Page 48 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

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CAN ONE SAY NO
TO CHINESENESS?

Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm

William Yang was born in 1943 and grew up in Dimbulah, a small mining town
in Northern Queensland, Australia. Today a celebrated photographer working
and living in Sydney, he is presented – classified – as ‘a third-generation Australian-
Chinese’. In an autobiographical account of his life he recounts:

One day, when I was about six years old, one of the kids at school called
at me ‘Ching Chong Chinaman, Born in a jar, Christened in a teapot, Ha
ha ha.’ I had no idea what he meant although I knew from his expression
that he was being horrible.
I went home to my mother and I said to her, ‘Mum, I’m not Chinese,
am I?’ My mother looked at me very sternly and said, ‘Yes, you are’.
Her tone was hard and I knew in that moment that being Chinese was
some terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help. Or my
brother, who was four years older than me, and much more experienced
in the world. He said, ‘And you’d better get used to it.’
(Yang 1996: 65)

This is a classic tale of revelation that can undoubtedly be told in countless variations
and versions by many people throughout the world, articulating the all-too-familiar
experience of a subject’s harsh coming into awareness of his own, unchosen,
minority status. ‘Chineseness’ here is the marker of that status, imparting an
externally imposed identity given meaning, literally, by a practice of discrimination.
It is the dominant culture’s classificatory practice, operating as a territorializing
power highly effective in marginalizing the other, which shapes the meaning of
Chineseness here as a curse, as something to ‘get used to’. Yang reveals that for most
of his life he has had negative feelings about ‘being Chinese’. But what does his
Chineseness consist of ?

We were brought up in the western way. None of us learned to speak
Chinese. This was partly because my father, a Hukka [sic], spoke
Mandarin, whereas my mother, a See Yup [sic], spoke Cantonese, and

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