Page 26 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

lurched into a severe crisis after 1996, when anti-multiculturalist, populist-
nationalist forces gained spectacular momentum, I was interested in tracking
the troublesome place of Asia and Asians in this supposedly so tolerant and
cosmopolitan, multicultural Australia. Chapter 5 provides a genealogy of this
multiculturalism in crisis, which is a crisis of legitimacy associated closely with
the way in which multiculturalist discourse, in the Australian context at least, tends
to present itself as having overcome the language of race, and therefore that of
racism. But the discourse of race cannot be so easily repressed, especially not as it
has been one of the master discourses of the very (self-)constitution of the Australian
nation as a nation of the West. One of the classic defining characteristics of the West
has been its whiteness, so the very entry of increasing numbers of non-whites is all
too easily read as a crisis in the making – a crisis of the very unmaking of the West.
In this ideological context, as I argue in Chapter 6, ‘Asians in Australia’ is a logical
contradiction in terms, as amply expressed by the constant fear of ‘too many’ Asians:
a fear which reveals an Orientalist anxiety of being overtaken, in numbers as well
as in status. Western fears of ‘the yellow peril’ are all too well known, of course,
but there is a distinct Australian version of this fear, which has to do with the
peculiarities of Australian history and geography. The Australian island-continent,
the most recent European settler colony, was both very empty – in relative
terms – and relatively accessible to the teeming masses of Asia, whose imagined
‘invasion’ from the North has always animated important strands of the Australian
imagination. I characterize this imagination in Chapter 7 as ‘racial/spatial anxiety’.
But times change, of course, and by the time I made my own entry as a migrant
into Australia, in the early 1990s, fear of Asia was complexly supplemented by a
desire for Asia. I describe the ambivalences of this fear/desire complex in Chapter
8, especially as it articulates itself in a gendering of Asia, a feminization of the Asian
other. In this framework, being an Asian woman places one in a contradictory
and ironic position of acceptance/submission, hence, ‘the curse of the smile’!
The harmonious multicultural society, then, is a myth – a utopian fantasy rather than
social reality. Moreover, as a cultural fantasy, it creates power hierarchies of its own.
An oft-expressed view is that multiculturalism – with its emphasis on the celebration
of cultural diversity – advances and privileges the way of life of so-called cosmo-
politan elites (who relish the consumption of diversity) at the expense of those who
are both economically disadvantaged and culturally marginalized in an increasingly
fluid, globalized and postmodern world, where no ‘identity’ is secure any longer.
These considerations matter to the migrant or diasporic intellectual because she is,
to all intents and purposes, a representative of those ‘cosmopolitan elites’!
In Chapter 9, ‘Identity blues’, I reflect on my own relative empowerment as an
economically secure, well-educated migrant, and its implications for the politics of
identity. In a context where the cultural capital of the diasporic intellectual provides
her with undeniable social advantage, it makes no longer sense simply to reproduce
the serviceably self-victimizing image of Asian identity. Indeed, while racism has
by no means disappeared and while many Asians remain severely marginalized,
it is clear that being Asian in the West today no longer necessarily or only means

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