Life behind the wire: Chinese shopkeepers’ boredom in Kingston, Jamaica

This article presents the lives of Chinese migrant shopkeepers in Kingston, Jamaica. It addresses their state of inhabitation-in-boredom, entangled with the shop’s physical structure, through three distinct modes of expression. The shopkeepers’ self-confinement behind wire grills and glass paradoxically liberates them from the constraints of their homeland while intensifying their feelings of fear, mistrust, and discrimination toward Jamaican society. Boredom emerges as a deliberate construction of security and comfort and entails speculation and fantasising. Within this emotional space, migrants grapple with homemaking surrounded by otherness and develop their knowledge of the city primarily as a transient waypoint to other places and possibilities. This paper ethnographically re-envisions boredom as an affective mechanism in the inter-ethnic contexts of the Global South and shows how it sustains a distinctive mode of urban life through separation rather than openness.