Page 2 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent
questions of identity in an age of globalization and diaspora. The starting-point for
Ang’s discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese
descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself ‘faced with
an almost insurmountable difficulty’ – surrounded by people who expected her to
speak to them in Chinese. She writes: ‘It was the beginning of an almost decade-
long engagement with the predicaments of “Chineseness” in diaspora. In Taiwan
I was different because I couldn’t speak Chinese; in the West I was different because
I looked Chinese.’
From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions
between ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ at a national and global level, and to consider
the disparate meanings of ‘Chineseness’ in the contemporary world. She offers a
critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and
challenges Western tendencies to equate ‘Chinese’ with ‘Asian’ identity.
Ang then turns to ‘the West’, exploring the paradox of Australia’s identity as a
‘Western’ country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia’s uneasy relationship
with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary
multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of ‘Asia’ and ‘the
West’ to consider the social and intellectual space of the ‘in-between’, arguing
for a theorizing not of ‘difference’ but of ‘togetherness’ in contemporary societies.

Ien Ang is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute for Cultural
Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is the author of
a number of books, including Watching Dallas (1985), Desperately Seeking the
Audience (1991) and Living Room Wars (1996), and recently co-edited Alter/
Asians: Asian Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture (2000).