Page 85 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

everyday life in situations of complicated entanglement, it is also widely practised
by the people/masses – against the grain of imposed fixed identities. The diasporic
intellectual needs to hold on to her detached ambivalence, too often dismissed as
a failure of solidarity, as a necessary stance to go beyond the primordialist truisms
and passions of diasporic ethnicity as it is promoted in dominant discourse – a
discourse which, as this chapter has shown, is being globalized in a dramatic fashion
through the new networks of cyberspace.
Which leads me to conclude that if I am a diasporic intellectual – and I am
certainly not always one – then my diasporic reference point, my imaginary ‘home’,
cannot be ‘China’; it has to be ‘Indonesia’. But my position as an Indonesian
diasporic intellectual is necessarily ambivalent and double-edged, always already
steeped in hybridity. In pointing to the social and political contradictions condensed
within the valorization of diaspora, we can be guided by Zygmunt Bauman’s (1993:
245) ‘postmodern wisdom’ that ‘there are problems in human and social life with
no good solutions, twisted trajectories that cannot be straightened up, . . . moral
agonies which no reason-dictated recipes can soothe, let alone cure’. Acting on this
wisdom is the wisdom of hybridity.

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