On Not Speaking Chinese

Living Between Asia and the West

Ien Ang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134512928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Ang's discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness' in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia' and `the West' at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness' in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese' with `Asian' identity. Ang then turns to `the West', exploring the paradox of Australia's identity as a `Western' country in the Asian region, and tracing Australia's uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia' and `the West' to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between', arguing for a theorising not of `difference' but of `togetherness' in contemporary societies.

PART I

BEYOND ASIA

Deconstructing Diaspora

1

ON NOT SPEAKING CHINESE

Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity

No ancestors, no identity.

(Chinese saying)

The world is what it is; men [sic] who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

(V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979)

The first time I went to China, I went for one day only. I crossed the border by speedboat from Hong Kong, where I had booked for a daytrip to Shenszhen and Guangzhou – the so-called New Economic Zone – with a local tourist company. ‘This is the most well-off part of China. Further north and inland it is much worse,’ the arrogant Hong Kong guide warned. It was, of course, the arrogance of advanced capitalism. Our group of twelve consisted mainly of white, Western tourists – and me. I didn’t have the courage to go on my own since I don’t speak any Chinese, not even one of the dialects. But I had to go, I had no choice. It was (like) an imposed pilgrimage.

‘China’, of course, usually refers to the People’s Republic of China, or more generically, ‘mainland China’. This China continues to speak to the world’s imagination – for its sheer vastness, its huge population, its relative inaccessibility, its fascinating history and culture, its idiosyncratic embrace of communism, all of which amounts to its awesome difference. This China also irritates, precisely because its stubborn difference cannot be disregarded, if only because the forces of transnational capitalism are only too keen to finally exploit this enormous market of more than a billion people. Arguably this was one of the more cynical reasons for the moral high ground from which the West displayed its outrage at the crushing of the students’ protests at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, discourses of democracy and human rights notwithstanding.

My one-day visit occurred nine months after those dramatic events in Beijing. At the border we were joined by a new guide, a 27-year-old woman from Bejing, Lan-lan, who spoke English in a way that revealed a ‘typically Chinese’ commitment to learn: eager, diligent, studious. It was clear that English is her entry to the world at large (that is, the world outside China), just as being a tourist guide means access to communication and exchange with foreigners. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, as Lan-lan told us, that it is very difficult for young Chinese people to become tourist guides (they must pass a huge number of exams and other selection procedures): after all, these guides are the ones given the responsibility of presenting and explaining China to foreign visitors. International tourism emphasizes and reinforces the porousness of borders and is thus potentially dangerous for a closed society like China which nevertheless, paradoxically, needs and promotes tourism as an important economic resource in the age of globalization.

How Lan-lan presented and explained China to us, however, was undoubtedly not meant for the ears of government officials. Obviously aware that we all had the political events of the previous year in mind, she spontaneously started to intersperse the usual touristic information with criticism of the current communist government. ‘The people know what happened last year at Tiananmen Square,’ she said as if to reassure us, ‘and they don’t approve. They are behind the students. They want more freedom and democracy. We don’t talk about this in public, but we do among friends.’ She told us these things so insistently, apparently convinced that it was what we wanted to hear. In other words, in her own way she did what she was officially supposed to do: serving up what she deemed to be the most favourable image of China to significant others – that is, Westerners.¹

But at the same time it was clear that she spoke as a Chinese. She would typically begin her sentences with ‘We Chinese . . . ’ or ‘Here in China we . . . ’ Despite her political criticism, then, her identification with China and Chineseness was by no means in doubt. On the contrary, voicing criticism of the system through a discourse that she knew would appeal to Western interlocutors, seemed only to strengthen her sense of Chinese identity. It was almost painful for me to see how Lan-lan’s attempt to promote ‘China’ could only be accomplished by surrendering to the rhetorical perspective of the Western other. It was not the content of the criticism she expounded that I was concerned about. What upset me was the way in which it seemed necessary for Lan-lan to take up a defensive position, a position in need of constant self-explanation, in relation to a West that can luxuriate in its own taken-for-granted superiority. My pain stemmed from my ambivalence: I refused to be lumped together with the (other) Westerners, but I couldn’t fully identify with Lan-lan either.

