Something about Hokkien migration should remind us that people of those days in that culture had a very different conception of what was meant by “abroad.” In port cities all along the China coast, from Guangzhou to Tianjin, lived sizable populations of sojourning Hokkien, managing shipping and entrepôt business in networks of dialect-based collaboration. A family might send members to several venues, within and outside China, to manage trade for considerable periods of time. It was a different world from ours, yet in some ways prophetically transnational. One went where business looked promising, boundaries notwithstanding.
