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Unsettling Potentialities: Topographies

of Hope in Transnational MigrationDr Phillip Mar

Published online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Dr Phillip Mar (2005): Unsettling Potentialities: Topographies of Hope in

Transnational Migration, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 26:4, 361-378

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Unsettling Potentialities:Topographies of Hope in TransnationalMigration

Phillip Mar

For transnational migrants, hope is of practical significance, as an emotional structure

accompanying complex temporal and spatial strategies, often involving the splitting of

selves, relationships and families. This paper examines some configurations of hope in

motion, drawing on ethnographic research on movements of Hong Kong migrants

between Hong Kong and Australia. As a complex affective and intellectual practice, hope

encompasses both momentary embodied affects and more consciously and collectively

articulated emotional trajectories, to practically and psychologically manage temporal-

ities of change and flux. Objects of hope emerge as shifting referents in a play of loyalties,

attachments and desires. Migrant hope is examined in terms of spatialised object relations, in which hopeful affects cohere around imaginings of place and temporality

constituted by specific transnational pathways. An often dualistic structure of spatial

imaginings contains complementary elements of an imagined fullness of existence that

connects to differing social imaginaries of ‘the good life’. Australia could stand for aspects

of the pleasure principle */ enjoyment of nature or prospects of retirement */ in opposition

to the hard ‘reality’ of Hong Kong capitalism. Temporal narratives of ‘national’ and

more local places ‘being ahead’ or ‘being behind’ are important elements locating the

subject and their specific trajectory within a migrant ‘economy of hope’. Hoping turns on

the fantasy integration of such shifting identifications and attachments which emerge as

contingent objects in a transnationally articulated ‘space of play’.

Keywords: Social Hope; Transnational Migration; Emotion

In recent years, ethnographic research on migration has taken on a new scope and

scale, moving beyond the local community studies and ‘host’ nation-specific analyses

Dr Phillip Mar has a research interest in transnational migration, the sociology of affect and emotion, social

hope and public housing. He currently teaches sociology and anthropology at the University of Sydney.

Correspondence to: Phillip Mar, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, MillsBuilding, A26, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/05/040361-18

# 2005 Centre for Migrant and Intercultural Studies

DOI: 10.1080/07256860500270213

Journal of Intercultural Studies

Vol. 26, No. 4, November 2005, pp. 361 Á / 378



that typically characterised older work. In the more globalist perspectives of

transnational and diasporic studies, migration is no longer framed as a one-way

movement from a sender to a receiving nation, with resulting struggles of adaptation

and integration to the ‘host’ nation. For instance, in anthropology, transnational and

multi-sited studies (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Marcus 1995)flourished from the 1990s on, reflecting a wider focus on interconnections within a

‘multidimensional global space with unbounded, often discontinuous and inter-

penetrating sub-spaces’ (Kearney cited in Brettell 2000: 104). With the opening up of

this expanded purview of migrant practice, we have come to realise the multiplicity of

migration networks and pathways, and the multiple modes of insertion of individuals

and groups at various spatial and governmental levels.

In these spatially expanded intercultural contexts, what is it that drives, motivates

and sustains migrant movements and strategies, particularly in the most intense and

uncertain stages of the initial formation of transnational networks? Lessinger (cited inBrettell 2000: 103) noted that current migration research sees the cause of migration

as increasingly complex, and unable to be adequately explained in terms of the old

language of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, as push and pull factors can be operating

simultaneously. Aside from the external pushes and pulls, ‘internal’ emotional forces

motivate or de-motivate actions as much as external events or circumstances. (After

all not all people will choose to emigrate when faced with the same objective

conditions.) Pushing and pulling is experienced by migrants as emotional tensions

and ambivalences, particularly where there is no clear and predictable outcome or

directionality. These pushes and pulls of migrants will be the subject of this paper.

I will concentrate on a highly mobile migrant population in which emotionaltensions and ambivalences were apparent. Between 1995 and 2000 I interviewed 31

migrants from Hong Kong who came to Australia during the 1990s and who were

engaged in frequent movements between Hong Kong and Sydney.1 These people were

part of a relatively new communal formation in terms of immigration to Australia,

not strongly linked by long established kinship and cultural links to earlier southern

Chinese migration. They are characteristic of a state of ‘unfinished migration’ */

people who are still strategically ‘unsettled’, that is, not yet in a stabilised and

naturalised state of belonging. (When is migration ‘over’, we might ask.)

Emigrants from Hong Kong in this particular historical period could not escape anexplicit orientation to two powerful social facts which generated doubt and

uncertainty: firstly, the transition to postcoloniality without independence of the

1997 handover (wu `ih gwa `i ) of sovereignty from British colonial port to the Chinese

state; and secondly, the figuring of Hong Kong within an imagined space of global

capitalism. Hong Kong was strongly anchored in the imaginings of my informants as

the ‘treasure box’ of entrepot capitalism (my informants were speaking of a time

prior to the protracted recession affecting Asian economies since 1998). At the same

time, Hong Kong’s interstitial status as an entrepot port means any viable ‘homeland’

identification is very fragile. For Aihwa Ong (1992: 131), the Hong Kong subject does

not harbour hopes of return to a motherland, but rather pursues the ‘transnational

