To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity

Author(s): Ien Ang

Source: Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1993), pp. 1-17
Published by: Brill
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24491642
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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese:
Diaspora, Culture
and Postmodern Ethnicity*
Ien Ang
Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia

"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)

I only went to China once, for one day only. I crossed the border by speedboat from
Hong Kong, where I had booked for a daytrip to Shenzhen 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 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 embracement of communism, all
of which amount 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 Beijing, Lan
lan, who spoke English in a way that revealed a "typically Chinese" commitment to

* A version of this paper was first presented as "On not speaking Chinese: Diasporic identifications and
postmodern ethnicity" at the symposium on "Trajectories: Towards Internationalist Cultural Studies",
held inTaipai, Taiwan, in July 1992. A Chinese translation of this paper was published as "Bu hui shuo
Zhongguo hua: lun sanjuzuyi zhi shenfen rentong yu houxiandai zhi zhongzuxing", translated by Shi
Yiming in Zhongivai wenxue [Chung Wai Literary Monthly], vol. 21, no. 7, December 1992, pp. 48-69. J

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2 • Southeast Asian journal of Social Science

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 a tourist guide (they must pass through 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 the 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.
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 year before 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.
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.1 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 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 about a typically Chinese roundtable. 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: you have to be in
rich, decadent, capitalist Hong Kong for that, so I found out.) And we did not get
bowl and chopsticks, but a plate with spoon and fork. I was shocked, even though my
chop-stick 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

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity • 3

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 is 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 mind's eye, 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 'thirdworldliness" 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 to it, but at the same time I felt a
rather irrational anger towards China itself—at its "backwardness", its unworldliness,
the seemingly naive 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.

I am recounting this story for a number of reasons. First of all, it is my way of

apologizing to you that I am speaking here 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
qiaö). 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: "Autobiography is
usually thought of as seizing the authority of authenticity. But in order not to be
authoritative, I've got to speak autobiographically." (1992: 277) If, as Janet Gunn has
put it, autobiography is not conceived as "the private act of a self writing" but as
"the cultural act of a self reading" (1982: 8), then what is at stake in autobiographical
discourse is not a question of the subject's authentic "me", but a question of the
subject's location in a world through an active interpretation of experiences that one
calls one's own in particular, "worldly" contexts, (Gunn, 1982: 23) that is to say, a
willful 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.

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4 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

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 dismissively calls "the
star-coded politics of identity" (1992: 502) 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 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 has noted, the practice of "speaking as" (e.g. as a
woman, an Indian, a Chinese) always involves a distancing from oneself since one's
subjectivity is never fully steeped in the modality of the speaking position one
inhabits at any one moment (Spivak, 1990:60).2 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 theorizing (Steedman, 1986) in order to critique the formalist, poststructuralist
tendency to overgeneralize the global currency of so-called nomadic, fragmented and
deterritorialized subjectivity. Such nomadology, as James Clifford (1992) has dubbed
it, 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 foregrounding what Lata Mani calls an abstract,
depoliticized, and internally undifferentiated notion of "difference". (Mani, 1992:
392-3) 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

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern- Ethtiicity • 5

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 (1989: 1)
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". 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 essay, I will
describe some moments of how this pressure toward diasporic identification with the
mythic homeland took place in my own life. 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.

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 Southeast
Asia,3 in contrast with 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 Southeast 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. (Suryadinata, 1975: 86; Fitzgerald, 1975: 5) 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

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6 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

