Page 22 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

wanted to know ‘where are you from?’, and were never satisfied when I answered
simply, ‘from Holland’. Implied in the very question was always the expectation,
the requirement even, that I would mention another space. That space, in very
general terms, is somewhere in ‘Asia’ – or more precisely, ‘China’, the Asian
land/nation/culture that has loomed largest in the European imagination as the
embodiment of the mysterious, inscrutable other – presumably the ‘natural’ land
of origin for people with my ‘racial’ features. More annoyingly, the question, ‘Do
you speak Chinese?’ was put to me ad nauseam. My answer, a resounding negative,
was easy enough to blurt out, but as I contemplated on the question itself – and
the very frequency with which I was confronted with it – I became aware of its
precarious cultural-political presumptions and implications, many of which I reflect
on in this book.
The title of this book, On Not Speaking Chinese, articulates the subjective position
from which the chapters collected here have been written: it signals a somewhat
awkward, oblique relationship to a socially assigned ‘identity’ in a time when
both identity claims and identity impositions of the essentializing kind are the
order of the day. If there is an overarching theme throughout this book, then,
it revolves around the multiple disjunctures and tensions between large-scale,
publicly reproduced categorical identities – ‘Chinese’, ‘Asian’ – and the concrete
social subjectivities and experiences which are shaped and circumscribed by these
identity categories but at the same time always exceed their reified boundaries.
In other words, there can never be a perfect fit between fixed identity label and
hybrid personal experience; indeed, while the rhetoric of identity politics generally
emphasizes the liberating force of embracing a collective identity, especially if that
identity was previously repressed or oppressed, that very identity is also the name
of a potential prison-house. It is very hard to imagine and appreciate the compli-
cated entanglement of our togetherness-in-difference from within the prison-house
of identity.

Deconstructing diaspora

I explored the ambiguous ramifications of identity politics for the first time in the
opening chapter, ‘On not speaking Chinese’. This chapter examines the ambiva-
lences of my being interpellated, increasingly frequently, as ‘Chinese’ (even though
I was born in Indonesia, a very different place in Asia than China). There is of
course an excitement in the self-affirmation and self-assertion that is inextricably
linked to the rise of identity politics since the 1960s: there is a pleasure in the sheer
realization of a distinctive shared identity and the empowered sense of belonging
it imparts. Identity politics, in this regard, is a logical offshoot of the decline of
assimilationism and its illusory promise of equality on the basis of a strived-for
but never achieved sameness: the politics of identity relies quintessentially on the
recognition and mobilization of difference once the ideal of sameness has proved
unreachable. Claiming one’s difference (from the mainstream or dominant national
culture) and turning it into symbolic capital has become a powerful and attractive

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