362 P. Mar



world of capitalism that developed under European hegemony’. Irresolvable political

doubt surrounded (and still surrounds) the possible actions of the Chinese state in

relation to Hong Kong’s fragile and rather residual democracy and social freedoms in

the 50 year liminal period of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

negotiated between the British colonists and the PRC government and beginningin 1997. The major ‘push’ for the burst of emigration from Hong Kong in the 1990s

was the fear arising from the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Nevertheless this

fear and apprehension coexisted with an almost delirious belief in Hong Kong’s

economic fortunes. Abbas’s phrase ‘doom and boom’ perfectly captures the

admixture of political fear and economic confidence that prevailed particularly in

the mid-1990s (Abbas 2001: 612). An informant narrated the shifts in prospective

thinking up to the 1997 handover:

A few years ago, many people they went out to Australia, or Canada, United States,

especially after June 4th [incident], because it was a big tragedy, people worriedabout the Chinese. . . . Now they got more information. And a lot of people havecome back. Actually Hong Kong is a golden, golden place. Every week we see theHang Seng Index . . . just shooting up.2

Hong Kong perhaps more than other ‘Asian tigers’ was riding on the affective wave of

newfound legitimacy and economic status. Scenarios of political doom and economic

boom only tended to intensify a Hong Kong ethic that had long centred on economic

rather than political definitions of success. This ethic was enhanced by Hong Kong’s

laissez-faire policies, the lack of well-established local democratic traditions and the

marginal social welfare support available.I have very broadly described the emotional environment to which migrants from

Hong Kong were responding, both practically and emotionally. These included doubt

(and at times despair) about the political future in relation to Chinese governance,

the peculiar situation of Hong Kong which never really had its postcolonial moment,

coupled with doubts about the future viability of Hong Kong as the economic ‘golden

place’. At the same time faith in Hong Kong’s continuing prosperity perhaps

substituted for a political nationalism that could never develop in the historical

circumstances of colonially sponsored entrepot capitalism. How can we best focus

our understanding of this play of apparently contradictory emotions? The world of Hong Kong cinematic representations, so richly flourishing at the time, perhaps

mirrored this simultaneity of fear and euphoria, push and pull. Steven Ching-kiu

Chan (2001) has written a suggestive account of Hong Kong film culture in the

handover period up to 1997, bringing together Ernst Bloch’s theory of hope and

Castoriadis’s notion of the social imaginary. Chan outlines how a social imaginary

operating through cinema generated manifest content as imaginings of Hong Kong’s

specific postcolonial situation and experience of capitalism. Chan’s study focuses on

significations of home and foreignness within the cinematic imaginary of wuxia 3

(swordfighting) films. Films such as Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time provide an

imaginative and affective setting for tracing the presence or absence of hope. Wong’s

Journal of Intercultural Studies 363



characters such as Evil East and Malicious West are engaged in a highly obscure and

stylised meditation on an unknowable situation that could not be satisfactorily

articulated though realist or rationalist means, but were nevertheless able to be

constituted as artefacts of an ‘anticipation-imagination that tends towards a ‘‘livable

future’’’ (Chan 2001: 490).As inevitably speculative as Chan’s cinematic interpretation is, he does identify

hope as a crucial element of the zeitgeist of the handover period. Hope, as

anticipatory expectation and a desire for ‘something better’ is no doubt a crucial

dynamic motivating migration processes. While Chan locates this Hong Kong

imaginary of hope through an allegorical reading of cinema products, hope could

also provide us with a conceptual framework for interrogating migrant dispositions

and emotional states. I want to spend some time to outline a conception of hope and

argue for its relevance for the study of transnational migration.

The Problematic of Hope, and its Use in the Analysis of Migration

Hope is a slippery concept to think with and about because it involves engaging with

a heavily overdetermined field of values and significations. In ‘the west’, the concept

of hope is strongly embedded in Christian and utopian ethical traditions, due to its

long association, along with faith, hope and love with discourses of salvation and

redemption (see Davies 1993; Castoriadis 1991: 102 Á /103; Crapanzano 2004). The

residue of desire for forms of ethical redemption is clearly seen in much

contemporary writing about hope (such as the humanist psychology of hope).

Miyazaki proposes moving away from this ethical and normative emphasis to groundconcrete ethnographic analysis in a ‘method of hope’, that is, ‘the ways in which hope

is produced and maintained in concrete processes of knowledge formation’, rather

than focusing on ‘divergent objects and ethical implications’. At the same time,

Miyazaki’s work adopts a strong reflexivity in its discursive engagement with hope,

presenting the analysis of hope as itself a means to reorient one’s own knowledge in

relation to the future (Miyazaki 2003a: 30 Á /31).

What is the nature of hope as a social method or practice? Hope cannot be simply

categorised as an emotion, or even more particularly as ‘pure affect’ (Massumi 1991:

221),4

since it entails ‘cognitive’ dimensions and interacts with intersubjectively shared, and therefore ‘public’ evaluations of possibility. Averill (1996), in distinguish-

ing hope from apparently more immediately ‘embodied’ emotional experiences such

as anger and fear, usefully characterises hope as an ‘intellectual emotion’. In doing so

he perhaps swings too far towards a cognitive and rational emphasis, ignoring the

range of bodily feelings associated with hope. Nevertheless, hope by definition is a

more sustained and fluctuating emotional process which may encompass both

intensities of affect and more sustained and intersubjectively shared feelings towards a

specific object. If hope bears an intimate relation to the immediacy of desire, it also

involves the partial sublimation */or postponement */of those desires. As Crapan-

zano notes, the existence of hope implies a metaphysics and an ethics ‘of expectation,

364 P. Mar



constraint and resignation . . . founded on some notion or another of the real */on a

realism that limits its fantasy and enactment’ (Crapanzano 2004: 6).