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 subjected to forms of surveillance and contro
which set them apart from both the Europeans and Eurasians in the colony on the on
hand, and from the indigenous locals on the other. For example, increasingly strict
pass and zoning systems were enforced by the Dutch on the Chinese in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, requiring them to apply for visas whenever they
wanted to travel outside of their neighbourhoods, while 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 nineties. According to Lea
Williams, Overseas Chinese Nationalism was the only possible way for Chinese at
that time to better their collective conditions as a minority population in the Netherlands
Indies. However, animosities and cultural differences continued to divide Totoks and
Peranakans. The Peranakans only partly responded to calls for their resinification,
predominantly in the form of education in Chinese language, values and customs.
This made the Totoks regard the Peranakan Chinese as "unpatriotic" and behave like
"non-Chinese" (Suryadinata, 1975: 94).
Peranakan identity then is a thoroughly hybrid identity. In the period before
World War II, Chinese Malay (bahasa Melayu Tionghoa) was Malay in its basic structure,
but Hokkien and Dutch terms were extensively used (Suryadinata, 1975: 94). My
grandmother was sent to a Dutch-Chinese school in Batavia, but her diary, whil
mainly written in Dutch, is interspersed with Malay words and Chinese characters I
can't read. In the late twenties, encouraged by the Chinese nationalist mood of the
day, my grandfather decided to go "back" to the homeland and set up shop there,
only to realize that the mainland Chinese no longer saw him as "one of them". Upon
his return to Indonesia, he sent his daughters (my mother and her sister) to study in
the Netherlands. At the same time other Peranakans were of the opinion that "it was
in the interests of Peranakan Chinese to side with Indonesians rather than with the
Dutch" (Suryadinata, 1975: 57). It is not uncommon for observers to describe the
Peranakan Chinese situation in the pre-World War II period as one caught "between
three worlds". Some more wealthy Peranakan families invested in the uncertain
future by sending one child to a Dutch school, another to a Chinese one, and a third to
a Malay school (Blussé, 1989:172).

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity • 7

However, all this changed when Dutch colonialism was finally defeated after
World War II. Those who were previously the ruled in the power structure, the
indigenous Indonesians, were now the rulers. Under these new circumstances, most
Peranakans, including my parents, chose to become Indonesian citizens, although
they remained ethnic Chinese. But it was a Chineseness which for political reasons
was not allowed to be cultivated. Indonesian nationalism has always tended to define
the Indonesian nation as comprising only the indigenous peoples of the islands,
excluding the Chinese, and other "non-natives" such as the Arabs, who were considered
an "alien minority" (Suryadinata, 1975: 45). To this day the pressure on the Chinese
minority to assimilate, to erase as many traces of Chineseness as possible, has been
very strong in Indonesia; for example, in the late sixties my uncle, who chose to stay
and live in Indonesia, Indonesianized his surname into Angka.
It would be too easy, however, to condemn such assimilation policies as just
the result of ordinary racism on the Indonesians' part. This is a difficult point as I am
implicated in the politics of memory here. How can I know "what happened" in the
past except through the stories I hear and read? And the stories don't cohere: they are
a mixture of stories of oppression and opportunism. I was told stories about
discrimination, about how the Indonesians didn't like "us" Chinese because "we"
were more well-off (and often by implication: because "we" worked harder). But I
also heard stories about how the Chinese exploited the indigenous Indonesians: how,
under the rule of the Dutch, the Chinese felt safe because the Dutch would protect
them from the ire of the Indonesians. In retrospect, I am not interested in reconstructing
or fabricating a "truth" which would necessarily put the Chinese in an unambiguously
favourable light, or in the position of victim. But neither am I interested in accusations
such as the one made by a self-declared, morally superior anti-racist in the Netherlands
a few years ago: "Your parents were collaborators." History, of course, is always
ambiguous, always messy, and people remember — and therefore construct — the
past in ways that reflect their present need for meaning. I am not exempt from this
process. So, baggaged with my intellectual capital, I resort to Benedict Anderson's
(1983) "explanation" of the origins of Indonesian nationalism: it was by the separating
out of the "foreign Orientals" and the "natives" in the colonial administration that a
space was opened up for the latter, treated as lowest of the low by the Dutch, to
develop a national consciousness which excluded the former.
My mother, who" spent part of her youth in China (as a result of my grandfather's
brief romance with the homeland) and speaks and writes Chinese fluently, carefully
avoided to pass on this knowledge to me. So I was cut off from this immense source of
cultural capital; instead, I learned to express myself in bahasa Indonesia. Still, it was in
my early youth in Indonesia that I was first yelled at, "Why don't you go back to your
own country?" — a remark all too familiar to members of immigrant minorities
anywhere in world. Trouble was, to my own best knowledge as a ten-year old,
Indonesia was my own country. In Sukarno's Indonesia (1945-1965) all schoolchildren
were heavily exposed to the discourses and rituals of Indonesian nationalism (as is
the case in all nations having just gained independence from colonial rule), and
during that time the singing of Indonesia Merdeka (the nation's anthem) did make me
feel intensely and proudly Indonesian. Therefore, to be told — mostly by Javanese
kids — that I actually didn't belong there but in a faraway, abstract, and somewhat
frightening place called China, was terribly confusing, disturbing, and utterly

