Coming Home to a Foreign Country is two books folded, with some success, into one. It is on the one hand a migration history, describing the long trajectory of Hokkien migration from Amoy (Xiamen) to major settlements in South East Asia, focused on issues of “identity construction in diaspora.” It is also a longitudinal urban social history of Xiamen, with a particular focus on the developmental impacts on the city traceable to the influence of its returning migrants. With the exception of chapter one, which gives an overview of the evolution of Xiamen from the 17th to the 19th century, and occasional broad-brush commentaries on preceding Ming and Qing-era demographic and social trends in chapter five, most of the book is set during the high tide of Chinese emigration during the colonial era, from the establishment of Xiamen as a British treaty port in 1843 until the Japanese invasion in 1938. Subsequent chapters offer urban histories of Xiamen, as a treaty port (chapter two, “Opening for business”), a migration hub (chapter three, “Facilitating migration”), and a financial metropolis and beneficiary of overseas investment (chapter five, “Transforming Xiamen”). Two other chapters on migrant identity are interpolated into this urban history: chapter four, “Manipulating identities,” on how emigrants manipulated citizenship and nationality in the era of treaty ports, and chapter six, “Making home,” which is at core a biographical study of two extremely prominent men of Hokkien descent who “returned” to Xiamen.

The book extends pioneering studies of Hokkien emigration by Wang Gungwu, Ng Chin-keong, James Cook and others, and is a welcome addition to studies of emigrant qiaoxiang, or Chinese emigrants’ “home villages,” by Michael Williams, Yow Chuen Hoe, Madeline Hsu, Leo Douw and others. Used in conjunction with these books, and given its thorough appraisal of the secondary literature and available primary material on Xiamen, it is an excellent resource for students and scholars of Chinese migration alike. Chapter three is a particularly assignable chapter, as it offers a thorough overview of the mechanics of treaty port emigration. The book is based on a tremendous, carefully mined source base of documentation about Xiamen in both Chinese and English: Qing archival record collections, UK foreign office correspondence, US State Department papers, provincial and regional gazetteers from both Qing and Republican eras, Chinese maritime customs trade reports and others, alongside contemporary periodicals, biographies, memoirs, clan genealogies, and other materials typically used to study Chinese migrants and their economic activities. One outcome of the reliance on state-centred archives is that the study lacks treatment of migration and gender: in the whole book there are only two specific mentions of women.

On the basis of these chapters, Ong makes two arguments which, at times, pull in opposite directions. Firstly: the urban city of Xiamen is best understood not as a treaty port and a “beachhead for Western imperialism,” but rather in its longer history as a sea-facing migrant hub and a portal into histories that push beyond the geopolitical boundaries of China. This point is well made in chapters two and three, where Xiamen is described as a port city that evolved a range of institutions to facilitate trade and migration, while also functioning as an aspirational destination for migrants from its poorer hinterlands. Secondly: the migrants who “returned” to Xiamen were, nevertheless, not always “returning home,” since a significant number of them were not originally from Xiamen but from its provincial, rural environs or other parts of China entirely, or else had acculturated so significantly after leaving Xiamen, sometimes over several generations, that they were effectively “coming home to a foreign country.” Despite the fact that his two returnee case studies (chapter six), Li Qingquan and the ever-studied Lim Boon Keng, were not strictly speaking Xiamen natives, in Ong's telling they chose to define Xiamen as home and became enthusiastic participants in the modernization story of China, pouring money into the reconstruction and salvation of Xiamen from a poor, overcrowded, disorderly walled city into a vibrant, colonial metropolis.

In this respect, although the book's stated intention is in part to disrupt the “homeland–hostland” binary (pp. 5–6) which characterizes many studies of Chinese migration, the effect of its more conventional urban historical approach and the focus on illustrious returnees is actually to reinforce the general observation that Chinese emigrants do materially contribute to the progress and modernization of the national homeland, which thus benefits from its continuing relationship with overseas Chinese populations. Despite its tight focus on Xiamen and its desire to take a more qiaoxiang-based rather than nation-state perspective, therefore, the book does not quite challenge the hegemonic nation-state framing of “diaspora,” which posits an ever-present, always-re-ignitable relationship of all ethnic Chinese to the homeland, even after generations of absence. At core, it simply suggests that ethnic Chinese can and do make material contributions to any part of China they like, not necessarily their own qiaoxiang. Perhaps a clearer disruption of this weighty homeland–hostland binary would have been to discuss Hokkien emigrants who chose not to contribute to Xiamen's development, or to China at all, but rather who defined their homes as ever elsewhere, and never engaged with China again.