Perhaps this element of realism (however knowable or unknowable the real is) is

what makes hope a useful means of grasping what motivates and sustains migrant

practices, over other possible categories such as desire or fantasy. The social analysisof hope must encompass the time of waiting, spatial and social movement,

expectation and achievement, all of which are fundamental to the emotional

experience of migration. Hope accesses a temporalised sense of potential, of having

a future. In many languages, this active future orientation is semantically explicit. For

instance, in Cantonese the word for hope */he i mohng */means literally looking

forward (he i meaning want or wish, and mohng to look forward). Hopeful activity

entails a consciously foregrounded anticipation of a possible object in some future

time, even if that object may be vague and incompletely articulated. For Ernst Bloch,

hope is the ‘anticipatory consciousness’ of a delayed condition (a ‘not yet’). Itinvolves an orientation to the future in maintaining expectations of ‘something

better’. While this future orientation can centre on diversionary or compensatory

wishes, as in the ‘daydreams’ we use to imagine possible futures whilst avoiding

engaging in undesirable aspects of the present (Bloch 1986), hope is a vital element in

imaginatively structuring ongoing projects particularly long-term speculative projects

that involve protracted action and uncertainty. This is hardly a new idea */Weber’s

modernist ethic derives from just this transmutation of ‘otherworldly’ hopes for

salvation into worldly applied actions. This is especially pertinent to migration, a

particularly open-ended and speculative practice that encompasses long spans of

time, steep curves of cultural learning and social attunement, risks and investmentsthat occur across generations. Hence on a practical and dispositional level, hope is

germane to capacities to wait, to defer, discipline and even transform oneself in

anticipation of some object that cannot be obtained in the present. Migration often

seems like a particularly ‘Protestant’ practice (if not literally) in the way that

individuals and kinship and communal groups marshal and discipline themselves

around long-term hopes. However, while hope requires a dialogue with a possible

object, it is never merely reducible to the functional requirements of an acting

individual, nor is it merely a dispositional supplement to the achievement of tasks or

goals, whether utopian or more mundanely wedded to everyday expectations. Attimes the maintenance of hope may be dys functional, as a device for indefinitely

delaying action, or a means of shielding the ego (individual or collective) from the

loss of particular objects (Potamianou 1997: 58). Hope is not only attached to

expected outcomes projected into the future */it is also projective in the psycho-

analytic sense. Its objects tend to follow the logics of projective identifications, getting

rid of parts of the self into other objects; and of introjective identifications, taking

attributes of others into the self. This will be pertinent to my later discussion of the

spatial distribution of hopes in transnational migration.

The dynamics of hope are necessarily conditioned by situational doubt, and the

impossibility of certainty in predicting outcomes. I have discussed the doubt inherent




in the Hong Kong situation and the coexistence and sudden vacillation of apparently

contradictory feelings in the handover period. A perspective on emotions grounded

in the affective economy of the body and mind outlined in Spinoza’s Ethics is valuable

in enabling us to position hopeful strategies within a relational logic, in which

emotional states are not essentialised around a static set of categories. Hope is neverhope without the presence of doubt, an element of ontological insecurity, either

about gaining a hoped-for object or state, or about having the capacity to achieve that

outcome. For Spinoza, anticipation without doubt is ‘confidence’. Hope can be

disappointed (or it would not be hope), and it can flip over into fear, which is always

implicit in hopeful states (Spinoza 1992: 115). Migrant subjects are only too aware of

‘every sliding movement’, in the words of an informant, the volatile sense of the ‘ups

and downs’ of migration which characterise everyday states of being, even of

economically well-off migrants.

Because when you first came, and then you came with your family, and then you’relooking for houses, and everything is unsettled. Can your wife settle, and your sonsettle? Those are the questions you can’t answer unless you experience it. If they come back every day crying, and they are ill today at school, and your wife says theneighbour’s bad, and then you have to go back. . . . Everything, every slidingmovement will make them to think whether it’s against them or for them.

The polysemy of ‘settling’ (the task of migration) and ‘unsettlement’ (as emotional

state) in this passage points to the close and volatile relationship between the practical

tasks of migrant establishment in a profoundly different place, and the struggles to

maintain a secure sense of one’s capacities in the face of an unknowable future.‘Living in hope’ is a condition in which perceived causal effects of things or events

that enhance or threaten the hoped-for state are magnified and dramatised. The

above quote also demonstrates the intersubjective nature of these hopeful states.

An analysis of hopeful discourses and emotional states can provide a means of

indexing the interface of affective states and migrant trajectories and social positions,

within a field brought into being through migration. Nevertheless, a purely

phenomenological investigation of migrant habitus is unable, by itself, to account

for highly uneven capacities to imagine a future across transnational environments.

Ghassan Hage (2002) has argued that an analysis of the unequal distribution of socialhope within the ‘world economy’ can enhance the explanatory potential of a political

economy of transnational migration. A globalising economy encompasses more than

what is narrowly defined as economic: it also entails a struggle and renegotiation of

collective and societal ‘meanings for life’ (i.e. the ‘good life’) (Hage 2003: 12 Á /21) both

within nation-states and within emergent transnational networks. As diasporic

groups and other collectivities in motion increasingly seek viable lives beyond

national boundaries they generate topographies of hopeful belonging, of expectant

movements and flows across a cultural space characterised by ‘disjuncture and

difference’ as Appadurai expressed it. Appadurai’s well-known essay asserted the

centrality of the imagination as ‘a form of negotiation between sites of agency

366 P. Mar



(individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility’ (Appadurai 2001: 256). How

does this imaginative negotiation of global possibility mesh with the everyday

practical domains of transmigrants?