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8 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

unacceptable. I silently rebelled, I didn't want to be Chinese. To be sure, this is the

kind of denial which is the inner drive underpinning the urge toward assimilation.
That is to say, cultural assimilation is not only and not always an official policy forced
and imposed by host countries upon their non-native minorities; there is also among
many members of minority populations themselves a certain desire to assimilate, a
longing for fitting in rather than standing out, even though this desire is often at the
same time contradicted by an incapability or refusal to adjust and adapt.
Chineseness then, at that time, to me was an imposed identity, one that I
desperately wanted to get rid of. It is therefore rather ironic that it was precisely our
Chinese ethnicity which made my parents decide to leave Indonesia for the Netherlands
in 1966, as a result of the rising ethnic tensions in the country. This experience in itself
then was a sign of the inescapability of my own Chineseness, inscribed as it was on
the very surface of my body, much like what Frantz Fanon (1970) has called the
"corporeal malediction" of the fact of his blackness. The "corporeal malediction" of
Chineseness, of course, relates to the more general "fact of yellowness", characterized
amongst others by those famous "slanted eyes". During the Los Angeles "riots" in
1992 my uncle, who lives there, felt threatened because, as he said, he could be
mistaken for a Korean. However, I should point to the odd trajectories of labelling
that are involved even here: when I was in Hong Kong my (Hong Kong Chinese) host
assured me that people wouldn't expect me to be able to speak Chinese because I
would surely be mistaken for a Filipina. That is to say, racial categories obviously do
not exist outside cultural context, but are thoroughly framed by and within it.
Anyway, in the new country, the former colonizer's country, a new cycle of
forced and voluntary assimilation started all over again. My cherished Indonesian
identity got lost in translation, as it were, as I started a life in a new language.7 In the
Netherlands I quickly learned to speak Dutch, went to a Dutch school and a Dutch
university and for more than two decades long underwent a thorough process of
"Dutchification". However, the artificiality of "national identity", and therefore the
relativeness of any sense of historical truth, was brought home to me forever when
my Dutch history book taught me that Indonesia became independent in 1949. In
Indonesia I had always been led to commemorate 17 August 1945 as Independence
Day. The disparity was technical: Sukarno declared Indonesia's independence in 1945,
but the Dutch only recognized it in 1949, after four years of bloody war. But it's not the
nuances of the facts that matter; what is significant is the way in which nations choose
to construct their collective memories, how they narrate themselves into pride and
glory (Bhabha, 1990). The collision of the two versions of history in my educational
experience may have paved the way for my permanent suspicion toward any self
confident and self-evident "truth" in my later intellectual life. As Salman Rushdie has
remarked, those who have experienced cultural displacement are forced to accept the
provisional nature of all truths, all certainties (Rushdie, 1991:12, emphasis added).
At the level of everyday experience, the fact of my Chineseness confronted me
only occasionally in the Netherlands, for example when passing ten-year old redhaired
boys triumphantly shouting behind my back, while holding the outer ends of their
eyes upwards with their forefingers: "Ching Chong China China", or when, on
holiday in Spain or Italy or Poland, people would not believe that I was "Dutch". The
typical conversation would run like this, as many non-whites in Europe would be
able to testify:

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity • 9

"Where are you from?"

