Page 46 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

and history. But in order to seize on that potential, diasporas should make the most
of their ‘complex and flexible positioning . . . between host countries and
homelands’ (Safran 1991: 95), as it is precisely that complexity and flexibility which
enable the vitality of diaspora cultures. In other words, a critical diasporic cultural
politics should privilege neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but
precisely keep a creative tension between ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re
at’. I emphasize creative here to foreground the multiperspectival productivity of
that position of in-between-ness (Gilroy 1993b). The notion of ‘biculturality’,
often used to describe this position, hardly does justice to this hybrid productivity.
Such a notion tends to construct the space of that in-between-ness as an empty
space, the space in which one gets lost in the cultural translation from one side to
the other in the bipolar dichotomy of ‘where you’re from’ and ‘where you’re at’.
But the productivity I am referring to precisely fills that space up with new forms
of culture at the collision of the two: hybrid cultural forms born out of a productive,
creative syncretism. This is a practice and spirit of turning necessity into oppor-
tunity, the promise of which is perhaps most eloquently expressed by Salman
Rushdie (1991: 17): ‘It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in
translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.’
What the recognition of the third space of hybridity enables us to come to terms
with is not only that the diasporic subject can never return to her/his ‘origins’, but
also, more importantly, that the cultural context of ‘where you’re at’ always informs
and articulates the meaning of ‘where you’re from’. This is, to speak with Rushdie,
what the diasporic subject gains. In this sense, hybridity marks the emancipation
of the diaspora from ‘China’ as the transparent master-signified of ‘Chineseness’:
instead, ‘Chineseness’ becomes an open signifier invested with resource potential,
the raw material for the construction of syncretic identities suitable for living ‘where
you’re at’.
It is by recognizing the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of
diaspora cultures that ‘not speaking Chinese’ will stop being a problem for overseas
Chinese people. ‘China’, the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute
norm for ‘Chineseness’ against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora
are measured. Instead, Chineseness becomes an open signifier, which acquires its
peculiar form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions
in which ethnic Chinese people, wherever they are, construct new, hybrid identities
and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday
popular culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American
invention quite unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or, for that matter, in
China itself. In Malaysia one of the culinary attractions is nyonya food, a cuisine
developed by the peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices
and ingredients. Some time ago I was at a Caribbean party in Amsterdam full
of immigrants from the Dutch West Indies; to my surprise the best salsa dancer of
the party was a young man of Chinese descent who grew up in Surinam. There
I was, facing up to my previously held prejudice that a Chinese can never become
a Latino!

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