Page 59 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

to ‘see themselves as Indonesian rather than Chinese, [but] recognize their Chinese
origin, albeit knowing very little of Chinese culture and tradition’ (Tan 1997: 51).
And as for many peranakans China has no relevance at all in their lives, what
meaning does the notion of ‘Chinese origin’ still carry? 6
Wu (1994) argues that two sentiments identify those who see themselves
as ‘Chinese’. The first, a culturalist sentiment, is a feeling of connectedness with
the fate of China as a nation, a patriotism associated with ‘a sense of fulfillment, a
sense of being the bearers of a cultural heritage handed down from their ancestors,
of being essentially separate from non-Chinese’ (Wu 1994: 149). But it is clear
that this sentiment does not apply to those in the diaspora who not only have
‘lost’ most of their cultural heritage, language being chief among them, but also
do not have a great attachment to the ancestral homeland at all, while still
identifying themselves (and being identified) in one way or another as ‘Chinese’.
The peranakans in Indonesia are a case in point, but so, for that matter, is William
Yang, the ‘Australian-Chinese’ photographer with whose story I began this chapter.
Yang’s story illuminates the precarious meaning of Chineseness at the outer edge
of the diaspora. If Yang, brought up the Western way in small-town Australia, can
be described as Chinese at all, then his is a Chineseness stripped of any substantial
cultural content. This, of course, is the case with millions of ‘ethnic Chinese’
throughout the West, those who have settled in all corners of the world in
a chequered history of several centuries of dispersal from the original ‘homeland’.
To understand Yang’s Chineseness in terms of his imaginary and subjective
relationship to this imputed homeland, which can only be an extremely tenuous
relationship anyway, would be missing the point altogether. As his own account
of the formative event shows, he came to know about his Chinese identity only
because someone else, arguably a non-Chinese, labelled him as such, to Yang’s
own initial surprise and to his later chagrin, when his mother confirmed that he was
indeed Chinese. In other words, Yang’s identification as Chinese took place in a
context of co-existence and interaction with others, others who were identifiably
different from him. Yang’s Chineseness then is fundamentally relational and
externally defined, as much as it is partial. Its boundaries are fuzzy. Its meaning is
uncertain. Yang both is and is not Chinese, depending on how he is perceived by
himself and by others. But what is it, we might ask, that still ultimately determines
the possibility of Yang’s categorization as Chinese in the first place?
This bring us to the second sentiment which, according to Wu, is common to
those identifying themselves as Chinese. This is the sentiment that Chinese share
of seeing themselves as being members of ‘the Chinese race’ or ‘the Chinese people’
(Wu 1994: 150). We return here to a concept that, as I remarked earlier, refuses
to go away from social discourse despite its repudiation as a scientific concept in
the West: ‘race’. So when Yang’s mother affirmed sternly that he was Chinese, his
brother adding insult to injury by informing him that ‘he’d better get used to it’,
the only tangible markers of distinction could only have been those associated with
‘race’. The glee with which the schoolkid, most probably white, could yell ‘Ching
Chong Chinaman’ at Yang was based on the former’s dominant positioning within

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