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Julie Y. Chu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

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"In this vivid account of Fuzhounese villagers' strenuous efforts to realize their own cosmopolitan mobility as undocumented, smuggled persons, Julie Y. Chu connects architecture, spirit money, the politics of destination, and the cosmology of value. As she convincingly argues, mobility is the modern feature of modernity, and the real is always in motion."--Tani Barlow, Rice University

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COSMOLOGIES OF CREDIT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments..........................................................................................................ixNotes on Orthography and Names...........................................................................................xiiiIntroduction.............................................................................................................1PART I: EDGY DISPOSITIONS................................................................................................23ONE To Be Emplaced: Fuzhounese Migration and the Geography of Desire.....................................................31TWO Stepping Out: Contesting the Moral Career from Peasant to Overseas Chinese...........................................59PART II: EXITS AND ENTRANCES.............................................................................................101THREE Snakeheads and Paper Trails: The Making of Exits...................................................................107FOUR Bad Subjects: Human Smuggling, Legality, and the Problem of Entrance................................................141PART III: DEBTS AND DIVERSIONS...........................................................................................165FIVE For Use in Heaven or Hell: The Circulation of the U.S. Dollar among Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors.....................171SIX Partings and Returns: Gender, Kinship, and the Mediation of Renqing..................................................217Conclusion: When Fortune Flows...........................................................................................257Notes....................................................................................................................269Bibliography.............................................................................................................295Index....................................................................................................................321

Chapter One

An old convention of ethnographic presentation is to open with a map as a way for framing the field site as a locatable and knowable "place." Though a great flood of scholarship in recent years has challenged the assumptions of "place" as simply the staging grounds or container of social life, the territorial map has remained a powerful conceptual shorthand for situating anthropologists and the "areas" we study. Nonetheless, I also begin this chapter with a map in order to provide a general orientation to my field site, which I call Longyan. But in lieu of an image situating Longyan within the territorial and administrative borders of China (the nation-state), I offer an alternative geography of the five boroughs of New York City rendered in Chinese and English (figure 1). The map itself appears on the back cover of a book titled Practical English for People Working in Chinese Restaurants, which is published in New York. It has circulated broadly within Longyan; first through the efforts of overseas relatives who purchased and shipped copies of it from the United States to China and later through the technological wonder of copy machines, which made this map ubiquitous among all those who aspired to go abroad, mainly with the ideal of finding restaurant work in one of New York's three Chinatowns. As both a material link to overseas connections and a mediator of social imaginaries, this map has become much more integral than a regional map of China ever could to people's understandings of what it means to be a dangdiren or "local person" in Longyan today.

What I especially love about this image of the map here are the greasy fingerprint smudges on it pointing to the materiality of its circulation from restaurant workers abroad to their relatives in the village. This particular copy of Practical English belonged to Zou Shu, the wife of a short-order cook working just outside of New York City; he had sent her the book along with its accompanying audio tapes and a Walkman cassette player to help her prepare for her impending venture and anticipated life overseas as a restaurant worker by his side. This book was already tattered by the time it reached her in Longyan, she told me. Inside its well-worn covers, scrawled notes in Chinese scattered along the margins enabled this villager to imagine her husband's studiousness, as well as his struggles overseas during their many years of physical separation. Inspired by these leftover traces of her absent husband's linguistic labors, she also scribbled in the margins as she studied from this book herself, adding her own distinctive marks as part of their continuity of efforts and momentum for connecting overseas and for remaking the scale of their everyday life as transnational subjects on the move.

* * *

This chapter offers an exploration of what it means to be emplaced amid the various spatial and temporal streams currently flowing through my field site in the Fuzhou countryside along the southeast coast of China. These flows include both transnational currents resulting from two and a half decades of mass emigration to the United States and other foreign destinations and national and translocal currents driven in part by post-Mao reforms for market liberalization and China's "opening up." Like other scholars working in the vein of transnationalism (Appadurai 1991; Basch et al. 1994; Clifford 1997; Kearney 2000; Levitt 2001; Ong and Nonini 1997; Rouse 1991), my aim is to highlight the complications of locality—its unsettled boundaries and experiences—among subjects differentially connected and on the move in contemporary Longyan.

The notion of a cultural and economic gap between one's "home" and "settlement" country has long informed much of the analysis concerning both motivations for migration and the possibilities for assimilation in receiving nations. Typically, scholars of international migration have assumed that the movement from "home" to "settlement" is naturally strange and alienating, while "to go home is to be where one belongs" (Malkki 1995, 509). This assumption that one's identity and experiences are only whole and well when rooted in a territorial homeland has been critiqued by anthropologist Liisa Malkki, among others, as the "sedentarist analytic bias" of research on migration (508).

