Friendship networks and encounters in student-migrants’ negotiations of translocal subjectivity

Introduction

While working in the heart of Melbourne’s ‘international student district’ (the north of the city centre where two major universities have campuses), I often noticed the long lines outside the ‘bubble tea’ ¹ shops near campus. Largely unheard of in Australia until the late 1990s, the proliferation of bubble tea outlets in Melbourne’s urban landscape is just one of many manifestations of the impact of large populations of predominantly Asian international students on the already culturally diverse fabric of urban life in Melbourne (Tsutsumi and O’Connor, 2005). In an research interview with Rahti, a Malaysian student-migrant whose experiences I explore in some detail in the latter half of this paper, I heard that two returned international students had started a café in Rahti’s hometown of Penang called the ‘Bourke St Café’, named after one of Melbourne’s major streets and serving distinctly Australian-style barista coffees, such as ‘flat whites’, ‘long blacks’ and ‘lattes’, previously unavailable in Penang. The bubble tea shop and the Bourke St. Café are symbolic of more than just globalised consumer practices. They are, like most coffee and tea shops globally, meeting-places – sites within the urban landscape where rituals of friendship are performed. The transnational circulation of these urban beverage cultures reflects the circular mobility patterns of student-migrants as transnational subjects. This paper seeks to explore how student-migrants experience particular kinds of selfhood in relation to translocal urban spaces, and how encounters and interactions with friends and the formation of different friendship networks are implicated in these selfhoods in various ways.

In the specific context of this paper, I use the term ‘student-migrant’ to describe mobile subjects who arrive within a nation-state on a student visa, but transition subsequently to different forms of temporary or permanent migrant status. Some student-migrants arrive with the intention to use student visas as a stepping stone to longer-term migration; others remain because of unforeseen circumstances and opportunities. In Australia, student-migrants have become an increasingly significant part of the national migration programme because of the policy formation known as the education-migration nexus (Robertson, 2013). Australian migration policy has, since 1998, ² linked international education and skilled migration, creating and refining various policies that allow many international students to transition to new visas after completing their degrees. This creates what Allon et al. (2008) refer to as ‘mutant mobilities’, as student-migrants’ intentions for study, overseas work experience and building language capabilities, as well as their families’ strategies for permanent migration and transnational investment, combine across ‘staggered’ migration pathways (Robertson, 2013). Strong transnational ties, uncertain visa statuses and the desire to use migration to Australia as stepping stone to circulation or onward migration to a third country also mean that student-migrant journeys often remain ‘continuous, not finite’ (Ley and Kobayashi, 2005: 113). Student-migrant pathways (common not only in Australia but also to varying extents in New Zealand, Canada and the UK across the first decade of the 2000s) are part of a more global trend towards increasingly diversified migration flows (Alba and Nee, 2009). Migrants’ pathways are now frequently fragmented, multiple and non-linear (Castles and Miller, 2003; Jordan and Duvall, 2003) and involve mobility across different statuses (Schuster, 2005).

While the transnational dimensions of student-migrant lives have been studied in some detail in both my own work and the work of others (see, for example, Baas, 2010; Raghuram, 2013) the significance of friendship networks and encounters remains an emergent area of research, in comparison with the more dominant focus generally in transmigration research on family and kin networks. Friendship is particularly significant to student-migrant experiences – usually migrating as young adults without their families, student-migrants rely heavily on friends, both locally and transnationally, for support throughout the migration process. However, despite an exorbitant amount of literature on international student experiences in Australia, including their social networks (see, for example, Kudo and Simkin, 2003; Russell et al., 2010; Sawir et al., 2008), there are few studies that substantively address student-migrant socio-spatial experiences in relation to both their transnational mobility and their translocal emplacement. Friendship networks become implicated in student-migrants’ sense of belonging and sense of self, in relation to both ‘super-diverse’ Australian urban centres such as Melbourne, and in relation to the cities and towns across the globe that they come from and return to with varying degrees of regularity. Cities are more than just the context in which these mobilities unfold – as I seek to show in this paper, urban places and urban social practices play a highly significant role in how student-migrants narrate and make meaning out of their socialities and mobilities, and also in the translocal selfhood that both emerges and is contested through these socialities and mobilities.

