6 research outputs found
The Turtle Garden: Tan Kah Keeâs last spiritual world
This paper explores the role of diasporic subjects in Chinaâs heritage-making through a case study of the Turtle Garden built by Tan Kah Kee in Xiamen, China. Tan is the first person with Overseas Chinese background who built museums in the P.R. China and has been regarded as a symbol of Overseas Chinese patriotism. This paper argues that the Turtle Garden, conceptualised as a postcolonial âcarnivalesqueâ space, is more than a civic museum for public education. It reflects the ownerâs highly complex and sometimes conflicting museum outlook embedded in his life experience as a migrant, his encounter with (British) colonialism in Malaya, and integrated with his desire and despair about the Chinese Communist Partyâs nation-building project in the 1950s. Rather than a sign of devotion to the socialist motherland as simplistically depicted in Chinaâs discourse, the garden symbolises Tanâs last âspiritual worldâ where he simultaneously engaged with soul-searching as a returned Overseas Chinese and alternative diasporic imagining of Chinese identities and nation. It brings to light the value of heritage-making outside centralised heritage discourses, and offers an invaluable analytical lens to disentangle the contested and ever shifting relationship between diasporic subjects, cultural heritage and nation-(re)building in the Chinese context and beyond
Re-establishing networks: capital, power and identity in the making of an Indonesian Chinese community in Hong Kong
published_or_final_versiontocabstractAsian StudiesDoctoralDoctor of Philosoph
Postcolonial border crossing: British skilled expatriates in post-1997 Hong Kong
Through a postcolonial lens and based on in-depth interviews with British expatriates who moved to Hong Kong in the first decade after its handover, this paper highlights the contested role of borders in the everyday making and remaking of skilled migration. It draws on Paasi's (2003) definition of boundaries to denote that borders are not merely geographical lines but zones of mixing, blending and reconfiguring historically formed material connections, identities and power relations through which contemporary skilled mobility is constituted. The border crossing of skills in Hong Kong and elsewhere is a historically contingent phenomenon whose meaning derives not only from economic forces and social networking but also the accumulated history of the borders they cross. The notion of âpostcolonial border crossingâ highlights the dis/continuity in skilled migration and integrates social, cultural and economic spheres into the same framework in interpreting skilled mobility