Page 83 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

a retreat into Chinese tribalism – a misguided strategic essentialism which would
only help perpetuate the master dichotomy – but the implementation of contingent
cultural practices which disrupt, in ever so modest ways, the fixity of the dichotomy
itself. Such practices of hybridization are in the orbit of what ordinary people,
Chinese and non-Chinese, think, believe and do in their local situations, and they
are undoubtedly much more pervasive than is commonly recognized. But their
significance remains unaccounted for precisely because the discursive force of global
diaspora – and its loud assertion of globally applicable ethnic boundaries – tend
to submerge what Appadurai (1996a: 153) describes as ‘the incessant murmur of
urban political discourse and its constant, undramatic cadences’, the everyday
terrain where, I would argue, ordinary hybridity is practised. Mrk from Bandung
obviously felt he had to make a case for the importance of hybridity as a survival
strategy when he wrote to the Huaren Bulletin Board:

My grandma was the one who taught all of us to treat pribumi as equals,
if we did then they’d treat us right. She always thought of all the tukang
becak and everyone else who lived near our house in Solo as her friends.
. . . Grandma was and still is a very wise person . . . I was just trying to
share her views with other huaren over here [on the list], but I’m not
as wise nor as persuasive as Grandma is.
(16 May 1998)

In an important sense, hybridity is the politics of those ‘who do not have claims to
territorial propriety or cultural centrality’ (Chow 1993: 25). This is particularly
pertinent for groups such as Chinese Indonesians, who are ‘stuck’ in a country
they have not been allowed to call their own despite the fact that they have lived
there for generations. The difference between Chinese Indonesians and other ethnic
groupings in Indonesia such as the Acehnese, the Bataks, the Balinese, and so on
– the diverse local ethnicities that make up the imagined community of the
Indonesian nation – is of cardinal significance here. The latter, ‘natives’ all, can
claim to be the rightful inhabitants of particular territorial parts of the country.
Their ‘territorial propriety’ is undisputed, and they could, in principle, though not
in practice as long the concept of the Indonesian nation still holds, decide to secede
and construct their own nation (state). 16 No such option is open to the Chinese
Indonesians: dispersed as they are throughout the archipelago, they literally have
no space of their own. In other words, they have no choice but to live among and
side by side with the (other) Indonesians and in this sense, paradoxically, their fate
is intimately connected with the national project of ‘Indonesia’ – itself, one could
argue, a formidable hybrid construction. The entangled histories of colonialism,
competing nationalisms and the postcolonial consolidation of the Indonesian
nation–state have left a legacy which present generations cannot wish away –
whether they like it or not, they have to negotiate its consequences from a position
of marginalization, of what I have described elsewhere as being ‘trapped in
ambivalence’ (Ang 2001). This is why hybridity is not a luxury, but a necessity.

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