"Diaspora" as a key unit of analysis beyond the territorially bounded nation has provided important challenges to the dominant assumptions of migration studies by foregrounding the multiplicity and hybridity of cultural identities among immigrants and refugees. Responding to an era of decolonization in the "Third" World and deindustrialization in the "First" World, works on diaspora, particularly in postcolonial and British cultural studies, have been among the first to analyze the important historical transformations of the global political-economic order in relation to the formation of cultural identities and political communities among displaced and mobile people. For instance, in observing the mass movement of former colonial subjects into the former metropoles of European empires, Stuart Hall (1991; Hall et al. 1996) challenges the conceptual distancing of "home" and "settlement," peripheries and centers, and other spatial metaphors emphasizing the boundedness and purity of people, places, and cultures. As Hall notes, far from being alienating and strange, these postcolonial migrations are the logical culmination of long-standing political and social ties, an experience less about social rupture than about historical continuity. Moreover, this kind of analysis has contributed to a blurring of distinction between economic migrants and refugees by historicizing the inextricable links between political and economic oppression. Paul Gilroy's conceptualization of a "Black Atlantic" and the "double consciousness" of its diasporic African subjects has also provided important critiques of the essentialized conflations of cultural identity with discrete nation-states (1991; cf. Gilroy 1993). Specifically, Gilroy notes how the ongoing experience of displacement is the grounds, not a barrier, for forging an alternative cultural identity anchored in a diasporic network (that is, "the Black Atlantic") outside the territorial confines of any particular nation-state (cf. Hall et al. 1996: 235). Displacement, in this sense, refers to the shared experience of feeling out of "place" within and across the boundaries of the nation-state.

Unfortunately, in much of the scholarship concerned with diaspora, critiques of assimilationist ideologies and primordial ties to territorial nations often privilege the idea of displacement to such an extent that "home" countries become devalued as proper sites for research. This is because displacement is usually construed as the result of the physical departure of people from a prior literal or imagined "home," an analytic move that logically excludes these "home" sites as significant domains for examining diasporic conditions. At best, such sites simply get reinterpreted as immigrant nostalgia for a shared mythical homeland and desire for impossible returns (cf. Safran 1991).

My research in Longyan, which currently has 49 percent of its population overseas, aims to provide a corrective to this overemphasis (and sometimes celebration) of displacement as an experience outside of "home" and, moreover, to the mystification of "home" sites as simply imaginary places of longing and belonging. Approaching issues of migrant identities and social formations from the location of dispersion rather than arrival enabled me to critically examine and situate these analytic assumptions of displacement alongside local theorizations of emplacement made by those who stayed put (or rather "stuck") in my field site as others moved around them. As I will show for my Fuzhounese subjects, the ultimate form of displacement was seen and experienced as the result of immobility rather than physical departure from a "home."

This examination of emplacement presupposes the imbrication of "home" sites in diasporic formations while at the same time it contributes to the continual intellectual project on "diaspora" for relativizing (though not discounting) bounded and autochthonous assumptions of belonging to the nation-state, the primordial homeland, or the pristine "local" (against a penetrating globalization "from above") (cf. Brecher et al. 2000). I do not wish to suggest that territorial boundaries no longer matter in an era of transnational and global flows. Rather, my goal is to show how villagers' quest for emigration shifted the very grounds of both mobility and enclosure (Cunningham and Heyman 2004). It reshaped the geography of desire, expanding the possibilities of emplacement for some while contracting the terms of belonging for others. As I will show, not everyone was localized (or globalized) in the same way in Longyan. There were, in fact, multiple scale-making projects that shaped villagers' sense of belonging in the world. Scale, as Anna Tsing has noted, "is not just a neutral frame for viewing the world; scale must be brought into being: proposed, practiced, and evaded, as well as taken for granted" (Tsing 2005, 58).

In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on these processes of scale-making and particularly on the resonances, tensions, and confusions of "place" such processes have generated among Longyan residents. Following a general overview of village experiences of locality, I offer three ethnographic sketches of how architecture and landscape could enable concurrent as well as conflicting senses of scale and emplacement among villagers. These three sketches will spotlight transformations first in housing, then in temples, and finally in roads. As a means for understanding Fuzhounese migration, the built environment is a particularly good starting point since scholars and journalists often seemed so puzzled by Fuzhounese desires to spend overseas remittances on the building of lavish temples and houses rather than on what most critics consider more "rational" economic activities like investments in local enterprises or public works. Overseas remittances currently comprise approximately 70 percent of all income in Longyan, and according to the local party secretary's office, an estimated two-thirds of these remittances go to the renovation and construction of houses and temples. While these construction projects are commonly dismissed by local officials and elites as the unproductive result of newly wealthy but "low cultured" residents (di wenhua), my aim here is to move this discussion of value and value production beyond the economic terms of rational utility. Instead, I ask: How do these transformations of the built environment contribute to the production of locality as a structure of feeling? Specifically, how do they complicate the possibilities and terms of place and emplacement among the various members of this community? I conclude this chapter with some final thoughts on scale-making by returning to the spatial imaginaries conjured by "Restaurant English" and its practitioners in Longyan.

