Page 96 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

UNDOING DIASPORA

Indeed, Wang is acutely aware of the pressure brought about by this emphasis
on proliferating diversity, predicting that:

the single word, Chinese, will be less and less able to convey a reality that
continues to become more pluralistic. We need more words, each with the
necessary adjectives to qualify and identify who exactly we are describing.
We need them all to capture the richness and variety of the hundreds
of Chinese communities that can now be found.
(Wang 1999: 16)

Unlike Anderson (1998), however, Wang does not go so far as problematizing the
use of the term ‘Chinese’ as such. And yet precisely in light of the pluralization
of diaspora advocated by Wang it is instructive to reiterate Anderson’s disturbing
query: why would ‘Chinese’ who happened to end up in the most far-flung corners
of the world – Jamaica, Hungary, or South Africa – still count as Chinese, even
if they are now citizens of those nation–states? What makes them still Chinese and
when, if ever, can or do they stop being Chinese? This question drives us right into
the question of the border: the boundary between ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’
which, as we have seen above, is liable to manipulation and redefinition, moulded
from soft to hard.

Undoing ‘(the) Chinese’

What I am trying to get at is this: not only the word diaspora needs to be
problematized, but also the word ‘Chinese’. While Wang’s concern focuses on the
need to diffuse the China-centredness of Chinese overseas (even though ‘China’
remains inevitably central to the imagining of the diaspora, the imaginary homeland
that ultimately binds the diaspora together symbolically), Anderson’s question
points to the need for a serious examination of the outer border of the diaspora,
that shifty, peripheral area where ‘Chinese’ transmutes into ‘non-Chinese’. Of
course, this very image of core and periphery captures the central hierarchy that is
key to the transnational nationalist imagination which carries dominant renderings
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of the Chinese diaspora. Take, for example, this visual resprentation of the Chinese
diaspora in the Encyclopedia of the Chinese overseas, which displays all the paradoxes
of the diasporic imagination I have discussed here (see Figure 4.1).
The centrality of China and Chinese within China is dramatically represented in
Figure 4.1, with Taiwan and Hong Kong slightly decentred. The Encyclopedia
deals mainly with those in circle C. The definition of this group is quite compre-
hensive:

[it] encompasses those unequivocally identified as ‘overseas Chinese’
(or ‘Chinese overseas’). Examples of these are the so-called ‘hyphenated’
Chinese: Sino-Thais, Chinese Americans, and so on; people who are
of Chinese descent but whose non-Chinese citizenship and political

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