Page 170 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

IDENTITY BLUES

the globalized existence of a cosmopolitan and multicultural diasporic intellectual,
simply by talking to people and sharing our experiences (about which fish to buy
or the quality and the origins of the fruit in the fruit market, figuring out how to
translate certain words, the state of the real estate market in the neighbourhood,
and so on).
What such mundane local interactions can contribute to, I believe, is the
incremental and dialogic construction of lived identities which slowly dissolve
the boundaries between the past and the future, between ‘where we come from’
and ‘what we might become’, between being and becoming. Being is enhanced
by becoming, and becoming is never possible without a solid grounding in being.
As subjects from multiple backgrounds negotiate their social co-existence and their
mutual entanglement, the contradictory necessity and impossibility of identities are
played out in the messiness of everyday life, as the global and the local interpenetrate
each other. This gradual hacking away at the absolutist antagonism between
‘identity’ and ‘globalization’ in practice is never guaranteed – it is an ongoing
process bound to have its ups and downs in its own right. But it is a form of micro-
politics of everyday life informed by the pragmatic faith in the capacity for cultural
identities to change, not through the imposition of some grandiose vision for the
future, but slowly and unsensationally, by elaborating ‘the practical means . . .
that enable deep and lasting social change’ (Morris 1998b: 209). In this way, a
cosmopolitan ethos can be fostered from below, based not on a separation between
‘elites’ and ‘the people’, but on their mutual intermingling, and ultimately, on an
effort to break down this very divide.

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