Page 9 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

PREFACE

In the past decade, identity politics has also been extremely salient for me in
my newly adopted country, Australia. As a person of Chinese background I became
identified as ‘Asian’ in a white country which has come to define itself increasingly
as ‘multicultural’. But while I am of Chinese descent, I was born in Indonesia and
grew up in the Netherlands, before relocating to Australia as an adult. Coming
from Europe to this part of the world, I did feel somehow reconnected with ‘Asia’,
but only obliquely. The plane flew over my country of birth but landed thousands
of kilometres further south, in the only corner of the ‘Western’ world which has
ever imagined itself as ‘part of Asia’. Identity politics – including that of nations –
can take strange turns!
To a certain extent then, any identity is always mistaken, and this may be taken
as the overall motto of this book. My personal biographical trajectory compels me
to identify myself neither as fully ‘Asian’ nor as completely ‘Western’. It is from this
hybrid point of view – the ambiguous position of neither/nor, or both/and – that
this book has been written. It is also from this point of view that I argue beyond
identity and difference toward a more dynamic concern for togetherness-in-
difference – a crucial issue for cultural politics in the twenty-first century.

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