Page 101 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

help but enter into relations with each other, no matter how great the desire for
separateness and the attempt to maintain cultural purity.
So what happens to Chineseness and Chinese diasporic communities in the
global cities of today? This, of course, is an empirical question that needs to be
examined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account not just demographic features
and population movements but also the socio-cultural contexts and ideological
currents which influence the formation of local identities and communities.
Singapore and Sydney, to name but two global cities in the Asia-Pacific region,
provide two very different examples. Let me finish this chapter with a brief
exploration of Chinese/non-Chinese hybridization in the two cities.
Singapore is an odd case because it is both a nation–state and a global city.
Here, the ‘Chinese’ are the majority ethnic group in an explicitly multiracial and
multicultural city–state context – a unique situation in the Chinese diaspora.
However, the Chineseness of the Singaporean Chinese has been a persistent object
of significant concern to the PAP government, which has been insistent on
the necessity to stop what they see as the gradual erosion of Chinese cultural
characteristics among its Chinese population. Hence, the famous Speak Mandarin
Campaign and other government policies to inculcate those of Chinese ‘race’ with
Chinese ‘culture’ (Clammer 1985; Chua 1995; Ang and Stratton 1996). In other
words, in Singapore there is an officially orchestrated desire to soften, if not counter
the effects of hybridization as people of Chinese descent mix with others on a daily
basis in a modern urban environment which has grown out of a British colonial
legacy. As a result, a constant concern, if not obsession, with Chineseness is an
enduring part of the Singaporean state’s cultural mindset, even if the distinction
between what is and what is not Chinese is often impossible or nonsensical to make
in the hybrid conditions of everyday social practice. Such a climate, as Geoffrey
Benjamin remarked in an early analysis of Singaporean multiracialism, ‘puts Chinese
people under pressure to become more Chinese . . . in their behaviour’ (1976:
118). Chineseness, then, becomes a prescription, a project, an artificially imposed
cultural identity rather than a lived, uncontrived one. But this desire to manage the
Chineseness of Chinese Singaporeans, which is a project of the Singaporean
nation–state, runs up against the actual processes of hybridization which proliferate
in Singapore the global city.
In 1999, a storm of indignation and apprehension erupted in the global city–state
when the results of a sociological survey were revealed in the press indicating that
more than one in five young Chinese Singaporeans would rather be of another race
– primarily white or Japanese – than Chinese. The survey was conducted by Dr
Chang Han Yin of the National University of Singapore, who in an interview with
The Straits Times expressed alarm over the lack of ethnic pride and confidence in
Chinese culture that he read into his data (15 December 1999). Not the results of
the survey as such (whose interpretation is contestable) but the fact that they caused
so much consternation and anxiety is of most significance here. It could well be that
precisely the heavy-handed insistence on the importance of being Chinese in the
nation–state of Singapore generates a desire among a large number of young people,

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