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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
How do Chinas mobile individuals create a sense of home in a rapidly changing world?
Unhomely life, different from houselessness, refers to a fluctuating condition between losing home feelings and the search for home — a prevalent condition in post-Mao China. The faster that Chinese society modernizes, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This is the central paradox that Xiaobo Su explores: how mobile individuals—lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China's big cities, displaced natives and rural migrants in peripheral China—handle the loss of home and try to experience a homely way of life.
In Unhomely Life, Xiaobo Su examines the subjective experiences of mobile individuals to better understand why they experience the loss of home feelings and how they search for home. Integrating extensive empirical data and a robust theoretical framework, the author presents a journey-based critical analysis of “home” under constant making, un-making, and re-making in post-Mao China. Su argues that the making of home is not a solely economic or rational calculation for maximum return, but rather a synthesis of resistance and compromise under the disappointing conditions of modernity.
Offering rich insights into the continuity and disruption of China's great transformation, Unhomely Life:
- Develops an original theory of unhomely life that incorporates contemporary research and traditional Chinese ideas of home
- Explores the process of homemaking and its implications for understanding the costs of high-speed economic growth in China
- Analyzes mobile individuals across different genders, ages, ethnicities, social classes, and economic backgrounds to address the balance between meaning and money in everyday life
Containing in-depth and sophisticated empirical data collected from 2002 to 2020, Unhomely Life: Modernity, Mobilities, and the Making of Home in China is an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers, and academic researchers in cultural studies, migration, tourism, China studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and cultural geography.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface and Acknowledgments
Notes on Fieldwork
Chapter One: Introduction: From
Xiangtu
China to Unhomely China
Modernity as a Deal
Two Dimensions of Uneven Mobilities
Lijiang Old Town: The Case
Structure of the Book
Notes
Chapter Two: A Sense of Home in China: Then and Now
Home: An Ensemble of Representations and Experiences
A Sense of Home in Traditional Chinese Culture
Modernization and Loss of Home Feelings in Post‐Mao China
Unhomely Life: An Analytic Framework
Notes
Chapter Three: Lifestyle Migration and the (Un)making of an Ideal Home
Representing Lijiang as an Ideal Home
Making Home in its Material and Lived Aspects
Unmaking Home: The Spatial Politics of Belonging and Alienation
Divergence between Busyness and Slowness
Conclusion: The Ambivalence of an Ideal Home
Notes
Chapter Four: The Act of Retreat: Tourism, Loafing, and the Consumption of Home
Solitude and a Natural Way of Living
Loafing through Socialization
Regarding Lijiang Old Town as a Home
Being Unhomely in a Mobile World
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Five: Displacing Native Residents: Money, Meaning, and the Remaking of Home
A Sense of Home in the Town
From Familiar to Strange: In‐situ Displacement
Age Difference: Departure or Stay
Making and Remaking Home in Daily Life: Four Stories
Conclusion
Note
Chapter Six: Hometown Babies: Immobility and Lijiang Locals’ Struggles for Home
Speed and Slowness: The Supply of Homely Service to the Old Town
Pain and Joy: Embracing Hometown in Lijiang
Stay and Departure: The Longing for Settlement
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter Seven: Homemaking in a Relentless World
The Politics of Homemaking in Lijiang
Remembering Home in China: By Whom and for What?
Being Unhomely in Modern Times
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 Dimensions of uneven mobilities.
Table 1.2 The population of Old Town District in Lijiang in 2020.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 A conception of unhomely life between power and meaning.
Figure 1.2 The location of Lijiang in China.
Figure 1.3 Lijiang Old Town in Lijiang Valley.
Figure 1.4 A map of Lijiang Old Town.
Figure 1.5 Sifang Square in Lijiang Old Town in 2004. The background in this...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The Courtyard in Yunhui’s Guesthouse in 2020.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Tea table in Mahua’s guesthouse in Lijiang Old Town in 2020.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 The Courtyard in Gengfu’s house in 2004. The lady in the picture ...
Figure 5.2 The front courtyard in Laoyu’s house in 2007.
Figure 5.3 Streetscape in Lijiang’s new city in 2007.
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 A tricycle rider in Lijiang Old Town in 2018.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Preface and Acknowledgments
Notes on Fieldwork
Begin Reading
References
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Unhomely Life
Modernity, Mobilities, and the Making of Home in China
Xiaobo Su
Department of Geography
University of Oregon
This edition first published 2024© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is applied for:Paperback ISBN: 9781394176304Hardback ISBN: 9781394176298
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © Xiaobo Su
To Huang Chunyuan and Su Yufei
Preface and Acknowledgments
It is said that we geographers write about other people’s stories, which somehow reflect our own consciousness. It is also said that literally, geography is about earth writing, or writing about the conjunction between the physical existence of nature and the human practices of everyday life. Located at the center of this conjunction, home is imbued with stories.
In this book, I narrate various stories of homemaking and unmaking in the context of China’s great transformation in the past four decades. My interest here is not so much in analyzing China’s housing market disoriented from the use value of dwelling to the exchange value of economic speculation, nor in highlighting the ideology of house ownership as a symbol of middle‐class society, as if such gestures are self‐evident in the race for wealth and fame. Rather, I am more concerned with the ongoing deal between profit and meaning that currently affects those who strive for homemaking as an integral part of their daily life in China. The question of “what is home” cannot be separated from the question of “where is a place to call home.” Inserted directly into the actual and imaginative space of daily life, homemaking goes beyond the material forms of private residence to reach deep into interior subjectivity and social consciousness that become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the tenets of rational efficiency prevalent in an era of speedy modernization.
