Page 16 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

Asian, even though no a priori similarity in the forms of double consciousness can
be assumed between blacks of the African diaspora (of which Gilroy speaks) and
Asians in the West, given the vastly different historical conditions under which
Africans and Asians have entered Western space, in Europe, the Americas, and in
Australasia (Chun 2001).
The themes I focus on in this book are not merely personal, but coincide with
some major cultural and historical developments which have taken place in the past
thirty to forty years or so, a period in which the configuration of the world has
changed dramatically. Specifically, what we have experienced in the past few decades
is a transition from a world of nation–states who organize themselves more or less
effectively as socially distinct, culturally homogeneous and politically sovereign
(and in which there is no real place for migrants who are considered too different),
to an interconnected, intermingled world in which virtually all nation–states have
become territories where various economies, cultures and peoples intersect and
interact. In the latter part of the twentieth century, in other words, nation–states
have become spaces of global flows, in which the confluence of cultural difference
and diversity has become increasingly routinized. At the same time, the process of
globalization has also routinized the transnational interconnections and interdepen-
dencies which erode and transcend the separateness of nation–states. In short, the
world is now a space of complicated entanglement, of togetherness-in-difference.
My own personal history as a migrant and as a migrant intellectual has been
marked in quite interesting ways by this enormous world-historical transformation.
As an Asian migrant in the West, my positioning in the world has changed
dramatically in the past thirty years or so, not least because the global meaning of
‘Asia’ has undergone major shifts in the postcolonial period. In the 1960s, when
I migrated from Asia to Europe as a child, Asianness – in whatever national
embodiment: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Malay, Filipino, and so on – was still
firmly associated with Third World backwardness in the Western imagination.
China had become communist and was totally out of bounds. Japanese economic
progress, actively supported by the United States, was routinely dismissed as
the result of the dumb Japanese skill at imitating and copying the West, not the
reward of their own creativity, innovativeness and hard work. South-East Asian
nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore were still in the throws of the
decolonization process. The Vietnam War, which more than any event brought Asia
into the everyday lifeworld of people living in the West, produced TV images of
violence, cruelty and sheer human despair. When thousands of ‘boat people’ from
Indochina were allowed to settle in Western countries after 1975, their refugee
status did not exactly enhance the standing of the category ‘Asian’ in Western
minds.
By the 1990s, however, Asianness is no longer linked exclusively to lamentable
Third World connotations. One important reason for this has been the highly
contested, spectacular rise of East and South-East Asian ‘dragons’ and ‘tigers’ in
the global economy in the 1980s and 1990s, a development which managed to
make the advanced, Western world extremely nervous and jittery. For the first time

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