Page 12 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

Between Asia and the West
(In complicated entanglement)

The figure of the postcolonial diasporic intellectual – born in the Third World and
educated and living and working in the West – has become the subject of much
controversy in recent years. This is especially the case as some diasporic intellectuals
– one thinks of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Stuart Hall, to
name but a few – have gained international celebrity status in the halls of the
Western academy. As Caren Kaplan (1996: 123) has observed, ‘the cosmopolitan
intellectual as migrant figure signals for many either the liberatory or negative
effects of an increasingly transnational world’. As such, the figure of the diasporic
intellectual operates as a metaphor that condenses the current intellectual
discomfort and sense of crisis thrown up by the new world (dis)order created
by the end of the Cold War, the accelerated globalization of capitalism, and
the increasingly assertive presence of ‘the Rest’ in ‘the West’. What is it then
about the distinctive voice of the diasporic intellectual that generates so much
contention?
Rey Chow, who grew up in Hong Kong and now lives and works in the United
States, has this to say about her own work:

If there is something from my childhood and adolescent years that remains
a chief concern in my writing, it is the tactics of dealing with and dealing
in dominant cultures that are so characteristic of living in Hong Kong.
These are the tactics of those who do not have claims to territorial
propriety or cultural centrality.
(1993: 25)

For Chow, ‘Hong Kong’ operates as a kind of interstitial location which impels her
to engage in what she calls ‘tactics of intervention’. According to Chow:

The history of Hong Kong predisposes one to a kind of ‘border’ or
‘parasite’ practice – an identification with ‘Chinese culture’ but a distantia-
tion from the Chinese Communist regime; a resistance against colonialism
but an unwillingness to see the community’s prosperity disrupted.
(ibid.: 22)

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