"From Holland."

"No, where are you really from?"

To this usually insistent, repetitive and annoying inquiry into origins, my
standard story has become, "I was born in Indonesia but my ancestors were from
China" — a shorthand (re)presentation of self for convenience's sake. Such incide
were disturbing signals for the impossibility of complete integration (or perhap
"naturalization" is a better term), no matter how much I (pragmatically) strived for
To put it in another way, it is the very question "where are you from" — a question
easily thrown up as the bottomline of cultural identity (thereby equating cultur
identity with national identity) — which is a problem for people like me, as it lac
transparency. Of course, this is a problem shared by millions of people througho
the world today, where migration has become an increasingly common phenomeno
The experience of migration brings with it a shift in perspective: to paraphrase Pa
Gilroy (1990/91), for the migrant it is no longer "where you're from", but "whe
you're at" which forms the point of anchorage. However, so long as the question
"where you're from" prevails over "where you're at" in dominant culture, t
compulsion to explain, the inevitable positioning of yourself as deviant vis-à-
the normal, remains. In other words, the relation between "where you're from" an
"where you're at" is a deeply problematic one. To be sure, it is this very problem
which is constitutive to the idea of diaspora, and for which the idea of diasp
attempts to be a solution. As William Safran has put it, "diaspora consciousness is
intellectualization of an existential condition", (Safran, 1991:87) an existential condit
that becomes understood and reconciled through the myth of a homeland from wh
one is removed but to which one actually belongs. But I would argue that th
solution, at least at the cultural level, is by no means sufficient or unambiguous
effective: in fact, the diasporic imagination itself creates and articulates a number
new problems.
Take, for example, the position of ethnic minorities in western advance
capitalist societies today. In Western Europe, including the Netherlands, issues of
race and ethnicity, now so familiar and almost obligatory to us working with
cultural studies, only slowly became prominent in public debate and concern in t
late seventies or so. Discourses of ethnicity started to proliferate as minorit
communities began to assert themselves in their stated desire to "maintain their
cultural identity". However, such (self-) ethnicization, which is in itself a confirmat
of minority status in white, western culture, can paradoxically serve as an alibi fo
what Rey Chow has called "prescribed 'otherness' " (1991). Thus, "Chinese" identit
becomes confined to essentialist and absolute notions of "Chineseness", the source o
which can only originate from "China", to which the ethnicized "Chinese" subjec
must adhere to acquire the stamp of "authenticity". So it was one day that a self
assured, Dutch, white, middle-class, marxist leftist, asked me, "Do you speak Chines
I said no. "What a fake Chinese you are!", was his only mildly kidding respon
thereby unwittingly but aggressively adopting the disdainful position of judge to s
"real" from "fake" Chinese. In other words, in being defined and categoriz
diasporically, I was found wanting.
"Not speaking Chinese", therefore, has become a personal political issue to me
an existential condition which goes beyond the particularities of an arbitrary perso

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10 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

history. It is a condition that has been hegemonically constructed as a lack, a sign of

