The possessions that provide emigrants with a sense of home – old and new
- In the past, what people took to their new lives illuminates what they considered personally important
- Socio-economic status and a desire for integration into an adopted culture also informed these decisions
What possessions do people choose to take with them when they leave their homelands forever to start new lives elsewhere? In these days of enhanced global mobility, with easy international movement and relatively low transport and storage costs, emigrants can usually take most chattels with them.
But this was not so in the past. What people took to their new lives, and then retained for a couple of generations – or else jettisoned before they left – sharply illuminates what they considered personally important.
Photographs were obvious treasures; albums take up little space during transport – negatives even less – and provide ongoing memories of earlier times, places and people. But even these were usually subject to significant weeding before departure, with a dozen albums reduced to a few, and only core contents retained.
Wedding portraits, school, university, and sporting club group photographs, and other personal milestone reminders were preserved; random party shots, poorly lit domestic interiors and peripheral personalities thrown away. In consequence, a striking similarity in terms of content emerges in emigrant photograph albums, when examined several decades later.
Socio-economic status also closely informed what was kept. An affluent childless couple emigrating for retirement to Portugal in the late 1960s, who simply wanted to replicate their old home in a new place, might have taken virtually everything with them.
Low-level bank clerks with young children, moving to Australia or America during the same period in search of a better life, would probably possess little of material value to transport in the first place. For these emigrants, portable mementoes, such as wedding presents, sporting trophies, or impossible-to-part-with childhood treasures, were almost all that they retained in their new lives.
Before relatively inexpensive air travel, emigration – for most – meant a permanent physical severance with their former life. For those relocating for better economic opportunities, the need to securely establish themselves in their new home meant that return visits were something for the far-distant future, if ever. This meant that family and community ties – unless friends and relatives also emigrated to the same places – inexorably weakened over time.
Also, the desire for a different life in a new country, with all the deliberate reinvention and conscious changes to personal identity that accompany these transformations, meant that formerly prized possessions might be deliberately discarded as part of this quest.
This was especially so for those – like many from Hong Kong’s local Portuguese and Eurasian communities – for whom a move to the West was, symbolically as well as geographically, a deliberate removal from their Asian roots. Hong Kong was relegated to their past, and many emigrant parents did not expect – or even want – their former home to figure much in their children’s future lives. Most wanted them to be wholly of “the West” – however so defined – and consequently, telltale Asian identity reminders were jettisoned.
In emigrant destinations – such as 1950s Australia – where wholehearted cultural assimilation was overwhelmingly regarded as the only possible option for grateful arrivals to “The Lucky Country”, these choices were undertaken for rational, if inherently sad, extrinsic reasons.
I vividly recall an afternoon tea with two elderly local Portuguese ladies over 20 years ago. Lifelong friends from their Kowloon schooldays onwards, one was visiting from San Francisco, where she had moved in the 1960s. An antique, heavily embossed Chinese silver tea service was used, and the Californian visitor casually remarked on the similar set she used to have, before she emigrated.
On being asked, by me, why she had parted with something both lovely and easily transported, the reply was starkly illustrative. “Oh, I didn’t want any of that old stuff any more – gave it all away when I left Hong Kong,” she laughed, with a dismissive wave. “You see, I wanted to be American.”