Page 35 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

authentic ‘me’, but one of the subject’s location in a world through an active
interpretation of experiences that one calls one’s own in particular, ‘worldly’
contexts, that is to say, a reflexive positioning of oneself in history and culture.
In this respect, I would like to consider autobiography as a more or less deliberate,
rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed
self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity,
an identity which can be put to work. It is the quality of that usefulness which
determines the politics of autobiographical discourse. In other words, what is the
identity being put forward for?
So I am aware that in speaking about how it is that I don’t speak Chinese, while
still for the occasion identifying with being, and presenting myself as, an ‘Overseas
Chinese’, I am committing a political act. I care to say, however, that it is not my
intention to just carve out a new niche in what Elspeth Probyn (1992: 502)
somewhat ironically calls ‘the star-coded politics of identity’, although I should
confess that there is considerable, almost malicious pleasure in the flaunting of my
own ‘difference’ for critical intellectual purposes. But I hope to get away with this
self-empowering indulgence, this exploitation of my ethnic privilege, by moving
beyond the particulars of my mundane individual existence. Stuart Hall (1990:
236–7) has proposed a theorization of identity as ‘a form of representation which
is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover
places from which to speak’. To put it differently, the politics of self-(re)presentation
as Hall sees it resides not in the establishment of an identity per se, full fledged
and definitive, but in its use as a strategy to open up avenues for new speaking
trajectories, the articulation of new lines of theorizing. Thus, what I hope to
substantiate in staging my ‘Chineseness’ here – or better, my (troubled) relationship
to Chineseness – is precisely the notion of precariousness of identity which has
preoccupied cultural studies for some time now. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1990: 60) has noted, the practice of ‘speaking as’ (e.g. as a woman, an Indian, a
Chinese) always involves a distancing from oneself, as one’s subjectivity is never fully
steeped in the modality of the speaking position one inhabits at any one moment.
My autobiographic tales of Chineseness are meant to illuminate the very difficulty
of constructing a position from which I can speak as an (Overseas) Chinese, and
therefore the indeterminacy of Chineseness as a signifier for identity.
At the same time, however, I want to mobilize the autobiographic – i.e. the
narrating of life as lived, thereby rescuing notions of ‘experience’ and ‘emotion’
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for cultural theorizing – in order to critique the formalist, post-structuralist
tendency to overgeneralize the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented
and deterritorialized subjectivity. Such, what James Clifford (1992) has dubbed
‘nomadology’, only serves to decontextualize and flatten out ‘difference’, as if
‘we’ were all in fundamentally similar ways always-already travellers in the same
postmodern universe, the only difference residing in the different itineraries we
undertake. Epistemologically, such a gross universalization of the metaphor of
‘travel’ runs the danger of reifying, at a conveniently abstract level, the infinite and
permanent flux in subject formation, thereby privileging an abstract, depoliticized,

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