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and a Chinese national. Hybridised forms of cultural identification hence become the norm for migrants whose homes are no longer tied to one place. Yet identity, because it is so important, cannot remain only at the level of cultural politics. Lanxin, reacting to her husband’s attempts to be upbeat about their prospects as immigrants in Canada, exclaimed: At least our house needs to look like a home! Look at our place*does it look like a home? How do you expect me to like this place?! I don’t have this feeling at all now [half-laughs as she gestures at her house]. When the condition is better...when the condition...and it has the look of a home, the feeling of a home. Identity is thus also deeply rooted in the materiality of everyday life. The flexibility of PRC migrants’ identification with China and/or Canada relies ultimately on how they perceive their practical experiences.

Conclusion 总结

In Chinese poetry, legends and folk songs, the moon is a recurring metaphor for a migrant’s longing for his or her hometown. Since it is the same moon that shines in both the homeland and the foreign land, an imaginary connection is drawn between Journal of Ethic and Migration Studies 817 the two when the migrant gazes at the moon. Hence it is perhaps no surprise that autobiographical and semi-fictional writings by PRC migrants feature titles such as The Bright Moon of Another Land and The Moon Back Home is Brighter, as noted by Yang (1997: 313). In this paper, I have focused on the structural forces and human agency involved in producing and consuming images of the moon back home being brighter. While I am conscious of the active role played by the PRC state in creating political discourses to draw migrants back into the fold of the nation-state and the very real attraction that the growing economy of contemporary China holds for migrants, my emphasis has been on the ‘cultural logics that inform and structure border crossings’ (Ong 1999: 5). Following Ien Ang (2001), I have tried to revive notions of ‘experience’ and ‘emotion’ for theorising, in the process uncovering the complexities of their emotional geographies (Davidson et al. 2005). After all, at a basic level, migration is a human link between different places (King 1995). Moreover, as we move, ‘so too do our personal and social boundaries shift; in this sense, migration involves a constant process of reinvention and self-redefinition’ (Gardner 1995). This approach enables me to provide a quite different face to the homo economicus that Haiwen*the immigrant I described in the introduction*initially appeared to be. He, too, had been a member of a transnational household during his time in Vancouver, leading him to conclude that ‘Immigration is almost always very painful. Why? Even though it is a good path for development, the change is too drastic; it decides the way you live for the rest of your life. It is not easy to take this step’. Likewise, despite discursive constructions of the ‘flexible citizen’ by the state and the media, foregrounding the migrants’ voices has led me to emphasise the material ramifications of border crossings for their everyday lives. I further suggest that exploring the possibility of return migration has opened up notions of ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ to further complicate the cultural politics of identity and belonging. In my view, formal citizenship may not necessarily reflect the layered nuances of