Page 187 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

‘a long-term process of translocal connecting’. What I have tried to emphasize
in this chapter, however, is the practical fact that there are limits to the sharing we
can do, that there is only so much (or so little) that we can share. Indeed, I think
we could only stand to gain from the recognition that any process of ‘translocal
connecting’ not only needs hard work, but, more importantly, can only be partial
also. I would even suggest that our crossroads encounters would be more
productive if we recognize the moments of actual disconnection rather than hold
on to the abstract utopian ideal of connection so bound up with celebrations of
the borderlands. For it is in the realization and problematization of such moments
of actual disconnection – that is, moments when the act of meaningful comparison
and communication reaches its limits – that the material consequences of difference,
of the irreducible and unrepresentable specificity and particularity of ‘the local’ are
most bluntly exposed, but always-already within the translocal context within which
that ‘local’ is distinctively constituted.
In short, it is at moments when comprehending my local-specific narrative
becomes problematic to you, my reader, when such comprehension seems
muted because I do not seem to speak in familiar discourse, that the malleability
of general theoretical concepts such as ‘race’, ‘nation’ and ‘identity’, not to mention
metaphors such as the ‘borderlands’ and the ‘crossroads’, becomes evident. It is
the ways in which we both do and do not share these (and many other) concepts
and metaphors across local/particular/specific boundaries that we should begin to
interrogate and highlight.

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