Page 40 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

identifiable among others by those famous ‘slanted eyes’. During the Los Angeles
uprising in 1992 my father’s brother, who lived there, felt threatened because, as
he said, he could be mistaken for a Korean – a dangerous quandary because the
Koreans were the target of African-American anger and violence in that racial
conflict. But the odd trajectories of labelling can also have some surprising twist
and turns. Thus, when I was in Hong Kong my (Hong Kong Chinese) host assured
me that people wouldn’t expect me to be able to speak Chinese because I would
surely be mistaken for a Filipina. That is to say, racial categories obviously do not
exist outside particular social and cultural contexts, but are thoroughly framed by
and within them.
Anyway, in the new country, the former colonizer’s country, a new cycle of
forced and voluntary assimilation started all over again. My cherished Indonesian
identity got lost in translation, as it were, as I started a life in a new language
(Hoffman 1989). In the Netherlands I quickly learned to speak Dutch, went to
a Dutch school and a Dutch university, and for more than two decades long
underwent a thorough process of ‘Dutchification’. However, the artificiality of
national identity – and therefore the relativeness of any sense of historical truth –
was brought home to me forever when my Dutch history book taught me that
Indonesia became independent in 1949. In Indonesia I had always been led to
commemorate 17 August 1945 as Independence Day. The disparity was political:
Sukarno declared Indonesia’s independence in 1945, but the Dutch only recognized
it in 1949, after four years of bloody war. But it is not the nuances of the facts that
matter; what is significant is the way in which nations choose to construct their
collective memories, how they narrate themselves into pride and glory (Bhabha
1990). The collision of the two versions of history in my educational experience
may have paved the way for my permanent suspicion of any self-confident and
self-evident ‘truth’ in my later intellectual life. As Salman Rushdie (1991: 12) has
remarked, those who have experienced cultural displacement are forced to accept
the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties.
At the level of everyday experience, the ‘fact’ of my Chineseness confronted me
only occasionally in the Netherlands, for example, when passing 10-year-old red-
haired boys triumphantly would shout behind my back, while holding the outer
ends of their eyes upwards with their forefingers: ‘Ching Chong China China’,
or when, on holiday in Spain or Italy or Poland, people would not believe that
I was ‘Dutch’. The typical conversation would run like this, as many non-whites
in Europe would be able to testify:
‘Where are you from?’
‘From Holland.’
‘No, where are you really from?’

To this usually insistent, repetitive and annoying inquiry into origins, my standard
story has become, ‘I was born in Indonesia but my ancestors were from China’ –
a shorthand (re)presentation of self for convenience’s sake. Such incidents were

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