My research engages with how experiences of forced migration refashioned constructions of home. Specifically, I focus on the settlements created to provide a temporary home to 600.000 military personnel migrated to Taiwan – the so-called military villages – and on the meanings of their disappearance from the city landscape in the 1990s. I ask what it means to relocate for the first generation migrants who settled in Taiwan and I investigate the social and political effects of relocation, particularly on the first generation. How is home re-created after forced displacement? How do the same displaced people face urban relocation sixty years after?

In this talk, I look at the temporality of the relocation and its politics through the category of anticipation. By looking at the crucial, unsettling moment of the move, I document the anxieties and desires of the residents during this transition time. By witnessing the coping strategies of the first generation refugees, I contend that new stories about the past and aspiration towards new prospects are both necessary devices to face an uncertain future.