My long interest in studying home, and especially its multiple meanings to people on the move, must in one way or another result from my own experiences of migration and travel. My birth‐family house, located in a rural village in central China, has been permanently left behind in my forward journey, ever since my parents moved from it to become typical rural‐to‐urban migrants when I was 14 years old. Although the birth house lingers in my dreams, I dare not visit it in person. To some people, the house of one’s birth in relation to childhood and old buddies entails symbolic power, either as a place of origin or a sentimental embodiment of a time gone by. To me, it is a starting point from which I embark upon a never‐returning journey. By abandoning my birth house and childhood years, I have lost my rooted home. Later, I drifted yet, farther away, until I became a transnational migrant in the United States. Possibly I can define myself as a subject of liquid modernity.
Shuttling back and forth between the United States and China, I somehow lose a rich sense of feeling at home in either geography or society. Rather, I develop an unruly sense of distance from wherever I stay, and look for new possibilities there. In Eugene, Oregon, I leave my house for work in the morning and come home at the end of the day. During holidays, I become a tourist to travel around in the United States and then go home at the end of the journey. I must confess that I have not been bothered by any housing problem. Nevertheless, a typical US middle‐class lifestyle cannot guarantee me a sense of home. The most recent upheaval of Asian hatred after 2016 causes me much mental stress and fearfully reminds me of racial inequality and discrimination. In the United States, a country where I have regularly dwelt, I define myself as an alien of color with permanent residency, indicating that I choose to be exiled to a land I seem to be familiar with.
Almost every year before the COVID‐19 pandemic, I traveled back to China in summers. This was and remains a passage of “going home” (huijia, 回家), but the country’s dramatic change always makes me feel both excited and alienated. In China, I develop a mood of being a guest, either because everyone treats me as a foreigner from the United States, or because I stay in one hotel or another. Despite my close ties and frequent travels, I have increasingly felt myself to be an alien in the country of my birth. To me, one form of going home means going to the place where my parents reside. They are my biological root and cultural mooring in this highly mobile world of which I am an essential part. The versatile homes that they make in their life enable me to develop a sense of belonging and comfort, no matter how far I have moved away from them. Ironically, I cannot spend much time accompanying them during my stay in China, since I am kept busy with fieldwork on homemaking by others or visiting friends for enjoyment. To my parents, my arrival at home means a forthcoming departure in a week or two. From their perspective, I am their most familiar stranger. Once strangeness starts to shape my familiarity with China, I slide into an unhomely condition, which means struggling between a loss of home and the search for home.
The loss of cultural roots leads me to think that there is an urgent need to understand the lack of feeling at home as a common phenomenon. Indeed, everybody has become unhomely in one way or another because of globalization, increasing mobility, forced displacement, or other causes. Here, unhomeliness is not simply ontologized as a consequence of structural transformation, but also remains a universal experience that we share in common, in both psychological and cultural ways. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, capitalist modernity has removed the very forms of rootedness in time and space and thus rendered impossible the establishment of emotional attachment to a stable society or an inclusive community. Or as Karl Marx says, all that is solid melts into air for the sake of capital accumulation. Mobilities are decisive in my own unsettled sense of home in adult life and render my journey unhomely. Unsurprisingly this sense inflects the conceptual thinking and empirical analysis that follow in this book.
My account goes beyond a development approach that would define the condition of being unhomely as the consequence of economic modernization or the pain of China’s dramatic transformation into a global economic power. Even the ills of modernity, as many scholars frequently cite, cannot offer a nuanced description of how individuals react to China’s great transformation. Instead, I use the notion of unhomely life as a unique lens to examine more closely the subjective experiences of those on the move in order to understand why they experience the loss of home feelings and how they search for home through imaginations and practices to counter such a loss. Therefore, my analysis shifts from the domestic space of household responsibility and the materiality of housing and property ownership to much broader experiences of homelessness derived from time‐space discipline in an era of speedy modernization. In one specific place, Lijiang, a well‐known tourist destination in Yunnan province, China, I have witnessed for two decades how individuals with different social and economic backgrounds (gender, age, ethnicity, and class) oscillate between meaning and profit in their everyday life to make and unmake their home.
Unhomely Life provides a critical analysis of how mobile individuals in China make home for a better life in a rapidly changing world. These mobile individuals, including lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China’s big cities, displaced native town residents, and local service workers from rural Lijiang, engage in an endless journey to mitigate the gap between the home they leave behind or escape from, the existential home in which they currently dwell, and the ideal home that they imagine for retreat and comfort. Filled with compromise, illusion, and resistance, their journey epitomizes an unhomely life through which they make efforts to negotiate for a relatively comfortable existence under a given set of constraining circumstances in China. I argue that the making of home is not confined to a peculiarly economic, rational calculation for maximum return, but expresses a refusal of the status quo and represents resistance against and compromise with the disappointing conditions of modernity. This synthesis of resistance and compromise in the process of homemaking has profound implications for our understanding of the trajectories of social transformation in China.