We were served a lunch in a huge, rather expensive-looking restaurant, complete with fake Chinese temple and a pond with lotus flowers in the garden, undoubtedly designed with pleasing international visitors in mind, but paradoxically only preposterous in its stereotypicality. All twelve of us, members of the tourist group, were seated around a typically Chinese round table. Lan-lan did not join us, and I think I know why. The food we were served was obviously the kind of Chinese food that was adapted to European taste: familiar, rather bland dishes (except for the delicious crispy duck skin), not the ‘authentic’ Cantonese delicacies I was subconsciously looking forward to now that I was in China. (Wrong assumption, of course: you have to be in rich, decadent, colonial capitalist Hong Kong for that, so I found out. These were the last years before the impending ‘handover’ in 1997.) And we did not get bowl and chopsticks, but a plate with spoon and fork. I was shocked, even though my chopstick competence is not very great. An instant sense of alienation took hold of me. Part of me wanted to leave immediately, wanted to scream out loud that I didn’t belong to the group I was with, but another part of me felt compelled to take Lan-lan’s place as tourist guide while she was not with us, to explain, as best as I could, to my fellow tourists what the food was all about. I realized how mistaken I was to assume, since there seems to be a Chinese restaurant in virtually every corner of the world, that ‘everybody knows Chinese food’. For my table companions the unfamiliarity of the experience prevailed, the anxious excitement of trying out something new (although they predictably found the duck skin ‘too greasy’, of course, the kind of complaint about Chinese food that I have heard so often from Europeans). Their pleasure in undertaking this one day of ‘China’ was the pleasure of the exotic.

But it was my first time in China too, and while I did not quite have the freedom to see this country as exotic because I have always had to see it as somehow my country, even if only in my imagination, I repeatedly found myself looking at this minute piece of ‘China’ through the tourists’ eyes: reacting with a mixture of shame and disgust at the ‘thirdworldiness’ of what we saw, and with amazement and humane wonder at the peculiarities of Chinese resilience that we encountered. I felt captured in-between: I felt like wanting to protect China from too harsh judgements which I imagined my fellow travellers would pass on it, but at the same time I felt a rather irrational anger towards China itself – at its ‘backwardness’, its unworldliness, the seemingly naïve way in which it tried to woo Western tourists. I said goodbye to Lan-lan and was hoping that she would say something personal to me, an acknowledgement of affinity of some sort, but she didn’t.

Identity politics

I am recounting this story for a number of reasons. First of all, it is my way of apologizing to you that this text you are reading is written in English, not in Chinese. Perhaps the very fact that I feel like apologizing is interesting in itself. Throughout my life, I have been implicitly or explicitly categorized, willy-nilly, as an ‘overseas Chinese’ (hua qiao). I look Chinese. Why, then, don’t I speak Chinese? I have had to explain this embarrassment countless times, so I might just as well do it here too, even though I might run the risk, in being ‘autobiographical’, of coming over as self-indulgent or narcissistic, of resorting to personal experience as a privileged source of authority, uncontrollable and therefore unamendable to others. However, let me just use this occasion to shelter myself under the authority of Stuart Hall (1992: 277): ‘Autobiography is usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity. But in order not to be authoritative, I’ve got to speak autobiographically.’ If, as Janet Gunn (1982: 8) has put it, autobiography is not conceived as ‘the private act of a self writing’ but as ‘the cultural act of a self reading’, then what is at stake in autobiographical discourse is not a question of the subject’s authentic ‘me’, but one of the subject’s location in a world through an active interpretation of experiences that one calls one’s own in particular, ‘worldly’ contexts, that is to say, a reflexive positioning of oneself in history and culture. In this respect, I would like to consider autobiography as a more or less deliberate, rhetorical construction of a ‘self’ for public, not private purposes: the displayed self is a strategically fabricated performance, one which stages a useful identity, an identity which can be put to work. It is the quality of that usefulness which determines the politics of autobiographical discourse. In other words, what is the identity being put forward for?)

