Page 157 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

nothing of what he said and that I refused to speak to him other than in English.
Unfortunately, the conversation was doomed to be extremely brief because I
couldn’t think of anything to say to unlock me from the pigeonhole of Asianness
in which he insisted on placing me, continuing to say how much he loved Asia.
What takes place in such incidents is still a form of othering, but it is an othering,
in Trinh Minh-ha’s (1991: 186) words, based on ‘allowing the Other an apparent
aura’. In contemporary Australia, then, Asians are no longer excluded (as they were
during the White Australia policy), nor are they merely reluctantly included despite
their ‘difference’, but because of it! What we have here is acceptance through
difference, inclusion by virtue of otherness.
What, then, are the consequences of this pervasive ambivalence? How should
we respond to it politically? For one thing, it is important that we recognize the
very operation of ambivalence in our relations with each other. Jane Flax, using
a Freudian perspective, defines ambivalence thus: ‘Ambivalence refers to affective
states in which intrinsically contradictory or mutually exclusive desires or ideas are
each invested with intense emotional energy. Although one cannot have both
simultaneously, one cannot abandon either of them’ (1990b: 50). She goes on to
note that such ambivalence is not necessarily a symptom of weakness or confusion
but, on the contrary, ‘a strength to resist collapsing complex and contradictory
material into an orderly whole’ (ibid.). In this sense, ambivalence is ‘an appropriate
response to an inherently conflictual situation’ (ibid.: 11). Translating this to
the situation in/of ‘multicultural Australia’, I would like to suggest that it is the
repression of ambivalence that makes us unable to grasp the complexities and
difficulties of ‘living with difference’, and the contradictions inherent in the very
multicultural idea(l) itself. But if ambivalence is an appropriate response here,
psychologically or emotionally, how can it be reckoned with in our political
pursuits?
Several authors, mainly working within postcolonial and postmodern theory,
have proposed that ambivalence itself is a political force of sorts. Bhabha (1990b),
for example, has coined the space of ambivalence as ‘the third space’ – a space
in between sameness and otherness, occupying the gap between equality and
difference – and he is generally quite hopeful about the subversive potential of this
liminal space of ambivalence, seeing it as the place from where one might go beyond
the contained grid of fixed identities and binary oppositions through the production
of hybrid cultural forms and meanings. Trinh (1991) also enunciates the produc-
tivity of liminal in-betweenness as a place from where the minority subject can
become an unsettling agent:

Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands in that undetermined
threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the
‘inside/outside’ opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both
a deceptive insider and a deceptive outsider. She is this Inappropriate
Other/Same who moves about with always at least two/four gestures:
that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her difference; and

146