As Conradson and Latham (2005b: 228) note, despite the proliferation of narratives around globalisation and mobility, more attention needs to be paid to how emplaced forms of sociality (such as friendship and kinship as well as national belonging) are ‘re-worked and re-imagined’ through mobility. In this paper, I use the framing concept of ‘translocal subjectivities’ (Conradson and McKay, 2007) to highlight the crucial role that the formation of different friendship networks over time, as well as specific encounters and interactions with friends, play into how senses of self are both multiply located and transformed through transnational mobility; how specific urban localities, materialities and social practices are involved in the negotiation of the ‘translocal’ self; and how senses of belonging and not belonging shape and are shaped by encounters with friends in the context of translocality. The paper draws on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with 30 student-migrants gathered during a study on the education–migration nexus conducted in Melbourne between 2005 and 2009, and a smaller pilot study involving former students on temporary graduate visas in both Melbourne and Sydney, conducted in 2013. Both studies focused on the local social experiences, transnational mobilities and social networks of student-migrants of varied ethnic and national backgrounds in Australia. While friendship was not initially a key question guiding the research, it emerged as a highly significant theme in student-migrants’ narratives of their mobility and their social worlds.

I will first situate this paper within the existing literature on friendship, cities and transnational mobility, and outline the mobilisation of a ‘translocal subjectivities’ lens. I then turn to an in-depth analysis of the narratives of four student-migrant participants across two sections. In the first section, I give a chronological account of the development of friendship networks and belonging across time and within space for two student-migrants: Vincent, from Hong Kong, who eventually achieved permanent residency after six years of working and studying in Australia, and Jingfei, from China, who at the time of the interview had been in Australia for five years, was on a temporary graduate visa, and was in the process of applying for permanent residency. In the second section, I seek to understand how translocal subjectivities are negotiated in relation to encounters with friends when student-migrants return to visit the cities that they come from. Here, I employ the narratives of two women from Malaysia, both who achieved permanent residency after their degrees: Shui, a ‘serial international student’ who studied for her PhD in Melbourne after also studying in Canada and the UK, and Rahti, who completed both undergraduate and postgraduate study in Australia. Pseudonyms have been used throughout this paper and other possibly identifying details changed.

I have chosen to focus primarily on a small number of participants in this paper so that their experiences can be understood within the rich context of their overall migration pathway and their specific cultural, social and religious identities and networks. Following from Smith (2005), such an approach allows the socially and spatially situated nature of transnational subjects and their everyday experiences to remain at the forefront of the analysis. While the specific narratives chosen in this paper reflect unique experiences, inflected with the individual’s particular intersectional identities of class, culture, gender and religion, the key themes addressed – shifting friendship networks over time and their implications for belonging within Melbourne, and ‘contested encounters’ with friends during return visits home – were strong patterns across all 30 interviews. The experiences of the four individual participants who form the focus of this paper thus reflect broader patterns in the data.

Translocal subjectivities, friendship, belonging and the city

It is clear from much of the literature that geographical mobility has a transformative effect on selfhood, as ‘experiences of mobile subjects become a process of self-researching, self-reflection, transition and transformation’ (Christou, 2011: 253). This is particularly the case for young, middle-class and relatively well-educated mobile subjects such as international students, with international education often cited as a form of mobility that constitutes the development of new senses of the self, particularly ‘hybrid’ (Koehne, 2005) ‘cosmopolitan’ (Rizvi, 2005) and ‘multiple’ (Gomes et al., 2014) orientations. Space is often crucial, not merely as a backdrop to these transformations in selfhood, but as constitutive of them, as ‘spatial discourses of belonging trace the relations between places, identities and bodies’ (Christou, 2011: 250). As Brickell and Datta (2011: 70) note, ‘home’ and ‘return’ can operate at multiple levels, and local places, including neighbourhoods and urban areas, are crucial to the negotiation of translocal subjectivities in migrants’ everyday lives.

Conradson and McKay (2007) employ the term translocal subjectivities to ‘describe the multiply-located senses of self amongst those who inhabit transnational social fields’ (p. 168). First, Conradson and McKay (2007: 168) understand translocal subjectivities as ‘emerging through both geographical mobility and multiple forms of ongoing emplacement’. This paper looks closely at student-migrants as both mobile and multiply emplaced by engaging with their processes of socially embedding themselves within Melbourne alongside their narratives of trying to ‘re-emplace’ when they return to visit home. Second, the notion of translocal subjectivities acknowledges that ‘the formation of migrant selfhood is usually more closely related to localities within nations than to nation-states’ (p. 168). The formation of student-migrant self-hood and belonging is understood through this paper strongly hinged on local places – the cities in which they live but also the different domestic, leisure, work and consumption sites within these cities. Finally, Conradson and McKay (2007) note that ‘the emotional and affective states that accompany mobility are key dimensions of translocal subjectivities’ (p. 169). The narratives that I focus on in this paper reveal constant negotiation of belonging/not belonging that accompany student-migrants’ mobilities within and between cities. Importantly, I understand translocal subjectivity as something that is neither completely static nor completely fluid – it is not ‘acquired’ through mobility and then simply maintained, but constantly negotiated and renegotiated within different spaces and at different times across student-migrants’ mobility pathways.

