Page 42 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

which is one of the clearest expressions of the pervasiveness of Western hegemony. 1
Yet it is precisely this urge to apologize which I would now like to question and 2
counter as well. In order to do this, however, I need to come to terms with my 3
relationship to ‘Chineseness’, the complexities and contradictions of which were 4
dramatized in the story about my one-day visit to China and my encounter with 5
Lan-lan. It was, of course, a drama born out precisely of a diaspora problematic. 6
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Haunted by Chineseness
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If the ‘Indonesian Chinese’ can be described as a distinctive ‘people’ – one which, 0
as I have sketched above, has its historical birth in colonial Dutch East Indies – then 11
they in turn have become diasporized, especially after the military coup in 1965. 12
While my parents, among many thousands, chose the relative wealth and comfort 13
of a life in the Netherlands (‘for the sake of the education of the children’), I was 14
recently informed by an aunt that I have some distant relatives in Brazil, where 15
some two hundred Indonesian Chinese families live in São Paulo. There is also 16
a large Indonesian Chinese community in Hong Kong, many of whom ended up 17
there after a brief ‘return’ to ‘the homeland’, Mao’s China, where they found, just 18
like my grandfather earlier in the century, that their very ‘Chineseness’ was cast in 19
doubt: the mainlanders did not consider them Chinese at all (Godley and Coppel 20
1990). Nevertheless, this Chineseness has never ceased to be a major identity 21
preoccupation in this unlikely diaspora. 22
The small peranakan Chinese-Indonesian community in the Netherlands, while 23
generally well integrated in Dutch society, has re-ethnicized itself tremendously in 24
the last decade or so. Interestingly, it is Chineseness, not Indonesianness which 25
forms the primary focal point of ethnic identitification, especially among the older 26
generation – that of my parents. There are now peranakan Chinese associations, 27
sports and entertainment clubs, discussion evenings; lessons in Chinese language 28
and culture, and special trips to China are being organized. Since the 1980s, my 29
parents have built up a large video collection of films and documentaries about 30
China and China-related subjects, all taped from television – and it is amazing how 31
often European public television features programmes about China! Whenever 32
I visit them these days (which is not often as I now live in Australia), I am assured 33
of a new dose of audiovisual education in Chineseness, as it were, as we watch films 34
together about the Yellow River, the Silk Route, on Taoism, Chinese village life, 35
the Great Wall, the Chinese Red Army, the history of Chinese communism, the 36
Tiananmen Square massacre, or whatever is available, or otherwise any Chinese 37
feature film that was recently televised (the Fifth Generation films of Zhang Yimou 38
and others loom large here), and so on and so on. So my familiarization with the 39
imputed ‘homeland’, and therefore my emotional subjection to the homeland 40
myth, has been effected rather informally, through intimate and special family 41
rituals and practices and through media and popular culture. In other words, I felt 42
I already ‘knew’ China, albeit a mythic China, a fetishized China, when I went 43
there for that one-day visit. 44

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