The remainder of the paper will draw on ethnographic accounts of hope in

practice. But first it is necessary to provide some background to the specific socialattributes of the transmigrant group I was researching, and the range of migration

strategies adopted.

Social Specificities of the Migrant Group and Migration Strategies

I will be drawing on field research which traced the movements of migrants from

Hong Kong who came to Australia during the 1990s and who were engaged in

frequent movements between Hong Kong and Sydney. These people could be readily

classified as transnational migrants or ‘transmigrants’, subjects whose ongoing

existence is characterised by ‘multiple and constant interconnections across

international borders and whose public identities are configured in relation to

more than one nation state’ (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton 1995: 48).

However, as Faist has warned about a tendency to collapse profound differences in

practices and the scale of practices into the category of ‘transnational community’

(Faist 2000: 191), we should be careful not to allow the transnational category to

conceal important specificities and differences.

My interest was specifically in ‘middling migrants’ in terms of their class location

and likely trajectories. Informants were mostly professionals and para-professionals

such as nurses, engineers and social workers, most often employed as wage workersfor government organisations. They were not ‘high flying’ business migrants, and

were typically from the first generation of tertiary educated emerging with the

significant expansion of university education in Hong Kong from the 1980s. Such

middling migrants make up the majority of ‘legitimate’ migration to industrialised

(and now post-industrial) countries such as Australia which seek to appropriate skills

and educational capital rather than ‘unskilled’ labour. People from this strata are

structurally the most anxious of subjects, insecurely poised between demands of

material necessity and aspirations for upward social movement. They do not often

possess the absolute confidence of those with the cultural capital and cosmopolitan-ism derived from extensive prior experience of travel, or the economic power to move

at will, own property in more than one country, and so on.

To give an idea of the nature of the migrant sample I constructed a three-part

classification of my transmigrant sample: (1) shuttlers, who engaged in quite frequent

and substantial movements between places for business or domestic reasons but

basically maintained a base in Australia; (2) ‘astronauts’, whose familial unit was

divided cross-nationally (an explanation of this term follows); and (3) returnees, who

had basically returned to Hong Kong usually having acquired Australian citizenship.

Even returnees might not have established final ‘destinations’, as they often harboured

hopes to move back to Australia later on. I further ‘cross-tabulated’ these categories




with imputed ‘attitudes’ to their migrant trajectory, hence reluctant or willing

astronauts, returnees or shuttlers (see Table 1).

The specificities of this group and its migratory strategies can perhaps best be

illustrated by exploring their relation to two common ‘native’ conceptions of migrant

strategies. The notion of the ‘astronaut’ exemplifies a contemporary Hong Kong (and

more generally East Asian) idealisation of the global body in perpetual motion. The

Cantonese word5 for astronaut (taai hu `ng ya `hn ) was adapted to describe emigrants

who send family members off to other ‘host’ countries while they maintain

professional careers or business interests in Hong Kong, China or elsewhere.6 Hence

the astronaut represents a mobile cosmopolitan and generally masculinised body that

is strongly identified with business and the mobility of global capital. On the other

hand, ‘astronaut’ is often used pejoratively and rarely used as a positive basis for

identification. ‘Middling’ migrants who struggle to aspire to this degree of mobility,

but who may not possess the economic and cosmopolitan capacities which wouldmake such a trajectory ‘smooth’, tended to disavow this identification */‘we are not

like those astronauts’. This disavowal is perhaps partly defensive and partly reflecting

the moral image of the astronaut in Hong Kong as disloyal and irresponsible.

Another ‘native’ term in common use was ‘insurance migrant’. Insurance migrants

are those who emigrated primarily to gain citizenship of a second country in the

event of some form of political downturn. The notion of migration as insurance

dated from the period following the Joint Declaration of 1984 when there was much

public contention about the migration options of Hong Kong citizens. The argument

emerged that holding the right of abode to a foreign country would serve as an

‘insurance policy’ to provide a sense of security for people so they could remain in

Hong Kong for the longer term. ‘Insurance’ became common parlance to describe a

strategy of securing citizenship in order to return. One such returnee summed up the

rationale of insurance migration:

Like many Hong Kong people do, I came to buy insurance. If Hong Kong hassomething happen, then I can go back to Australia.

Security was explicitly ‘purchased’ to cover the possibility of a political clampdown

following the 1997 handover. The very notion of insurance migration suggests a

commodified relation to migration, a strategic negotiation of national belonging

Table 1 Interviewees by ‘Migration Strategy’

Transmigrant mode N

Shuttling settler 5

Willing returnee 12Reluctant returnee 5Willing astronaut 5Reluctant astronaut 2‘Ground control’ (astronaut spouse) 2Total 31

368 P. Mar



which Aihwa Ong (1998) dubbed ‘flexible citizenship’. My research pointed to very

significant differences in capacities to realise the potentials of this flexibility, even

within the middling group. In the first section I broadly sketched the general political

and economic environment which migrants from Hong Kong were responding to,

both practically and affectively. The parameters of hope in Hong Kong include doubtabout the political future in relation to Chinese governance, the peculiar situation of

Hong Kong which never really had its postcolonial moment, coupled with doubts

(increasingly) about the future viability of Hong Kong as the economic ‘golden place’.