So I am aware that in speaking about how it is that I don’t speak Chinese, while still for the occasion identifying with being, and presenting myself as, an ‘Overseas Chinese’, I am committing a political act. I care to say, however, that it is not my intention to just carve out a new niche in what Elspeth Probyn (1992: 502) somewhat ironically calls ‘the star-coded politics of identity’, although I should confess that there is considerable, almost malicious pleasure in the flaunting of my own ‘difference’ for critical intellectual purposes. But I hope to get away with this self-empowering indulgence, this exploitation of my ethnic privilege, by moving beyond the particulars of my mundane individual existence. Stuart Hall (1990: 236–7) has proposed a theorization of identity as ‘a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak’. To put it differently, the politics of self-(re)presentation as Hall sees it resides not in the establishment of an identity per se, full fledged and definitive, but in its use as a strategy to open up avenues for new speaking trajectories, the articulation of new lines of theorizing. Thus, what I hope to substantiate in staging my ‘Chineseness’ here – or better, my (troubled) relationship to Chineseness – is precisely the notion of precariousness of identity which has preoccupied cultural studies for some time now. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990: 60) has noted, the practice of ‘speaking as’ (e.g. as a woman, an Indian, a Chinese) always involves a distancing from oneself, as one’s subjectivity is never fully steeped in the modality of the speaking position one inhabits at any one moment. My autobiographic tales of Chineseness are meant to illuminate the very difficulty of constructing a position from which I can speak as an (Overseas) Chinese, and therefore the indeterminacy of Chineseness as a signifier for identity.

At the same time, however, I want to mobilize the autobiographic – i.e. the narrating of life as lived, thereby rescuing notions of ‘experience’ and ‘emotion’ for cultural theorizing² – in order to critique the formalist, post-structuralist tendency to overgeneralize the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented and deterritorialized subjectivity. Such, what James Clifford (1992) has dubbed ‘nomadology’, only serves to decontextualize and flatten out ‘difference’, as if ‘we’ were all in fundamentally similar ways always-already travellers in the same postmodern universe, the only difference residing in the different itineraries we undertake. Epistemologically, such a gross universalization of the metaphor of ‘travel’ runs the danger of reifying, at a conveniently abstract level, the infinite and permanent flux in subject formation, thereby privileging an abstract, depoliticized, and internally undifferentiated notion of ‘difference’ (Mani 1992). Against this tendency, which paradoxically only leads to a complacent indifference toward real differences, I would like to stress the importance for cultural studies to keep paying attention to the particular historical conditions and the specific trajectories through which actual social subjects become incommensurably different and similar. That is to say, in the midst of the postmodern flux of nomadic subjectivities we need to recognize the continuing and continuous operation of ‘fixing’ performed by the categories of race and ethnicity, as well as class, gender, geography, etc. on the formation of ‘identity’, although it is never possible, as determinist theories would have it, to decide ahead of time how such markers of difference will inscribe their salience and effectivity in the course of concrete histories, in the context of specific social, cultural and political conjunctures. To be more specific, it is some of the peculiarities of the operative dynamics of ‘Chineseness’ as a racial and ethnic category which I would like to highlight here. What I would like to propose is that Chineseness is a category whose meanings are not fixed and pregiven, but constantly renegotiated and rearticulated, both inside and outside China.

But this brings me also to the limits of the polysemy of Chineseness. These limits are contained in the idea of diaspora, the condition of a ‘people’ dispersed throughout the world, by force or by choice. Diasporas are transnational, spatially and temporally sprawling sociocultural formations of people, creating imagined communities whose blurred and fluctuating boundaries are sustained by real and/or symbolic ties to some original ‘homeland’. As the editors of Public Culture have put it, ‘diasporas always leave a trail of collective memory about another place and time and create new maps of desire and of attachment’ (1989: 1). It is the myth of the (lost or idealized) homeland, the object of both collective memory and of desire and attachment, which is constitutive to diasporas, and which ultimately confines and constrains the nomadism of the diasporic subject. In the rest of this chapter, I will describe some moments of how this pressure toward diasporic identification with the mythic homeland took place in my own life. A curious example occurred to me when I first travelled to Taiwan – a country with which I do not have any biographical or familial connection. However, as a result of the Chinese ius sanguinis which is still in force in Taiwan, I found myself being automatically positioned, rather absurdly, as a potential national citizen of this country, that is to say, as a Chinese national subject.

