Page 62 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

CAN ONE SAY NO TO CHINESENESS?

intercultural encounters in the world at large. As it happens, William Yang, who
now calls himself ‘bicultural’, does occupy such a position in his public life. His
celebrated photographs of friends suffering from AIDS testify to his identification
with Western gay culture, which he represents as entangled with, but also distinct
from, the cultural identifications derived from his ethnicity, and articulate a hybrid,
disaggregated, multiple identity that is uncontainable, in any meaningful sense, by
the category ‘Chinese’. 8
To reiterate my conclusion in the previous chapter, ‘if I am inescapably Chinese
by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent. When and how is a matter
of politics.’ The politics involved here reaches far beyond the identity politics of
individual subjects, in diaspora or otherwise. What is at stake are the possibilities
and responsibilities of these subjects to participate, as citizens of the world, in the
ongoing political construction of world futures. As we enter the twenty-first
century, the world faces ever greater challenges in light of growing global economic
disparity, continuing environmental degradation, rapid technological change,
increasingly massive transnational migrations and shifting geopolitical (im)balances
of power. There is no necessary advantage in a ‘Chinese’ identification here; indeed,
depending on context and necessity it may be politically mandatory to refuse the
primordial interpellation of belonging to the largest ‘race’ of the world, the ‘family’
of ‘the Chinese people’. In such situations the significant question is not only:
Can one say no to China? (Chow 1997), but also: Can one, when called for, say
no to Chineseness?

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