Page 34 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

so I found out. These were the last years before the impending ‘handover’ in 1997.)
And we did not get bowl and chopsticks, but a plate with spoon and fork. I was
shocked, even though my chopstick competence is not very great. An instant
sense of alienation took hold of me. Part of me wanted to leave immediately,
wanted to scream out loud that I didn’t belong to the group I was with, but another
part of me felt compelled to take Lan-lan’s place as tourist guide while she was
not with us, to explain, as best as I could, to my fellow tourists what the food
was all about. I realized how mistaken I was to assume, since there seems to be
a Chinese restaurant in virtually every corner of the world, that ‘everybody knows
Chinese food’. For my table companions the unfamiliarity of the experience
prevailed, the anxious excitement of trying out something new (although they
predictably found the duck skin ‘too greasy’, of course, the kind of complaint about
Chinese food that I have heard so often from Europeans). Their pleasure in
undertaking this one day of ‘China’ was the pleasure of the exotic.
But it was my first time in China too, and while I did not quite have the freedom
to see this country as exotic because I have always had to see it as somehow my
country, even if only in my imagination, I repeatedly found myself looking at this
minute piece of ‘China’ through the tourists’ eyes: reacting with a mixture of shame
and disgust at the ‘thirdworldiness’ of what we saw, and with amazement and
humane wonder at the peculiarities of Chinese resilience that we encountered.
I felt captured in-between: I felt like wanting to protect China from too harsh
judgements which I imagined my fellow travellers would pass on it, but at the same
time I felt a rather irrational anger towards China itself – at its ‘backwardness’, its
unworldliness, the seemingly naïve way in which it tried to woo Western tourists.
I said goodbye to Lan-lan and was hoping that she would say something personal
to me, an acknowledgement of affinity of some sort, but she didn’t.

Identity politics
I am recounting this story for a number of reasons. First of all, it is my way of
apologizing to you that this text you are reading is written in English, not
in Chinese. Perhaps the very fact that I feel like apologizing is interesting in itself.
Throughout my life, I have been implicitly or explicitly categorized, willy-nilly, as
an ‘overseas Chinese’ (hua qiao). I look Chinese. Why, then, don’t I speak Chinese?
I have had to explain this embarrassment countless times, so I might just as well
do it here too, even though I might run the risk, in being ‘autobiographical’, of
coming over as self-indulgent or narcissistic, of resorting to personal experience as
a privileged source of authority, uncontrollable and therefore unamendable to
others. However, let me just use this occasion to shelter myself under the authority
of Stuart Hall (1992: 277): ‘Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the
authority of authenticity. But in order not to be authoritative, I’ve got to speak
autobiographically.’ If, as Janet Gunn (1982: 8) has put it, autobiography is not
conceived as ‘the private act of a self writing’ but as ‘the cultural act of a self reading’,
then what is at stake in autobiographical discourse is not a question of the subject’s

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