Page 33 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

at large (that is, the world outside China), just as being a tourist guide means access
to communication and exchange with foreigners. It shouldn’t come as a surprise,
therefore, as Lan-lan told us, that it is very difficult for young Chinese people to
become tourist guides (they must pass a huge number of exams and other selection
procedures): after all, these guides are the ones given the responsibility of presenting
and explaining China to foreign visitors. International tourism emphasizes and
reinforces the porousness of borders and is thus potentially dangerous for a closed
society like China which nevertheless, paradoxically, needs and promotes tourism
as an important economic resource in the age of globalization.
How Lan-lan presented and explained China to us, however, was undoubtedly
not meant for the ears of government officials. Obviously aware that we all had
the political events of the previous year in mind, she spontaneously started to
intersperse the usual touristic information with criticism of the current communist
government. ‘The people know what happened last year at Tiananmen Square,’
she said as if to reassure us, ‘and they don’t approve. They are behind the students.
They want more freedom and democracy. We don’t talk about this in public, but
we do among friends.’ She told us these things so insistently, apparently convinced
that it was what we wanted to hear. In other words, in her own way she did what
she was officially supposed to do: serving up what she deemed to be the most
favourable image of China to significant others – that is, Westerners. 1
But at the same time it was clear that she spoke as a Chinese. She would typically
begin her sentences with ‘We Chinese . . .’ or ‘Here in China we . . .’ Despite
her political criticism, then, her identification with China and Chineseness was
by no means in doubt. On the contrary, voicing criticism of the system through
a discourse that she knew would appeal to Western interlocutors, seemed only to
strengthen her sense of Chinese identity. It was almost painful for me to see how
Lan-lan’s attempt to promote ‘China’ could only be accomplished by surrendering
to the rhetorical perspective of the Western other. It was not the content of the
criticism she expounded that I was concerned about. What upset me was the way
in which it seemed necessary for Lan-lan to take up a defensive position, a position
in need of constant self-explanation, in relation to a West that can luxuriate in its
own taken-for-granted superiority. My pain stemmed from my ambivalence:
I refused to be lumped together with the (other) Westerners, but I couldn’t fully
identify with Lan-lan either.
We were served a lunch in a huge, rather expensive-looking restaurant, complete
with fake Chinese temple and a pond with lotus flowers in the garden, undoubtedly
designed with pleasing international visitors in mind, but paradoxically only
preposterous in its stereotypicality. All twelve of us, members of the tourist group,
were seated around a typically Chinese round table. Lan-lan did not join us, and
I think I know why. The food we were served was obviously the kind of Chinese
food that was adapted to European taste: familiar, rather bland dishes (except
for the delicious crispy duck skin), not the ‘authentic’ Cantonese delicacies I was
subconsciously looking forward to now that I was in China. (Wrong assumption,
of course: you have to be in rich, decadent, colonial capitalist Hong Kong for that,

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