Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1, no. 1 (1991): 83–99.
Clifford, James. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302–338.
Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 1996.
Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.
Brubaker, Rogers. "The 'Diaspora' Diaspora." Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 1–19.
Chinese diaspora and identity
Ang, Ien. On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West. Routledge, 2001.
Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press, 1999.
Wang Gungwu. Don't Leave Home: Migration and the Chinese. Times Academic Press, 2001.
Tu Weiming. "Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center." Daedalus 120, no. 2 (1991).
Saudade and Portuguese culture
Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina. A Saudade Portuguesa (1914). The classic Portuguese essay on the concept.
Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. A Lisbon classic of longing and displacement.
Fado was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2011.
Watch
Pico Iyer, "Where Is Home?" (TED, 2013).
Taiye Selasi, "Don't Ask Where I'm From, Ask Where I'm a Local" (TEDGlobal, 2014).
Credits and connect
