Page 49 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

they spoke English at home. My mother could have taught us Cantonese
but she never did – frankly, she couldn’t see the point.
(ibid.: 63/4)

This glimpse into one ordinary family’s history indicates the apparent lack of interest
Yang’s parents had in transmitting their Chinese roots or cultural traditions to their
children. This would have been a difficult thing to do anyway in 1940s and 1950s
Australia, when the official ideology was still one of ‘white Australia’ and required
the few non-white people in the country to assimilate. But at the same time Yang’s
family obviously never lost a sense of certainty about the self-declared fact of their
Chineseness. But are they indeed ‘Chinese’? What makes them so? And how do they
know?

The diasporic paradigm
Scholars have always been bewildered about China. The intricate empirical
multifariousness and historical complexity of this enormous country are hardly
containable in the sophisticated (inter)disciplinary apparatus and theoretical
armoury of Western researchers. Language, culture, civilization, people, nation,
polity – how does one describe, interpret, and understand ‘China’, that awesome
other country which has never ceased to both fascinate and infuriate its dedicated
scholar? The difficulty has grown exponentially with the emergence of a so-called
diasporic paradigm in the study of ‘Chineseness’. The booming interest in what is
loosely termed the Chinese diaspora has unsettled the very demarcation of ‘China’
as an immensely complex yet ontologically stable object of study. The diasporic
paradigm has shattered the convenient certainty with which Chinese Studies has
been equated, quite simply, with the study of China. ‘China’ can no longer be
limited to the more or less fixed area of its official spatial and cultural boundaries,
nor can it be held up as providing the authentic, authoritative, and uncontested
standard for all things Chinese. Instead, how to determine what is and what is not
Chinese has become the necessary preliminary question to ask, and an increasingly
urgent one at that. This, at least, is one of the key outcomes of the emergent
diasporic paradigm.
As I have already argued in Chapter 1, central to the diasporic paradigm is the
theoretical axiom that Chineseness is not a category with a fixed content – be it
racial, cultural or geographical – but operates as an open and indeterminate signifier
whose meanings are constantly renegotiated and rearticulated in different sections
of the Chinese diaspora. Being Chinese outside China cannot possibly mean the
same thing as inside. It varies from place to place, moulded by the local circum-
stances in different parts of the world where people of Chinese ancestry have settled
and constructed new ways of living. There are, in this paradigm, many different
Chinese identities, not one. This proposition entails a criticism of Chinese
essentialism, a departure from the mode of demarcating Chineseness through an
absolutist oppositioning of authentic and inauthentic, pure and impure, real and
fake. The anti-essentialism of the diasporic paradigm opens up a symbolic space for

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