Page 15 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

intellectual’, although I prefer the more neutral term ‘migrant intellectual’. This
book is to a certain extent auto-biographical, in that it is in large part a reflection
on my own experiences as a multiple migrant. Migrants always inevitably undergo
a process of cross-cultural translation when they move from one place to another,
from one regime of language and culture to another. Salman Rushdie (1991), the
famous diasporic Indian writer, calls himself a ‘translated man’. But the process
of cultural translation is not a straightforward and teleological one: from the ‘old’
to the ‘new’. As Clifford (1997: 182) has put it, ‘One enters the translation process
from a specific location, from which one only partly escapes.’ Hall (1996a: 399)
remarks that diasporic intellectuals are ‘transitional figures’, ‘constantly translating
between different languages, different worlds’. It is this condition of transitionality
that characterizes the lives of migrant intellectuals, also aptly described as ‘living
in translation’, to borrow a term from Tejaswini Niranjana (1992: 46).
This book draws on my own particular experiences with living in translation
between Asia and the West, as it were, although more specific geo-historical
coordinates will need to be elaborated below. After all, ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ are
not natural entities but historically produced, homogenizing categories. The idea
of ‘Asia’ as a distinct, demarcatable region of the world originated in a very
Eurocentric system of geographical classification. In their book The Myth of
Continents, Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen (1997: 37) remark that ‘of all the
so-called continents, Asia is not only the largest but also the most fantastically
diversified, a vast region whose only commonalities – whether human or physical
– are so general as to be trivial’. This is true, but it does not do away with the reality
that in the contemporary world, ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’ are powerful terms of
identification for many cultures, societies and peoples who are somehow subsumed
under these terms. We know, commonsensically, which are Asian countries, and
millions of people living in these countries – as well as in the West – would call
themselves Asians (as well as Singaporeans, Chinese, Thai, Indian, and so on), even
though this may not always be a strongly or unambiguously felt identification.
‘The West’, for its part, may be an internally diverse category but it is evidently,
as Naoki Sakai (1989: 95) remarks, ‘a name always associating itself with those
regions, communities, and peoples that appear politically and economically superior
to other regions, communities and peoples’. Indeed, it is the very entrenched
hegemony of this asymmetrical relationship between the West and the Rest which
reinforces the potency of ‘Asia’ and ‘Asians’ as categories which represent a
difference from the West, whether imposed or self-declared. Being Asian means
being non-Western, at least from the dominant point of view, and this in itself has
strong implications for one’s sense of self, especially if one is (positioned as) Asian
in the West. The fact that identification with being Asian – sometimes in hyphenated
form such as ‘Asian-American’ – is so ubiquitous across Western nation–states
reveals much about the tension that exists between the two categories. Paul Gilroy
(1993: 1) once remarked that ‘striving to be both European and black requires
some specific forms of double consciousness’, pointing to the presumably unnatural
quality of such an identity. The same can be said about being both Western and

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