Theorizing back to the critical geographies of home, I emphasize that the loss of home that ordinary Chinese people experience has already occurred to Europeans following the Industrial Revolution, and to individuals in colonial and postcolonial societies, and continues to haunt them today. Thus, the loss of home, or a sense of homelessness, is not exceptional to China, but becomes a universal reality derived from capitalist modernity. What matters is how the loss of home spatially and temporally unfolds in various geographical contexts, and how individuals mitigate such a loss. As one of the most idealized sites of human existence, home offers a critical entry point into understanding and unraveling the micro‐geographies of social and spatial uncertainty in a rapidly changing world. I deploy the vocabulary of the loss of home feelings and longing for home throughout the book to illuminate an in‐between condition that reflects and reinforces the unevenness of mobilities and modernity. As far as home is concerned, we must critically analyze the practices of everyday life through a dialectic relation between here and there, between past and present, rather than in static isolation.
Over the past two decades, I have accumulated enormous debts of gratitude to many scholars and friends who have helped me to furnish and articulate the in‐between condition between home and homelessness. I started my Lijiang adventure in 2002 when I worked with Jigang Bao. Being an enthusiastic mentor, Bao always supports my theoretical exploration and pushes me to ask critical research questions. In Singapore, my former advisor Peggy Teo inspired me to be a critical geographer so that I can expand beyond political discourses in China to think about social and economic inequality that underpins the practices of everyday life. Likewise, Henry Yeung always urges me to go beyond the case study of China and theorize back, in this case, a critical understanding of home.
In the process of writing this book, I have received valuable support and comments from Kai Bai, Weijun Chen, Elaine Ho, Lily Kong, Kean Fan Lim, Jianxiong Ma, Laurence Ma, and Shanyi Zhou. Critical and detailed comments from Alec Murphy and two anonymous reviewers pushed me to build a dialogue with the critical geographies of home and clarify the uniqueness of a Chinese conception of home. In May and June 2023, I had two conversations with Daniel Sui, who expressed great interest in this book and highlighted to me the significance of big pictures and theorization in academic research. My two research assistants, Qingyan Huang and Jiayu Yuan, helped me enormously when I was unable to return to Lijiang to do fieldwork during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Friends and respondents in Lijiang generously shared with me their life stories interesting enough to sustain my interest in the town for two decades. Without their generosity, I could never have completed this book. Gratitude is also due to my colleagues in the Department of Geography, University of Oregon, who shared many administrative burdens at a key point in the completion of this manuscript. I benefit tremendously from stimulating conversations with Amy Lobben, Andrew Marcus, and Karen Ford. I am particularly indebted to Chih Yuan Woon and Ruth Craggs, the two editors of this book series, for their perceptive and thoughtful comments on the final manuscript. I feel grateful to Mary Sharon Moore who offers superb proofreading and Rebecca Walter and Carol Thomas who assisted in preparing the manuscript for production. Portions of chapter 3 are revised from my article “Lifestyle migration and the (un)making of ideal home,” Geoforum, 2020, 115: 111–119, reproduced with permission from Elsevier.
Writing a book on homemaking cannot be possible without the support of my own family members who foster a homely environment for me. Despite my feeling stuck in an in‐between condition encapsulating the United States and China, my wife Huang Chunyuan and son Su Yufei create an oasis of calm that enables me to slow down to write about homemaking. I would not have written this book without their affective company, particularly during the COVID‐19 pandemic. My mother, Tang Xiangzhen, and father, Su Yeshan, anchor my liquid life journey around them so that I do not completely get lost. My mother‐in‐law, Zhong Meizhen, and father‐in‐law, Huang Bingqian, demonstrate to me how cyclical time currently plays out in China’s xiangtu or rural society, and provide me with the best hospitality I have ever enjoyed in my life. Although my parents and in‐laws have no idea of what I am writing about, they always believe that I can do something good to benefit society. For decades, my brother Su Boqing, and two sisters, Su Yan’e and Chen Yanli, have given me unfettered warmth and comfort, which sustain my sense of belonging. It is to my family members that I dedicate this book.
Notes on Fieldwork
My research on Lijiang, Yunnan Province in China, started in 2002 and spanned almost two decades. The bulk of data collection in Lijiang was conducted during nine intervals between 2002 to 2020. In 2004 and 2005, I spent ten months doing intensive ethnographic fieldwork in Lijiang, including over 150 in‐depth interviews with tourists, migrants, service workers, and native residents. Then I made five return visits (2007, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2018) to Lijiang and each visit lasted between one and five weeks. The most recent fieldwork in October 2020 was conducted by my research assistant Huang Qingyan, because the COVID‐19 pandemic stopped me from returning to China with ease. This book largely relies on the data collected since 2015 to exemplify the town’s most recent transformation. Nevertheless, I relied on the earlier data I collected in the 2000s when I focused on native residents (particularly in Chapter 5), because almost all of them in the town had moved to the new city and rented out their property to domestic migrants.
