Home Is not Here

Wang Gungwu is emeritus professor at Australian National University and university professor at the National University of Singapore. He is the former vice chancellor of the University of Hong Kong. Wang is the author of more than twenty books, including The Chinese Overseas and Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: War, Trade, Science and Governance.

"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." - China Channel"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." - Asian Review of Books"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." - Mekong Review"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." - Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society"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." - Cross-Currents"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." - New Books Network"[An] absorbing memoir of [an] outstanding scholar and exemplar of a humble cosmopolitanism that is becoming rare." - Inside Story"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." - Ezra Vogel, Harvard 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." - Prasenjit Duara, Duke University"meaningful historical record" - Shanghai Review of Books