Page 60 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

the prevailing social network, which gave him the power to offend in this way. But
it also depended on the availability of some clues which enabled him to single out
the guileless, young William Yang as an appropriate object of such an attack. What
else could it have been but his ‘yellow skin’ and ‘slanty eyes’, the key ‘racial’ markers
for Chineseness in the West?
While scientific racism has long been discarded, then, it is in situations like these
that the notion of race continues to thrive in everyday life. Here, race theories
operate in practice as popular epistemologies of ethnic distinction, discrimination
and identification, which are often matched by more or less passionate modes of
self-identification. As Balibar (1991) has remarked, the idea of being part of a race
produces a sense of belonging based on naturalized and fictive notions of kinship
and heredity. In Chinese discourse, of course, this is eminently represented by
the enduring myth of the unity of the Chinese people as children of the Yellow
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Emperor. What Rey Chow (1993: 24) calls the ‘myth of consanguinity’ has very
real effects on the self-conception of diasporic subjects, as it provides them with a
magical solution to the sense of dislocation and rootlessness that many of them
experience in their lives. William Yang describes it this way:

I’ve been back to China and I’ve had the experience that the ex-patriot
(sic) American writer Amy Tan describes; when she first set foot in China,
she immediately became Chinese. Although it didn’t quite happen like
that for me I know what Amy’s talking about. The experience is very
powerful and specific, it has to do with land, with standing on the soil of
the ancestors and feeling the blood of China run through your veins.
(1996: 23)

In this extraordinary narrative of ‘return’ to the imposing ‘centre’, Yang constructs
himself as a prodigal son who had almost lost his way, a fallen leaf that has blown
back to the soil where the living tree has its roots. In this narrative, race – blood –
operates as the degree zero of Chineseness to which the diasporic subject can resort
to recover his imaginary connectedness with China, and to substantiate, through
the fiction of race, what otherwise would be a culturally empty identity.
But, as Chow (1993: 24) has rightly pointed out, ‘the submission to consan-
guinity means the surrender of agency’. The fiction of racial belonging would
imply a reductionist interpellation (in the Althusserian sense of the term) which
constructs the subject as passively and lineally (pre)determined by ‘blood’, not as
an active historical agent whose subjectivity is ongoingly shaped through his/her
engagements within multiple, complex and contradictory social relations which
are over-determined by political, economic and cultural circumstances in highly
particular spatio-temporal contexts. Race, in other words, provides a reductionist,
essentializing discursive shortcut, in which, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, the signifier
‘Chinese’ is ‘torn from its historical, cultural and political embedding and lodged
in a biologically constituted racial category’ (Hall 1996e: 472). In the imagining
of ‘the Chinese race’, differences which have been constructed by heterogeneous

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