Page 8 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

PREFACE

‘On not speaking Chinese’, the opening chapter of this book, was first presented
in 1992 at a conference in Taiwan. The conference organizers said it was up to me
what I wanted to talk about. I was elated, of course, for I had never been to Taiwan
before, but when I started to prepare for the event I was suddenly faced with
an almost insurmountable difficulty. Imagining my Taiwanese audience, I felt
I couldn’t open my mouth in front of them without explaining why I, a person
with stereotypically Chinese physical characteristics, could not speak to them
in Chinese. In anticipation, I wrote this essay, which is now also the title of this
book.
My scholarly work until then had mainly focused on mass media and popular
culture – globally ubiquitous phenomena which fascinated me deeply but the
analysis of which did not really implicate my personal identity (although I did make
it a point, in the mid-1980s, that I liked watching Dallas). To all intents and
purposes it was an academic pursuit which I could articulate in an ‘objective’ voice.
In Taiwan, however, I felt that I couldn’t speak without recognizing explicitly
who I was and responding to how I was likely to be perceived by the people in
this country. I expected much questioning, which turned out to be more than
warranted: again and again, people on the streets, in shops, restaurants and so on
were puzzled and mystified that I couldn’t understand them when they talked to
me in Chinese. So my decision to present a semi-autobiographical paper on the
historical and cultural peculiarities of ‘not speaking Chinese’ resonated intimately
with this experience. It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement
with the predicaments of ‘Chineseness’ in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different
because I couldn’t speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked
Chinese.
The politics of identity and difference has been all the rage in the 1990s. All over
the world, people have become increasingly assertive in claiming and declaring
‘who they are’. This book is perhaps a symptom of this trend, but it is also a critique
– not in the sense of dismissing identity politics altogether, but by pointing to
‘identity’ as a double-edged sword: many people obviously need identity (or think
they do), but identity can just as well be a strait-jacket. ‘Who I am’ or ‘who we are’
is never a matter of free choice.

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