Overseas Chinese: The State of the Field‪.‬

Author's Note: This paper was originally presented at the Regional China Colloquium, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, March 4, 2000. It was prepared quickly without time for reflection. Post-colloquium editing consisted of making several additions without altering the basic text. The paper should be read in that light. "Overseas Chinese Studies" is an extremely broad and inclusive field. Its scope encompasses anything and everything about ethnic Chinese who live--or have lived in the past--outside of China, Hong Kong--Macau, and Taiwan. The literature of this field includes everything from quasi-intelligence-gathering about Overseas Chinese business networks (very popular these days) to fieldwork reports on qiaoxiang (ancestral home localities in China); from contemporary Chinese American literature to the archaeology of Chinese sites in New Zealand; from studies of China's Overseas Chinese policies, past and present, to microanalyses of the architecture of Chinese shophouses in Singapore; from the experiences of Chinese children minding their parents' takeaway food shops in Britain to the psychological problems of second-generation Chinese in Hawai'i--and more. The disciplinary and other approaches to the study of Overseas Chinese are correspondingly diverse.