Page 55 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

flows and movements? Doesn’t this emphasis unduly strait-jacket diverse strands
of the diaspora into the narrow and claustrophobic shaft of a projected, if highly
abstract ‘obsession with Chineseness’?
The organic metaphor of ‘the living tree’ to describe cultural China provides
us with a clear insight into the problem I am hinting at here. A living tree
grows and changes over time; it constantly develops new branches and stems
that shoot outward, in different directions, from the solid core of the tree trunk,
which in turn feeds itself on an invisible but life-sustaining set of roots. Without
roots, there would be no life, no new leaves. The metaphor of the living tree
dramatically imparts the ultimate existential dependence of the periphery on
the centre, the diaspora on the homeland. Furthermore, what this metaphor
emphasizes is continuity over discontinuity: in the end, it all flows back to the roots.
In thus imputing an essential continuity and constancy in the diaspora’s
quest for Chineseness, the discourse of cultural China risks homogenizing what
is otherwise a complex range of dispersed, heterogeneous, and not necessarily
commensurable diaspora narratives – a homogeneity for which the sign of
‘Chineseness’ provides the a priori and taken-for-granted guarantee. But in this way
the hegemony of ‘China’ (cultural if not geopolitical China) is surreptitiously
reinforced, not undercut. As Tu rightly notes, ‘hegemonic discourse, charged with
an air of arrogance, discriminates not only by excluding but also by including.
Often it is in the act of inclusion that the art of symbolic control is more insiduously
excercised’ (1994b: vii). Tu refers here to the coercive manner in which the People’s
Republic includes a variety of others (such as the non-Han minorities inside the
borders of China) within the orbit of its official political control. But a wholesale
incorporation of the diaspora under the inclusive rubric of cultural China can be
an equally hegemonic move, which works to truncate and suppress complex realities
and experiences that cannot possibly be fully and meaningfully contained within
the singular category ‘Chinese’.
Ironically, Tu recognizes the fact that not all members of the diaspora would feel
comfortable with their inclusion in the grand design of cultural China. Indeed, he
writes, ‘Learning to be truly Chinese may prove to be too heavy a psychological
burden for minorities, foreign-born, non-Mandarin speakers, or nonconformists;
for such people, remaining outside or on the periphery may seem preferable’
(1994b: vii–viii). Let’s ignore the surprising return to cultural essentialism –
the ghost of the ‘truly Chinese’ – here. What we must start to question is the
very validity and usefulness of the spatial matrix of centre and periphery that is so
constitutive of the conventional thinking about the Chinese diaspora; we must give
the living tree a good shake.

The prison-house of Chineseness
The condition of diaspora, literally ‘the scattering of seeds’, produces subjects for
whom notions of identity and belonging are radically unsettled. As James Clifford
puts it in his very useful discussion of contemporary theorizing on diasporas:

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