ABSTRACT

Contextualized in the historical period prior to and after the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, selected poems by Hong Kong poets Louise Ho and Leung Ping-Kwan are read as social texts generated by Asian transnational processes that incorporate aspects of a cosmopolitan merchantile identity, leading to a different form of diaspora or what I term "traveling transnationalism." Their fraught representations of Hong Kong emigrant subjects in Australia and Canada suggest the contingent identity formations that anthropologists such as Aihwa Ong have theorized as forms of flexible citizenship. The essay argues that a different paradigm of Chineseness emerges in these poems which imagine subjects as "astronauts" whose cultural identities evolve from continuous travel between at least two national territories.

Key words: diaspora, transnationalism, Hong Kong emigration, hypermodern travel, "astronaut," "parachute family," citizenship, Chineseness, Australia, Canada.