These conditions for locating hope in Hong Kong’s future are still unknowable. Aside

from these general doubts about the viability of Hong Kong’s future, the doubts of

middling migrants about the viability of their transnational prospects are largely

positional, drawing on a sense of relative chances relative to a field of migrancy. For

Bourdieu (2000: 208) the social experience of time and the capacity to incorporate a

sense of the future in the present is linked to ‘the quasi-automatic coincidencebetween expectations and chances, illusio and lusiones , expectations and the world

which is there to fulfill them’. There is a class dimension within migrant fields, based

in the differential experience of mobility of migrant subjects which itself conditions

capacities to further develop an expansive and transforming sense of what is possible.

We located an ambivalence among middling migrants towards the figure of the

astronaut and the associated dream of absolute mobility and autonomy of globalised

capital (a mixture of disavowal and aspiration). So where did they place their hopes?

The next part of the paper will examine the way in which imagined objects of hope

are distributed in relation to transnational ‘places’.

Hope in Place: The Spatialisation of Objects of Hope

What is the ‘something better’ hoped for in migration? Of course, such a question

could not be expected to take account of the manifold desires of migrant subjects. For

transnational migrants there can be no single idea or image of the ‘good life’ */the

range of different moves and directions of attachment are too varied. People in

motion rarely articulate ‘ultimate’ hopes. Engaged in the practical pathways of

transnational migration, they tend to index hopeful or less hopeful states in terms of

imaginings of place rather than in terms of outcomes located in relation to some‘pure’ temporality or historicity. Hopeful states are linked to modalities of temporal

and spatial inhabitance. For the philosopher J. E. Malpas, place can be more

expansively conceived as ‘a structure comprising spatiality and temporality,

subjectivity and objectivity, self and other’ (Malpas 1999: 163). While Malpas’

thinking about place involves a general formulation of human experience, memory

and imagination, it is very applicable to the realm of transnational migration which is

demonstrably such a place where ‘multiple places coexist’.

The transmigrant in motion inhabits and accesses through memory and

imagination an interconnected but territorialised topography or ‘space of play’

where multiple objects of hope can coexist. The transnational sense of place indexes a




field of experienced, remembered and imagined places. Rather than being a flat

symmetrical space in which objects, associations and feelings are located like points

on a map, it has a ‘folded’ or ‘nested’ character. For Malpas (1999: 186), ‘we

understand a place and a landscape through the historical and personal narratives

that are marked out within it and that give that place a particular unity and establisha particular set of possibilities within it’. Elements or qualities of place are maintained

through a continuous interrelation and juxtaposition of experience, memory and

other significations as migrant subjects endeavour to find a sense of continuity in

multiple and disjunctive times and places. Migrant accounts comment through

comparison on the externality of relations between (often) sharply dichotomised

places, as well as on ‘internal’ states expressed in terms of perceptions and affects

directed towards these places. I have suggested that transnational migration brings

into play an intersection of social imaginings of modernity, which are neither

detachable from the spatial experience of migration nor reducible to them.Migrant accounts of place frequently draw on imaginings of global capitalism and

uneven development. Places are often described in terms of a hierarchy of progress

and modernity. Temporalised discourses of ‘being ahead’ and ‘being behind’

characterise central and more marginal positions in the global imaginary (Miyazaki

2003b; Mazzarella 2003: 101). While hope may not be essentially hierarchical and

competitive in nature, narratives of modernity, progress and globalisation tend to

hierarchical differentiation enforcing a set of positions within an imagined worldwide

capitalist space-time. Of course there is no single or essential imagining of a world

space of modernity, only positional perspectives. Neither is the imagining of

‘progress’ in this world space a one-way flow. The coexistence of competing visionsof modernity means that Hong Kong or Australia could be figured as ‘ahead’ or

‘behind’ in particular ways. Technological comparisons, economic power, technolo-

gical, infrastructure, available sources of enjoyment (weather, food, fashion,

entertainment, etc.) are among the many elements of disjunctive narratives about

progress or its lack in a particular place. Here are some typical criticisms of life in

Australia:

I find it very backward we’re used to shopping in Hong Kong, so many brands, somany fashions, up to date things.

I couldn’t believe it, they didn’t even have laser discs in Australia.

‘Backwardness’ in the spheres of economics, the availability of consumer items and

urban infrastructure were often criticised. For migrant subjects, Hong Kong was place

of bounteous economic power and machine-like efficiency. Its ascendancy to ‘Asian

tiger’ status was frequently understood as a ‘miracle’ of success. But the bipolar mood

swings of the doom and boom scenarios in the 1990s were frequently manifested in

an ambivalence amongst immigrants about what they were leaving. While the

miraculous vision of Hong Kong as ‘golden place’ was faithfully rendered by nearly all

informants, migrant subjects at the same time typically pointed to a ‘cost’ to Hong

370 P. Mar



Kong’s success in terms of hard work, social alienation or a damaged environment.

This viewpoint was partly reinforced by migrant experience in Australia. Hence the

other side of the bounteous economic miracle of Hong Kong (with its costs to social

being) is the image of its other, a ludic Australia untarnished by the economic. I recall

a young woman who was about to emigrate to Australia anticipating life in Sydney asbeing ‘like living in a resort’. This image of Australia often animated migrants prior to

leaving to emigrate, or as a nostalgic after-memory on return to the ‘realities’ of life

and labour in Hong Kong.

Australia was hopefully imagined almost as a pastoral idyll of leisure and personal

cultivation in which material necessity and competition is bracketed out. Freud

pointed to a type of fantasy yearning for ‘freedom from the grip of the external world’

and compared ‘the creation of a mental domain of phantasy’ with ‘the establishment

of ‘‘reservations’’ and ‘‘nature parks’’’ (Freud cited in Marx 1967: 8). In actual

experiences of moving to Australia, the pastoral fantasy was typically reinforced by

the discovery of new proxemic and social experiences acquired in practical projects,

such as the cultivation of suburban spaces such as the backyard, a previously

unthinkable experience for most urban dwellers from Hong Kong.

