Drawing upon studies on mobility, transnationalism, migration and ethnic community, this dissertation examines the paradox of transnational mobilities at the cross-national scale and (im)mobilities at the local scale of Chinese (im)migrants1 in Flushing, New York City, which is currently the largest Chinese community on the East Coast. The project investigates how the paradox is embedded within individual Chinese (im)migrants‘ everyday routine and rhythm of life, and how it forms their imaginative geographies and impacts their identities and senses of place. I utilize a mixed method approach including: census and immigration data analysis, ethnography, interviews, mental mapping and GIS. The findings suggest that transnational and local mobile practices are simultaneously embedded in the everyday life of Chinese (im)migrants in Flushing. The urban local mobilities, limited by the socioeconomic, linguistic, and spatial-temporal constraints, intersect with and are compensated by the transnational practices, simplify their geographic perceptions of the urban space, enhance their attachments to the neighborhood, and form their multi-layered identities and sense of place through a dialectal interaction with place. This study contributes to the conceptualizations of mobility by interrogating the relationships between mobility and place, by taking into account intentionality and by examining the paradoxical relations to immobility. This research also contributes to the study of race and ethnicity, (im)migration and urban ethnic communities from the perspective of mobility and humanistic approach. The dissertation is formed by three manuscripts, from the perspective of place, people and identity. Chapter 2 constructs and develops the concept of mobilocality, the paradoxical and racialized urban locality that is mobilizing yet anchoring, fluid yet rooted, transient yet static. Chapter 3 introduces voluntary immobility to investigate mobility and immobility in relation to intentionality. By analyzing and visualizing the mobile practices in the everyday life of Chinese (im)migrants in Flushing, Chapter 3 examines the socioeconomic, linguistic and spatial-temporal constraints in their everyday travel in urban space as well as their coping strategies. Chapter 4 examines the formation of imaginative geographies of the country, the city and the community through daily mobility embedded within place. In this chapter, I further examine how imaginative geographies impact geographic knowledge, daily language, sense of place, notions of home and identity among Chinese (im)migrants in Flushing.
