Page 103 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

In this regard, one might ask whether it makes sense to speak of a unitary ‘Chinese
community as a whole’ in the first place!
Indeed, the very meaning of Chineseness, and who can or should be included in
this category, can be the object of intense contestation among and between these
groups. Here, then, we have a clear case where what counts as Chinese (or not) is
torturously uncertain. Inglis remarks that one of the most isolated groups is the East-
Timorese Chinese, who after more than two decades in Australia are ‘only gradually
developing contacts with other Chinese’ (1998: 285). The tricky formulation here
is ‘other Chinese’, which too hastily serves to stress the presumed commonalities of
East Timorese of Chinese ancestry with, say, Hong Kong Chinese or Vietnamese
Chinese. But most East-Timorese Chinese speak Hakka (if they still do), not a very
widely used language in the other Chinese groups. Moreover, under the influence
of the Portuguese who were the colonial rulers of East Timor until 1975, most
East-Timorese Chinese are Catholic and do not observe many traditional Chinese
customs. I have been told that the East-Timorese Chinese community in Sydney a
few years ago decided to celebrate Chinese New Year in February together with
some other Chinese groups in the city. This is a festivity which the East-Timorese
Chinese had long dropped from their annual calendar, so their taking it up can be
described as a small but meaningful instance of resinicization. After one year,
however, they abandoned the event again because they didn’t feel comfortable
partying together with the other Chinese. Instead, they decided to celebrate
something akin to ‘Chinese New Year’ (signified by typical paraphernalia such as
dragon dances) among themselves, but on the ‘regular’ Christian New Year’s day,
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the first of January. One might wonder whether ‘Chinese’ is still useful to describe
this very hybrid cultural practice? Is the category Chinese meaningful to label the
East-Timorese Chinese at all, and if so why? The same questions can be asked, inter
alia, about the Indonesian-Chinese, most of whom speak Indonesian not Chinese,
and do not feel much affinity with other Chinese groups at all. To put it bluntly,
why are they so readily counted in the Chinese diaspora, as the Huaren website and
others have so insistently done, not the Indonesian diaspora?
In the hybridized and hybridizing environment of the global city, then, it is
the continued validity of the label ‘Chinese’ itself that comes under scrutiny. In
Singapore, it is pushed officially as a desirable and preferred Identity (with a capital
I), which has led paradoxically to its problematization by significant numbers
of young Singaporeans. In Sydney, the coming together of many different groups
who have carried the label ‘Chinese’ to describe themselves has exposed its
contested nature and its failure to operate as a term of diasporic integration. In this
sense, ‘Chineseness’ is put under erasure, ‘not in the sense of being written out of
existence but in the sense of being unpacked’ (Chow 1998b: 24), denaturalized
and stripped of its self-evident cogency as a category of social and cultural classi-
fication. The hybridizing context of the global city brings out the intrinsic
contradiction locked into the concept of diaspora, which, logically, depends on
the maintenance of an apparently natural, essential identity to secure its imagined
status as a coherent community. The global city is the space of diaspora’s undoing.

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