In the end, what I hope to unravel is some of the possibilities and problems of the cultural politics of diaspora. But this, too, cannot be done in general terms: not only is the situation different for different diasporas (Jewish, African, Indian, Chinese, and so on), there are also multiple differences within each diasporic group. For the moment, therefore, I can only speak from my own perspective; in the chapters that follow I will elaborate in more general terms on the complexities of Chinese diaspora politics.

Colonial entanglements

I was born in postcolonial Indonesia into a middle-class, peranakan Chinese family. The peranakans are people of Chinese descent who are born and bred in South-East Asia,³ in contrast to the totok Chinese, who arrived from China much later and generally had much closer personal and cultural ties with the ancestral homeland.⁴ The status of the peranakans as ‘Chinese’ has always been somewhat ambiguous. Having settled as traders and craftsmen in South-East Asia long before the Europeans did – specifically the Dutch in the case of the Indonesian archipelago – they tended to have lost many of the cultural features usually attributed to the Chinese, including everyday practices related to food, dress and language. Most peranakans lost their command over the Chinese language a long time ago and actually spoke their own brand of Malay, a sign of their intensive mixing, at least partially, with the locals. This orientation toward the newly adopted place of residence was partly induced by their exclusion from the homeland by an Imperial Decree of China, dating from the early eighteenth century, which formally prohibited Chinese from leaving and re-entering China: after 1726 Chinese subjects who settled abroad would face the death penalty if they returned (FitzGerald 1975: 5; Suryadinata 1975: 86). This policy only changed with the weakening of the Qing dynasty at the end of the nineteenth century, which prompted a mass emigration from China, and signalled the arrival of the totoks in Indonesia.

However, so the history books tell me, even among the peranakans a sense of separateness prevailed throughout the centuries. A sense of ‘ethnic naturalism’ seems to have been at work here, for which I have not found a satisfactory explanation so far: why is it that these early Chinese traders and merchants still maintained their sense of Chineseness? This is something that the history books do not tell me. But it does seem clear that the construction of the peranakan Chinese as a separate ethnic group was reinforced considerably by the divide-and-rule policies of Dutch colonialism. Dubbed ‘foreign Orientals’ by the Dutch colonizers, Chinese people in Indonesia – both peranakans and totoks – were subject to forms of surveillance and control which set them apart from both the Europeans and Eurasians in the colony, on the one hand, and from the indigenous locals, on the other. For example, the Dutch enforced increasingly strict pass and zoning systems on the Chinese in the last decades of the nineteenth century, requiring them to apply for visas whenever they wanted to travel outside their neighbourhoods. At the same time, those neighbourhoods could only be established in strict districts, separate residential areas for Chinese (Williams 1960: 27–33).⁵ Arguably, the widespread resentment caused by such policies of apartheid accounted for the initial success of the pan-Chinese nationalist movement which emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this period diverse and dispersed Chinese groups (Hokkiens, Hakkas, Cantonese, as well as ethnic Chinese from different class and religious backgrounds) were mobilized to transform their self-consciousness into one of membership in the greater ‘imagined community’ of a unified pan-Chinese nation – a politicization which was also a response to the imperialist assault on China, the homeland, in the late 1800s. According to Lea Williams (1960), Overseas Chinese Nationalism was the only possible way for Chinese at that time to better their collective conditions as a mino...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Between Asia and the West (In complicated entanglement)
• Beyond Asia Deconstructing Diaspora
• On Not Speaking Chinese Diasporic identifications and postmodern ethnicity
• Can One Say no to Chineseness? Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm
• Indonesia on my Mind Diaspora, the Internet and the struggle for hybridity
• Undoing Diaspora Questioning Global Chineseness in the era of globalization
• Beyond the West Negotiating Multiculturalism
• Multiculturalism in Crisis The new politics of race and national identity in Australia
• Asians in Australia A contradiction in terms?
• Racial/Spatial Anxiety ‘Asia' in the psycho-geography of Australian whiteness
• The Curse of the Smile Ambivalence and the ‘Asian' woman in Australian multiculturalism
• Identity Blues Rescuing cosmopolitanism in the era of globalization
• Beyond Identity Living Hybridities
• Local/Global Negotiations Doing cultural studies at the crossroads
• I'm a Feminist But … ‘Other' women and postnational identities
• Conclusion Together-in-difference (The uses and abuses of hybridity)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index