Page 211 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND IDENTITIES: LIVING HYBRIDITIES

struggles, nationalist conflicts or revivals, even genocide, follow on essentialist
constructions of unitary, organic cultural collectivities.’ In other words, identity
politics is never innocent.
It is in this light that the importance of hybridity needs to be stressed. Gregor
McLennan (1995: 90) has commented that the problem with hybridity is that it
‘does not easily produce a people’. This is true, but I would argue that we need to
lay stress on the unsettling horizon of hybridization precisely because essentializing
and divisive claims to ethnicity, the assertion of distinct and separate ‘peoples’, are
so rampant. The sheer force of identity politics gives us a sense of ‘why [cultural
hybridity] is experienced as dangerous, difficult or revitalising despite its quotidian
normalcy’ (Werbner 1997a: 4). We live in the paradoxical situation, then, that
hybridity is still seen as a problem or an anomaly despite the fact that it is every-
where, because it is identity that has been privileged as the naturalized principle
for social order. Therefore, it is the very preoccupation with demarcating the line
between ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’, ‘Asian’ and ‘Western’ – that is, the preoccu-
pation with boundary-setting and boundary-maintenance – that I have wanted
to problematize in this book. Against such essentializing moves, I wish to hold
up the non-Chinese-speaking figure of the banana – ‘yellow outside, white
inside’ – to stress the porousness of identities and, more importantly, the fact that
they evolve and take shape through multiple interrelationships with myriad,
differently positioned others. These interrelationships, whether economic, political,
professional, cultural or personal, are never power-free, but they cannot be avoided,
they have to be continually negotiated and engaged with somehow. More, these
interrelationships are by definition constitutive of contemporary social life. This,
of course, is what togetherness-in-difference is all about: it is about co-existence in
a single world.
To conclude then, rather than seeing hybridity as a synonym for an easy
multicultural harmony, or as an instrument for the achievement thereof, I want to
suggest that the concept of hybridity should be mobilized to address and analyse
the fundamental uneasiness inherent in our global condition of togetherness-in-
difference. This unease has been historically produced, in that we are still
overwhelmingly captured by the dominant habit of thinking about ourselves and
the world in terms of identity, ethnic, national and otherwise. As a result, mixture
is still often inevitably thought of and felt as a contamination, a breach of purity,
an infringement of ‘identity’. In fact, even in its celebration of interethnic marriage
as the creative generator of the happy hybrid nation, The Bulletin has to admit that
all is not that simple. A marriage consultant is quoted as saying: ‘The fact of
intermixing tells us little about the adaptation and adjustments couples and their
children are required to make, and the processes which occur when values are
in conflict’ (Kyriakopoulos 1996). In short, hybridity is not only about fusion
and synthesis, but also about friction and tension, about ambivalence and incom-
mensurability, about the contestations and interrogations that go hand in hand
with the heterogeneity, diversity and multiplicity we have to deal with as we live
together-in-difference. Robert Young (1995) describes the situation succinctly:

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