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Journal of Intercultural Studies

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Unsettling Potentialities: Topographies of Hope in Transnational Migration

Dr 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 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256860500270213

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Journal of Intercultural Studies Vol. 26, No. 4, November 2005, pp. 361 /378

Unsettling Potentialities: Topographies of Hope in Transnational Migration

Phillip Mar
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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 temporalities 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.
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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, Mills Building, A26, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: phillip.mar@arts.usyd.edu.au ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/05/040361-18 # 2005 Centre for Migrant and Intercultural Studies DOI: 10.1080/07256860500270213

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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 interpenetrating 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 in Brettell 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 emotional tensions 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 an explicit orientation to two powerful social facts which generated doubt and uncertainty: firstly, the transition to postcoloniality without independence of the ` ih gwa `i ) of sovereignty from British colonial port to the Chinese 1997 handover (wu 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 t capitalism (my informants were speaking of a time the treasure box of entrepo prior to the protracted recession affecting Asian economies since 1998). At the same t port means any viable homeland time, Hong Kongs interstitial status as an entrepo 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
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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 Kongs 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 beginning in 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 Kongs economic fortunes. Abbass 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 worried about the Chinese. . . . Now they got more information. And a lot of people have come back. Actually Hong Kong is a golden, golden place. Every week we see the Hang 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 Kongs 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 Kongs continuing prosperity perhaps substituted for a political nationalism that could never develop in the historical t capitalism. How can we best focus circumstances of colonially sponsored entrepo 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 Blochs theory of hope and Castoriadiss notion of the social imaginary. Chan outlines how a social imaginary operating through cinema generated manifest content as imaginings of Hong Kongs specific postcolonial situation and experience of capitalism. Chans study focuses on significations of home and foreignness within the cinematic imaginary of wuxia 3 (swordfighting) films. Films such as Wong Kar-wais Ashes of Time provide an imaginative and affective setting for tracing the presence or absence of hope. Wongs

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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 Chans 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: 102 103; 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 ground concrete 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, Miyazakis work adopts a strong reflexivity in its discursive engagement with hope, presenting the analysis of hope as itself a means to reorient ones own knowledge in relation to the future (Miyazaki 2003a: 30 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 distinguishing 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 Crapanzano notes, the existence of hope implies a metaphysics and an ethics of expectation,
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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 analysis of 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 `i mohng * means literally looking instance, in Cantonese the word for hope * he `i meaning want or wish, and mohng to look forward). Hopeful activity forward (he 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). It involves 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 * Webers 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 investments that 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. At times 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 psychoanalytic 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
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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 Spinozas 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 never hope 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 youre looking for houses, and everything is unsettled. Can your wife settle, and your son settle? Those are the questions you cant answer unless you experience it. If they come back every day crying, and they are ill today at school, and your wife says the neighbours bad, and then you have to go back. . . . Everything, every sliding movement will make them to think whether its 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 ones 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 social hope 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 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. Appadurais well-known essay asserted the centrality of the imagination as a form of negotiation between sites of agency
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(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 social attributes 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 workers for 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 cosmopolitanism 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

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Table 1 Interviewees by Migration Strategy

Transmigrant mode Shuttling settler Willing returnee Reluctant returnee Willing astronaut Reluctant astronaut Ground control (astronaut spouse) Total N 5 12 5 5 2 2 31

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 ` ng ya ` hn ) was adapted to describe emigrants Cantonese word5 for astronaut (taai hu 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 would make 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:
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Like many Hong Kong people do, I came to buy insurance. If Hong Kong has something 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

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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 doubt 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 (increasingly) about the future viability of Hong Kong as the economic golden place. These conditions for locating hope in Hong Kongs future are still unknowable. Aside from these general doubts about the viability of Hong Kongs 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 coincidence between 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
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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 establish a 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 visions of modernity means that Hong Kong or Australia could be figured as ahead or behind in particular ways. Technological comparisons, economic power, technological, 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 were used to shopping in Hong Kong, so many brands, so many fashions, up to date things. I couldnt believe it, they didnt 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

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Kongs 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 as being 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]ts quite exciting, and, more spatial. And we can spend time, leisure time, in the back yard. But its not easy, we find that its not easy. Because we have to mow the lawn and do all the gardening and . . . always weeds. At first we didnt know what to do, I didnt have any garden knowledge, I didnt know what to do with the tools. So much to do. The back yard, yeah, we have to pay for it. Still we found, 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 informant noted. 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.
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Chung-hoi: [I]n Australia, everything is quiet. Very slow and ah . . ., it gives you, it gives you some time to think about you, about me, and the people around you. I mean, the personal relationships much more closer . . . In Hong Kong, people are very busy, and they live, they believe what we believe. [Here he laughs, realising that he is not just talking about others, but about himself as well.] We believe [in Hong Kong] that time is very important. We always try to go faster than other people,

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because, when they lost a chance, then they, they dont 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 dont 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 dont 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 and attachments in line with realistic potentials and probabilities, in developing attachments and deciding where to settle.
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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.

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Celia: When Im in Australia I want to go back, . . . but when Im in Hong Kong, I dont quite like it. The people are impolite . . . and they rush, I mean the job pressure, and pressure to live in the big city, and the air pollution, the noise.

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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 lifepaths and she felt she was being left behind. But Celia was also increasingly anxious about returning to Hong Kong although she felt she cant 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, the weather 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 didnt have much confidence in God. But when Celia unexpectedly got a job she had applied for, she decided that it was not a coincidence, but part of Gods 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.
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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 disappointment to me by idealising Australia and his hopes to live there with his family. Australia is so clean, tidy, no pollution * I feel its 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 Cals 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 empirical details 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 Hong Kong * 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 Australias specific civic and political realms. Australia was not often figured as a social sphere in which subjects could interact and participate as
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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 confers international 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:
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R: I have two homes. Im 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 its a country Ill go and stay one day. The people are more friendly. . . . But I think I would find it difficult to get a job in Australia that can offer this satisfaction. In terms of financial rewards, 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 Cals, 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. As he said, I dont have a very strong and narrow nationalistic thing * in a way Im 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 a quotidian struggle to make a place and belonging somewhere in the more restricted spaces between Hong Kong and Sydney.
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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

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means of framing emotional trajectories accompanying long-term migrant movements, 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 differing articulations 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.
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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. This interview took place before the market collapse of late 1997.

[2]

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[3] [4]

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[5] [6]

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[7]

[8]

Wuxia is a Mandarin word that is nevertheless commonly used in Hong Kong to describe this particular genre of martial arts lms. Massumi (1991: 221) draws a radical distinction between emotion and affect. On the one hand emotion is gured as qualied intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action / reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized, while affect is unrecognized, unqualied, resistant to critique. Throughout this paper, I have used the Yale Romanzation system in the transliteration of Cantonese words. ` ng ) and The coincidence of sounds and meanings in the word for (outer) space (taai hu ` ng), through a typical associative blurring in the empty wife (wife 0/taai, empty 0/hu semantic eld, 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 gure: 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. This is a common ideological explanation expressed by Hong Kong people */that the economic 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 benets and welfare payments by Hong Kong born Australians (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs [DIMA] 2000: 3). Some 36% of Hong Kong born people professed to be Christian in the 1996 census (DIMA 2000: 32 /33), while the proportion of Christians in Hong Kong is probably about 8% (Hong Kong Government 1997: 340 /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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