Page 24 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

In this sense, being Chinese in (South-East) Asia is often an even more precarious
predicament than being Asian in the West! But to respond to this situation by
retreating into an essentialized Chinese identity – the diasporic solution – would
be tantamount to overlooking the complex, historically determined relations
of power in which ‘Chinese’ identities have come to be constructed in relation
to non-Chinese, ‘native’ identities, on the one hand, and European identities, on
the other. I reflect on these complex interrelationships in Chapter 3, ‘Indonesia
on my mind’, the writing of which was prompted by the anti-Chinese riots in
Indonesia in 1998 and its aftermath, as played out on the Internet – with its
electronic immediacy and accessibility one of the most spectacular, potent amplifiers
of the expansion of global diasporas in the late twentieth century. It is in this
chapter, especially, that I confront some of the more painful contradictions and
ambiguities of diasporic identity. In my own case, the question can be asked,
do I belong to the Chinese diaspora, as all too often spontaneously assumed, or to
a notional Indonesian diaspora? And why is it that the latter option has so much
less currency than the former? This leads me, in Chapter 4, ‘Undoing diaspora’,
to problematize – though not completely discard – the value of diasporic identity
politics, indeed, the importance of Chineseness itself as the symbolic anchor of
such a politics. I not only question the boundaries of the (Chinese) diaspora itself,
but also point to the implicit local/global power relations established in the very
construction of the imagined community of ‘the Chinese diaspora’. Thus, while
the transnationalism of diasporas is often taken as an implicit point of critique of
the territorial boundedness and the internally homogenizing perspective of the
nation–state, the limits of diaspora lie precisely in its own assumed boundedness,
its inevitable tendency to stress its internal coherence and unity, logically set apart
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from ‘others’. Ultimately, diaspora is a concept of sameness-in-dispersal, not of
togetherness-in-difference.

Negotiating multiculturalism
If the liberating prospect of diasporic identity is generally sought in its transnational,
even global reach and scope, this very deterritorializing move (out of the place
of location) may also be seen as one of its drawbacks. As Clifford (1997: 258)
has rightly noted, ‘theories and discourses that diasporize or internationalize
“minorities” can deflect attention from long-standing, structured inequalities of
class and race’. That is, by projecting its political and cultural faith onto the imag-
ined community with others elsewhere (based on primordialist assumptions of racial
and ethnic kinship), diaspora, as a concept, tends to de-emphasize, if not diminish
the import of living here. In Clifford’s (ibid.: 255) apt phrase, diaspora communities
are ‘not-here to stay’.
In practice, of course, this cannot be the case. All migrants ultimately have to
forge an accommodation with where they find themselves relocated, and to recon-
cile with their situation here, whether this be the United States, the Netherlands,
Australia, or anywhere else. For Asians who have migrated to the West, this means

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