loss of "authenticity". This, then, is the reason why I felt compelled to apologize that I
have to speak to you in English, the global lingua franca which is one of the clearest
expressions of the pervasiveness of western hegemony. Yet it is precisely this urge to
apologize which I would now like to question and counter as well. In order to do this,
however, I need to come to terms with my relationship to "Chineseness", the
complexities and contradictions of which were dramatized in the story about my one
day visit to China and my encounter with Lan-lan. It was, of course, a drama borne
precisely out of a diaspora problematic.
The Peranakan Chinese community in the Netherlands, while generally well
integrated in Dutch society, has re-ethnicized itself tremendously in the last decade or
so. Interestingly, it is Chineseness, not Indonesianness which forms the primary focal
point of ethnic identification, especially for the older generation. There are now
Peranakan Chinese associations, sports and entertainment clubs, discussion evenings;
lessons in Chinese language and culture, and special trips to China are being organized.
Over the last five years or so, my parents have built up a large video collection of
films and documentaries about China and China-related subjects, all taped from
television (and it is amazing how often European public television features programmes
about China!). Whenever I visit them these days, I am ensured of a new dose of
audiovisual education in Chineseness, as it were, as we together watch films about
the Yellow River, the Silk Route, on Taoism, Chinese village life, the Great Wall, the
Chinese Red Army, the history of Chinese communism, the Tiananmen Square
massacre, or whatever is available, or otherwise any Chinese feature film that was
recently televised (the Fifth Generation films loom large here), and so on and so on. So
my familiarization with the imputed "homeland", and therefore my emotional
subjection to the homeland myth, has been effected rather informally, through intimate
and special family rituals and practices. In other words, I felt I already "knew" China,
albeit a mythic China, a fetishized China, when I went there for that one day visit.
But this symbolic orientation toward the "homeland" tends to complicate the
problem of identity, as "China" is presented as the cultural/geographical core in
relation to which the "westernized" overseas Chinese is forced to take up a humble
position, even a position of shame and inadequacy over her own "impurity". In this
situation the overseas Chinese is in a no-win situation: s/he is either "too Chinese" or
"not Chinese enough". As Chow has observed, "Chinese from the mainland are
[often felt to be] more 'authentic' than those who are from, say, Taiwan or Hong
Kong, because the latter have been 'Westernized' " (1991: 28-9). But the problem is
exacerbated for more remote members of the Chinese diaspora, say for the Indonesian
Peranakan Chinese or for second-generation Chinese Americans, whose "Chineseness"
is even more diluted and impure.
Of course, this double-bind problem is not unique to migrants of Chinese
descent. In a sense, it enters into the experience of all diasporic peoples living in the
West. What is particular to the Chinese diaspora, however, is the extraordinarily
strong originary pull of the "homeland" as a result of the prominent place of "China"
in the western imagination. The West's fascination with China as a great, Other
civilization began with Marco Polo and remains to this day (MacKerras, 1991). In the
western imagination China cannot be an ordinary country, so that everything
happening there is invested with more than "normal" significance, as most recently

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity »11

testified by the intense and extreme dramatization of the "Tiananmen massacre" in

the western media. There is, in other words, an excess of meaningfulness accorded to
"China"; "China" has often been useful for western thinkers as a symbol, negative or
positive, for that which the West was not. As Zhang Longxi has noted, even Jacques
Derrida, the great debunker of binary oppositions, was seduced to treating the non
phonetic character of the Chinese language as "testimony of a powerful movement of
civilization developing outside of all logocentrism", that is, as the sign of a culture
totally different from what he conceives as western culture (1988: 127). Worse still,
this powerful Othering is mirrored by an equally strong and persistent tendency
within Chinese culture itself to consider itself as unique within the world, exemplified
by the age-old Chinese habit to designate all non-Chinese as "barbarians", "foreign
devils" or "ghosts". This is a form of self-Othering expressed in the famous inward
looking aloofness of Chinese culture recently criticized, within China itself, in the
controversial television series River Elegy, and which I also sensed in Lan-lan's ultimate
insistence, through a paradoxical, assertive defensiveness in relation to the West, on
China's pure Otherness.
In the interlocking of this mutual discursive exclusionism overseas Chinese
people often find themselves inevitably entangled in China's elevated status as
privileged Other to the West, depriving them of an autonomous space to determine
their own trajectories for constructing cultural identity. I recognize Rey Chow's
observation that there is, among many Chinese people, an "obsession with China".
What connects the diaspora with the "homeland" is ultimately an emotional, almost
visceral attachment. The relationship is, to use Amitav Ghosh's term, an epic one
(1989). It is precisely this epic relationship which invests the homeland myth with its
power: it is this epic relationship to "China" which made millions of overseas Chinese
all over the world feel so inescapably and "irrationally" sick and nauseous when the
tanks crushed the students' movement at Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, as if they
felt the humiliation on their own bodies, despite the fact that many, if not most of
them would never think of actually "returning" to this distant "motherland". The
desires, fantasies and sentimentalisms that go into this "obsession with China", says
Chow, should be seen at least in part as "a response to the solicitous calls, dispersed
internationally in multiple ways, to such a [collective, 'Chinese'] identity" (1991: 25).
In other words, the subjective processes of diasporic ethnic identification are often
externally instigated, articulating and confirming a position of subordination in relation
to western hegemony. To be sure, I think that it is this structure of dominance and
subjection which I internalized when I found myself caught between my western co
tourists and Lan-lan •— an impossible position, a position with no means of its own to
assert itself.

