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In China a series of academic and business meetings have taken place in which overseas Hmong have been dismayed to be introduced to Miao of other, non-Hmong groups who could speak no Hmong and knew no Hmong customs or practices.22 At the official, educated level, a strange shift of identification has taken place in which some recognition of a common ancestry with these non-Hmong Miao is made, yet when the overseas Hmong meet local village Hmong, in Wenshan or the Hong He region of Yunnan, with whom they can freely converse and exchange tales of the tragedies of war and parting, the emotions are overpowering. There is an enormous nostalgia during these encounters, and a longing for an untrammelled past in which the Hmong were their own masters and practiced their own social customs with little interference from those around them - a time which for many is mythic, and yet not without some substance in historical realities. Now that these re-encounters are becoming institutionalised and regularised, some economic transformations have developed at the local level with the production of costumes and items of Hmong culture for sale and reproduction overseas (see Schein 1998). In these processes of local economic transformation, resulting directly from a diasporic return, the state plays a very ambivalent role, at once threatened by the potential emergence of pan-national, trans-border identities and trading interests, and yet benefiting economically through tourist revenues and investments in local productive enterprises and infrastructure.23
Nostalgic constructions of place are, as we have seen, inevitably implicated in these processes of return to a homeland, which Hong Kongers must be familiar with in at least two aspects; the return of Hong Kong families to ancestral sites in China which became possible after economic liberalisation in China in the 1980s, although these may now have lessened as Hong Kong becomes itself the site of nostalgia24; and the return of Hong Kongers who had left to establish new homes in the West and luodi shenggen, plant roots abroad (Wang 1998) prior and subsequent to the return to Chinese rule. Wong Siu-Lun (1999) has recently examined these returning ‘astronauts', where whole families rather than individuals have been on the move, and for whom China is no longer home.25 While from the point of view of the returnees these visits may merely be return sojourns, brief visits to assuage nostalgia, from the local point of view they may be seen in almost celebratory, rejuvenant way; as a triumph of local ties of community and friendship over the arduous separations brought about by time and space. Post-colonialism