Page 36 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

and internally undifferentiated notion of ‘difference’ (Mani 1992). Against this
tendency, which paradoxically only leads to a complacent indifference toward real
differences, I would like to stress the importance for cultural studies to keep paying
attention to the particular historical conditions and the specific trajectories through
which actual social subjects become incommensurably different and similar. That
is to say, in the midst of the postmodern flux of nomadic subjectivities we need
to recognize the continuing and continuous operation of ‘fixing’ performed by
the categories of race and ethnicity, as well as class, gender, geography, etc. on the
formation of ‘identity’, although it is never possible, as determinist theories would
have it, to decide ahead of time how such markers of difference will inscribe their
salience and effectivity in the course of concrete histories, in the context of specific
social, cultural and political conjunctures. To be more specific, it is some of the
peculiarities of the operative dynamics of ‘Chineseness’ as a racial and ethnic
category which I would like to highlight here. What I would like to propose is that
Chineseness is a category whose meanings are not fixed and pregiven, but constantly
renegotiated and rearticulated, both inside and outside China.
But this brings me also to the limits of the polysemy of Chineseness. These
limits are contained in the idea of diaspora, the condition of a ‘people’ dispersed
throughout the world, by force or by choice. Diasporas are transnational, spatially
and temporally sprawling sociocultural formations of people, creating imagined
communities whose blurred and fluctuating boundaries are sustained by real and/or
symbolic ties to some original ‘homeland’. As the editors of Public Culture have
put it, ‘diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and
time and create new maps of desire and of attachment’ (1989: 1). It is the myth of
the (lost or idealized) homeland, the object of both collective memory and of desire
and attachment, which is constitutive to diasporas, and which ultimately confines
and constrains the nomadism of the diasporic subject. In the rest of this chapter,
I will describe some moments of how this pressure toward diasporic identification
with the mythic homeland took place in my own life. A curious example occurred
to me when I first travelled to Taiwan – a country with which I do not have
any biographical or familial connection. However, as a result of the Chinese ius
sanguinis which is still in force in Taiwan, I found myself being automatically
positioned, rather absurdly, as a potential national citizen of this country, that
is to say, as a Chinese national subject.
In the end, what I hope to unravel is some of the possibilities and problems
of the cultural politics of diaspora. But this, too, cannot be done in general terms:
not only is the situation different for different diasporas (Jewish, African, Indian,
Chinese, and so on), there are also multiple differences within each diasporic group.
For the moment, therefore, I can only speak from my own perspective; in the
chapters that follow I will elaborate in more general terms on the complexities
of Chinese diaspora politics.

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