Page 54 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

reproduces unintentionally its own profound entanglement with the former; it
also, by this very preoccupation, effects its own unwarranted internal homogeniza-
tion and limits the much more radical potential that a diasporic paradigm allows.
In other words, while the aim would seem to be to rescue Chineseness from China,
to de-hegemonize geopolitical China (the PRC) which is found wanting in its own,
heavy-handed politics of modernizing Chineseness/sinicizing modernity, the
rescue operation implies the projection of a new, alternative centre, a decentred
centre whose name is cultural China, but China nevertheless. It is clear, then, that
the all-too-familiar ‘obsession with China’ which has been a key disposition in the
work of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century remains at work here
with undiminished intensity (Hsia 1971). This obsession, which is so profoundly
inscribed in the psychic structure of a wounded Chinese civilizationalism, ‘privileges
China’s problems as uniquely Chinese, which lays absolute claim to the loyalty of
Chinese in all parts of the world’ (Lee 1994: 232).
According to Leo Ou-fan Lee (1994), who came from Taiwan to the United
States as a graduate student more than thirty years ago and who describes himself
as ‘a voluntary exile situated forever on the fringes of China’, the ‘excessive
obsession with their homeland has deprived Chinese writers abroad of their rare
privilege of being truly on the periphery’. For Lee, it is only by being truly on
the periphery that one can create a distance ‘sufficiently removed from the center
of the obsession’, allowing one to ‘subject the obsession itself to artistic treatment’
(1994: 226). From this point of view, cultural China definitely does not occupy
a truly peripheral position at all. On the contrary. An overwhelming desire –
bordering, indeed, on obsession – to somehow maintain, redeem, and revitalize the
notion of Chineseness as a marker of common culture and identity in a rapidly
postmodernizing world is the driving force behind Tu’s conception of cultural
China. While the meaning of Chineseness is defined explicitly as fluid and change-
able, the category of Chineseness itself is emphatically not in question here: indeed,
the notion of cultural China seems to be devised precisely to exalt and enlarge the
global significance of Chineseness, raising its importance by imbuing it with new,
modernized meanings, and heightening its relevance by expanding its field of
application far beyond the given spatial boundaries of geopolitical China.
The Chinese diaspora, as we have seen, is posited as one of the key pillars of the
imagined community of cultural China. It is noteworthy that Tu persistently
accentuates the quest for Chineseness as a central motif in his wide-ranging
discussion of variant diaspora narratives. In the case of South-East Asian families
of Chinese descent remigrating from Malaysia or Vietnam to North America,
Western Europe, or Australia, he sees the ‘irony of their not returning to their
ancestral homeland but moving farther away from China with the explicit intention
of preserving their cultural identity’ (Tu 1994c: 24). In mainland Chinese
intellectuals’ decision not to return to China after the Tiananmen event in 1989,
he reads a ‘conscious and, for some, impulsive choice to realize one’s Chineseness
by moving far away from one’s homeland’ (ibid.). But isn’t Tu being too insistent
in foregrounding the salience of Chineseness in the configuration of these diasporic

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