Wai-fan: [I]t’s quite exciting, and, more spatial. And we can spend time, leisuretime, in the back yard. But it’s not easy, we find that it’s not easy. Because we haveto mow the lawn and do all the gardening and . . . always weeds. At first we didn’tknow what to do, I didn’t have any garden knowledge, I didn’t know what to dowith the tools. So much to do. The back yard, yeah, we have to pay for it. Still wefound, if we have a good back yard, we have power, we can invite our friends, OK,

this is what I did. So, if we have a good back yard, you can actually increase our self esteem. [laughs] So, quite exciting.

But this account of the discovery of social potential in the suburban backyard should

be placed in perspective. It was a refracted memory of a returnee, who had returned

to maximise economic opportunities in Hong Kong. It is a typical daydream of

returnees */a compensatory respite from the labours of the present. For the

transmigrant everything has a cost (‘we have to pay for it’) */for maintaining the

backyard and then for leaving it behind. A further return to Australia could be

anticipated as an end of economic struggle */a place reserved for future enjoyment,

retirement. Australia is conceived as ‘a good place for retirement’, one informantnoted.

This sharp differentiation of place and the modes of investment and enjoyment

associated with it is strikingly tied to the sense of a different gearing of the body, its

intensities and velocities.

Chung-hoi: [I]n Australia, everything is quiet. Very slow and ah . . ., it gives you, itgives you some time to think about you, about me, and the people around you. Imean, the personal relationships much more closer . . . In Hong Kong, people arevery busy, and they live, they believe what we believe. [Here he laughs, realising thathe is not just talking about others, but about himself as well.] We believe [in HongKong] that time is very important. We always try to go faster than other people,




because, when they lost a chance, then they, they don’t know when [it] will come

back. So, the chance to buy a house, the chance to get business, to make

money . . . But in Australia, they seem to acquire everything, just enough is OK.

They don’t want more.

The economic object is not locatable in Australia, nor is the social object locatable in

Hong Kong. This is a typical example of the spatialised splitting of the imagined

contents of the good life and its location, supported by an embodied sense of

differing velocities and intensities. Busyness and speed are counterposed with quiet

leisure, and the cultivation of more intensive personal relationships. Australia was

imagined as somehow outside of competitive relations and material necessity. This

difference is often tied to the availability of welfare support in Australia, which

Chung-hoi imagines erodes the need to pursue material gain.7

This daydream of Australia as idyll of leisure and personal cultivation was often

compensationary. It could be either anticipatory or nurtured as compensatory memory for the returnee (and an anticipation of ‘retirement’). The idyllic natural

Australia offset the image of Hong Kong as ‘golden place’, a pure world of economic

instrumentalism to which other social possibilities must be sacrificed. (We were

talking about the period before the economic crisis from 1998.) Returnees lamented

that in Hong Kong people don’t just get together ‘for no reason’, while in Australia

they could ‘go deeper’ with friendships and relationships. The mutual exclusivity of

these accounts of place and possibility */between social possibility and economic

possibility */seemed to contain complementary elements of a hoped for life which

could not be brought together in the present. Australia stood for aspects of the‘pleasure principle’ */enjoyment of nature or retirement */in a structural opposition

to the hard ‘reality’ of Hong Kong capitalism. (This opposition could also be

reversed.)

This balancing of parts of the good life, or an imagined completion of existence is a

way of distributing hopes to other places and times within the practical construction

of a transnational imaginary, which allows an allocation of hopes within the folded

segments of place. As with Kleinian object relations, good and bad aspects of the self

are strategically distributed to other locations, in greater or lesser proximity. This

could assist the migrant subject to practically locate and prioritise their desires andattachments in line with ‘realistic’ potentials and probabilities, in developing

attachments and deciding where to settle.

Dialectics of Hope and Fear in Transnational Space

Some subjects who found the negotiation of transnational space more difficult were

less able to manage the balance of hopes and fears that enabled a relatively stable

sense of position. One informant, who I have called ‘Celia’, found Sydney unsatisfying

but could not manage to allocate the hopes for change in a ‘positive’ manner. She

expressed her sense of unsettlement within the realm of transnational possibility.

372 P. Mar



Celia: When I’m in Australia I want to go back, . . . but when I’m in Hong Kong, Idon’t quite like it. The people are impolite . . . and they rush, I mean the jobpressure, and pressure to live in the big city, and the air pollution, the noise.

Nowhere feels right and Celia feels increasingly out of place. She had hoped to extend

her business qualifications and improve her economic and career prospects in Sydney.

She was feeling the pressure of passing time, that it may have become too late to

return. Other friends and colleagues in Hong Kong had progressed in careers and life-

paths and she felt she was being left behind. But Celia was also increasingly anxious

about returning to Hong Kong although she felt she ‘can’t stand it any longer here’.

She expressed this ambivalence by imagining a maximised mobility: ‘Actually my

ideal thought is that, if I can live in both places for half a year. When Hong Kong is

hot, I come and live in Australia.’ But this was not a realistic scenario for her */she

could not practically pull together these elements of both possible worlds, or afford

the perpetual mobility of the astronaut. As is often the case in migrant discourses, theweather carried great metaphoric weight. Celia expressed the frustrated hopes of the

integration of parts by imagining that ‘astronaut’ mobility could link the elements she

desires in both places. In her story is a familiar structure of a hopeful imagined

fullness of existence, in which desirable components are integrated by movements

between different places and times.

