Homelanding

Home on the Dot

How does a foreign land become your homeland? This is the question migrants and host societies ask every day around the world. Singapore has long been a country of migrants. Ask any Singaporean and there is a good chance that they, their parents, or their grandparents came from elsewhere. Some of these migrants may have planned to return to their homeland one day, but with time this foreign land became home. In this episode, student-producer Ching May explores the challenge of settling into a new land by focusing on an institution that long helped Chinese migrants: the clan association, or huiguan. She visits one of Singapore’s 300 surviving huiguan to ask how it is adapting to the times and how home has changed in meaning for different generations of migrants. She also shares her personal journey as a migrant from Hong Kong who now considers Singapore home, without the help of a clan association. Finally, we hear from Prof Kenneth Dean, an expert on clan associations who leads a fascinating clan association research project, an online GIS-enabled portal called Map of Origins: https://libportal.nus.edu.sg/frontend/ms/sg-chinese-clans/about-sg-chinese-clans