Home But Not Home: Four Vignettes of Return Migrants in Hong Kong

This article is based on a study that was conducted against the background of substantial emigration from Hong Kong to other countries, particularly Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, when the return of sovereignty to mainland China loomed large in the 1990s. Using an open-ended interview schedule, in-depth interviews were conducted in 2007 with 40 respondents who had lived and/or worked in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Sweden, England, France, Spain and Columbia. They had returned to Hong Kong for between one and 25 years. Return migrants have a deep inner restlessness or an eagerness for achievement that cries out for actualization. Being in an inner turmoil is the immigrant’s existential condition. The return migrant’s restlessness, harnessed by years of having worked in and lived at the crossroads of diverse, sometimes contradictory, cultural currents, is the fountainhead of hybridity, creativity and innovation. To the immigrant, what is done in one way can always be done in another way, better, faster. One distinguishing characteristic of our return migrants is their differentness, which often marks them off against the sameness of locals. Differentness, to the return migrant, means creativity, but it is also a threat to the sense of security, certainty and continuity of the locals. The fate of a return migrant, who himself has become more open-minded than before as a result of their sojourn overseas but who now lives in a society that is less than appreciative of differences, depends largely on how his differentness is socially treated by the local others. Social treatment, as an outer force, determines the inner psyche of the immigrant. On coming home, the returnees we interviewed found themselves continually job and company hopping; they were looking for a better fit between self and work organization. Maladjustment, maladaptation or stress, is a sign of a lack of fit between self and non-self or society. To reduce this lack of fit, the returnee has several behavioral possibilities at his disposal: he conforms, withdraws, innovates, even rebels. Innovativeness and creativity are eulogized by most cultures as virtues, but when they are put into practice, they are often stigmatized and punished because they are seen as subversive of the status quo, or threatening the social order and those in power. There is a deep irony here: return migrants, or for that matter all immigrants, are desired and hated for the same thing – their different ways of doing things – because human nature is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the strange. The dark side of the hybrid returnees’ inner emotional landscapes has much to do with the nature of the outer discourse on such values of modernity as democracy, equality, pluralism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, hybridism, multiculturalism, diversity and freedom.

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