Page 44 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

an epic one. It is precisely this epic relationship which invests the homeland myth 1
with its power: it is this epic relationship to ‘China’, for example, which made 2
millions of overseas Chinese all over the world feel so inescapably and ‘irrationally’ 3
sick and nauseous when the tanks crushed the students’ movement at Tiananmen 4
Square on 4 June 1989, as if they felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite 5
the fact that many, if not most of them would never think of actually ‘returning’ 6
to this distant ‘motherland’. The desires, fantasies and sentimentalities that go into 7
this ‘obsession with China’, says Chow (1991: 25), should be seen at least in part 8
as ‘a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed internationally in multiple ways, to 9
such a [collective, “Chinese”] identity’. In other words, the subjective processes 0
of diasporic ethnic identification are often externally instigated, articulating and 11
confirming a position of subordination in relation to Western hegemony. To be 12
sure, I think that it is this structure of dominance and subjection which I inter- 13
nalized when I found myself caught between my Western co-tourists and Lan-lan 14
– an impossible position, a position with no means of its own to assert itself. 15
The contradictions and complexities in subject positioning that I have tried to 16
explicate are neatly summed up in the memoirs of Ruth Ho, a Malaysian peranakan 17
Chinese woman who grew up in Malacca before World War Two. In the chapter 18
of her book, called ‘On learning Chinese’, she complains about the compulsory 19
lessons in Chinese that she had to undergo as a young girl: 20
21
Mother always felt exceedingly guilty about our language deficiency 22
and tried to make us study Chinese, that is Mandarin, the national dialect. 23
. . . [But] I suppose that when I was young there was no motivation to 24
study Chinese. . . . 25
‘But China was once the greatest and most cultured nation in the 26
world! Weren’t you proud to be Chinese? Wasn’t that reason enough 27
to study Chinese?’ Many people felt this way but unfortunately we just 28
didn’t feel very Chinese! Today we are described by one English writer 29
as belonging to ‘the sad band of English-educated who cannot speak 30
their own language’. This seems rather unfair to me. Must we know the 31
language of our forefathers when we have lived in another country 32
(Malaysia) for many years? Are the descendants of German, Norwegian 33
and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know 34
German or Norwegian or Swedish? Are the descendants of Italian and 35
Greek emigrants to Australia expected to study Italian and Greek? Of 36
course not, and yet overseas Chinese are always expected to know Chinese 37
or else they are despised not only by their fellow Chinese but also by non- 38
Chinese! Perhaps this is due to the great esteem with which Chinese 39
history, language and culture are universally regarded. But the European 40
emigrants to the USA and Australia also have a not insignificant history, 41
language and culture, and they are not criticized when they become 42
English speaking. 43
(Ho 1975: 97–99) 44

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