Since 2015, I have interviewed forty‐five lifestyle migrants (twenty‐five men and twenty women), forty domestic tourists (twenty‐two men and eighteen women), twenty service workers (eight men and twelve women), and five native residents. For lifestyle migrants, they had lived in Lijiang for at least one year prior to the interview. Half of them had spent more than five years in Lijiang. By definition, they are migrants rather than tourists, as they leave the cities where they used to live and stay for over six months in Lijiang to establish tourism‐related businesses such as cafés, guesthouses, outdoors shops, and bars. Most of them were born in the 1970s and 1980s, and a few in the 1990s. All of them are Han ethnicity. In terms of their socioeconomic position within Chinese society, their previous employment was predominantly in either the public sector as teachers or civil servants, or in the business sector as professionals or managers. A few young migrants originated from relatively affluent families, allowing them to receive financial support from their parents to operate businesses in the town. Lifestyle migrants rarely relocate their household registration (or hukou in Chinese) to Lijiang, but their school‐age children can go to local public primary schools since the local government wants to retain these migrants. Having said this, many choose to send their children back to the cities where they used to live for the purpose of a better education in middle and high schools, and some others simply leave Lijiang once their children are old enough to go to school.
Tourist respondents came from China’s big cities and generally spent at least one week in Lijiang Old Town. Their age ranged from late twenties to early fifties. Middle‐class independent tourists (in contrast to group tourists, business tourists, or young budget tourists) were strategically chosen in order to address how they critically understand the meanings of home when they are away from their regular abode. Local service workers originated from urban villages in Lijiang’s new city or rural villages with a manageable distance to the old town. Their age ranged from mid‐twenties to fifties, and all were married. Among the twenty service workers I interviewed, 70% are Naxi and 30% Bai, two major ethnic minority groups in Lijiang.
Regarding interviews with lifestyle migrants and service workers, I specifically identified a nonrandom selection of respondents who could offer distinctive perspectives about daily experiences in Lijiang. Then I asked them to introduce me to other respondents so that I could expand the relationship of basic trust to gather further information. Alternatively, I approached tourist respondents randomly in restaurants, guesthouses, and streets. Respondents were not expected to represent a whole sample of domestic tourists in Lijiang, nor did their interviews generate exhaustive knowledge about tourist experiences. All interviews ranged from forty‐five to ninety minutes in length, and were conducted in Mandarin. Stories can elicit relevant details with an emphasis on the density of meanings and reflections by respondents. This storytelling format allowed respondents to narrate their experiences in their own way.
In Lijiang, people generally love to talk about their life with unacquainted persons in a relaxed touristic setting where social obligation is relieved. With the exception of three respondents who had not much time to be interviewed because they rushed to deliver and collect parcels in the town, other respondents willingly accepted our interview request and elaborated their life stories. Some even actively approached us for an interview when they noticed that we were collecting life stories. Some others were interviewed more than once.
To understand the broad context of Chinese society, I also relied on my own experience of living in big cities. My regular stay in Guangzhou every summer and frequent travel to Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai before 2020 allow me to develop a nuanced impression of hectic life in these first‐tier cities in China, and my interactions with friends in these cities further increasing my understanding of how urban living has been accelerated for efficiency. In other words, these experiences allow me to resonate with my respondents (tourists and lifestyle migrants) in Lijiang regarding speed and busyness, but I did not conduct any participant observations about my respondents’ actual life in other cities. Indeed, this observation can generate critical insights into the intimate and uncanny search of paradise, as shown by Li Zhang’s (2012) critical analysis of homemaking by middle‐class citizens in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province.
Doing fieldwork in Lijiang only is a methodological choice, as I prefer to approach my respondents in one place rather than reaching out to them in their regular settings. It would be ideal if I could trace back to the daily life of my respondents in metropolitan cities or rural villages. It can be a difficult undertaking to visit different cities and villages to approach people who willingly share their time with an unfamiliar scholar for meaningful reflections on their personal life. Most tourist respondents have been busy in their regular cities, including work, family affairs, Internet surfing, and socialization, in order to efficiently use every minute. Some respondents explicitly told me that they never wanted to talk about themselves if they did not meet me in Lijiang. Henceforth, I maintained Lijiang as a field of interrelationships in which people from cities and villages converge. I heed recent calls for the territorial and relational conception of place, and understand Lijiang as a contact zone with “dense bundles of social relations and power‐infused interactions that are always formed out of entanglements and connections with dynamics at work” (Hart 2002, p. 297). Even though data collection was grounded in Lijiang, the fieldwork took place within a translocal cultural setting related to the social and spatial networks that connect my respondents with other Chinese cities.
Scholars talk about conducting fieldwork in sites of constant contact, such as motels or airports, which are designed to accommodate mobile people (Clifford 1997) or night bars for intense discussion (Appadurai 1991). Lijiang is such a mobile place, as people constantly come and go. This mixture between short‐lived and flimsy interactions among people on the move, and the long‐lived and stable sediment in Naxi traditional society presents a complicated and contradictory parameter of daily life. Tourists and lifestyle migrants said that they enjoy Lijiang’s lifestyle very much and indeed, contributed culturally or commercially to myth making in Lijiang, but very few actually stay long enough to live a settled way of life. To the respondents I interacted with, regardless of their background, Lijiang is like the site of a grown‐ups playground, or as Levi‐Straus puts it, “a place of transit, not of residence” (cites from Clifford, 1997, p. 17). In such a place, the only unchanged thing is the (un)making of home for meaning or money (Fog Olwig and Hastrup 1997). Meanwhile, native residents and Lijiang locals avoid the old town and leave it to outsiders. To them, the town is a place from which they earn money, where their encounters with others are fleeting and arbitrary. In such a place where people constantly come and go, stay and departure are in rapid flux. Maybe I am one of the very few who retain such a long passion with the town, spanning nearly two decades. During this period, I can see that the old town and Lijiang’s new city, like many other Chinese cities, have undergone dramatic changes, but some elements remain rooted. This two‐decade‐long engagement with Lijiang enables me to observe the continuity and disruption born out of China’s dramatic transformation in the post‐Mao era.
