Page 99 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

negotiate their differences if they are to avoid war. The result, after many centuries
of contact history, is a throroughly hybridized world where boundaries have
become utterly porous, even though they are artificially maintained. As Garcia
Canclini asserts:

It is not possible to say where the British end and where the colonies
begin, where the Spanish end and the Latin Americans begin, where Latin
Americans begin and where the indigenous do. None of these groups still
remain within their original limits.
(ibid.: 49)

In parallel, we can say that centuries of global Chinese migrations have inevitably
led to a blurring of the original limits of ‘the Chinese’: it is no longer possible
to say with any certainty where the Chinese end and the non-Chinese begin.
Indeed, the very attempt to draw such a line would amount to a form of discursive
reductionism, if not symbolic violence, which disparages the long history of
profound imbrication of Chinese peoples in the world as they have dispersed
themselves all over the globe. Obviously ‘(non-)Chinese’, here, is to be defined
in more than strictly biological terms, not just as ‘race’ with all its complicated
connotations (see Chapter 2), but in cultural terms, in terms of the meanings and
practices that we have over the centuries come to think of as what sets ‘Chinese’
culture apart from others. Wherever notionally Chinese communities and indi-
viduals routinely enter into relations with others, live and work together with
‘non-Chinese’, processes of hybridization are set in motion which inevitably
transform everyone involved. It is in these border zones that the fuzziness of
the identity line, the fundamental uncertainty about where the Chinese end and
the non-Chinese begin(s), can be best recognized and empirically examined.

Hybridity and Chineseness in the global city
In methodological terms, this means an interesting shift of our focus back to the
space of the territorial nation–state, or more precisely, to the physical space of
territorial co-presence. In this era of globalization, nation–states are no longer the
enclosed beacons of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Indeed, the very proliferation
of diasporas in the past century or so has thoroughly undermined the nineteenth-
century apartheid fantasies of ‘a place for each “race”’ so favoured by nationalists
(Cohen 1997: 196). Instead, many nation–states today, especially those which are
destination points for the mass migrations of the past century or so, are undergoing
a process of what Kobena Mercer (2000: 234) calls ‘multicultural normalization’
– a massive process of social transformation which makes it increasingly more
appropriate for nation–states to be described as multicultural states, consisting of
many different, overlapping and intertwined groups and identities with multiple
loyalties and attachments, exchanges and interactions both within and across the
border.

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