The contradictions and complexities in subject positioning that I have tried to

explicate are neatly summed up in the memoirs of Ruth Ho, a Malaysian Peranakan
Chinese woman who grew up in Malacca before World War II. In one chapter of her
book, called On Learning Chinese, she complains about the compulsory lessons in
Chinese that she had to undergo as a young girl:

Mother always felt exceedingly guilty about our language deficiency and tried to
make us study Chinese, that is Mandarin, the national dialect... [But] I suppose
that when I was young there was no motivation to study Chinese ... 'But China

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12 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

was once the greatest and most cultured nation in the world! Weren't you proud
to be Chinese? Wasn't that reason enough to study Chinese?' Many people felt
this way but unfortunately we just didn't feel very Chinese! Today we are
described by one English writer as belonging to 'the sad band of English
educated who cannot speak their own language'. This seems rather unfair to me.
Must we know the language of our forefathers when we have lived in another
country (Malaysia) for many years? Are the descendants of German, Norwegian
and Swedish emigrants to the USA, for instance, expected to know German or
Norwegian or Swedish? Are the descendants of Italian and Greek emigrants to
Australia expected to study Italian and Greek? Of course not, and yet overseas
Chinese are always expected to know Chinese or else they are despised not only
by their fellow Chinese but also by non-Chinese! Perhaps this is due to the great
esteem with which Chinese history, language and culture are universally regarded.
But the European emigrants to the USA and Australia also have a not insignificant
history, language and culture, and they are not criticized when they become
English speaking! (Ho,1975: 97-99)

Ho's comparison with the European immigrants in the USA and Australia is well
taken. Isn't the double standard she refers to an expression of the desire to keep
western culture white? Wouldn't this explain why an English-speaking Chinese is
seen, from a western perspective, as so much more "unnatural" than an English
speaking Norwegian or Italian? From such a perspective, the idea of diaspora serves
as a ploy to keep non-white, non-western elements from fully entering and therefore
contaminating the centre of white, western culture.8 Ho's heartfelt indignation then
should be read as a protest against exclusion through an imposed diasporic
identification in the name of a fetishized and overly idealized "China". It exemplifies
the fact that when the question of "where you're from" threatens to overwhelm the
reality of "where you're at", the idea of diaspora becomes a dispowering rather than
an empowering one, a hindrance to "identity" rather than an enabling principle.

I am not saying here that diasporic identifications are intrinsically oppressive, on the
contrary. It is clear that many members of ethnic minorities derive a sense of joy and
dignity, as well as a sense of (vicarious) belonging from their identification with a
"homeland" which is elsewhere. But this very identification with an imagined "where
you're from" is also often a sign of, and surrender to, a condition of actual
marginalization in the place "where you're at". In his introduction to the launch of the
new journal, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies in 1991, Khachig Tölölyan
defines diasporas as "the exemplary communities of the transnational moment"
which interrogate the privileged homogeneity of the nation-state (Tölölyan, 1991). At
the same time, however, the very fact that ethnic minorities within nation-states are
defining themselves increasingly in diasporic terms, as Tölölyan indicates, raises
some troubling questions about the state of intercultural relations in the world today.
The rise of militant, separatist neo-nationalisms in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture a?id Postmodern Ethnicity • 13

