Home is Not Here
Distributed for National University of Singapore Press
216 pages
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12 halftones, 2 maps
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6 x 9
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© 2018
Review Quotes
China Channel
“Generalities die by a thousand particular cuts. History, fortunately, is the domain of the particular. A new memoir by historian Wang Gungwu, Home Is Not Here, has given us one beautiful, incisive cut against any general idea of Chinese belonging.”
Asian Review of Books
“Wang’s continual balancing of his Chinese heritage with his growing up in a multicultural, British-ruled Malaysia encapsulates the challenge of dual or multiple identities that many overseas Chinese face.”
Mekong Review
“If home was not ‘here,’ nor was it in China, it was also not nowhere. Faced with the unknowability of his own home, history and roots, he learned to take refuge in the world. There, through geography, literature and eventually history itself, he arrived at a capacious world-mindedness in which ‘all places and people had become knowable.’ For Wang, home became, in that sense, everywhere.”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
“His stories of growing up in colonial Malaya are illuminating: mingling with people of different races and Chinese people of different dialect groups enabled him even at a young age to develop empathy with strangers and nurtured a sense of inclusiveness, even of humanity. Like a sponge, he soaked up all that he could learn. His intellectual curiosity was boundless and his heart was open to diversity.”
Cross-Currents
“For such an outstandingly accomplished individual, publication of such an evocative and detailed memoir carries tremendous weight in the burgeoning field of Chinese overseas studies.”
New Books Network
“This book is an intimate reflection on the themes of family, education, language, Chinese identity, and the search for a sense of home during a tumultuous period in Southeast Asian and Chinese history.”
Ezra Vogel, Harvard University
"A charming, intimate, and modest autobiography of the childhood and schooling of a great historian of China. . . . How a wise Chinese mother and a headmaster in Ipoh Malaysia taught their only son to love learning in and out of China in transition."
Prasenjit Duara, Duke University
“As the doyen of Chinese studies and the Chinese in Southeast Asia pens the memoirs of his early days in Malaya and China, history comes to life in a most intimate way. What could lead to a rootless confusion becomes a capacious cosmopolitanism.”
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