| This research investigates the San Francisco-based cultural heritage program for young Chinese-Americans with ancestry from Guangdong Province "In Search of Roots." It examines second, third, fourth, and fifth generation participants' engagement in the year-long program and journey to visit their ancestral villages in China. I describe the diverse hopes and expectations they hold as they enter into the program, and their understandings of the journey's complex emotional, bodily, intellectual, and social outcomes. I investigate these participants' perspectives in relation to the heritage program as a nation-building and subject-making project.;The dissertation unveils deeply-embedded modes of belonging, probing heritage travelers' attitudes toward ethnicity, race, nation, gender and sexuality, and class. It describes how they seek resolution of competing modes of belonging, form transnational connections, and reconceptualize ideas of "Chineseness," home, and kin, through a journey much like a pilgrimage. This investigation leads to new material- and practice-oriented understandings of belonging and how belonging is negotiated. It also expands theory on transnationalism, by pushing beyond a focus on the connections first generation immigrants maintain. Finally, it contributes to scholarship about heritage travel as I examine the ritual functions of the journey to resolve conflicts of cultural and/or ethnic belonging experienced by minority youth. |
