Page 41 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

disturbing signals for the impossibility of complete integration (or perhaps ‘natural-
ization’ is a better term), no matter how much I (pragmatically) strived for it.
To put it in another way, it is the very question ‘where are you from?’ – a question
so easily thrown up as the bottom line of cultural identity (thereby equating cultural
identity with national identity) – which is a problem for people like me, as it lacks
transparency. Of course, this is a problem shared by millions of people throughout
the world today, where migration has become an increasingly common phenom-
enon. The experience of migration brings with it a shift in perspective: to paraphrase
Paul Gilroy (1990/1), for the migrant it is no longer ‘where you’re from’, but
‘where you’re at’ which forms the point of anchorage. However, so long as the
question ‘where you’re from’ prevails over ‘where you’re at’ in dominant culture,
the compulsion to explain, the inevitable positioning of yourself as deviant vis-à-
vis the normal, remains. In other words, the relation between ‘where you’re
from’ and ‘where you’re at’ is a deeply problematic one. To be sure, it is this
very problem which is constitutive to the idea of diaspora, and for which the idea
of diaspora attempts to be a solution. As William Safran (1991: 87) put it, ‘diaspora
consciousness is an intellectualization of an existential condition’, an existential
condition that becomes understood and reconciled through the myth of a
homeland from which one is removed but to which one actually belongs. But I
would argue that this solution, at least at the cultural level, is by no means sufficient
or unambiguously effective: in fact, the diasporic imagination itself creates and
articulates a number of new problems.
Take, for example, the position of ethnic minorities in Western advanced
capitalist societies today. In Western Europe, including the Netherlands, issues
of race and ethnicity, now so familiar and almost obligatory to us working within
cultural studies, only became a matter of public debate and concern in the late
1970s or so. Discourses of ethnicity started to proliferate as minority communities
began to assert themselves in their stated desire to ‘maintain their cultural identity’.
However, such (self-)ethnicization, which is in itself a confirmation of minority
status in white, Western culture, can paradoxically serve as an alibi for what Rey
Chow (1991: xvi) has called ‘prescribed “otherness”’. Thus, ‘Chinese’ identity
becomes confined to essentialist and absolute notions of ‘Chineseness’, the source
of which can only originate from ‘China’, to which the ethnicized ‘Chinese’ subject
must adhere to acquire the stamp of ‘authenticity’. So it was one day that a self-
assured, Dutch, white, middle-class, Marxist leftist, asked me, ‘Do you speak
Chinese?’ I said no. ‘What a fake Chinese you are!’, was his only mildly kidding
response, thereby unwittingly but aggressively adopting the disdainful position
of judge to sift ‘real’ from ‘fake’ Chinese. In other words, in being defined and
categorized diasporically, I was found wanting.
‘Not speaking Chinese’, therefore, has become a personal political issue to me,
an existential condition which goes beyond the particularities of an arbitrary
personal history. It is a condition that has been hegemonically constructed as
a lack, a sign of loss of authenticity. This, then, is the reason why I felt compelled
to apologize that I have written this text in English – the global lingua franca

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