PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 4- Home, domesticity and belongingand a series of habitual and ritual practices, I also found that the transnationality,manifested by the transnational influence of housing and their border-crossing links andactions are an important part of contemporary migrants‘ experiences and integrated intheir practices of belonging. In other words, Taiwanese expatriates‘ experiences of homeand feeling of homeliness at the domestic scale are often influenced and constructed bypractices which take place at and are linked to different scales (see also Blunt andDowling 2006).Aside from that, the discussion in this chapter was attentive to household (interpersonal)interactions which have attracted less attention in the understanding of migrants‘domestic practices of belonging. In this, I elaborated the atmosphere of home asdomestic space and how Taiwanese expatriates‘ feeling of homeliness is constituted bytheir family relationships and interactions with the non-Taiwanese family members ordomestic workers. Particularly drawing on households in whichPRC Chinese areco-present, I understood not only that the idea of home is a concept which needs to benegotiated, but home is also a contested terrain as family and household members oftenhave to negotiate their imagination of home and perform their power relations andidentities. As such, my analysis has made it clear that migrants‘ identities are always animportant determinant in all aspects of their domestic practices to constitute a feeling ofhomeliness and belonging. But the experience of Taiwanese expatriates‘ identitiespractices often manifest their narratives of multiple references of identities andidentifications (e.g. self, family, national, ethnic and cosmopolitan identity).However, while domestic space as a suitable spatial unit to analyse and understandmigrants‘ spatial practices of belonging an examination of those practices in otherspaces is also necessary. In next chapter, I turn to examine Taiwanese expatriates'166