This paper also adds more generally to the literature on migrants, social relationships and cities. Despite an established canon of research in migration studies on family and kin networks in relation to social and cultural capital (see, for example, Anthias, 2007; Goulbourne et al., 2010; Nee and Sanders, 2001) as well as an increasing interest in urban space as a site of everyday encounters with diversity (Wise and Velayutham, 2009, 2014), friendship as a distinct form of encounter and social relation with diverse cities remains, as Kathiravelu (2013) asserts, largely unexamined. As well as a focus on family and kinship, the most prominent work on migrants and cities tends to focus on labour markets, immigrant organisations, transnational institutions, festive events and political organisation (see, for example, Cross and Moore, 2001; Glick-Schiller and Caglar, 2011; Smith, 2001). The much more prosaic and everyday relations of friendship, which I argue are instrumental to constructions of translocal subjectivities, are often left out. Similarly, literature of encounters with difference in urban space and its potentially transformative effects has tended to focus on public, chance encounters in public spaces. This paper responds to calls from scholars such as Valentine and Sadgrove (2012) for private spaces and encounters as sites of the negotiation of difference and identity to also be considered.

Emerging work from Kathiravelu (2013), Bunnell et al. (2012), Ryan (2011, 2015) and Conradson and Latham (2005b) has sought to add conceptual agendas as well as significant empirical accounts to understandings of friendship and geographic mobility, including transnational mobility. This paper works from Ryan’s (2011: 710) critique that simplistic dichotomies of co-ethnic networks as ‘bonding’ and cross-ethnic networks as ‘boundary crossing’ need unsettling, and particularly so in diverse urban contexts where ‘migrant’ and ‘host’ subjectivities do not fall into discrete or mutually exclusive ethnic categories. In Melbourne, for example, student-migrants encounter and forge friendships with other international students and student-migrants from their own ethnic and national backgrounds as well as from around the world, and with ‘local’ Australian residents from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Alongside these local networks, they also sustain transnational friendship networks, which can be globally scattered (Gomes et al., 2014). Studies of international students, friendship networks and urban practices, however, often focus on the early stages of their arrival (see, for example, Lobo, 2013; Sawir et al., 2008). They seldom follow students’ narratives as they move on from university and on to migration pathways, where their friendship networks develop in new ways. While some studies recognise the importance of transnational friendship networks (see, for example, Gargano, 2009; Gomes et al., 2014) few focus in depth on how emplaced encounters and interactions with friends within the multiple local spaces that make up transnational social fields may have bearing on negotiations of translocal subjectivity.

This paper specifically answers Ryan’s (2011) call for more attention to the ways in which migrants ‘access maintain and construct different types of networks, in varied social locations, with diverse people’ (p. 707), as well as providing a unique case study that will contribute to Kathiravelu’s (2013: 3) development of a research agenda around ‘the social and spatial configurations of friendship’ and their ‘implications for urban dwellers’ experiences of city life’. A crucial addition to this literature in this paper is bringing narratives of ‘settling in’ (I deliberately avoid the term ‘settlement’ here because it evokes linearity and permanence) together with narratives of return in relation to friendship. Unlike much of the literature on migrant urban social networks, the paper thus focuses not just on local relationships and their implications for belonging, nor only on the maintenance of transnational links through embodied and virtual forms of mobility. Instead, by focusing on student-migrant narratives of the formation of friendship networks during both of the period of ‘settling in’ and of encounters with friends during the return event of the ‘visit-journey’ (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport, 2000) the paper specifically explores the emplaced nature of encounters with friends in relation to translocal subjectivities.

In this paper, I acknowledge the ambiguities of concepts of ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ as culturally and historically situated, and potentially overlapping with relations of family, kin, colleagues and acquaintances (Westcott, 2012). I take a broad approach to the idea of ‘friendship’, a broadness that is required to anchor research that included participants from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I define ‘friendship’ within this paper as any social relationship outside of family and kin relations that is based in voluntary association (Blieszner and Adams, 1992) and shared social and leisure practices, involving varying degrees of intimacy. Participants in the study tended to view friendships this way themselves – as highly mobile and young migrants, friendships were dynamic, evolving and involved varied intensities of relationship. Friendships were not always described as deep, intimate relations, but sometimes tentative and emerging connections or reconnections around shared interests and shared spaces. Levels of intimacy varied across both time and space in these relationships. This paper also does not seek to analyse individual relationships within specific friendships and their affective dimensions – it rather approaches friendship as a site of encounter or a moment of interaction within which translocal subjectivities are contested and negotiated. The focus is thus not individual friendship relations per se, but how specific encounters with friends in different contexts, and individuals’ narrations of the development of their friendship networks over time, become part of reflections on the translocal self, through which senses of belonging and not belonging in different local spaces are formed.

