Home is the horizon
Responding to In the place where we left and arrived by Samuel Zhang
In the place where we left and arrived, 2022 (Film still)
“It feels like there’s no good place to be these days,” my friend tells me over lunch. We are in a quiet corner of Hong Kong, thinking about the dozens of friends and acquaintances who in the past year have left the city, looking for a new home. From what we hear, no one has found one elsewhere yet.
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Samuel Zhang, when I first saw In the place where I left and arrived, I wasn’t sure what to hone in on. Your work is an attempt to capture the dispersed, yet urgent reasons behind a new wave of young Chinese migrants to the UK. It is a meditation on your own experiences as a queer Chinese person and others in your community, but it also looks beyond that, thinking about how your experiences speak to a wider generational moment of movement, which is itself enfolded into a long history of the Chinese diaspora.
You show us how the place you left has become an untenable place to live: the COVID pandemic bringing unprecedented levels of state surveillance and control; queer spaces shuttered overnight amidst a period of rising anti-gay sentiment. Yet, you are also frank about the problems of this place you have arrived at, with the violence of xenophobia and racial discrimination deeply felt in everyday interactions.
I name all these facets of In the place where we left and arrived because it feels crucial to understand the work as an accumulation; as a collection of elements that are connected, but cannot be articulated as a fixed narrative. You are describing the problem of home for queer Chinese migrants in the UK, and the problem is that there are too many factors that shape our reasons for leaving and arriving, too many positionalities we are working between. It is impossible to speak of such experiences through a single angle.
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A loved one tells me about how severe restrictions were in Shanghai during the worst year of the pandemic. He tells me of a long month in which even leaving the front door of his apartment was illegal, and how during that time neighbours banded together to get what they needed: swapping beer for fruit, fruit for rice, rice for water. Lightly glossing over the details, he is keen to discuss how these days he is mapping his way back to the UK, after two decades spent away.
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For me to write about In the place where we left and arrived, I feel that it is necessary to note the difference in our positionalities. You grew up in Shanghai and I am still in Hong Kong, the difference of a permeable border that is hard to articulate given the geopolitics of the two cities’ shared region.
Let me put it this way: the city-wide lockdown was a possibility in Hong Kong, but a reality for those in Shanghai. I hear news of queer community centres closing down in Shanghai, while Hong Kong is set to host the Gay Games later this year. Yet, both cities are experiencing a wave of migration as their inhabitants decide to become part of the Chinese diaspora, and I wonder if their reasons for doing so are more similar than is discussed. We are all looking for a place to call home, and when the place that was once home has changed beyond recognition, it becomes hard to stay; even harder still, to leave.
While watching In the place where we left and arrived, I realised that our different positionalities cannot be understood in the UK. This is part of the operations of xenophobia you describe: we look like we came from the same elsewhere, and that is enough for us to be collectively known as Other. My only consolation is that our shared struggle may allow us to find resonance with each other where we might have once resisted.
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In Tokyo, I meet a new friend and discover that we share a language. They are doing good work supporting queer youth in Japan. When we feel it is safe to do so, we speak in hushed tones about the disappearances of queer spaces in the place they once called home. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go back,” they tell me, a statement which holds both grief and determination.
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I feel the most at home in the section of your work where you interview fellow queer Chinese migrants. They speak of difficult things: of being scrutinised for being queer in public, of being accidentally outed and the friction it has caused within the family, of experiences of racism in and outside of the queer community. Yet they also comment on the joy of finding queer people everywhere in East London, of being able to live openly and the comfort of community.
Perhaps it’s the deceptive intimacy of the video format, but the interviewees remind me of my queer friends and how they speak about objectively difficult things with humour and candour. Their stories tell me that being queer and Chinese in the UK is hard, but survivable. That there are pockets of safety to be found in each other, and that laughter is not only possible, but necessary.
I know that home must be a site of constant negotiation for them, and for you as well, Samuel Zhang. As you say, it is hard for those in the diaspora to feel like they belong anywhere. But might there be a way in which home becomes a network of relationships, an accumulation of shared contexts? What if home is not the place we have come from, but a future horizon we are moving towards together?
