As a second-generation migrant in Beijing, I often ask myself: “Where can I truly put down roots?” Beijing is a city where belonging is hard to grasp. Commercialization, globalization, and the relentless pace of life have left me, after seventeen years, feeling little different from a newly arrived outsider. And yet, the attachment to land seems deeply inscribed in the cultural DNA of China—wandering has always been marked as otherness. Perhaps that is why I have never had the courage to drift, for I fear losing that fragile yet indispensable sense of “root.”
Nestlessness is not an absolute void, but a suspended state of being: not belonging, yet not erased; unanchored, yet growing in movement. It is a condition at once raw and contradictory—a life continually uprooted yet endlessly rebuilt; a fate of wandering that transcends regions and cultures, yet is replayed in the body of every individual. In the summer of my seventeenth year, I encountered in Rome a group of the nestless. They had come from distant countries, converging in a city that, for centuries, had seemed unchanging. Their relationship with the city was tenuous, at once near and distant. At every moment, they lived with the feeling that *the ground beneath their feet might give way. Exile, fracture, and the ceaseless search form the eternal epic of the foreigner. “To be a foreigner is, in itself, a kind of lifelong, unfinished pregnancy.” The
Nestless