Report on a workshop on early South Sulawesi, 18-19 August, 2000

In this article, I explore the new forms of people's mobility in the borderlands of the upper Mekong, where China meets Myanmar and Laos. In particular, I examine a way in which returned exiles, restoring their senses of place, focused on their life stories after returning to their motherland in southwest China. Ethnographically, I investigate a Thai restaurant run by a returned exile family and the daily activities in and through this social space, read as ‘a transnational place’. Situating these returned exiles, the Chinese Dai minority, as members of the Tai-speaking peoples of the upper Mekong, who have dispersed across the national borders of China, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, I show that transnational mobility and connectivity, old and new, can be utilised by them to mobilise themselves into the contexts of modernisation, dislocation and regionalisation, re-emplacing their homeland, making their locality visible and sensible.