With her increasing dissatisfaction and sense of stasis, Celia began to engage more

in religious fantasies. She rang me to tell me she had converted to Christianity (she

had never been religious at all). Then she went on a retreat camp with a friend. At

first she ‘didn’t have much confidence in God’. But when Celia unexpectedly got a jobshe had applied for, she decided that it was not a coincidence, but part of God’s plan.

At the church there was a practice of relating peoples’ experience to show the work of

God. Celia also mentioned the testimony of another university student who fell asleep

on the night before an essay was due. A salesman happened to call, waking her up, so

she was able to complete the essay. Rather prosaic ‘miracles’, we might think: they

nevertheless provide intimations of deliverance */and perhaps provide some clues to

why migrants become more Christian in Australia.8 In the words of psychoanalyst

Anna Potamianou (1997: 58) ‘nothing is impossible in hope’. The recourse to signs of

the miraculous is a way of maintaining hope in the face of adversity and feelings of incapacity to deal with obstacles. We have already seen how economic and social

‘miracles’ are part of the migrant fantasies of place */economic miracles, social

miracles and miracles of nature.

I have been describing the juxtaposition of hopes and fears, the affective ‘push’ and

‘pull’ factors acting (often simultaneously) within the subjectivities of informants. As

mentioned the collective language of simultaneous hopes and fears was most

powerfully present in the doom and boom zeitgeist of the handover years. The

tipping over of hope into fear is visible in the following story concerning a ‘reluctant

astronaut’ who had returned to Hong Kong, but hoped to join his family and settle in

Australia.




‘Cal’ was living most of the time in Hong Kong where he could earn more money,

while his partner and young children were in Sydney. He was frequently depressed

about the prolonged separation from his family. He would express this disappoint-

ment to me by idealising Australia and his hopes to live there with his family.

‘Australia is so clean, tidy, no pollution *

/I feel it’s very sweet. . .

and very . . .

comfort[sic ]. I love the place, the people.’ Cal was prone to dramatising his situation in Hong

Kong. ‘Life is hard, and poor’, he told me repeatedly. He elaborated an heroic story of

how he had torn himself away from paradise in Australia to provide a better life for

his family. He would also project his disappointment onto the political situation in

Hong Kong: ‘I feel some darkness in the future . . . out of control. I feel, I fear that,

fear . . .’, these words muttered as he seemed to go into a private space remote from

my presence. It seemed to me that this ominous mantra was based more in Cal’s

emotions about his migration trajectory and separation from his family than on any

objective political events in Hong Kong *

/he took little interest in the empiricaldetails of political life.

I was walking with Cal one hot and humid night in an older part of Hong Kong.

He remarked that it was ‘too dirty, the buildings too old’. The street markets, the

jostle of the Hong Kong street life were repulsive to him */he connected it to the

topography and the climate. We had just been to Victoria Peak, the famous lookout

over the harbour, where it was quite cool due to the higher altitude and a balmy

breeze. ‘Did you feel the difference up there? Just like in Australia.’ For Cal the cool

breeze of the Peak was associated with the open spaces and horizons of Australia for

which he was yearning. A bitter critical gaze was turned on every aspect of HongKong */its political situation, environment, climate and social values */as an

expression of disappointment and failure and the suffering of separation. Hong

Kong had become abject and unliveable. Such accounts of unhomely return present

overloaded hopes tipped over into fear */the political terrain provided Cal with a

projective imagining of fear and despair.

The transnational places mutually constituted by these migrant movements

contain complementary elements of an imagined fullness of existence. In the cases

above, the elements could not be easily brought together: the places, Hong Kong and

Australia, could not effectively be integrated. Nevertheless a hope remained that these

aspects could be brought together in the future. In the meantime, there was a strong

demarcation between the imagining of these places and their singular potentialities.

This perception of the folded and split space of transnationality effects an allocation

of temporal aspects to spatial referents. Where Australia is located as a place to retire,

social potentiality is something to be deferred. Or where Australia is imagined as ‘just

like a resort’, a kind of ludic territory, the subject understands ‘Australia’ as a

commodity space dedicated to enjoyment and a separation from necessity. Such

strategies which valorise Australia as pleasure principle may be a way of maintaining a

distance from Australia’s specific civic and political realms. Australia was not often

figured as a social sphere in which subjects could interact and participate as

374 P. Mar



responsible subjects. In their imagining of the host country, informants did not feel

interpolated into a position of citizenship or social belonging in Australia.

Only a very few of my informants successfully belonged in the astronaut class,

being able to maintain a confident practical grasp on a ‘global’ fullness of existence as

a durable state. This is assisted by an economic or professional status that confersinternational mobility, as well as cultural capital and cosmopolitan capacities to

comfortably negotiate differences between cultures. One example, a corporate lawyer

I call Raymond, had a house in Sydney where his wife and son live, while he spent

most of the time in Hong Kong tending to his business interests. His family

commuted to Hong Kong for maybe three months a year. As he described it:

R: I have two homes. I’m living across the ocean [laughs].

P: You can be equally comfortable in both places?

R: Yeah, I like Australia. When I first visited I just loved it. I still feel it’s a country

I’ll go and stay one day. The people are more friendly.. . .

But I think I would find itdifficult to get a job in Australia that can offer this satisfaction. In terms of financialrewards, I can probably earn seven to ten times as much [as in Australia]. If I work

here [in Hong Kong] for two years, I can stay in Australia for twenty years.

