Page 58 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

While Lee and Ouyang now live in different parts of the (Western) world, their
diasporic Chineseness is still clearly linked to their obvious biographical rootedness
in the cultural formations of the territorial centre of the ancestral ‘homeland’.
Moreover, even though they no longer live in this centre, their subjectivities are
still steeped in Chineseness, as it were: being first generation migrants, they possess
the linguistic and cultural capital that is generally recognized as authentically
Chinese. Lee and Ouyang know that they are Chinese, and they are known by
others as such. While both express a desire to go beyond their Chinese identities –
Lee by staking a claim to a Chinese cosmopolitanism, and Ouyang in wanting to
be more than just Chinese – their bottom-line Chineseness is not in doubt. Theirs,
in other words, is a relatively straightforward narrative of (self-)exile from ‘the
homeland’, and as such they are still easily incorporated in Tu’s cultural China and
firmly attached to one of the branches of the living tree.
Without wanting to devalue the decentring discourses articulated by intellectuals
such as Lee and Ouyang, I would nevertheless argue that there are other narratives
that tell of much more radical, complicated and chequered routes of diasporic
dispersal. In these narratives, the very validity of the category of ‘Chineseness’ is in
question, its status as signifier of identity thrown into radical doubt. It is in these
narratives that the diasporic paradigm is pushed to its limits, to the extent that any
residual attachment to the ‘centre’ tends to fade.
The peranakan Chinese in South-East Asia are often mentioned as one distinct
group of Chinese people who have lost their Chinese cultural heritage and have
gone ‘native’. The peranakans are an old diaspora: from the tenth century onwards
traders, mostly from South China, visited various South-East Asian ports. At first
they remained temporarily and rarely established permanent Chinese communities,
but between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Chinese trading quarters in
cities such as Bangkok, Manila, and Batavia became large and permanent, aided by
the ascendancy of European colonialism in the region. Over the course of centuries
they (who were mostly men) intermarried with local women, began to speak the
local languages, and adapted to local lifestyles (while selectively holding on to some
Chinese traditions). This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of this
important history of Chinese migration; the question to ask here is: why are they
still called ‘Chinese?’ As David Yen-ho Wu (1994: 161) observes: ‘While the “pure”
Chinese may question the legitimacy of the peranakans’ claim to being authentic
Chinese, the peranakans themselves are quite confident about the authenticity of
their Chineseness. They are often heard referring to themselves as “we Chinese”.’
Having been born into a peranakan family myself, I can testify to the correctness
of this observation: there is an instinctiveness to our (sometimes reluctant) identi-
fication as ‘Chinese’ which eludes any rationalization and defies any doubt. Yet
it is a fraught and ambivalent Chineseness, one that is to all intents and purposes
completely severed from the nominal centre, China. In Suharto’s Indonesia
(1966–98), for example, where the state deployed a strict assimilation policy to
eradicate Chinese difference within the national culture (for example, by banning
the use of Chinese characters from public display), peranakan Chinese were said

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