Page 95 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

In today’s diasporic activism, similar tendencies can be detected. Remember,
for example, the Huaren lament that many Chinese-Americans or Chinese-
Canadians ‘know or care little of their counterparts elsewhere’ and the added
militant directive that ‘such ignorance and indifference should be corrected’. To
be sure, the very suggestion that Chinese-Americans should consider any other
‘Chinese’ group elsewhere in the world as their ‘counterparts’ cannot be taken
at face value as a natural and logical demand. It is one instance of the imposition
of fictive kinship which is part and parcel of the production of the Chinese diaspora
as an imagined trasnational community. The claimed need for correction of trans-
national ignorance and indifference only stresses the desire for integrating, if not
unifying the diaspora.
One could object, of course, that unlike nation–states, diasporas do not in general
have the institutional resources to impose their disciplinary power on their
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members: they are, after all, stateless. Furthermore, one could point to the fact
that many people with Chinese ancestry today voluntarily identify with their
Chinese ‘roots’ – a development in sync with the emergence of identity politics and
the rise of multiculturalism, mostly in Western nation–states, especially the United
States. Indeed, novels by Amy Tan and many other Chinese-American writers have
popularized the stories of young and old second-, third- or even fourth generation
Americans with Chinese ancestry who derive profound meaning and joy out of the
rediscovery of their Chinese heritage, often underscored by return visits to China
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the motherland. But these developments only confirm the empirical observation
that the social and discursive production of the Chinese diaspora is in full swing, a
process driven by a passionate identification with and reification of ‘Chineseness’
as a globally relevant marker for identity and difference, and for which ‘China’,
which, as I have discussed in Chapter 2, can be culturally defined as much as
geographically located, forms the centre. The power of the diaspora here is ideo-
logical and emotional rather than institutional: it works through the imagination
(Appadurai 1996a).
We can now return to Wang Gungwu’s unhappiness about the upsurge in the
application of the word diaspora to the overseas Chinese. Wang’s concern focuses
on the danger that the expression ‘Chinese diaspora’, just like the word huaqiao in
earlier times, would create the false image of a single global Chinese community
which would be ultimately loyal to China, to the detriment of the autonomy and
specificity of local Chinese communities in different parts of the world. As Wang
remarks: ‘I have long advocated that the Chinese overseas be studied in the context
of their respective national environments, and taken out of a dominant China
reference point’ (1999: 1). To counter the homogenizing tendencies of ‘diaspora’,
Wang wishes to emphasize the large variety of overseas Chinese experiences, the
real historical effects of the process of dispersal. For Wang, this emphasis on
difference and diversity within the diaspora opens up the perspective of a diasporic
pluralism, one that recognizes that there are ‘many kinds of Chinese’, even ‘many
different Chinese diasporas’ (ibid.: 17), variously settled in and oriented towards
their new countries of residence.

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