Zanta left her remote Tibetan village in Sichuan Province with her son to seek better opportunities in the Chinese capital. She found, however, that she was marginalized both where she was “supposed to” belong, in rural Tibet as well as in urban Beijing, where she was seeking a school education for her you...ng son. She had nowhere to call home. This conversation explores migration and belonging in this era of mobility, dislocation and globalization.

This article is the result of the collaboration between a Norwegian university professor, Trine Brox, and an American journalist and documentary filmmaker, Jocelyn Ford. We met in the United States in 2014, brought together by our mutual research interest in the little-studied phenomenon of Tibetan migration to eastern China. In 2017, we met again for the screening of Jocelyn’s documentary about Zanta at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, where Trine works.