“Tomorrow I am flying home. Wherever that is.” I was on a Skype followup interview with Nils, the German who after three years in Tokyo and another two years back in his home country was just about to move to a South American metropole for his new job. Nils had just been on a business trip to Argentina and agreed to Skype from his hotel room before he would return to Europe for another week to sort out last bureaucratic issues. Everything to come after was still open and Nils seemed too jetlagged to think about his new life further.

The Skype interview stuck in my mind when writing the last parts of this book. I thought of Deborah, a Greek woman who I met during my first field trip to Singapore in 2015. She was the first interlocutor to pin down issues of mobility and belonging when she answered my question about her plans for the future with the words, “we never know, for most people like us, like who left many years ago … it’s not easy to say that I’m going to stay somewhere permanently. Okay, just call me in a year and maybe we’re here or maybe in Dubai or London, you never know” (cited in Hof, 2018). Deborah, in contrast to Nils, was still in Singapore when following up the second and third time in 2018 and 2020, respectively. I learned that she has three children, her own company and has lived in the city-state for 11 years. The trajectories of these two interlocutors accentuate the range of possible meanings of place and home for migrants along their worklife pathways.

This third and last part of the book connects the EU Generation’s sense of place and the meaning of home to their socialising and community building practices, as well as to intimacy. In Chapter 7, I first outline the Europeans’ socialising practices in Singapore and then shift the focus to Tokyo in order to approach the following questions: how do migrants manoeuvre the physical place of their migrant receiving societies and already existing group boundaries within? How do they interact with others in that particular society? Do they gradually develop a feeling of home or belonging and if so, does this refer to specific places or specific groups within the migrant receiving society? The chapter finds relationships unstable and sometimes fleeting and the notion of home both in the country of origin and abroad as difficult to pin down.