Page 50 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

people such as William Yang, arguably a distant member of the diaspora, to be
Chinese in his own way, living a de-centred Chineseness that does not have to live
up to the norm of ‘the essential Chinese subject’. 1
One of the distinctive characteristics of cultural studies is its recognition of the
positionality of any mode of intellectual practice or style of knowledge production.
Such a recognition implies a de-universalization of knowledge and an emphasis
on the particular historical and cultural coordinates which inform the enunciation
of discourse and the formation of knowledge. For cultural studies, as Lawrence
Grossberg (1996a: 153) puts it, ‘There can be no separation between theory,
at whatever level of abstraction, and the concrete social historical context which
provides both its object of study and its conditions of existence.’ Importantly,
this is both a political and an epistemological statement. Thus, any intellectual
investment in an object of study, say, Chineseness, is not the innocent reflection
of a natural reality that is passively waiting to be discovered; rather, the very quest
for knowledge actively brings into being, in the knower’s experience and under-
standing of the world, slices of reality he or she then calls and classifies as ‘Chinese’.
Furthermore, there are stakes involved in the ongoing ontological confirmation
of Chineseness, just as nineteenth-century Western science had a stake, beyond
the noble one of scientific progress, in producing the existence of distinct, and
hierarchically ordered, human ‘races’. This analogy should provoke us to inter-
rogate the political and ideological significance of the ongoing currency, as well as
shifting currents, of discourses, claims and disclaims to Chineseness in the modern
world. How Chineseness is made to mean in different contexts, and who gets
to decide what it means or should mean, are the object of intense contestation,
a struggle over meaning with wide-ranging cultural and political implications.
I also have a personal investment in this interrogation of Chineseness. Like
William Yang, though along a rather different historical trajectory, I am intimately
familiar with the injunction to ‘get used to being Chinese’. I was born into a
so-called peranakan Chinese family in Indonesia, a country that has always had
a problem with its long-standing and economically significant Chinese minority
(as, of course, is the case throughout South-East Asia except Singapore, where
ethnic Chinese are in a comfortable majority) (Suryadinata 1997). In Chapter 3, I
will go at length into the predicament and the contradictions of Chinese identi-
fication in the context of contemporary Indonesia. Suffice it to say at this point that
while growing up in Indonesia in the 1960s, I found ‘being Chinese’ a profoundly
ambivalent experience, fraught with feelings of rejection (by the majority of
non-Chinese Indonesians) and alienation (from an identity that was first and
foremost an imposed one). The need to come to terms with the ‘fact’ of my
Chineseness remained a constant after I relocated – in a peculiar diasporic itinerary
informed by the historical connections established by European colonialism – to
the Netherlands, where I spent my teenage and young adult years, and later after
I relocated to Australia (where I have lived for the past ten years). In these divergent
geocultural spaces the meaning of being Chinese was both the same and different,
framed by the fateful condition that I could not take my Chineseness (or lack of

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