Page 61 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

diasporic conditions and experiences are suppressed in favour of illusory modes
of bonding and belonging. Recently I had a taxi ride in Sydney with a driver who
was from mainland China. We mutually recognized each other as ‘Chinese’, but
I had to tell him that, unfortunately, I couldn’t speak Chinese. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it
will be easy for you to learn. After all, you have Chinese blood.’ As if my imputed
racial identity would automatically and naturally give me access to some enormous
reservoir of cultural capital!
As Balibar (1991: 100) has remarked, ‘The racial community has a tendency to
represent itself as one big family or as the common envelope of family relations.’
Indeed, there is an equivalence between the organicist metaphor of the living tree
and the lineal notion of race-as-family which is profoundly problematic if we are
to interrogate Chineseness effectively from the diasporic point of view. In his work
on the African diaspora Gilroy has criticized ‘the dubious appeal to family as the
connective tissue of black experience and history’ (1993b: 203), as it disables black
intellectuals from developing alternative perspectives on black lives in diaspora. In
Gilroy’s view, the diasporic formation must be grounded in explicitly disorganic,
hybrid and synthetic notions of identity and community, not in some cosy, familial
notion of blackness. Similarly, Hall (1996e: 474) has argued against ‘reaching for
an essentialized racial identity of which we think we can be certain’ as guarantee
for political solidarity or cultural unity. Instead, the very category ‘black’ needs to
be interrogated. In black British film-maker Isaac Julian’s words:

blackness as a sign is never enough. What does that black subject do, how
does it act, how does it think politically . . . being black isn’t really good
enough for me: I want to know what your cultural politics are.
(in Hall 1996e: 474)

In the same vein, if we are to work on the multiple, complex, over-determined
politics of ‘being Chinese’ in today’s complicated and mixed-up world, and if we
are to push the theoretical promise of the diasporic perspective to its radical
conclusion, we must not only resist the convenient and comforting reduction of
Chineseness as a seemingly natural and certain racial essence; we must also be
prepared to interrogate the very significance of the category of Chineseness
per se as a predominant marker of identification and distinction. Not only does
the moment of pure Chineseness never strike, there are also moments – occurring
regularly in the lives of those ‘truly on the periphery’, in Leo Ou-fan Lee’s words
– in which the attribution of Chineseness does not make sense in the first place.
The liberating productivity of the diasporic perspective lies, according to Rey
Chow (1993: 25), in the means it provides ‘to unlearn that submission to one’s
ethnicity such as “Chineseness” as the ultimate signified’ (italics in original). This
will allow diasporic subjects to break out of the prison of Chineseness and embrace
lives – personal, social, political – ‘more than just as a Chinese’ (Ouyang 1997);
to construct open-ended and plural ‘post-Chinese’ identities, if you like, through
investments in continuing cross-influences of diverse, lateral, unanticipated

50