Negotiating home, belonging and national identity: mainland Chinese student migrants’ childhood education migration experiences in Singapore
My name is XinTong, and I recently graduated from University College London (UCL) with a Bachelor of Arts in Geography. When I first joined UCL, my interest was in the field of sustainability. However, as I progressed through my studies, I became intrigued by topics around migration, particularly international student mobility as it resonated with me personally. Shortly after my 7th birthday, I moved from China to Singapore for education. Since then, I have become deeply embedded, both socio-culturally and emotionally, in both societies. Calling any of these places my “only home” or “the only nation-state I identify with or belong to” is now impossible. Instead, I gravitate towards a more fluid understanding of home, belonging, and identity. This fluidity, however, occasionally becomes a source of discomfort, where I feel neither truly Singaporean nor entirely mainland Chinese. Upon further research, I discovered that the themes of home, belonging, and national identity feature prominently in migration research that seeks to understand transmigrants’ lives. However, investigations into student migrants’ perceptions of these themes are lacking. My dissertation therefore sought to make young student migrants’ transnational lives more visible in literature and elucidate how they perceive and experience home, belonging, and national identity during educational sojourn.
Overall, my study reveals that as young Chinese student migrants grow up transnationally, negotiating ideas of home, belonging and national identities across social-cultural and national boundaries become part of their everyday lives. Their home, belonging, and national identity can no longer fit neatly into fixed locales but must embrace more fluid meanings. My research unveils that this negotiation process can be an ‘emotional labour’ as student migrants navigate feelings of in-betweenness arising from their dual orientation. Nonetheless, as student migrants exercise their agency to find their place in the world, they develop creative strategies to negotiate home, belonging and national identity in ways that best suit their transnational lives. By focusing on students’ childhood mobility experiences, my study also responds to the calls from children’s geographers and migration scholars to incorporate the perspectives of migrant children and young people, like young student migrants, in the predominantly adult-centric migration research, recognising children’s active agency in migration.
Currently, I am teaching geography in a secondary school and will be embarking on teacher training at the Singapore National Institute of Education in December.
Population Geography 