‘Settling in’: Friendship networks and belonging in Melbourne

This section looks at the pathways of two student-migrants to unpack how friendship networks develop for student-migrants over a staggered migration pathway as they arrive in Melbourne as students, and then transition to working and seeking permanent migration. It uses the narratives of these two student-migrants to unpack the role that different urban places in Melbourne play in the development of these networks and subsequently in the development of translocal subjectivities.

Jingfei attended an international school in China that offered students the chance to sit the Victorian Certificate of Education alongside the Chinese Higher School Certificate. As a result, Jingfei’s imaginary of living and studying in Melbourne was part of her high school experience, arguably embedding the beginnings of translocal subjectivity even prior to her arrival. When she landed in Melbourne many of her schoolmates arrived too, her friendship network thus transplanting easily with her. The Diploma course she studied in her first year was dominated by international enrolments, so her friendship network was initially almost exclusively Chinese. This was, for Jingfei, both a great comfort during her initial settling in, and a grave concern, as she felt she was not truly experiencing the diversity of life in Melbourne or improving her English sufficiently by only interacting with her Chinese friends. A turning point for Jingfei was when she moved on to study a Bachelors degree with a much higher proportion of local students, and moved out of student accommodation in the city centre and starting living in a suburban shared house with a mix of local and international students. This was also a time when many of her Chinese friends began to move back to China, forcing her somewhat outside of her comfort zone socially. At the suburban shared house, Jingfei lived with a young Australian man who was initially a friend, and then a boyfriend. Her social world opened up as she began to socialise frequently with her boyfriend’s predominantly Anglo-Australian friends, but also as she graduated and started working at a series of part-time jobs. At the time of the interview she was working for a migration agent, where both her colleagues and clients came from a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

For Jingfei, an unexpected result of living in Melbourne and developing cross-cultural friendships was a renewed connection with her own religious identity. Jingfei was a member of the Hui Muslim minority in China, but growing up, she described her family as only lightly culturally, and not at all religiously, Muslim:

When I was in China, I didn’t know anything about Muslims and especially the Islamic culture and all I know is about the rules and actually I treated Islam as culturally, not religiously. Let’s say, when I was young, I always ask my mum why I can’t eat pork and my mum said, ‘That’s the way we live’, because she doesn’t know much about it either.

Living in Melbourne was Jingfei’s first experience of seeing a diverse and everyday practice of Islam as she moved through urban space – people in Islamic dress, the observance of prayer times on campus and in the workplace, the prominence of mosques within the urban environment and the provision of halal food at many restaurants and supermarkets. Through her work, Jingfei befriended Muslims from a number of different countries, including Afghanistan, Egypt and India. These friends encouraged her to learn more about Islam and also began to teach her basic Arabic. Jingfei saw this opportunity to connect, through friendship networks and encounters, with a religious identify to be one of the most valuable and transformative parts for her life in Melbourne, and something that was closely connected to her plans for mobility and return:

[In China] sometimes I doubted whether I’m a Muslim or not … After I got to Australia I saw so many coming from Muslim countries … My friends are actually teaching me something about Islam … one of the reasons I want to stay here is I want to learn as much as I can and actually I can, maybe, one day I can actually go back to China and teach people those sort of stuff.

By the time of the interview Jingfei still missed her parents but was focused on a future in Melbourne and was applying for a permanent partner visa on the basis of her relationship with her boyfriend. She felt comfortable moving through the city, working in her multicultural workplace, and connecting with the social and leisure practices of her boyfriend’s Anglo-Australian friends, her ethnically diverse Muslim friends, and her remaining Chinese friends. The only space in which she still felt her belonging in tension was when she visited her boyfriend’s family, who lived in a small farming community several hours from Melbourne. Here, she felt her Otherness starkly. Jingfei said of her boyfriend’s family:

They never see foreigners there and especially Chinese Asian and they don’t know what to say to me and I don’t know what to say to them … They very British you know, very Australian … the country is so different from a city like Melbourne or Sydney.