Chapter OneIntroduction: From Xiangtu China to Unhomely China
“Lijiang is my home and I enjoy it very much. Do I want to go back to Beijing? No, absolutely no! I cannot endure living in Beijing anymore.” In her well‐maintained courtyard in Lijiang Old Town, a popular destination located in Yunnan province, China, and known for its relaxed lifestyle and Naxi ethnic culture, Mahua expresses to me her feeling of being at home in Lijiang and her disfavor with Beijing. After working in Beijing for years, Mahua became burned out by the hectic pace of life and high‐pressure work. In 2013, she migrated to Lijiang and spent her savings leasing a courtyard house, turning it into a five‐room guesthouse. After hiring a local female villager as a domestic worker in the guesthouse, Mahua has plenty of time to enjoy a simple and relaxed lifestyle, and shares it with those tourists who want to temporarily escape the hustle and bustle of daily life in China’s big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Indeed, she hopes her guests will retreat into a space of slowness and simplicity in a world rife with speed and excitement. As she explains, “I enjoy chatting with my guests and listening to their stories. In big cities, they cannot find a listener, since everyone is too busy to listen to others. By offering this sort of friendship, I rely on returning customers and their friends. They come to stay here again and again. There is something they cannot find in big cities, but can experience in Lijiang.”
The thing that Mahua holds dear to her heart is the home, or specifically, a combination of feeling at home and experiencing a homely way of life, even though she does not own the guesthouse, nor has she relocated her household registration to Lijiang. As Mahua explains, it took her nearly two years in Lijiang to recover from mental fatigue and discard the nightmare of rushing to complete job tasks. In Beijing, she felt dreadful and lonely, since she worked so hard that she had no time to slow down or build meaningful relations with the city. Her hometown in Jiangsu province in eastern China has undergone dramatic transformation, becoming an unfamiliar place that she does not want to return to, even though her parents expect her to do so. Between a hectic city hollowed out of meanings and a hometown left behind, Mahua had no place to call home and experienced a loss of home feelings. To counter such a loss, she migrated to Lijiang to regain a sense of home in a tourist destination in rapid flux. Ironically, this sense of home has become a good selling point for attracting millions of domestic tourists who more or less suffer from a similar loss of home feelings, as Mahua had before, in China’s big cities.
For two decades I have been intrigued by stories shared by Mahua and other respondents about how they enjoy Lijiang’s lifestyle and even treat Lijiang Old Town as an ideal home. Their literal meaning of home points to moments of homelessness, or a loss of “home feelings,” that plague them in China’s big cities and push them to stay in Lijiang for a sense of home, temporally or perennially. This felt sense of homelessness is not the same as being actually unhoused or lacking decent physical shelter, but highlights a loss of home feelings due to hectic daily schedules, high work pressure, and a disconnection with surroundings. Coping with such a loss in Lijiang by Mahua and others from China’s big cities, however, results in the displacement of native residents from their courtyard houses and the supply of service by workers from surrounding villages.1 The making of one home corresponds to the unmaking of the other. As I accumulated life stories from respondents in Lijiang, I came to comprehend an insidious crisis of home in contemporary China. The faster that Chinese society becomes modernized, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This central paradox forms the core of Unhomely Life.
This paradox deserves careful attention since it spells out a situation of seesawing between the loss of home and the search for home. I conceptualize this situation as “unhomely life.” Unhomely life is not exceptional to Mahua and other middle‐class residents in Chinese cities, but becomes a common reality derived from modernity. The most dramatic consequence of modernity is the formation of homeless mind, that is, a feeling of psychological homelessness (Berger, Berger, and Kellner 1974). Thanks to modernizing forces embedded in technocratic rationality, individuals are removed from the cultural root of belonging and familiarity, and become exposed to alienation and strangeness. As Berger et al. (1974, p. 82, original emphasis) state, “modern man has suffered from a deepening condition of ‘homelessness.’ The correlate of the migratory character of his [sic] experience of society and of self has been what might be called a metaphysical loss of ‘home.’” Similarly, Berman (1982, p. 35) states that “Our desire to be rooted in a stable and coherent personal and social past, and our insatiable desire for growth—not merely for economic growth but for growth in experience, in pleasure, in knowledge, in sensibility […] destroys both the physical and social landscapes of our past, and our emotional links with those lost worlds.” These scholars focus mainly on the experiences of homelessness in Europe after the Industrial Revolution, yet China is no exception. What matters is how the loss of home feelings spatially and temporally unfold in different geographical contexts, and how individuals imagine and experience a homely life to mitigate such a loss.
As Mahua indicated and I will emphasize, a temporal perspective is critical to understanding the relationship between home and modernity (Adam 1998; Friedman 2020; Heller 1999). To Virilio (1986), modernity is characterized by speed. It is a world in motion to accelerate the pace of machines and people, giving rise to a society trapped on a perpetual race course. Once efficiency becomes a constitutive element of modern capitalist society, the pace of economic production and social reproduction becomes inevitably accelerated to facilitate the logic of capital accumulation. Or as Rosa (2013, p. 161) argues, in the capitalist economic system, acceleration becomes “an inescapable compulsion embedded in the material structures of society.” No society is more obsessed with speed than China. If the automobile represents a form of speed on wheels in Western societies, the high‐speed train in China elevates the addiction to speed to an unprecedented level.2 The outcome of speedy modernization is not always rosy as expected, particularly with regard to home.
