ABSTRACT
When Rey Chow says that homelessness is coming to be “the only home ‘state,’” she is probably thinking as much about the general condition of modern diaspora as she is about her own personal life (1993, 197). The poignant expression of worldly homelessness, however, is not a denial of the hope for home, but rather an assertion of re-homing desire in the age of global diaspora. Modern diaspora disrupts the apparent closure of home and generates transnational, translocal communications and communities. Under such circumstances, the earlier conceptualizations of home based on a singular location are no longer adequate to describe the new dimensions and transformations of home, which has been re-versed in diaspora not as a “felicitous space” of living, but rather as a process of becoming. In a sense, Asian diaspora poetry in Canada represents a paradoxical feeling of both homesickness and home-crisis, for the movement between multiple locations of cultures suggests a cobelonging dialogue which, by situating diasporas simultaneously inside and outside of a culture, intensifies both the desirability and the impossibility of a given home-place. As Iain Chambers points out, “wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing on a sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history, even if it pretends to carry a single name” (1994, 4). In “a single name” yet a plural sense, home has developed on constantly changing configurations of diversity and unity and, henceforth, become increasingly
contingent on the interaction of different cultural passages. Situated “at the crossroads of the world,” Asian diaspora poetry problematizes the political nature and meanings of home, and suggests a dynamic, complicated process in which different cultures not only conflict one another but are also converged and convoluted together to produce new homes around “the simple axis of a mobility” (Kristeva 1991, 30).
