Page 32 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

Diasporic identifications and
postmodern ethnicity

No ancestors, no identity.
(Chinese saying)

The world is what it is; men [sic] who are nothing, who allow
themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
(V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979)

The first time I went to China, I went for one day only. I crossed the border by
speedboat from Hong Kong, where I had booked for a daytrip to Shenszhen and
Guangzhou – the so-called New Economic Zone – with a local tourist company.
‘This is the most well-off part of China. Further north and inland it is much
worse,’ the arrogant Hong Kong guide warned. It was, of course, the arrogance
of advanced capitalism. Our group of twelve consisted mainly of white, Western
tourists – and me. I didn’t have the courage to go on my own since I don’t speak
any Chinese, not even one of the dialects. But I had to go, I had no choice. It was
(like) an imposed pilgrimage.
‘China’, of course, usually refers to the People’s Republic of China, or more
generically, ‘mainland China’. This China continues to speak to the world’s
imagination – for its sheer vastness, its huge population, its relative inaccessibility,
its fascinating history and culture, its idiosyncratic embrace of communism, all
of which amounts to its awesome difference. This China also irritates, precisely
because its stubborn difference cannot be disregarded, if only because the forces
of transnational capitalism are only too keen to finally exploit this enormous market
of more than a billion people. Arguably this was one of the more cynical reasons
for the moral high ground from which the West displayed its outrage at the
crushing of the students’ protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, discourses
of democracy and human rights notwithstanding.
My one-day visit occurred nine months after those dramatic events in Beijing.
At the border we were joined by a new guide, a 27-year-old woman from Bejing,
Lan-lan, who spoke English in a way that revealed a ‘typically Chinese’ commitment
to learn: eager, diligent, studious. It was clear that English is her entry to the world

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