Vincent arrived in Australia from Hong Kong to do a Foundation course ³ before attending university, so, like Jingfei, his initial friendships were shaped by his campus experiences and were mostly based on other international students. His first friendships outside of the student population began when a classmate invited Vincent to attend his Christian church in the outer suburb of Bentleigh. Vincent found people in the Bentleigh congregation to be ‘nice’ but ‘difficult to communicate with in a deeper way … the local residents there, they’re not very exposed to the Asian populations like me’. Another classmate then introduced him to a church in central Melbourne which had a far more culturally diverse congregation, where he really started to feel at home:

There were many other people like me, and there were other people who had been here for ages or even born here but they were generally more receptive and more familiar with the way to deal with different people. So that kind of help me to settle down.

This church was also a turning point for Vincent because he had till then been bouncing through several different homestays, ⁴ but never finding the accommodation satisfactory or the families entirely convivial. At the city church, however, he met a new homestay family and moved in with them in an inner-city suburb. Vincent explained ‘this family is a real Australian family but actually the mum was a Malaysian local … so they were kind of very familiar with how to deal with Asians and all this stuff, but yeah I could learn a great deal of Australian culture from them’. Vincent described his homestay family as his closest friends during this time, but also a conduit to an expansion of his friendship networks through this ‘learning’ about Australian social and leisure practices that then allowed him to build further friendships. Vincent’s ‘learning’ about these daily, quotidian practices – such as having a glass of wine and chatting after dinner, or attending barbeques – become crucial to a growing sense of social ease in local contexts. He stayed with this family for three years, and remained close with them after he moved out: ‘there’s a connection there and they do care about me – so much so that they see me as one of their kids’. Vincent’s interests in sport and in student politics, along with his continuing involvement in church extended and strengthened his friendship networks during his degree:

Church and soccer and the home stay – that was a really good way to meet people. Not only Australians, they were born here, but also some other ethnic groups. […] And I mean all these interactions, they will help me to make a lot of friends and that was really great.

Vincent played on a soccer team with a number of Korean recent migrants and language students, and also attended services with them at the Korean church. Although there was a language barrier with many of the other players who did not have fluent English, Vincent felt comfortable with his friendships on the soccer pitch, which were built on the shared interest in the sport and the shared experience of being ‘new’ to Melbourne and being ‘Asian’.

At the time of the interview Vincent was immersed in a busy life in Melbourne and focused on progressing his career. He felt he could move fluidly between the different social contexts he encountered without the sense of dislocation that he often felt in his early years in Melbourne. He was engaged with diverse social and professional networks that reflected those of any young urban professional in multicultural Melbourne. His belonging in Australia, he said, was closely tied to his social relationships: ‘It was always people with me … In terms of your belongingness, which the sense of belongingness, yeah. […] I mean, I have to know myself, as who I am and people have to know me by how I interact with them’. However, Vincent was keen to reiterate that racialised boundaries still remained for him in Melbourne’s urban spaces, that there were certain sites and contexts in which he still did not feel comfortable. A sense of interpersonal social comfort with friends could not be overcome in particular environments that were unwelcoming to Otherness, particularly Asian-ness:

I do feel at home … but it depends on which social circle that you are in and what type areas you are in, like – just to give you an example, I would never feel so comfortable going to a footy match. […] When you go to a place where there might be some atmospheres that – out there, make you feel that it’s excluding or not for Asian anyway. They will look at you as like, ‘How come there’s an Asian at a footy match?’

There are several points around the significance of friendship, belonging and the city to the development of translocal subjectivities in Vincent and Jingfei’s stories that reflect broader trends across the interviews. Everyday and ‘taken-for-granted’ practices are important in conferring belonging (Mee and Wright, 2009), such as learning new ways of socialising, developing friendships at work and participating in study, church and sport. Particular areas within the city however often provide different opportunities for friendship networks to contract or expand – for example, while Vincent found his inner-city church more welcoming to cultural difference than the church in Bentleigh, Jingfei found that moving away from the dense international student population in the city centre was an opportunity to expand her friendship networks. Shared domestic spaces such as shared housing and homestays were also extremely common sites of the development of more intimate types of friendship for student-migrants. Many student-migrants made very deliberate choices in seeking out diverse housemates, as a means to embed themselves in friendship networks outside of their ethnic or national group. For Vincent, shared domestic space led to a close friendship that became ‘like family’ and for Jingfei, a friendship that became a romantic partnership. These kinds of intimate extensions of friendship provided the bridge to familiarity with ‘local’ (although not exclusively Anglo-Australian) spaces, networks and social practices. Vincent’s homestay family was a ‘typical Australian family’, typical also in its multiculturalism with a Malaysian mother. This presented an everyday ‘middle’ space where Vincent felt he could learn about Australian culture but with a sympathy and understanding of his own culture. It was the friendships that developed through this domestic intimacy that allowed him to feel most deeply embedded into life in Melbourne in his early years.