This astronaut imagining exhibits a remarkably similar structure to Cal’s, despite the

difference in means to mobility */social potential is separated out from labour and

economic actions and associated with Australia. Autonomous social enjoyment is

deferred until after certain economic goals are achieved. Unlike Cal, Raymond did

not feel an imperative to develop a strong attachment to Australia, since as an

economically and professionally valuable migrant, he could be located anywhere. Ashe said, ‘I don’t have a very strong and narrow nationalistic thing */in a way I’m a

citizen of the world’. The confident subject of what Bauman (2000: 113) calls ‘light

modernity’ carries minimal national attachment since national belonging is flexible

and interchangeable.

A differential economy of ‘global’ migrant belonging is apparent. As one of the two

fully ‘realised’ transnational subjects in my study, Raymond displayed the easy mobile

sense of belonging that goes with the freedom from needing a specific place of

belonging. This is closer to confidence than hope. We can counterpose this global

viewpoint with the experience of the middling migrant subjects engaged in aquotidian struggle to make a place and belonging somewhere in the more restricted

spaces between Hong Kong and Sydney.

Concluding Note on Hope and Migration

The cases I have been outlining chart some individual negotiations of place and

possibility in the practices of ‘middling’ migrants moving between Hong Kong and

Australia during the 1990s. These instances of accommodation to a newly

transnational existence point to the importance of understanding the affective

dimensions of transnational processes. The problematic of hope was adopted as a




means of framing emotional trajectories accompanying long-term migrant move-

ments, including differential capacities to imagine a future and to act on those

imaginings, the specificity of anticipations of a better life and the way they are

distributed spatially and temporally, and the volatility of hope in its relation to fear

and the unknown.In exploring ethnographic accounts of hope and fear, I have sought to locate the

interface of the affective states of individual subjects with the imagining of two

‘national’ places. In spite of the variable realisation of hopes of these mobile subjects,

they drew in similar ways on a repertoire of imagined contents and qualities of

different aspects of a ‘good life’, distributed between two transnational locations. Ideal

memories of Australia typically revolved on idyllic aspects of the pleasure principle */

the enjoyment of nature or of social potential */offsetting the ‘reality’ of Hong Kong

capitalism. These positional idealisations of social potential seem to have been

generated out of very specific postcolonial histories and disjunctural imaginings of places brought together through migrant movement and interaction. This particular

matrix of imaginings will no doubt prove to be quite ephemeral, generated in a

particularly unsettling moment of postcolonial transition, amidst the schizoid

atmosphere of the ‘doom and boom’ scenarios of the 1990s.

I also argue that such imaginings are integral to practical strivings and strategies of

hope employed by migrant subjects in negotiating the difficult movements of

transnational existences. The dualistic structure of spatial and temporal imaginings of

places within a newly constituted ‘world’ of transnationality contains complementary

elements of an imagined fullness of existence that corresponds to differingarticulations of ‘the good life’. Hopefulness in the above cases revolved around

maximising access to elements of imagined social value invested in places of origin

and migration, while accounting */narratively and affectively */for the disjunctures

experienced in the present. But migrant hope cannot be simply reduced to a calculus

of social resources such as economic and cultural capitals to adapt to more mobile

and flexible forms of life, although my examples do suggest a strong relation between

expectation and dispositional resources. Hopeful states in migration, as psycho-social

structures of emotion, intellect and attachment are much more volatile, complex and

contingent in practice. Further studies in migrant hope could usefully interrogate the

relation of practical hope to the collective significations of social imaginings of the

good life emerging between and beyond the nations in question.

Notes

[1] A number of informants were omitted from this study who had settled in Australia without

engaging in much movement to Hong Kong or other countries, and hence were not included

in the category of transnational migrants. Interviews and participant observation took place

in both Sydney and Hong Kong, as I attempted to trace people at different stages of

transnational movement.

[2] This interview took place before the market collapse of late 1997.

376 P. Mar



[3] Wuxia is a Mandarin word that is nevertheless commonly used in Hong Kong to describe

this particular genre of martial arts films.

[4] Massumi (1991: 221) draws a radical distinction between emotion and affect. On the one

hand emotion is figured as ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of

insertion into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action Á /

reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized, whileaffect is unrecognized, unqualified, resistant to critique.’

[5] Throughout this paper, I have used the Yale Romanzation system in the transliteration of

Cantonese words.

[6] The coincidence of sounds and meanings in the word for (outer) space (taai hu `ng ) and

‘empty wife’ (wife0/taai, empty 0/hung), through a typical associative blurring in the

semantic field, lends to the word connotations of men without wives, ‘empty wife’, or a

person in between places (Skeldon 1995: 66; Pe-Pua et al. 1996: 1). The astronaut is clearly a

gendered figure: the semantic play in Cantonese implies that an astronaut is a man. Married

women typically take on the role of maintaining a home and providing for children and their

educational arrangements in a new country.

[7] This is a common ‘ideological’ explanation expressed by Hong Kong people *

/that theeconomic drive of Hong Kong people is a product of a necessity that is somehow absent in

Australia, negated by social welfare measures. Reliance on social security assistance is often

felt to be shameful by people from Hong Kong. An Immigration Department study notes the

‘remarkably low rate of use of government benefits and welfare payments’ by Hong Kong

born Australians (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs [DIMA] 2000: 3).

[8] Some 36% of Hong Kong born people professed to be Christian in the 1996 census (DIMA

2000: 32 Á /33), while the proportion of Christians in Hong Kong is probably about 8% (Hong

Kong Government 1997: 340 Á /41). It would seem that Christians have a greater propensity to

emigrate to countries such as Australia, but also to become Christians.

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