Page 166 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

IDENTITY BLUES

back to an imagined golden past – embodied in a selective memory of ‘tradition’
and ‘heritage’ – than with the visionary articulation of a new future. This use
of ‘identity’ is clearly in sharp contradistinction to Hall’s buoyant association of
cultural identities with becoming rather than being, with the confident embrace
of the open-endedness of history and destiny. On the contrary, here ‘identity’ is
firmly conjoined with the very antithesis of change, with some core, immutable
essence that needs to be cherished and protected, precisely because recourse to
the discourse of identity has become a key mechanism to alleviate the fear of the
terrifying future associated with ‘globalization’. Absent, in this perspective, is a
sense of identities as the dynamic repositories or channels of historical agency:
clinging to (an imagined) past inheritance and to the idea of conservation. Identity
here is a sign not of the active making of history, but of being the passive prisoner
of it.
I have invoked the Australian situation here in order to expose the partiality of
my own theoretical predilections. As a relatively recent immigrant into Australia
and a person of ‘Asian’ background, I had (and have) a personal cultural stake in
the redefinition of ‘Australian identity’ as an open space of diverse influences,
traditions and trajectories and as the intersection of a multiplicity of global cultural
flows – of Australia as a ‘transnation’ (Appadurai 1996a). Such a postmodern,
transnational nation would be more rather than less prepared than others in the
world to feel comfortable in the globalized world of the twenty-first century. It
would be a future-oriented nation which is not just capable of change but actively
desires change, turning necessity into opportunity in times of altered economic
and geopolitical circumstances (Turner 1997). Indeed, as a migrant who was eager
to find my place in this society I was excited to notice, in the early 1990s, that
a new Australian nationalism could so elegantly, and with such apparent ease, shift
its identificatory allegiance from being a racially and culturally exclusionary ‘White
Australia’ to an inclusive and cosmopolitan ‘multicultural Australia in Asia’. There
was no lack of rationale for this triumphant national self-understanding. After all,
Australia is a relatively new, settler nation mostly populated by waves of immigrants
(the persistent significance of its indigenous people notwithstanding), and as such,
so the theory goes, much less weighed down by historical establishment, with
an identity based much more on invention, improvisation and borrowing than
on an entrenched sense of primordial givenness. Indeed, what seemed at stake
in the new Australian nationalism was identity construction rather than identity
expression, the sense that ‘what we might become’ is more important than ‘who
we are’. In this sense, Australian national identity could arguably be imagined as
the perfect embodiment of Hall’s preferred association of identity with becoming
rather than with being, with the future as much as the past.
A quiet euphoria took hold of me when I found that my status as a well-educated
Asian migrant added significantly to my cultural capital in early 1990s’ Australia.
‘Asia’ had become, however ambiguously and not without harsh controversy, the
sign of success, of Australia’s becoming – Asia was Australia’s fantasmatic passport
to a prosperous and affluent future in a globalized world. This sense of euphoria

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