Page 43 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

But this symbolic orientation toward the ‘homeland’ tends to complicate
the problem of identity, as ‘China’ is presented as the cultural/geographical core
in relation to which the westernized overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble
position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own ‘impurity’. In this
situation the overseas Chinese is in a no-win situation: she is either ‘too Chinese’
or ‘not Chinese enough’. As Chow (1991: 28/9) has observed, ‘Chinese from
the mainland are [often felt to be] more “authentic” than those who are from,
say, Taiwan or Hong Kong, because the latter have been “Westernized”.’ But the
problem is exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, say, for
the Indonesian peranakan Chinese or for second-generation Chinese Americans,
whose ‘Chineseness’ is even more diluted and impure.
Of course, this double-bind problem is not unique to migrants of Chinese
descent. In a sense, it enters into the experience of all diasporic peoples living in
the West. What is particular to the Chinese diaspora, however, is the extraordinarily
strong originary pull of the ‘homeland’ as a result of the prominent place of ‘China’
in the Western imagination. The West’s fascination with China as a great, ‘other’
civilization began with Marco Polo and remains to this day (see e.g. MacKerras
1991). In the Western imagination China cannot be an ordinary country, as a
consequence, everything happening in that country is invested with more than
‘normal’ significance, as testified by the intense and extreme dramatization of events
such as the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ and the ‘Hong Kong handover’ in the Western
media (Chow 1993; 1998a). There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness
accorded to ‘China’; ‘China’ has often been useful for Western thinkers as a symbol,
negative or positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi (1988: 127)
has noted, even Jacques Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was
seduced into treating the non-phonetic character of the Chinese language as
‘testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside of all
logocentrism’, that is, as the sign of a culture totally different from what he
conceives as Western culture. Worse still, this powerful othering is mirrored by
an equally strong and persistent tendency within Chinese culture itself to consider
itself as central to the world, what Song Xianlin and Gary Sigley (2000) call China’s
‘Middle Kingdom mentality’, exemplified by the age-old Chinese habit to designate
all non-Chinese as ‘barbarians’, ‘foreign devils’ or ‘ghosts’. This is a form of self-
Orientalization expressed in the famous inward-looking aloofness of Chinese
culture criticized, within China itself, in the controversial television series River
Elegy, and which I also sensed in Lan-lan’s ultimate insistence, through a para-
doxical, assertive defensiveness in relation to the West, on China’s pure otherness.
In the interlocking of this mutual discursive exclusionism overseas Chinese
people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China’s elevated status as
privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine
their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. I recognize Rey Chow’s
(1991) observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an ‘obsession with
China’. What connects the diaspora with the ‘homeland’ is ultimately an emotional,
almost visceral attachment. The relationship is, to use Amitav Ghosh’s (1989) term,

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