Page 213 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1 For a diversity of popular accounts, see e.g. Schlosstein (1989); Gibney (1992); Chu
(1995); Naisbitt (1997).
2 Of course, not all of Asia is considered ‘modern’ by Western standards. Indeed, large
parts of Asia, mostly ‘less developed’ regions and countries (such as rural China
and large parts of Indochina) are still conveniently treated as backward, even by
other, more modern Asians such as the Japanese and the Taiwanese (see e.g. Iwabuchi,
forthcoming).
3 In a famous row, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating dismissed his
Malaysian colleague, Mahathir Mohammad, as ‘recalcitrant’ when the latter refused
to attend a meeting of the fledgling Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) in Seattle
in 1993, on the grounds that the organization was too dominated by Western powers
such as the USA and Australia.
4 The assertion of this symbolic equality is never more spectacularly displayed than at
photo sessions of APEC summits. All leaders wear the same outfit, vaguely derived
from the national cultural tradition of the host nation. There is something truly ironic
and poignant about the line of leaders all wearing a batik shirt, as during the summit
in Jakarta (1994): the sheer economic, social and political diversity of the nation–states
comprising this regional forum is suppressed by a symbolic declaration of sameness
expressed in the uniform costume.
5 For a recent discussion of assimilationism in the United States in relation to the Jews,
see Stratton (2000), Chapter 9.
6 Paul Gilroy, in his otherwise admirably anti-essentialist treatment of the Black diaspora
in his influential study The Black Atlantic (1993a), nevertheless gestures towards
this internal coherence and unity of the diaspora through his concept of the ‘changing
same’.
7 In this respect, there is the real issue of Asians’ relative collective success in advancing
themselves within Western societies compared with other racial minority groups, such
as African Americans and Hispanics in the USA and indigenous people and people of
Middle Eastern backgrounds in Australia. Such differences in success in ‘integration’
highlight the complexity of the politics of race and ethnicity in the postmodern,
heterogeneous West.

1 ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE
1 How the ‘Tiananmen Massacre’ (as it has come to be known in the West) should
be judged is a complex issue, too easily schematized in the complacent West in terms
of good and bad, heroic students versus a villainous communist dictatorship – a

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