No one can underestimate the significance of home as a key cultural value in China since it touches upon the deep root of Chinese society. For instance, Confucius’s dictum that “while one’s parents are alive, one should not travel to distant places” reinforces a strong commitment to homemaking for the purpose of filial piety;3 the popular Chinese aphorism “fallen leaves return to the roots” (叶落归根, yeluo guigen) reflects that home is an ultimate destination for mobile persons to ground themselves. Home as a kernel in Chinese culture builds upon China’s rural foundation. Over 70 years ago, renowned Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong published Xiangtu Zhongguo (literally, soil‐bound China, 乡土中国) to analyze the structural foundations of Chinese society.4 At the beginning of his book, Fei (1992, p. 37) specifies that “Chinese society is fundamentally rural. I say that it is fundamentally rural because its foundation is rural.” The closeness to soil as well as national environment characterizes this rurality. Related to this rural foundation is a slow pace of living around natural seasons and a strong sense of familiarity in local communities. Individuals in one village see each other every day and know everyone since childhood. This intimate feeling is developed through frequent and repeated interactions over a long period of time and within one place.
Undoubtedly, the rural foundation started to dramatically erode after Chairman Mao Zedong passed away in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping launched economic reform in 1978. The process of modernization in post‐Mao China, reified through industrialization and urbanization, has jeopardized and even demolished home‐related cultural norms to such an extent that ordinary people seem bereft of home. First, hundreds of millions of people have migrated from villages to cities and stopped relying on soil for livelihood;5 second, urban residents in those same residential communities do not know each other, let alone have deep and meaningful interactions; and finally, these individuals must manage the manacles of acceleration and rationality that have entered into private life to organize their time and space (Pun 2005; Rozelle and Hell 2020; Wu, Zhang, and Webster 2014). While Fei’s emphasis that Chinese society grows out of its ties to the soil reminds us of a deep rural foundation in China, a new episode unfolds in the course of speedy modernization in the post‐Mao era to implicate ordinary individuals in dramatic sociospatial changes. From rural to urban, from familiarity to strangeness, from slowness to speedup, China has undertaken a great transformation from a xiangtu society to an unhomely one.
When a lifetime burns under the forces of speed and pressure, the home inherent in Chinese society, which cannot be deciphered through wealth, property ownership, or social status, shatters into powder in mere decades. This is exactly the suffering that Mahua endured in Beijing. Indeed, high mobilities and rapid urbanization generate “a profound sense of a loss of territorial roots, of an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of place” (Gupta and Ferguson 1992, p. 9). The loss of home feelings has become such a cultural crisis in China that Chinese President Xi Jinping launched a nationwide campaign of Jizhu xiangchou (literally, remembering hometown, 记住乡愁) in 2013.6 To President Xi, remembering hometown means to retrieve cultural roots in the countryside so that individuals do not feel homeless or uprooted. Interestingly, the experiences of homely life by my respondents in Lijiang are centered upon three elements that Fei Xiaotong highlights in Chinese xiangtu society: closeness to nature, enjoyment of cyclic time, and finally, socialization for a sense of community. Against this backdrop, Unhomely Life places the home in the context of China’s speedy modernization to investigate how ordinary individuals experience a sense of home in order to mitigate the loss of home feelings in a rapidly changing society.
China’s transformation since 1978 has always provoked academic and public interest, and this transformation has sped up since China joined the World Trade Organization and became integrated into the global economy in 2001. Its rise to the status of a global economic power in a relatively short period impacts every aspect of life within and beyond the Chinese territory. Less examined is how ordinary individuals in China react to such a great transformation characterized by time discipline, rising wealth, and sociospatial alienation. For instance, middle‐class anxieties have become a popular theme to provoke intense debates across the Internet and in newspapers in China and elsewhere. Many residing in China’s big cities engage in the merciless race for wealth, but concurrently develop a self‐perpetuating sense of insecurity. Against the background of growing insecurity, discomfort, and anxiety, people attach new importance to home. In her excellent book on homemaking, In Search of Paradise: Middle‐Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis, Li Zhang (2012) delineates the significance of home as a paradise to middle‐class residents in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province. She points out that instead of seeking happiness and fulfillment through socialist ideals, these professionals and entrepreneurs prefer to enjoy material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities in the quest for a good life. The shift from collective sacrifice in Maoist China to conspicuous consumption in the post‐Mao era redirects the meaning of home towards personal oasis, class status, and personal identity.
