Too many houses for a home: Narrating the house in the Chinese diaspora

摘要

The scale and extent of human mobility in contemporary times has added a newudinflection to a question that has long pre-occupied scholars: this being the matter ofud‘what is home?’ or, more precisely and following Agnes Heller (1995), ‘where are weudat home?’. These questions are both minor and major. They implicate something asudordinary as ‘the house’ and as extraordinary as our sense of belonging. MartinudHeidegger’s well known essay from 1951, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, providesudone starting point for thinking about how a building like a house is attached to anudexperience like dwelling (Heidegger 1975). He investigates how dwelling requiresudbuilding (as a process and as a thing) and how, in turn, building helps constitute ourudsense of dwelling. Heidegger draws at one point on the example of a farmhouse inudthe Black Forest, which he uses to illustrate how building both cultivates andudexpresses dwelling. His conception of ‘proper dwelling’ relies, then, on the exampleudof a house that is embedded in its place of origin -- where building and dwelling andudlocation are co-constitutive. Through an architectural diagnostic, a dwelling such asudHeidegger’s farmhouse might occupy the category of ‘the vernacular’. Through audsociological diagnostic, we might think of it as a type of ‘ancestral home’. Suchudmodels of ‘proper’ dwelling are being radically transformed in contemporary times.udNot least, current levels of mobility act as a force of compromise. Mobility compelsudour lives to be full of radical open-ness, proliferating differences and multiplyingudloyalties. It produces flows of information, people and things that do away with, orudrender residual, what might be thought of as monogamous modes of dwelling. Withinudthis restructured world, both vernacular architectures and ancestral homes come toudassume new positions and are sutured into our modes of dwelling in quite differentudways.