While her memories of home are strong and seem to carry her through the hostland, the persona reminds herself that ‘There is no hurry / There are only endless gifts / To getting nowhere:’ (105). In its closing, the collection dares to imagine yet other elsewheres and other times, despite the many that she already carries. If Bulosan’s novel closes by carving out a space for its protagonist in America’s heart, so to speak, Lim-Wilson work gestures to the possibility of fleeing and breaking all its tethers. While Bulosan’s novel seems to resolve the ambivalence of cruel optimism in forging its imaginary of America out of its protagonist’s struggle, Lim-Wilson attempts to abandon place and time altogether and confront a structure of feeling in lieu of displaced optimism.

It would be therefore misguided to locate Lim-Wilson’s persona as rooted in the past, in life before America. But it is a past that nevertheless lives in her grief, in the present. Lim-Wilson tracks a persona moving forward, moving on and living on—as she carries the emotional life of all that she’s left ‘behind’. In this sense, her persona resists the rendering of her emotions in and by linear time. At the same time, while return to home is not romanticized nor desired, the persona is also not tethered to her present place, America, as she demonstrates in many poems. Bereft of linear temporal permanence, the persona has no spatial anchor, either. In such a way, the persona in Lim-Wilson’s poems betrays a dominant order in the migrant’s life: a then and now, a here and there. Often, the migrant is said to have a transnational habitus (Nedelcu, 2012), or to inhabit bifocal space, the simultaneous local and transnational attachments that shape their lives through the influence of places and attachments locally and elsewheres (Zontini, 2014). But the reader who understands the persona’s feelings about home and America finds that there are no such attachments.

How to name, if necessary, this incongruence between the migrant’s emotional lifeworlds and their supposed temporal and spatial mooring? I return to Berlant who wrote that ‘attachment is a structure of relationality,’ a way of orienting yourself to the world and others that is experienced as an emotional encounter. When no such attachments exist, what sort of (un)relations are possible? This seems to be Lim-Wilson’s preoccupation: states of eternal passage, in crossing the snowbridge, in following wandering roots, that traverse and are traversed by affective (re)orientations. Her work moves our understanding of the migrant beyond the domains of time and space by designating affective structures as a map to their life. Despite what appears to be a sense of placelessness, these poems tell us that what moves us provides enough direction.