Zhang’s work on homemaking in Kunming is valuable precisely because it provides deep insight into ubiquitous anxiety among middle‐class urban residents and their struggle for refuge and oasis in their own private property. It illustrates how the rise of private homeownership is reshaping urban space and daily life in contemporary China. While I share Zhang’s focus on the representations and experiences of home, I go beyond her combination of house and home and emphasize home as a subject of inquiry in its own right. By doing so, my analysis transcends the materiality of housing to specify that a homely way of life is not necessarily confined within the private sphere. Different from Zhang’s focus on residents who dwell in one city, I prioritize mobility as a central entry point because mobility provokes “a new experience or orientation and disorientation, new senses of placed and placeless identity” (Morley and Robins 1995, p. 121). On the one hand, the rapidly accelerating mobility of people generates a profound sense of uprootedness and erodes the cultural distinctiveness of places (Gupta and Ferguson 1992). On the other hand, individuals make efforts to withstand a loss of home feelings by traveling for a sense of home elsewhere (rural countryside, natural resorts, parents’ house, or heritage sites) or in another time (elsewhen) (nostalgia, childhood, or traditional communities).
As I explained at the beginning, Mahua and others from China’s big cities have an adequate ability to make their home by means of migration or retreat‐oriented tourism. But in Lijiang, many are pushed to move. For instance, native residents are socially displaced from their ancestral courtyard houses, while service workers are spatially dislocated from rural villages for tourism‐related job opportunities in the town. Mobilities are essentially uneven. Bauman (1998) classifies mobile individuals into two categories: vagabonds and tourists. The former have no choice but to move, while the latter travel because they have freedom to do so. To Bauman (1998, p. 94), “tourism is the only acceptable, human form of restlessness.” The point is well taken. But given that social and spatial mobility commonly transform and dominate everyday life in China and elsewhere, how do we arrive at an age of modernity characterized by homelessness and meaninglessness? When individuals are called upon not to become vagabonds, but rather to work hard, get rich, and become tourists, where is the place that people can call home? How do they strive for an ideal home elsewhere and elsewhen? Or asked differently, if modernity signifies what Karl Marx describes as “all that is solid melts into air,” why do people on the move, regardless of class, gender, or age, want to hold the home as solidly as possible?
Addressing these questions, I studied four groups of people – lifestyle migrants, retreat tourists, native residents, and local service workers. The research case is Lijiang Old Town in Yunnan province. These four groups came from different parts of China to converge in Lijiang and engage in making and unmaking home in their everyday life. To be clear, the individuals I study are not houseless. Rather, they can secure a decent abode, and some even are rich enough to own multiple properties. Different from those marginal groups who suffer from a housing shortage or dilapidated housing in Chinese cities (Pun 2005; Rozelle and Hell 2020; Wang 2004; Wu et al. 2014), my respondents are not harassed by housing issues. Their unhomely life means that they engage in an endless journey to reconcile the gap between the unhappy home they leave behind or escape from, the existential home they make where they currently dwell, and the ideal home that they imagine for a better life. Filled with confusion and negotiation, their journeys epitomize efforts to strive for a relatively homely life under a given set of constraining circumstances in China.
In Unhomely Life I have two primary objectives. First and most importantly, I seek to explore the making and unmaking of home by individuals, in order to unravel how they handle the loss of home feelings and experience a homely way of life. The process of homemaking entails various layers of contradictions and transactions. While lifestyle migrants and tourists hope to escape speedy modernization by staying in Lijiang Old Town and enjoying an “ideal” home characterized by relaxation and loafing, native town residents give up the right to use their own courtyard houses, and local service workers are brought into the tourism industry to offer homely service to tourists. While tourists must return to big cities and reengage in speedy life after a temporary stay in Lijiang, native residents and local workers prefer to become “hometown babies” (jiaxiangbao, 家乡宝) and embed themselves in local time‐space. While elderly native residents feel nostalgic about the loss of Naxi aura in the old town and insist on staying in their own courtyard houses for peace and comfort in a clamorous tourist setting, young natives swiftly move to the new city for modern lifestyles akin to those in China’s big cities. While female tourists can travel alone and stay in Lijiang Old Town for new experiences, local females must let go the dream of traveling elsewhere and long‐distance migration in order to shoulder the responsibility of homemaking in a patriarchal society. This list can go on, but the message is clear. Homemaking involves transactions and contradictions, revealing a synthesis of continuity and disruption to shape individuals’ efforts to make home.
I argue that the home, as an embodiment of ideal existence, may never be fully identified or reached, yet it motivates individuals to launch journeys in search of a better life. Furthermore, individuals on the move are not passive subjects in China’s modernity. They are simultaneously empowered and disempowered in the modernization process in post‐Mao China, since a ubiquitous matrix of political‐economic power is often at work, enabling their pursuit of home and pulling them back under direct control. The making of home is fraught with tension and inequality. Specifically, I highlight four types of inequality in terms of gender, age, class, and ethnicity, which can be reflected in time and space. The spatial and temporal unevenness in the process of homemaking, I argue, illuminates some of the most significant trends in contemporary China, perhaps most strikingly vis‐à‐vis commodification and modernization experienced by Chinese individuals in the post‐Mao era. My focus on homemaking extends inquiry beyond established analysis of housing and family to encompass the variety of negotiations and transactions that deduce the loss of home feelings and stimulate a sense of home. This analysis of life journeys between homes – as a point of departure and a destination of return – remains a heuristic tool of exploration into modernity and mobilities.
