Page 28 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INTRODUCTION

can be. This tells us that hybridity, the very condition of in-betweenness, can never
be a question of simple shaking hands, of happy, harmonious merger and fusion.
Hybridity is not the solution, but alerts us to the incommensurability of differences,
their ultimately irreducible resistance to complete dissolution. In other words,
hybridity is a heuristic device for analysing complicated entanglement. I illuminate
an instance of this complicated entanglement, which, I would argue, is how we
should conceive the condition of togetherness-in-difference, in Chapter 11, ‘I’m
a feminist, but . . .’. Encapsulated here is the very paradox of hybridity: any identity
can only be a temporary, partial closure, for there is always a ‘but’ nagging behind
it, upsetting and interfering with the very construction of that identity. This chapter
takes as its bone of contention one of the West’s most important and influential
recent political movements: feminism. Western feminism’s desire to have a
‘politically correct’ politics of difference through a strategy of inclusion will always
be subverted, at least partially, by the perspective of the included other, who, like
the diasporic intellectual, can never be completely assimilated nor fully recognized:
she will always be ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ at the same time. In this sense, the world
of feminism can stand for the West as a whole, as it is being infiltrated by increasing
numbers of ‘others’, including ‘Asians’. One consequence of this, as we all know,
is the slow but undeniable hybridization and creolization of ‘Western culture’ –
especially the culture of the metropolis, the global city, which Iris Marion Young
(1990: 318) forcefully describes as ‘the “being-together” of strangers’. This does
not mean that there are no longer any differences and hierarchies, but that they
are no longer easily separated out. Hybridity, as I conclude in the last chapter,
best describes this world, in which the complicated entanglement of togetherness
in difference has become a ‘normal’ state of affairs.
In such a thoroughly postmodern context, what it means to be ‘Asian’ can
no longer be defined or described in clear-cut, unambiguous terms despite the
increased salience of the very term ‘Asian’ as a self-conscious marker of identity in
the wake of identity politics. Speaking about Asians in the United States, author
Elaine Kim (1993) suggests that while Asian American communities and cultures
were shaped by legal exclusion and containment until quite recently, contemporary
experiences are being shaped by intensified globalization. The contrast is huge:
Yesterday’s young Asian immigrant might have worked beside his parents
on a pineapple plantation in Hawaii or in a fruit orchard on the Pacific
Coast, segregated from the mainstream of American life. Today’s Asian
immigrant teenager might have only Asian friends, but she probably deals
daily with a not necessarily anguishing confusion of divergent influences,
a collision of elements she needs to negotiate in her search to define herself.
(Kim 1993: xx–xi)

Arguably such hybrid multiplicity increasingly characterizes the lives of ‘Asians’
everywhere, in Asia and in the West: we are all, symbolically speaking, situated
‘between Asia and the West’.

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