Page 169 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

practice, including the often overlooked micro-politics of everyday life, where the
concrete, practical implications of globalization are most keenly and intimately felt.
In this respect, we should take seriously the Hansonites’ fear that they might
become ‘strangers in their own land’, which is another way of saying that they fear
that ‘others’ will ‘take over’ the country. Even if these fears may be motivated
by ‘irrational’ xenophobic impulses, they are still real, and need to be addressed as
such. I myself, as a representative of the ‘others’, of the threat of ‘globalization’,
am often deeply aware of these fears as I participate in the most mundane social
interactions. I am aware, for example, that many white locals in my neighbourhood
feel very uneasy about the large influx of Chinese, Vietnamese and other non-
whites in recent years, which has qualitatively changed the streetscape, the social
mix, the language one tends to overhear, and the range of services available in the
neighbourhood.
A fierce local protest against the establishment of a Chinese temple in the
neighbourhood, on the grounds that it ran against the area’s ‘heritage’, made it
clear that more established inhabitants have been feeling dislocated as they saw the
area change beyond recognition and be ‘appropriated’ by newcomers. A reactionary
sense of loss, a nostalgic longing for the old days, and a notion of progressive
decline is an all too common response among those who do not possess the cultural
(and other) capital to benefit from these changes. In response, Doreen Massey
2
(1994: 151) remarks wisely that ‘[t]here is a need to face up to – rather than simply
deny – people’s need for attachment of some sort, whether through place or
anything else’. At the same time, as there is no going back to the old days, we need
to find ways of working towards ‘an adequately progressive sense of place, one
which would fit in with the current global-local times and the feelings and relations
they give rise to’ (Massey 1994: 151–2).
Precisely as a member of the cosmopolitan, multicultural elites, I take it as my
responsibility to take seriously not just the pleasures, but the difficulties associated
with the construction of such a progressive sense of place, not only in my neigh-
bourhood but nationally and internationally, what Massey (1994) calls a ‘global
sense of place’. Self-reflexivity requires me to be aware of my own relative cultural
empowerment vis-à-vis those much more restricted in their mobility, both physical
and cultural, than I am, even as my ‘Asianness’ remains an at best ambivalent
signifier for my (lack of) ability to belong, to feel at home in Australia.
As a critical intellectual and an academic, I can write books such as this one,
which attempts to understand the fears of cultural loss and exclusion rather than
simply dismiss them as irrelevant or illegitimate. But in daily life as a citizen and
co-resident of this country I can also try to help alleviate these fears in more
practical, modest ways, by establishing cross-cultural rapport and a sense of social
sharing on an everyday basis, however fleeting, in shops, at the train station, and
so on. I make it a point, for example, to use my cultural capital to act as a translator
between different regimes of culture and knowledge in order to facilitate the
creation of a sense of shared reality, a togetherness in difference. I make it a point,
that is, that I am working to be a part of the ‘local community’ as much as I lead

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