Page 19 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

At the same time, the great number of other migrants from Asian countries
in Australia has meant that Asians – people who look like me – were no longer an
anomaly but a regular presence in this Western country, a presence to be reckoned
with (as in some other parts in the Western world such as California, but certainly
not in Europe). This has had a tremendous impact on my experience of being Asian
in the West. Over the years I had become used to the awkward position of being
one of the only or, at most, one of the few Asians in an otherwise white environ-
ment. This was so much the case that I always impulsively reacted pleased when
I encountered another Chinese-looking person, presuming a ‘we are in the same
boat’ sense of empathy. For example, when I first went to San Francisco in the mid-
1980s I was so pleased to be served by a Chinese-American clerk in a department
store that I was disappointed that he didn’t seem to treat me with any sign of special
recognition, but as just another customer. Of course, unlike Amsterdam (which was
my experiential yardstick at that time) San Francisco has long had a large and highly
visible Chinese-American population, so being Asian was nothing exceptional.
Today, living in Sydney, I similarly take it for granted that there are many other
Asians around. I routinely encounter them as shop assistants, taxi drivers, students,
doctors, even colleagues (though not, I have to say, as senior managers or political
representatives). In other words, there are now so many Asians in the West that
the West itself is slowly becoming, to all intents and purposes, ‘Asianized’.
It is in response to this shifting context of the Westernization of Asia and the
Asianization of the West – two complex, uneven and asymmetrical processes to be
sure – that this book should be read. The book is also a critical engagement with
some major strands of cultural politics which have emerged in the West in parallel
with the world-historical transformations I have outlined: identity politics, as well
as those of diaspora and multiculturalism.

From assimilation to identity politics
My formative years were spent in Europe, in the Netherlands to be more precise,
where I received a throroughly westernized education. Indeed, since I was 12,
when my family relocated from Indonesia to the Netherlands, I was brought up in
an assimilationist European environment in which my Asianness (or Chineseness)
was rendered virtually irrelevant. The most memorable exception was the dubious
special attention I occasionally received as a young woman from European men who
were fascinated by my long, straight black hair – a fatuous but still all-too-common
manifestation of the erotic exoticization of Asian femininity which has long been
part of western Orientalism. In general, however, my Asianness tended to be treated
as non-existent; for many years I went through life (in Europe) in the belief that
my Asian background was of no real significance to my social identity. We ate Asian
food at home – our tastebuds couldn’t really get used to the blandness of northern
European cuisine – but we spoke Dutch. All my friends treated me as if I were
Dutch (although none of them would ever have assumed that I was born there).
I lived in a thoroughly European world. Today, several decades later and in an era

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