Description

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Does home have to be a country or a city?... Or is home this house or that? We have been fortunate.... We seemed always to have been home.
 
Wang Gungwu’s account of his university education in Singapore and the UK,  and the early years of his career as an academic in Malaysia captures the excitement, the ambition, and the choices of a generation that saw it their responsibility to build the new nations of Southeast Asia.
 
The exploration of the emotional and intellectual journey towards the formation of an identity, treasured by readers of Wang's Home Is Not Here, extends in this volume into an appreciation of love, family life, and the life of the mind. We also see these years from Margaret’s perspective, her own fascinating family story, and her early impressions of this young bearded poet. Wise and moving, this is a fascinating reflection on identity and belonging, and on the ability of the individual to find a place amidst the historical currents that have shaped Asia.
 

About the Author

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Wang Gungwu is emeritus professor at Australian National University and university professor at the National University of Singapore.

 

Margaret Wang was educated at the University of Malaya, Homerton College, Cambridge, and the Australian National University. She was head of the English Department at the Malayan Teachers' College.

Praise For…

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"[An] absorbing memoir of [an] outstanding scholar and exemplar of a humble cosmopolitanism that is becoming rare."
— Inside Story

“By filling in gaps on what we know about Chinese, Southeast Asian and Chinese overseas history, Wang’s work will continue to be drawn on to understand China’s most recent rise and engagement with the world, as well as new waves of Chinese migration.”
— Sojourn

"Wang Gungwu, a global Chinese historian and former president of the University of Hong Kong, wrote the story of his "long and semi-nomadic career" at the age of nearly 90. His life began in Southeast Asia during the colonial era. He experienced colonization, war, turmoil, revolution, and migrated between three continents for most of his life, which constituting a rich and unique wandering history in the historical torrents of twentieth century."
— Yazhou Zhoukan