Page 102 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

UNDOING DIASPORA

whose lives are presumably most immersed in the processes of everyday hybridiza-
tion in the global city, to explore other identities beyond the bounds of their own
‘race’. Indeed, as one commentator suggests, against the litany of recommendations
on ‘what can be done to strengthen the young’s pride in their own race’, the survey
may show that ‘race is not such a big issue’ for young Singaporeans. The fact that
many of them, given the chance, would identify with Caucasians or Japanese not
only reflects a sound recognition of the global cultural power of Japan and the West,
but also, according to Han Fook Kwang (1999), ‘shows a certain openness to the
world, and willingness to accept new ideas, no matter from which ethnic grouping’.
In other words, in the globalizing world of today hybridization is increasingly a fact
of life, altering if not diminishing the significance of Chineseness in any ‘pure’ sense
as a marker of cultural identity. Thus, despite the persistence of the Speak Mandarin
Campaign, which was launched in the late 1970s and has been relaunched every
year since, the number of families using Mandarin at home has been dropping
steadily as English is becoming increasingly the language most frequently spoken
(from around 20 per cent in 1988 to more than 43 per cent in 2000) (The Straits
Times, 12 September 2000).
Sydney is a very different environment for the formation of (non-)Chinese
identities in the contact zone of the global city. Sydney is located within the
nation–state of Australia, but its status as a transnational global city is affirmed by
the fact that it receives by far the largest proportion of all migrants from all over
the world coming into the country every year. Many of these are of Chinese descent
in some particular fashion. Surveys of ‘the Chinese in Australia’, whose numbers
have increased substantially in the past few decades, now point routinely to the
diversity of the Chinese population, having migrated to Australia from different
previous countries of residence (Ho and Coughlan 1997; Inglis 1998). Thus,
Chinese from the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, or East
Timor, as well as those born in Australia, now share the metropolitan space of
Sydney (together with many other ethnic groupings originating from all over the
world). The global city, then, is a meeting place of large sections of the dispersed
diaspora, where ‘Chinese’ of very different and largely unconnected histories have
the opportunity to intersect and interact not in virtual cyberspace (as is the Huaren
website), but in actual social space. It should not come as a surprise that these
disparate groups have hardly recognized themselves as belonging to a singular
Chinese community, even if the predominant mode of categorizing would insist
on it. As Christine Inglis observes:
Attempts to bring the plethora of [Chinese] groupings together within a
unifying structure or umbrella at either the national or local level have so
far been unsuccessful. The diversity of interests and backgrounds, as well
as personal competition, has made it difficult to develop an organizational
structure acceptable to all, and to identify individuals able to represent,
or speak on behalf of, the Chinese community as a whole.
(1998: 282)

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