Religion played a fundamental role for both Vincent and Jingfei, but in markedly different ways. As a Christian, church relationships were foundational for the establishment of Vincent’s friendships, but he felt far more comfortable when he found a culturally diverse church. The translocal religious subjectivity developed by Jingfei however, emerged through the visibility of Muslim identities and practices in Melbourne in general, and also through specific cross-cultural Muslim friendships at work. These encounters caused Jingfei to reflect back on her Chinese Muslim identity and to seek to build a link between her new sense of belonging as a Muslim in Melbourne and her Hui community in China. Vincent and Jingfei’s encounters and friendship networks in Melbourne as a multicultural city are thus not binary encounters between self/Other, but layered and fluid relationships through which different aspects of their identities (Muslim, Christian, Asian, Chinese) are mobilised at different times and in different encounters. The places where translocal subjectivities reached their limits are also worth noting for Jingfei and Vincent – the monocultural rural space in contrast to the city and the ‘Aussie’ footy match, a space emblematic of masculinist and Anglo-Australian social ritual that contrasted with the more multicultural soccer pitch.

Vincent and Jingfei’s stories show how friendship networks morph and diversify across time and space in staggered migration pathways (Kathiravelu, 2013: 11). They also show how translocal subjectivities do not arise just from a transnational sense of merging home and host cultures but from exposure to many cultures and identities both within the self and with the people that mobile subjects build friendship networks of varying intimacy with. Their narratives also reveal the boundaries and limits of translocal subjectivities, and how translocal subjects can remain ‘unevenly embedded’ (Yeoh, 2005) into networks, norms and places. Although friendships clearly have ‘boundary-crossing potential’ (Bunnell et al., 2012: 494), providing a bridge to local belonging in many places, and an overall sense of belongingness in Australia, certain contexts remain enclosed and reignite a sense of non-belonging.

Visit-journeys: Encounters with friends and re-negotiating the self

Return is seen to be crucial in studies of selfhood and self-transformation involving international students and other mobile subjects. As Rizvi (2005: 8) highlights, the tensions inherent in multiply emplaced identities are often played out most acutely during return, when mobile subjects find themselves in a state of being ‘both insiders and outsiders in both places’. Therefore, although student-migrants experience many different kinds of geographic mobility – around Australia and nearby countries for work and tourism, onward migration to third countries, permanent return migration to their home countries, and circulation across different destinations for work, leisure and investment – in this paper I focus on when student-migrants make short-term visits home to see friends and family, what Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport (2000) have termed the ‘visit-journey’. I focus on the visit-journey because it was the moment in most participants’ narratives of their mobility in which friendship encounters, place and belonging come in to tension and contestation, and translocal subjectivities had to be negotiated.

In this section, I focus on the narratives of Rahti and Shui. As in the previous section, while their specific experiences are unique, their narratives are chosen because the overall themes resonate with many other student-migrant narratives across the study. Both from Malaysia, Shui is from the large urban metropolis of Kuala Lampur (KL) and Rahti is from Penang Island, both culturally diverse urban spaces. In this section, I analyse the way Shui and Rahti narrated their experiences of interactions and encounters with friends on their visits back to KL and Penang. For both women, as for many other participants, reconnecting with family was a highly important and largely pleasurable aspect of the visit-journey. Rahti stated: ‘I like being home ‘cause my mum – like my mum is there and my dad’s there. They fuss over me. My brother’s there and my dogs are there. […] I get really happy when I see them’. Interactions with friends were, however, more fraught, as new values and identities, grounded in their experiences in Melbourne, came into tension with the local practices and attitudes of their friends in KL and Penang. While feelings of non-belonging during return are common in studies of mobile and diaspora subjects (Svašek, 2008; Waite and Cook, 2011), I seek here to show specifically how they are related to encounters with friends and notions of urban place.

