Page 84 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

INDONESIA ON MY MIND

In the context I have described here, then, hybridity is not the extravagant
privilege of diasporic intellectuals and First World postmodernists. Here, the power
of hybridity is of a much more modest and mundane, but also a more vital kind.
It has to do with securing the very possibility for Chinese Indonesians to continue
to live in Indonesia in a situation of unchosen co-existence and entanglement
with (other) Indonesians. Indeed, it is only through hybridization that Chinese
Indonesians can stake a claim on the validity and, yes, ‘authenticity’ of their
Indonesianness. There is nothing to be exalted about this situation, nor to be
naïvely utopian about the promise of hybridity. As Garcia Canclini (2000: 48)
rightly remarks, ‘hybridisation is not synonymous with reconciliation among
ethnicities and nations, nor does it guarantee democratic interactions’. Hybridity
is not a superior form of transformative resistance, nor the only mode of politics
available, but, rather more humbly, a limited but crucial, life-sustaining tactic of
everyday survival and practice in a world overwhelmingly dominated by large-scale
historical forces whose effects are beyond the control of those affected by them.
Let me return, finally, to my own speaking position as a diasporic intellectual.
Rey Chow’s (1993) unorthodox conception of ‘writing diaspora’ is of particular
pertinence here. For Chow, the intellectualization of the diasporic condition is not
an occasion for the affirmation of ‘roots’, but on the contrary, a process which
enables a critical questioning of the powerful discourse of roots. Chow writes
specifically about the situation of Hong Kong around the time of its handover to
China, where, she observes, ‘one has the feeling that the actual social antagonisms
separating China and Hong Kong . . . are often overwritten with the myth of
consanguinity’ (ibid.: 24), the myth of a shared, primordial Chineseness. In this
respect, as I have already argued in Chapter 2, claims to Chineseness as the a priori
reason for loyalty and solidarity can act as a form of symbolic violence which narrows
the basis for political agency to that of blood and race. A similar reductionism
can be observed in the global Huaren embrace of the Indonesian Chinese cause
as integral to their own. The diasporic intellectual’s task would be to work against
such reductionism and, in Chow’s words, ‘to set up a discourse that cuts across
some of our new “solidarities” by juxtaposing a range of cultural contradictions that
make us rethink the currently dominant conceptualizations of the solidarities
themselves’ (ibid.). It is such an ‘ambivalent’ discourse that I have tried to develop
in this chapter.
At stake here then is what R. Radhakrishnan (1987: 203) refers to as ‘the
representative and representational connection between theory and constituency.’
Problematizing the positionality of what he calls the ‘ethnic theorist’, he points to
‘the paradox’ that ‘whereas the intellectual perceives theory to be an effective
intervention on behalf of ethnicity, the people/masses that are the constituency
are deeply skeptical and even hostile to the agency of the theorist’ (ibid.: 202).
This hostility amounts to the same anti-hybridity stance adopted by critics such
as Hutnyk and Friedman who, claiming rather superciliously to speak on behalf of
the people/masses, argue that hybridity is both elitist and politically toothless. But
as I have indicated above, hybridity is not only crucial for the conduct of ordinary

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