The migration experience of Chinese American immigrants is distinguished by dwelling within-and-between two worlds: the Chinese/Eastern and American/Western. Chinese American immigrants who uproot themselves from their home country and migrate to the United States straddle old and new, familiar and strange, belonging and alienation, but the unsettlement also enriches their psychic growth.

This dissertation investigates the psychological experience of Chinese American immigrants, specifically, their lived experience of dwelling within-and-between two worlds, to perceive their immigration experience as a psychic journey. The depth psychology of C. G. Jung, James Hillman, and Henry Corbin; Chinese Taoism; and the philosophical perspectives of Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer provide the theoretical lens to see through this experience. It is argued that this lived experience of within-and-between worlds can be revealed via an imaginative and poetic knowing. Moustakas' (1990) heuristic method with a hermeneutic-phenomenological philosophical foundation is employed to understand and explicate Chinese American immigrants' lived experience of dwelling within-and-between two worlds.

From interviews with nine research participants in two metropolitan areas dense with Chinese American immigrants, three polar dimensions emerged: accommodating to American culture versus retaining a Chinese cultural self; loneliness and alienation versus creating a sacred space; and minority status and oppression versus striving to integrate both cultures. The accommodation/retention regarding minority status and the wish for integrating both cultures was viewed as part of the cultural identification process, and discussion focused on issues involved in this process. Loneliness and alienation versus the creation of a sacred space was seen as a psychological transformation by which the research participants moved toward the Self (or God-image), which occurred either via institutionalized religion or personal search. Within the personal spiritual search, the Chinese psyche was discussed as the heart of this individual self-transformation. The Chinese psyche is objectified with artistic methods, either filmmaking, poems, or other means, and is often projected onto the landscape.