Diaspora as Relational Assemblage
As a researcher who grew up in Mainland China, I did not come to the question of the Chinese diaspora through grand narratives of nationalism or sweeping cultural frameworks found in stories of tragedy. What first drew me in was far more accidental and almost imperceptible: a brief moment in a conversation when I suddenly realized who I am and who they are, and the fact that our separations and proximities were not predetermined. Instead, these were the outcome of contingencies, of currents larger than any one life, drifting histories and uneven inheritances. Thus, diaspora, for me, began not as a scholarly concept but as a sensation; the quiet recognition that the places where we end up are shaped less by intention than by circumstances.
