Page 56 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

‘Diasporic subjects are distinct versions of modern, transnational, intercultural
experience’ (1997: 266). In this sense, diasporic subjects are exemplary cases of the
multiple and hybrid subjectivities so favoured by postmodern and poststructuralist
theory. Interestingly, however, as I have discussed above, a dominant tendency in
thinking about the Chinese diaspora is to suppress what Clifford calls ‘the lateral
axes of diaspora’, the ways in which diasporic identities are produced through
creolization and hybridization, through both conflictive and collaborative co-
existence and intermixture with other cultures, in favour of a hierarchical centring
and a linear rerouting back to the imagined ancestral home. Such a conceptual
focus on the centre, Clifford notes, inhibits an understanding of the significance
of diaspora cultures in the late twentieth century. As he puts it:

The centering of diasporas around an axis of origin and return overrides
the specific local interactions (identifications and ruptures, both construc-
tive and defensive) necessary for the maintenance of diasporic social forms.
The empowering paradox of diaspora is that dwelling here assumes
solidarity and connection there. But there is not necessarily a single place
or an exclusivist nation.
(Clifford 1997: 269, italics in original)

Indeed, for Clifford the most important aspect of diasporic formations is the
multiplicity of ‘here’s’ and ‘there’s’ which together make up ‘decentered, partially
overlapping networks of communication, travel, trade, and kinship [that] connect
the several communities of a transnational “people”’ (ibid.). The metaphor of the
living tree is not at all suited to capture the features of such dispersed, discontinuous,
fractal cultural formations. Interestingly, Paul Gilroy (1993a) has chosen the image
of ships as a starting point for his ground-breaking work on the African diaspora:
‘ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the
Caribbean as a central organizing symbol’ for the particular diasporic formation that
has developed historically as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, a formation he
calls the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy 1993a: 4). What is highlighted in this image is a
virtual space of continuous mobility, of criss-crossing flows and multiple horizontal
exchanges between different sites of black diasporic concentration, in which there
is no centre. I am not suggesting here that a similar image should be adopted for
the Chinese diaspora – indeed, the image of the ship is particularly appropriate
in Gilroy’s context for its evocation of the African diaspora’s founding moment
of the Middle Passage – but this comparative note might serve to illuminate the
fact that the metaphor of the living tree is by no means ideologically innocent. It
could encourage us to problematize the predominance of centrist and organicist
conceptions of Chineseness, Chinese culture and Chinese identity in diaspora. 5
Leo Lee, with his claimed desire to be ‘truly on the periphery’, comes close to
embodying the diasporic Chinese subject who has renounced the debilitating
obsession with the centre. ‘By virtue of my self-chosen marginality I can never fully
identify myself with any center’, he writes (1994: 231). He defines his marginality

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