Page 57 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

in relation to two centres, China and America: ‘On the peripheries of both
countries, I feel compelled to engage actively in a dialogue with both cultures’
(ibid.: 229). Freed from the usual obsession with China, Lee declares himself
‘unbounded’ by his homeland. Instead, he advocates what he calls a ‘Chinese
cosmopolitalism’: ‘one that embraces both a fundamental intellectual commitment
to Chinese culture and a multicultural receptivity, which effectively cuts across all
conventional national boundaries’ (ibid.). Cosmopolitanism, of course, is an idea
warranting a discussion of its own which I cannot provide here (see e.g. Cheah and
Robbins 1998), but what is the surplus gained in the addition of Chinese to
cosmopolitanism here? And what does Lee mean by a fundamental (that is to say,
a priori, fundamentalist) intellectual commitment to Chinese culture? What makes
Lee’s vantage point so interestingly contradictory is that while he places himself
on the margins of both ‘China’ and ‘America’, he does this from a position of
unquestioned certainty about his own ontological Chineseness and his (inherited?)
proprietorship of ‘Chinese culture’. Once a Chinese, always a Chinese?
Ouyang Yu, a poet and a specialist in English and Chinese literature who moved
from mainland China to Australia many years ago, actively resists such, what could
be called, ethnic determinism. ‘Where is the way out for people such as me?’ he asks.
‘Is our future predetermined to be Chinese no matter how long we reside overseas?’
(Ouyang 1997: 10). Ouyang expresses a desire to contribute to his present culture
– Australian culture – ‘more than as just a Chinese’ (ibid.: 35). But, so he tells us,
he has been prevented from doing so:

My effort to ‘English’ myself has met with strong resistance from all
sorts of people ever since I came here. Even if I wanted to be English, they
wouldn’t let me be. I would find my frequent criticism of China was not
appreciated. On many occasions, I found people preaching that I should
be proud of being a Chinese. . . . I was made to feel uneasy with my
disloyalty.
(ibid.: 10)

This story highlights how difficult it can be for people like Ouyang to embrace a truly
diasporized, hybrid identity, because the dominant Western culture is just as prone
to the rigid assumptions and attitudes of cultural essentialism as is Chinese culture.
In other words, there seems to be a cultural prohibition of de-sinicization, at least
for intellectuals from mainland China or Taiwan, such as Ouyang Yu and Leo Lee,
who have moved to the West. It would be interesting to speculate why this should
be so. It would be easy – and perhaps too simplistic – to suggest the antagonizing
work of racism or orientalism here; their capacity as forces that perpetuate and
reinforce essentialist notions of Chinese otherness should not be underestimated.
However, the important point to make here is that Lee’s ideal of ‘being truly on the
periphery’ is inherently contradictory, if not a virtual impossibility, because his
notion of periphery is still grounded in the recognition of a centre of sorts, the
deterritorialized centre of Chinese culture or, perhaps, Chineseness itself.

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