Page 18 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

Nevertheless, Asia’s standing has not been completely wiped out by the loss of
its economic face. Too many decades have passed in which Westerners have had to
deal with Asians – from Japanese corporate managers to Chinese Communist Party
leaders, from Hong Kong entrepreneurs to Singaporean and Malaysian diplomats
– on the basis of presumed equality, that is, on the basis of the assumed modernity
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of Asia. While there may be differences among moderns, moderns cannot relegate
one another to the realm of absolute Otherness. Whatever their differences,
moderns share the same world, the modern world, and therefore are expected to
treat each other, at least in principle, as equals. Thus, modern Asians can generally
no longer be represented unproblematically as primitives or exotics – two versions
of the absolute Other – by their Western counterparts. They may perhaps be called
‘recalcitrant’ (indicating at most the irritation felt by the older brother in a quarrel
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among siblings), but they cannot be dismissed as ‘backward’. Modern Asia,
in other words, unlike, say, Africa – too afflicted by endless poverty and disaster
– or the Arabs – too insistent on their fundamental difference – has acquired a
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position of symbolic equipoise with the West. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad expresses the sentiments best when he exclaims: ‘Asians will certainly not
dominate the world. But Asians or the mixed people living in Asia will take their
rightful place, their rightful share of the World Century’ (Mahathir 1999: 151).
In Australia, a country geographically tucked away at the far south end of the
so-called Asia-Pacific region and therefore the western nation most directly exposed
to changes and developments occurring among its northern neighbours, the 1980s
and 1990s were marked by an increasingly loud chorus of clamours for Australia
to ‘engage’, ‘enmesh’ and ‘integrate’ with Asia. The need for an ‘Asianization’ of
Australia, as perceived by government and business leaders and by influential
economists, policy analysts and journalists, was based on the observation that
if Australia did not, it would be hopelessly left behind in the global economy and
become a parochial backwater in world society, a ‘banana republic’. I came to live
and work in Australia in 1991 after having spent twenty-five years in Western
Europe. I left a Europe that had just undergone massive upheaval after the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and where international discussion was immersed by
excitement about the prospect of a unified Europe – something worked upon
assiduously by powerful European leaders such as Helmut Kohl and François
Mitterand (though not Margaret Thatcher). When I arrived in Australia, however,
I soon realized how geoculturally specific this ‘desire for Europe’ was (see Ang
1998). Nothing of it was evident in Australia; instead, to my amazement, the
country was engrossed in a ‘desire for Asia’. Paul Keating, the flamboyant political
leader who ‘pushed Australia further into Asia than any other prime minister’
(Sheridan 1995: xix), stated that by the year 2000 Australia should be a country in
which ‘our national culture is shaped by, and helps to shape, the cultures around
us’ (quoted in ibid.). For me, as a new migrant into Australia, this was a puzzling
as well as exciting experience: this Australian infatuation with Asia – after more
than a century-long rejection – rearticulated and recontextualized my own
Asianness in unprecedented ways.

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