Page 212 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER-IN-DIFFERENCE

Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into differ-
ence, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different
no longer simply different. In that sense, it operates according to the
form of logic that Derrida isolates in the term ‘brisure’, a breaking and
a joining at the same time, in the same place: difference and sameness in
an apparently impossible simultaneity.
(1995: 36)

In the hybrid cultural predicament, as McLennan (1995: 90) puts it, we have
to learn ‘how to live awkwardly (but also wisely and critically)’ in a world in which
we no longer have the secure capacity to draw the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’
– in which difference and sameness are inextricably intertwined in complicated
entanglement.
Let me close with these eloquent words from Edward Said, arguably one of the
most influential postcolonial intellectuals in the world today:

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or
Muslim, or American are no more than starting points, which if followed
into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.
Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global
scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe
that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or black, or Western,
or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also
make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting
continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages,
and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and
prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if
that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections
between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the ‘other
echoes [that] inhabit the garden’. It is more rewarding – and more difficult
– to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others
than only about ‘us’. But this also means not trying to rule others, not
trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly
reiterating how ‘our’ culture or country is number one (or not number
one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough of value
to do without that.
(1993: 407–8)

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