A Distant Shore

What relation does or should a descendant of immigrant parents have to the ancestral homeland? And what notions can he or she rely on to characterize, sustain, or even nullify such relations—language, ethnicity, consanguinity, or cultural loyalty? The Chinese Singaporean writer Chia Joo Ming ponders and casts new lights on these questions in his novella “Ambon Vacation.” For Chia, Chinese diasporic subjects have open-ended and plural identities that move and change in time and space. This chapter analyzes the way in which Chia details the entanglement among historical contingency, literary imagination, and personal feelings in relation to contemporary identity politics and the notion of loyalism.