In Manhattan's Chinatown, illegal migrants from Fujian Province, on a break from work in Chinese-owned garment workshops, buy telephone cards with Chinese instructions from Chinese vendors in order to call home. Can their experience of mobility, and the way that experience makes them relate to China, be understood in the same framework as that of a middle-class Chinese tourist at a popular “scenic spot” in China? Do these very different situations point to something common in terms of how newfound mobility is affecting subjectivity and its state conditioning in China? In this chapter, I suggest that both individuals have to negotiate their positions as modern Chinese subjects as they cope with contradiction between the expectation of mobility and barriers in front of it. While unifying and mobilizing images of Chinese modernity are transmitted to them through a range of media technologies from telephone cards to tourist brochures, they have to make their way through everyday situations and contradictory local discourses that stand in the way of movement and strip them of their enfranchisement.

Chinatown, Manhattan, March 7, 2001

At the Yidong Shopping Center at 88 East Broadway in Manhattan, Fujianese vendors sell international telephone cards. One vendor stocks fifty-one kinds, many with Chinese text and distinctive design. On one card, called Great Wall, Deng Xiaoping extends his congratulations on the return of Hong Kong to the Motherland.