The Traces of Selection: Cultural Layers in the Documentation of Chinese “Return Migration” from Burma to China

• In Event: 370. Archival Production and Chinese Diaspora: New Approaches to Race, Belonging, and Migration in the 20th Century

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the relationship between archives, empires, and historical narratives highlights how selective documentation shapes understanding of the past, present, and future. In studying the migration of Chinese residents of Burma who returned to China in the 1930s and 1940s as a result of wartime conditions, collections of news clippings about these individuals held at the Nanyang Research Institute at Xiamen University stand out as a particularly rich source. How these collections came to be, however, are equally as interesting when we consider what cultures of identity lead certain people, places, and institutions to maintain clipping files from Burmese and Chinese papers reporting on Chinese moving from Burma to China. Moreover, at the Xiamen University Nanyang Research Library these clippings are preserved in books made from randomly re-used paper from English-language novels and classics such as The Odyssey, science textbooks, and Chinese-language technical manuals.

This paper reads the visual effect of historical documents about a specific group of Chinese diaspora that can only be viewed when literally layered upon the texts of other (disposed) material and cultural resources. The paper encourages looking at documents related to Chinese migration between China and Burma from the margins. Such an approach asks us to attend to visual disruption and conjecture as ways to ensure the traces of selection that document people ‘moving home is understood as a layered process that is haunted by previous and passing cultural encounters, and practices of archival production.

Author

• Tina Mai Chen, University of Manitoba