What does it mean to be ‘called home’ from overseas? The case of Hakka Chinese Indonesian youth from West Kalimantan

Abstract

Every year thousands of Hakka Chinese Indonesian youth leave towns in West Kalimantan to go overseas to work and study in Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, America and the UK. Many have their sojourns abroad stopped by parents who ‘call them home’ (Hakka. ham chon; Indo. disuruh pulang) to perform family duties, primarily taking over family businesses and taking care of aging parents. Being ‘called home’ is rarely optional; it is a form of return that makes explicit the moral economy inherent in hierarchical family relationships. The ways internationally mobile youth respond to this request and make sense of their lives after returning, reveal complex and ambiguous feelings towards family, self, and community. Cosmopolitan transnational aspirations conflict with the daily realities of immobility, filial duty, and the monotony of small-town life. This is expressed in a series of changing states that move between love and acceptance, resentment and anger. Using three illustrative cases from long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper describes this process of being ‘called home’, showing how the tensions between personal aspirations for transnational mobility and the realities of small-town immobility linked to filial duty are a more significant experience of contemporary youthful sojourns than previously imagined.