Page 65 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

value of the rupiah plummeted. As popular anger and frustration burst out on the
streets, at least half a million people were killed in riots and mass attacks on
communists and people who were otherwise targeted as culprits. Many of these
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were Chinese. As a young girl, I was unaware of the full seriousness of the situation,
although I have always known that ‘we Chinese’ were often the object of dis-
crimination by the majority Indonesians, but my parents now tell me that everyone
in their circles lived in fear then. Stories abounded that the rivers were red with
blood and full of floating dead bodies. It was during this period that my parents
decided finally to get out.
According to Stuart Hall, diasporic intellectuals – usually, born in the ‘Third’
World but educated and working in the ‘First’ – occupy a ‘double space’, and ‘are
deeply embedded in both worlds, both universes’ (1996c: 399). It is just as
important, however, to stress the diasporic intellectual’s profound disembeddedness
from the worlds in which she finds herself biographically enmeshed. It is the
articulation of embeddedness and disembeddedness, the ‘lived tension’ between
‘the experiences of separation and entanglement’ that marks the construction of
diasporic subjectivities (Clifford 1997: 255). The current popularity of the notion
of diaspora is an index of the sense of alienation many migrants feel in their present
land of residence. While in the so-called host country they are condemned always
to be positioned as ‘different’ or ‘foreign’, (re)defining themselves as ‘diasporic’ –
as belonging to an idealized home elsewhere – affords them the promise of symbolic
escape from the pains and frustrations of marginalization. But this belonging to
a ‘there’ while being ‘here’ remains a vicarious, virtual one; never to be conflated
with the ‘real’ thing.
For diasporic subjects are not only spatially disembedded, ‘out of place’; they
are also temporally disembedded, that is, displaced from the ‘normal’ passing of
historical time. It is frequently noted that migrants who go back to their homeland
after, say, thirty years away, find themselves disorientated because they have to
realize that the place they have left behind is no longer the same. It has moved
on, too. This disjuncture of memory and history leaves many diasporic subjects
in limbo, as it were: they have to come to terms with being foreigners in their own
homeland because they are ‘out of time’. By migrating, they break the flow of
continuous historical time as lived when one stays in one place. Not only are notions
of past, present and future no longer anchored in a sense of evolving continuity,
they also become doubled, as it were, as the migrant steps into the temporality
of a different historical trajectory. As I entered the Western ‘sixties’ and began to
insert myself into a world evolving out of that particular historical moment, I lost
touch with the everyday process of history-making in Indonesia, in which I was
so deeply immersed until we left.
So I cannot speak for the ‘real’ Indonesia now: my relationship to it is extremely
tenuous, based more on memory than on present enmeshment. The Indonesian
pop stars whose names I still remember – Lilis Suryani, Rachmat Kartolo – are relics
from the 1960s long forgotten in the Indonesia of 2000. I no longer share, with
Indonesians of my generation, common histories and experiences of growing up

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