余光中自9歲因戰亂離鄉,抵台後於台北生活20年,期間三次赴美,再轉任香港中文大學,1985年返台至中山大學任教,定居高雄直到2017年末辭世。由於講學、演講、參訪……文藝交流活動頻繁,他的足跡遍佈世界五大洲,留下60多篇遊記作品。余光中赴港前的異國遊記主要以想像的文化中國為思念對象,屢屢於遊記中召喚時空錯位的中國風景,1992年重返中國後,永遠無法回歸的時間性鄉愁卻加深,重構成新鄉愁。余光中香港記錄裡的台灣形象多半仍附加中國鄉愁,其他地區的異國遊記,則以台灣為丈量世界的比例尺,著眼於生活層面的對比。赴港與定居高雄後,他先前於台北所居的廈門街113巷開始有了鄉愁意義,隨著認同對象的不斷調整,遊記中的鄉愁符碼展現了極為複雜的層次性。
The nostalgic poet, Yu Kwang-Chung, was in diaspora since the age of 9 years old. Because of the civil war, Yu Kwang-Chung left his hometown and came to Taiwan. During his stay in Taiwan, Yu Kwang-Chung had visited the United States three times before his relocation to the Chinese University of Hong Kong. In 1985, Yu Kwang-Chung returned to Taiwan, taught in National Sun Yat-Sen University, and lived in Kaohsiung until his death in 2017. Around 60 pieces of his travel journals were left because of his frequent cultural exchange and activities, which include lecturing, delivering talks, and visiting. Prior to his relocation to Hong Kong, Yu Kwang-Chung primarily wrote his travel journals abroad in a way treating the Cultural China as the target for which he was longing, which is frequently represented as the spatiotemporal dislocation of Chinese scenes in his travel journals. After his visit to China in 1992, Yu Kwang-Chung reconstructed new nostalgia because of the deepened unrestorability of temporal nostalgia. Taiwan functions as a scale to measure the distance of the world in his travel journals of other regions abroad, which contrasts the difference in daily life. After Yu Kwang-Chung' relocation to Hong Kong and settlement in Kaohsiung, his previous residence on Lane 113, Xiamen Street in Taipei, also denotes nostalgia. With his incessant change in identity, the nostalgia in Yu Kwang-Chung's travel journals are polysemous and hierarchical.