the world signals an intensification of the appeal of ethnic absolutism and exclusionism
which underpin the homeland myth, and which is based on the fantasy of a complete
juncture of "where you're from" and "where you're at".
It is not only that such a fantasy is at odds with the forces of increasing
transnationalization and "globalization" in world economy, politics, and
communications.9 At a more fundamental, cultural level, the fantasmatic vision of a
new world order consisting of hundreds of self-contained, self-identical nations, which
is the ultimate dream of the principle of nationalist universalism, strikes me as a
rather disturbing duplication of the divide-and-rule politics deployed by the colonial
powers to ascertain control and mastery over the subjected. It is against such visions
that the idea of diaspora can play a critical cultural role.
Since diasporas are fundamentally and inevitably transnational in their scope,
always linking the local and the global, the hear and the there, past and present, they
have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of "national
culture" or "national identity" which are firmly rooted in geography and history. But
in order to seize on that potential, diasporas should make the most of their "complex
and flexible positioning ... between host countries and homelands" (Safran, 1991: 95),
as it is precisely that complexity and flexibility which makes out the vitality of
diaspora cultures. In other words, a critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege
neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative
tension between "where you're from" and "where you're at". I emphasize creative
here to foreground the multiperspectival productivity of that position of in-between
ness. The notions of "biculturality" and "double consciousness", often used to describe
this position, hardly do justice to this productivity. Such notions tend to construct the
space of that in-between-ness as an empty space, the space that gets lost in the
cultural translation from one side to the other in the bipolar dichotomy of "where
you're from" and "where you're at". But the productivity I am referring to precisely
fills that space up with new forms of culture at the collision of the two: hybrid cultural
forms borne out of a productive, creative syncretism. This is a practice and spirit of
turning necessity into opportunity, the promise of which is perhaps most eloquently
expressed by Salman Rushdie: "It is normally supposed that something always gets
lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be
gained" (1991:17).
It is by recognizing the irreducible productivity of the syncretic practices of
diaspora cultures that "Not speaking Chinese" will stop being a problem for overseas
Chinese people. "China", the mythic homeland, will then stop being the absolute
norm for "Chineseness" against which all other Chinese cultures of the diaspora are
measured. Instead, "Chineseness" becomes an open signifier which acquires its peculiar
form and content in dialectical junction with the diverse local conditions in which
ethnic Chinese people, including those in Taiwan, construct new, hybrid identities
and communities. Nowhere is this more vigorously evident than in everyday popular
culture. Thus, we have the fortune cookie, a uniquely Chinese-American invention
utterly unknown elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora or, for that matter, in China itself.
In Malaysia one of the culinary attractions is nyonya food, a cuisine developed by the
Peranakan Chinese out of their encounter with local, Malay spices and ingredients. A
few years ago I was at a Caribbean party in Amsterdam full of immigrants from the
Netherlands West Indies; to my surprise the best salsa dancer of the party was a

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14 • Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science

young man of Chinese descent who grew up in Suriname. There I was, facing up to
my previously held prejudice that a Chinese can never become a Latino!
These examples suggest that we need to emphasize the irreducible specificity of
diverse and heterogeneous diasporic identifications. This in turn means that the
"imagined community" of the diaspora itself cannot be envisioned in any unified or
homogeneous way.10 Chinese ethnicity, as a common reference point for this imagined
community, cannot presume the erasure of internal differences and particularities, as
well as disjunctures, as the basis of unity and collective identity. What then is still its
use? Why still identify ourselves as "overseas Chinese" at all? The answer depends
on context: sometimes it is and sometimes it is not useful to stress our Chineseness,
however defined. In other words, the answer is political.
In this thoroughly mixed-up, interdependent, mobile and volatile postmodern
world clinging to a traditional notion of ethnic identity is impossible. Inasmuch as the
stress on ethnicity provides a counterpoint to the most facile forms of postmodernist
nomadology, however, we might have to develop a postmodern notion of ethnicity.
This postmodern ethnicity, however, can no longer be experienced as naturally based
upon tradition and ancestry. Rather, it is experienced as a provisional and partial
"identity" which must be constantly (re)invented and (re)negotiated. In this context,
diasporic identifications with a specific ethnicity (such as "Chineseness") can best be
seen as forms of "strategic essentialism" (Spivak, 1990) which enable diasporic subjects,
not to "return home", but, in the words of Stuart Hall, to "insist that others recognize
that what they have to say comes out of particular histories and cultures and that
everyone speaks from positions within the global distribution of power" (Hall, 1989).
In short, if I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese
by consentT1 When and how is a matter of politics.

