Page 20 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

of liberal multiculturalism and ethnic revivalism, such an assimilated existence
would probably be disapproved of as ‘self-denial’. But this was a time before the
coming into dominance of ‘identity politics’.
Until the 1970s, many postcolonial immigrants like us diligently pursued their
own assimilation into the dominant culture of the modern West – an ideology my
parents firmly believed in – not only because it held the promise of access into a
secure world of comfort, affluence and, most importantly, the possibility of upward
mobility. (Hence, of course, my parents’ insistence on the importance of learning
the language and culture of the West.) It was also simply a necessity, a survival
strategy, given the fact that when we first moved into the Netherlands, in the 1960s,
there were only few migrants like us with whom we could form what would now
be called an ‘ethnic (or diasporic) community’, which would celebrate its cultural
origins and protect/police its boundaries by insisting on maintaining its linguistic
and cultural difference from the dominant culture. This was not the kind of
aspirational environment I grew up in. Instead, for my family ‘out of Asia into the
West’ meant the utopian hope and the dogged determination to fully westernize,
and to claim the West as our destiny and our eventual site of belonging.
But assimilation, as Zygmunt Bauman (1991) has forcefully shown, can never
be fully successful. The modern project of assimilation, which literally means
‘making alike’, is inherently contradictory, because the very acquired – rather than
inherited or ascribed – character of cultural traits gained in the process of assimi-
lation turns the assimilating subject into a less than real, and thus somehow inferior
Westerner (Bauman’s discussion focuses on the German Jews before Hitler rose to
power). Even the most westernized non-Western subject can never become truly,
authentically Western. The traces of Asianness cannot be erased completely from
the westernized Asian: we will always be ‘almost the same but not quite’, because
we are ‘not white’ (Bhabha 1994: 89). As Bauman (1991: 105) remarks, ‘The
acceptance of assimilation as a vision and as a framework for a life strategy was
tantamount to the recognition of the extant hierarchy, its legitimacy, and above
all its immutability.’
Indeed, assimilationism was long an official government goal in immigrant
nation–states such as the United States and Australia, and a tacit expectation
inflicted on ‘newcomers’ in old-world European countries. The idea was that all
immigrants would be incorporated smoothly within the dominant national culture,
leaving their original cultures happily behind. In the USA, the idea of the ‘melting
pot’, popularized by the Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill who wrote his play The
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Melting Pot in 1908, was often taken to mean the absorption of newcomers into
the established, white Anglo-Saxon order until they became invisible in the national
scene, both physically and culturally. This process was thought to be achievable
especially for white European migrants (including European Jews), but not, of
course, for blacks and other non-white races such as the Chinese (against whom
there were exclusionary anti-immigration laws in both the USA and Australia).
The ultimate failure of the assimilation project could no longer be denied when,
by the late 1960s, even the (descendants of) European migrants such as Italians,

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