Page 205 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

In other words, by recognizing the inescapable impurity of all cultures and the
porousness of all cultural boundaries in an irrevocably globalized, interconnected
and interdependent world, we may be able to conceive of our living together in
terms of complicated entanglement, not in terms of the apartheid of insurmount-
able differences. If I were to apply this notion of complicated entanglement to my
own personal situation, I would describe myself as suspended in-between: neither
truly Western nor authentically Asian; embedded in the West yet always partially
disengaged from it; disembedded from Asia yet somehow enduringly attached to
it emotionally and historically. I wish to hold onto this hybrid in-betweenness not
because it is a comfortable position to be in, but because its very ambivalence is a
source of cultural permeability and vulnerability which, in my view, is a necessary
condition for living together-in-difference.
As Robert Young (1995: 27) puts it, hybridity ‘is a key term in that wherever it
emerges it suggests the impossibility of essentialism’. Hybridity – simply defined,
the production of things composed of elements of different or incongruous kind
– instigates the emergence of new, combinatory identities, not the mere assertion
of old, given identities, as would seem to be the case in ultimately essentialist
formulations of identity politics, even in their new-fangled, apparently transgressive
guises of ‘diaspora’ or ‘multiculturalism’. However, we shouldn’t extol uncritically
the value of hybridity without carefully understanding its complexity and its contra-
dictions. Indeed, too often hybridity is taken simply as the easy antidote to the
social divisions produced by the proliferation of difference. In this way, the term
loses its political edge and becomes simply a mechanism for overcoming difference
rather than living with and through it.
Take, for example, the cover of the 1996 Australia Day Edition of The Bulletin,
Australia’s premier current affairs magazine. We see an eye-catching group photo
of about twenty men, women and children of a variety of ‘races’ (Caucasian, Asian,
Aboriginal), all stripped down to underpants and with their arms crossed in front
of their chests. This mixed group is supposed to represent ‘the new Australian race’.
As The Bulletin writes:

Australia is slowly turning into a nation of hybrids. By the turn of the cen-
tury, more than 40% of Australia’s population will be ethnically mixed as
a result of intermarriage between Anglo-Celtic Australians and migrants,
or between people from the different ethnic groups.
(Kyriakopoulos 1996)
Far from a mixed blessing, this purported hybridization of the Australian population
is presented by The Bulletin as a straightforwardly good thing. A demographer is
quoted as saying that the high rate of ‘inter-cultural marriage’ provides ‘Australia’s
best protection against becoming a battleground of “warring tribes”’ (ibid.).
The unqualified desire for hybridity expressed in this discourse is in fact quite
progressive, certainly in light of the massive unease about miscegenation and racial
interbreeding which pervaded Western societies earlier. As Young (1995: 25)

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