Notes

How the political present and future of the People's Republic of China should be judg
in the light of what has come to be known worldwide as the "Tiananmen massacre" i
complex issue, too easily schematized in the complacent West in terms of good and b
heroic students and a villainous communist dictatorship — a schematization that on
enhances feel-good smugness, not nuanced analysis. This is not an issue I would like
gointo (see Wasserstrom and Perry, [1992]). For an engaging and discerning, an
reductionist account of the politics of the 1989 Bejing uprising, based on anthropolog
participant observation, see Chiu, (1991).
For a good example of the use of the autobiographic method for cultural theorising,
Steedman (1986). In his review of Steedman's book, Joseph Bristow states th
"Steedman's work, making ... observations about how the self is situated within th
devices of reading and writing, has a fascination with those moments of interpretat
(or identification) that may, for example, move us to anger or to tears" (Bristow 199
118-9). In more general item this kind of project draws on Raymond Williams's conc
of "structure of feeling": "specifically affective elements of consciousness a
relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as though
practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity"
(Williams, 1977:132).

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 To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture and Postmodern Ethnicity • 15

3 The term peranakan, meaning "children of", is derived from the Indonesian word for
child, anak, which is also the root of, for example, eranak, to give birth. Other terms used
to designate members of this community are baba (for the male), nyonya (married
female) and nona (unmarried female). Significantly, these are all Malay/Indonesian
terms, which are also in use in Malaysia and Singapore.
4 Totok is an Indonesian term meaning "pure blood foreigner". The Peranakans used the
term singkeh to designate this category of Chinese, meaning "new guests".
5 It should be noted that the practices of the Dutch colonisers were particularly oppressive
in this respect. A fundamental principle of British colonialism, universal equality before
the law, was conspicuously absent in the Dutch system. Singapore Chinese under
British rule, for example, were not burdened with hated pass and zoning systems. Such
historical specificities make it impossible to generalise over all Peranakans in the Southeast
Asian region: the different western colonialisms have played a central role in forming
and forging specific Peranakan cultures.
6 This view was expressed, for example, by the Partai Tionghoa Indonesia (the Indonesian
Chinese Party), founded in 1932, which was Indonesia-oriented and identified itself
with Indonesia rather than China or the Netherlands. Suryadinata (1975:57) did not say
how popular this position was.
7 I derive this phrase from Eva Hoffman (1989) whose book tells the story of her own
migration from Poland to Canada.
8 This desire might be at the basis of the ambivalence of western policies and discourses
in relation to immigration: on the one hand there is the demand for the immigrant to
"integrate" if not "assimilate", but on the other hand there is always the denial of the
very possibility of "integration", the insistence on (residual) difference, contained in
"multiculturalisme I cannot expand on this idea here.
9 For a discussion of the paradox between the increasing appeal of nationalism, on the
one hand, and the decline of the significance of the nation-state, on the other, see
Hobsbawm (1990).
10 What is now called "the Chinese diaspora" purported consists of "about 30 million
[ethnic Chinese residing] outside China proper and Taiwan, dispersed in some 130
countries on the 6 continents" (from the brochure for "Loudi-Shenggen: The Legal,
Political, and Economic Status of Chinese in the Diaspora", an International Conference
on Overseas Chinese, which was held in San Francisco in November 1992).
11 This distinction has been made by Werner Sollors (1986).

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