Second, Unhomely Life uses the home as an analytic frame to exemplify China’s great transformation from a poor society on the global periphery to a relatively affluent society with high industrialization and mass consumerism. But how does this great transformation, a term borrowed from Karl Polanyi who detected the dramatic shift of European civilization from the preindustrial world to the center of industrialization, descend upon individuals in China and shape their life? According to Polanyi (2001, p. 33), one immediate result was that England undertook an almost miraculous improvement on the capacity of production, an improvement accompanied by “a catastrophic dislocation of the lives of the common people.” By all means, what happened in post‐Mao China is analogous to the transformation undertaken in Europe since the Industrial Revolution, albeit at a more dramatic speed. One common theme between these two transformations is the loss of home feelings, an emblem of catastrophic dislocation reflecting and reinforcing political and economic power to discipline time and space for the sake of profit making. Following Brickell (2012, p. 228) who argues that home is “a vital space for understanding the micro‐geographies of social and spatial uncertainty,” I am concerned with comprehending the complex interplay of personal life journeys of (un)making home and the broader context of China’s social and spatial changes. Hence, my analysis responds to C. Wright Mills’s (1970, p. 162) call for the need to “grasp the interplay of intimate settings with their larger structural framework.” After all, no setting is more intimate than the home.
A detailed analysis of homemaking can generate vital clues to understanding both the continuity and disruption in China’s great transformation. In 1946, in a pioneering article on the Chinese society, Fei Xiaotong envisioned that dramatic changes would descend upon China once the country was brought into the orbit of the Western‐centric global economy.
It seems that traditional China achieved a certain equilibrium from which ensued stability. This equilibrium was upset when China came in contact with the Western powers, with their industrial supremacy. Modernization is imposed on the Chinese by the machine age, and China is forced to enter the world community. Hence the change in the Chinese social structure.
(Fei 1946, p. 12)
Nevertheless, Fei did not have a chance to update his vision, although he published Xiangtu Zhongguo in 1947 to further explain the rural foundation of traditional China and how this ensured stability played out among villagers. Unhomely Life provides an update on the change in the Chinese social structure in the rapid process of modernization and urbanization, particularly since 1978.
While these two primary objectives permeate Unhomely Life, I also pursue a third, though less ambitious, objective. Rather than evaluate or even outline various strands of philosophical thinking about home by ancient Chinese scholars, I will deploy some of their thoughts to frame my analysis of homemaking in contemporary China. Some influential thoughts include a destination of return to external and internal nature, and a balanced schedule between busyness and loafing. This engagement with Chinese traditional culture aims not to promote Chinese exceptionalism nor to provincialize China into a case easily explained by “universal” Western theories. Rather, I concur with Hamilton (1985, p. 207) who argues that:
China is not a mirror image of the West. Rather it is an independent vision of how a society can be put together, and must be understood in its own terms. Cross‐cultural comparisons are an important means to fashion such independent understandings, but China should be treated as a positive case [and] accordingly, the concepts and the theories of analysis should take their meaning from China’s historical experience.
Hamilton addresses the question of why there is no capitalism in China. While capitalism as a mode of political economy was indigenous to Europe and brought to China in the late nineteenth century, home is deeply rooted in Chinese civilization and has its own meanings in Chinese culture. Thus, Unhomely Life neither advocates homemaking in China as a mirror of European experiences, nor echoes Yan (2009) who argues that China presents an alternative model of social transformation in the age of globalization. Rather, Unhomely Life highlights the geographical and historical variants of homemaking to enrich the analysis of modernity and mobilities experienced by ordinary people in variegated socioeconomic positions in China.
Taken together, Unhomely Life seeks to address both theoretically and empirically unhomely life, a condition between the loss of home feelings and the experience of homely life, that exists in China under dramatic transformation. To counter what Polanyi (2001) calls “catastrophic dislocation,” ordinary people make great efforts to make home, not through house ownership, but through imaginations and experiences. They render home as necessary and essential to their life because they want to assert their anchoring place in an era of speedy modernization, to achieve temporal and spatial autonomy in the midst of time discipline and spatial alienation, and to retrieve the meanings of life without succumbing to the logic of money making. The pursuit of what constitutes a homely life, both spatiotemporally and socially, is often what human agency is about.
Blending a robust theoretical framework of unhomely life with in‐depth and sophisticated empirical data collected from 2002 to 2020, Unhomely Life offers three distinct contributions to the scholarship of China studies and critical geographies of home. First, the Chinese state mobilizes discourses of nationalism, civilization, and modernization to shape and control people’s everyday life. This efficacy of a state‐oriented mode of modernity is well illustrated by scholars who study the Chinese state and its relationship with society, such as Teresa Wright (2010) and Hui Wang (2009). The literature regards the Chinese state’s projects of modernization as an attempt to tame and control the path and pace of modernity, and thus integrate ordinary individuals into a modern society of perfect order. But can the discussion of state‐oriented modernity explain the changing everyday life experiences of individuals? The answer is no, simply because these authors neglect individuals’ agency in negotiating the logics of political control and capital accumulation.
We need a more nuanced analysis of social and spatial transformation in China. Unhomely Life offers a significant and timely intervention for scholarship on mundane China, because Chinese society in the post‐Mao era is differentiated into various social hierarchies. Yet our academic frames for analyzing such a trend of differentiation focus on political (party membership and administrative ranking) and economic (housing, urban‐vs‐rural, and income) variables, and thus remain deficient compared to China’s actual complexity. In response to these deficiencies, Unhomely Life underlines how variegated social differences are entwined to reshape individuals’ unhomely life. I consider the coexistence of various tensions when mobile individuals from China advance their own versions of home alongside social differences – class, gender, ethnicity, and age – that unfold unevenly in time and space.