For some student-migrants, urban social practices and cultural forms returned home with them. Rahti noticed, for example, when she returned to Penang, that her friendship network of permanently ‘returned’ international students and student-migrants displayed the desire to replicate leisure and consumption practices from Sydney and Melbourne in Penang. One example was the Melbourne-style ‘Bourke St. Café’ mentioned in the introduction of this paper, which Rahti understood not just as a circulation of consumption practice or a purely opportunistic business move, but as a way of replicating forms of socialising or re-enacting memories of friendships from Australia. Sites such as the Bourke St. Café linked specific embodied experiences of place across student-migrants’ translocal imaginaries of friendship encounters, as well as making good business:

Like I think they just want to replicate the good memories they have with their friends in Australia, and the things that they really love about Australia that you can’t find. Like a decent latte. I’m sorry, but Starbucks does not cut it. And that’s all we have in Penang – Starbucks. And so people try to replicate their experience. And I think they also think that because Australia is such a popular destination, that bringing a part of Australia back to Penang would be a good business thing.

Translocal subjectivities therefore manifest material changes in local places – through patterns of leisure, socialising and consumption that return with people. Collins (2008) has identified in his study of Korean transnational students in New Zealand ‘that culinary consumption in transnational worlds can …represent an effort to recreate familiarity through reference to characteristics of everyday life before migration’. The multi-directional pathways of student-migrants reveal that the same processes of re-enacting belonging and familiarity can also occur ‘after return’, through a rearticulation of practices of socialising and consumption that became familiar during migration.

However, like many of the student-migrants interviewed, Rahti often experienced a sense of contested translocal subjectivity during her encounters with her ‘emplaced’ Penang friends during her semi-regular visit-journeys. The sense of anonymity experienced in Melbourne and ability to build friendship groups out of individual shared values and interests rather than cultural norms disappeared for many student-migrants on their visit-journeys home. Rahti struggled in particular with the demands for intimate information during encounters with her Penang friends based on cultural expectations she considered ‘traditional’:

Everyone wants to know what you’re doing with your life. It’s Penang, okay. It’s about the size of Melbourne CBD sometimes. It feels – it’s such a small place. And it’s so – it’s still very grounded in very traditional things. Like ‘You’ve been overseas, you must make something big of yourself’. And that’s why I feel nervous, ‘cause – when I say, ‘oh I’m still studying’, and they go, ‘You don’t want to work, is it?’, and I hate getting that, I really hate getting it. And – that and my weight. God, ever from the first year I’ve been back, ‘Oh, you gained weight’ or ‘You lose weight, ooh’. […] ‘Who’s your boyfriend? How did you meet him? How much does he earn? When are you getting married?’. Especially the Chinese [friends]. I get a bit stressful when I think about all that stuff, because – you know, you’re gonna see them everywhere. They range from like my old friends to my mother’s friends, – I don’t like – I don’t like being probed that way.

The social pressure and discomfort that Rahti felt amongst her friends back in Penang is shaped by her experiences of mobility – first by her experience of a far more diffuse and broad social network in Melbourne (the sense in which she describes Penang as small, and therefore intrusive), but second because as a returnee, she is expected to have ‘made something big of herself’. She also, however, associated the particular line of uncomfortable ‘probing’ about her personal life specifically with her Chinese friends, as cultural norm of ‘Chinese-ness’ that she no longer felt comfortable with.

Like many student-migrants, Shui also experienced feelings of ‘not belonging’ and ‘not fitting in’ with her friends when she returned to KL. Much of this was connected to the personal transformation she felt she had undergone after 10 years studying and working overseas. The experience of independence and making new friends through her geographic mobility made her feel she was more sociable and more outgoing, but this new self sat uneasily during encounters with her ‘old’ friends in KL:

Every time I go home the first few days are nice and exciting and good to see everyone. The longer I stay the longer I felt I’m going back to the old me, because I changed quite a lot in the past ten years since I left home. […] I was very submissive, quiet and afraid of a lot of things and not very sociable and very closed. […] I felt that the longer I stayed, maybe that’s the way that people treat me or see me. […] Because they [my friends] haven’t seen me for too long, so every time I would go back they would treat me as the old Shui that they still remembered. And if I become too assertive or outgoing or sociable they would be a little bit confused and somehow not able to accept that. […] So I actually found that that part I actually have a little bit of a mixed feeling, very interesting. Yeah, feeling of not fitting in.

Shui’s ambivalent experiences with her friends were also, however, compounded by her rejection of particular urban practices and behaviours, considered the norm in KL:

I sort of disagree with a lot of things that my friends and family in KL do, where I – if I never left Malaysia, I will probably be one of them. […] The things that I exposed to here [in Melbourne] have really gave me a different perspective on the way to live and what I think is appropriate and inappropriate. […] And for example I really hate a lot of issues in Malaysia including the corruption and pollution and I will criticise why people have to drive from this and that distance, they can walk. And I will criticise why people throw rubbish on the floor and these are the things that other people find as normal, where they [my friends] would think ‘Hey you have been too arrogant’.