Placing on Locality

In many ways, Longyan appeared to be an idyllic rural village, surrounded as it was by verdant mountains on three sides and the flowing waters of the Min River as it splinters off and winds into the South China Sea. The small, flat valley bounded by the mountains, river, and sea contained most of the houses for village residents, as well as more than thirty Buddhist-Daoist temples, one Protestant church, an elementary and a middle school, a local government office, a few patches of farmland, and a green market at the end of two short and intersecting commercial streets of small shops. One of these two streets, River Head Road (Jiang Tou Lu), has long served as the vibrant hub for Longyan residents, though its luster as the commercial center for neighboring and even far-flung places up until the Communist Revolution no longer exists except in the youthful recollections of its oldest members. Though not much has changed about River Head Road's practical functions over the past century and a half, the street's spatial significance—like that of Longyan itself—has undergone several challenges and revisions since the Republican Era in China (1912–1949).

In regard to Longyan as a whole, as noted, there is some debate about whether this community is (or should be) properly called a "village" (cun) or a "town" (zhen). Though Longyan's physical boundaries remain intact, its emplacement within regional, national, and (more recently) transnational spatial hierarchies has been anything but stable through the years. The shifts are evident in Longyan's official "place" markers over the last century: from a regional township and military command center in the late Qing to a small district within a larger rural commune (gongshe) under Mao to a discrete "peasant village" (nongcun) under decollectivization and, finally, to its recent and ongoing transformation as a cosmopolitan home village of overseas Chinese (qiaoxiang). These various designations of place evoke quite different structures of feeling for being "local" in Longyan. Moreover, they have not succeeded one another as linearly and neatly as the official changes made to Longyan's "place" designation would suggest. Rather, as I discovered through my research, all of these distinct senses of locality still resonated in Longyan, though not necessarily at the same frequency or force.

Town, commune, peasant village, and overseas village channeled different spatial and temporal imaginings of what it meant to be a "local person" in Longyan. Some figurations of the "local," like "town," conjured up nostalgia for the pre-Communist days of regional prestige and influence, while others, like "peasant village," evoked ever-present anxieties of the stagnation and narrowing limits of one's social world since the Communist Revolution. Yet another term, like "commune," carried entangled associations of political obsolescence, moral idealism, and personal bitterness over utopic aspirations and material deprivations in the recent and still reverberating past. All these senses of locality have persisted in memory and embodied experience beyond their functional purposes for political administration by different state regimes in China. In fact, they have not only coexisted with but also centrally shaped Longyan residents' current efforts and collective claims for being an "overseas village."

Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has observed how contingent and fragile imaginations and experiences of the "local" can be, especially in the contemporary context of increasingly transnational and globalizing forces. As he notes, "Locality is ephemeral unless hard and regular work is undertaken to produce and maintain its materiality" (1997, 181). In trying to understand the unrelenting desires of the Fuzhounese to migrate through human smuggling networks, I found that I was also tracking this process for the production, transformation, and maintenance of locality in Longyan. As Appadurai argued, locality is not merely the given, stable grounds for identity formation and collective action but also in itself "a relational achievement" (186) and "property of social life" (182). Not only were there different and contested ways for being "local" in Longyan, but some people also became more local-ized than others in the process.

Not everyone who resided in Longyan was considered a "local person" (dangdiren). Many in the population who had migrated from Sichuan and other interior provinces of China were commonly referred to as "outsiders" (waidiren), as were the small corps of teachers and school administrators who mainly hailed from Fuzhou City and held urban residence status in the Chinese state's household registration system (hukou). It goes without saying that as a resident of Longyan, I also occupied this position of "outsider." Though all these "outsiders" shared spaces of habitation and sociality in Longyan, they did not all share the same material and embodied sense of locality. These distinctions were based not only on where people were from, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on where they were potentially going in the increasingly fluid context of a globalizing post-Mao China. Some people were better positioned amid regional, national, and transnational flows to imagine themselves as mobile and forward-looking (or "modern") subjects in a cosmopolitan context. Others less connected to such currents easily became "stuck" in the most narrow and confining sense of locality—as unchanging peasants in an equally stagnant and backward peasant village.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from COSMOLOGIES OF CREDITby Julie Y. Chu Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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