Departing from the dominant trend of favoring flexibility, flattened relations, and deterritorialization in featuring the transnational, this autoethnographic inquiry theorizes and exemplifies how the gravity of place may give rise to the evolvement of scholarship in the context of transnational mobility. I examine my own career trajectory to demonstrate how groundedness results from the dynamics between displacement and emplacement. While recounting my experience of moving back and forth between Western universities and my home institution in Vietnam, I explore issues such as the nation building framework for transnational mobility, scholarly self-formation, and community cultivation. The study centers a mode of emplacement termed 'existential commitment'. It calls attention to the cultivation of a small, immediate scholarly community as a form of scholarship in the global periphery. The emphasis is on how the transnational can be grounded in local academic practices that address the world at multiple layers and scales.