Here, we see the translocalisation of subjectivity in terms of urban practices, ways of being and behaving in the city, that come in to tension for Shui as she moves between Melbourne and KL. ‘Sustainable’ modes of urban living (such as minimising car use and not littering) are a strong part of the cultural fabric of urban life in Melbourne. These practices represent not just a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an ethics of collective urban living and a social norm usually shared with peers. Shui’s criticism of accepted urban norms in KL brings tension into her encounters with her friends, who consider her translocal perspectives on urban living a reflection of ‘arrogance’.

Shui and Rahti’s experiences of the return ‘visit-journey’ reflect the ways their translocal subjectivities – their multiply placed identities – have to be negotiated with their immobile, emplaced friends. Their experiences suggest a contrast with those of Conradson and Latham’s (2007) transnational New Zealanders, for whom time abroad similarly fashioned different senses of selfhood, but engendered a positive, rather than a negative reappraisal of ‘home’. However, what Shui and Rahti’s narratives most strongly reflect is how personal transformation is situated around particular ways of being-in-place, and particular ways of understanding the self in relation to place. Translocal subjectivities can thus manifest materially in cities within student-migrants’ transnational circuits but also in terms of urban practices – ways of acting and being. The changes Shui and Rahti have undergone and the experiences they have had living in Melbourne (and in Shui’s case various other Western cities) cause ambivalence or discomfort socially when they return. Shui and Rahti’s encounters with friends during the visit-journey are thus heavily coloured by their translocal subjectivities coming in to tension with more static and emplaced subjectivities.

Conclusions

In this paper, I have focused in depth on the narratives of four student-migrants living in Melbourne, Australia, to unpack the ways that encounters and interactions with friends become sites through which the translocal self is formed and negotiated. I have sought to show through these narratives that changing friendship networks over time, as well as moments of encounter with friends, can be crucial to the transformation and multiple emplacements of the self that occur through transnational mobility. I have also argued that specific urban localities, materialities and social practices sustain and reflect translocal selfhood; and that belonging/not belonging often becomes part of emplaced negotiations of the translocal self in relation to old and new friends. Through the analysis of the stories of ‘settling in’ and ‘return’ of Vincent, Jingfei, Shui and Rahti, I have shown that diverse cities such as Melbourne contain micro-geographies of belonging and not belonging that are far more complexly imagined and practiced for student-migrants than the ‘bonding networks’ of co-ethnic friendships or the ‘bridging contacts’ of friendships with Anglo-Australian locals. Social networks form and reform around different urban localities, with the city centre and various suburbs playing key roles in the formation of particular friendships and subjectivities, and key sites within these localities (the church, the home, the workplace, the leisure site) also playing a role on a more micro scale.

In addition to this, such spatial imaginaries of belonging also extend into translocal space during the visit-journey, as student-migrants have to renegotiate urban social and leisure practices acquired overseas alongside reintegrating into friendship networks. Ways of acting and being in the city are understood by student-migrants in these moments of return as crucial to the self-transformations engendered by geographic mobility. They then experience not belonging as these ways of being come into tension with the ways of being of their immobile friends. Material and social aspects of urban life thus travel back with student-migrants – whether through material/consumption manifestations such as ‘coffee cultures’ or through sustainable attitudes to urban living. Belonging is constantly negotiated and renegotiated through encounters with old and new friends within different local sites both in Melbourne and during return. Friendship encounters and networks help student-migrants to navigate translocal belonging, but also entail tensions, contradictions and discomforts across particular places. Their experiences reveal that not only do migrants have multi-positioned relationships to different locales in their transnational journeys (Waite and Cook, 2011), but that specific sites and socialities within these locales add further complexities to these relationships.

Student-migrants in Australia and other urban centres in the West are often problematically understood as simply transient sojourner-consumers (Robertson, 2014), representing ‘middling’ if not ‘elite’ mobilities. Although their local and transnational networks have often been the subject of research, the emplaced nature of their friendship networks and encounters in relation to their mobilities has seldom been a key focus. The focus of this paper on both ‘settling in’ and the ‘visit-journey’ has allowed the exploration of the tensions between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and of the local and emplaced ways in which translocal subjectivities are constantly contested and negotiated. This analysis has therefore expanded understandings not only of the complexities of ‘middling’ forms of transnationalism, but also on the significance of friendship encounters and networks to understanding of place, belonging and transnational mobility in urban contexts.