InsaneJournal

What I ask myself
OK, so I want to write a post for the 2nd Asian Women Blog Carnival because the theme this time around is Inter/intra/transnationality (i.e. "sourcelanders and hyphenates and diasporas, oh my!", to quote phi in the comments). But I also got some financial services legislation to grapple with, and the deadline is on Monday, and argh my terrible time management skills!

So this isn't going to be poetic, but let's do this. I was thinking about what I wanted to write for this carnival because it is kind of the topic of my heart. I mean, I don't know what I would be if I wasn't a filthy immigrant. But I didn't know what to say; it was like asking a fish to write a dissertation about water -- where do you start? I also didn't want to write a personal history: as deeply interesting as I find these to read, I didn't feel like cutting myself open in that way.

But here's a question that keeps coming up, again and again, and it's an interesting question because it's often so painful to think about, and because it's never the same answer. I'm not sure if there is an answer. The question is this: do we lose something? What do we lose?

I'll pick a hypothetical scenario I read about in the comments to a Racialicious post, though for many people the scenario is the opposite of hypothetical. Say a Chinese girl is adopted by a white American family and brought up in the USA in mainstream white American culture. She doesn't speak any dialect of Chinese; she doesn't eat Chinese food growing up, except for the sort of Chinese takeaway food which American films teach me is a part of American culture; doesn't celebrate Chinese New Year. All her friends are American. Most of them are white. Does she lose something by that? Has she lost something worth losing?

My answer to this would be yes -- note that this is a personal answer and there is no one right answer really, though I do think there are wrong ones -- and my reason is that the world being what it is, that kid is going to face a lot of racism and white privilege growing up. Her whole life, she is going to have to justify her appearance, her eyes and her skin colour. Even her friends and family members may not be able to offer her a refuge from this constant battle, unless they do a hell of a lot of work to understand it. But I'm going to posit that her white family and friends are much like the rest of us: if they've never had any problems with racism then they're going to have difficulty seeing where the problems are coming from; they're going to be uncomfortable when their kid brings it up; they're going to dismiss and derail and hide behind colourblindness.

So if other people are going to see her as Chinese, it seems a shame to me that she doesn't get to enjoy the fun, the enriching parts of being Chinese. If you're going to get get the discrimination -- what happens when other people see you as Chinese -- then you should be able to enjoy the culture as well -- you could call this what happens when you see yourself as Chinese.

But that's not really what I wonder about. Let's transplant the kid. Let's say she grows up in a thriving Chinese community away from China or Hong Kong or Taiwan. Let's say she grows up in Ipoh, or Penang, or Selangor. All her friends are Malaysian. Most of them are Chinese. Because she's been lucky, her racial self-identity is largely painless and uncomplicated -- she's never been the only Chinese person or PoC in the room. Despite the fraught racial politics in her country, her culture is an acknowledged part of the majority culture. She gets two weeks off school for Chinese New Year. She doesn't speak Chinese, though. She's been to China maybe twice in her life -- two weeks spent in the motherland, in total.

Has she lost something?

I have formulated the question in such a vague way. But I don't know how to be more specific. What is lost? Culture? But you can't crystallise culture without killing it; you can't have a definitive definition of what a culture is because it changes and grows. And if you try to define culture it so often leads to defining it in terms of what it is not. (I am thinking of frangipani's wry aside on "we hate gay people" being a common value of all SEAsians here, but I'm sure you can come up with your own examples.)

At the same time, I can't help feeling that something is lost. I wouldn't be the same person if I were a sourcelander, if I didn't have this contested place in the world -- not Malaysian enough, not Chinese enough, definitely not a Westerner. (Does Cephas ever get told that he is not English enough? Probably not. What must that be like? I imagine it to be absolute security. Perhaps an unshakeable knowledge that you deserve your place in the world.) It's interesting being in between, but from this position you can see all the things you can't have or be, and you are able to mourn the loss -- but is it a loss worth mourning?

Here is some personal history, just so it's clearer what I'm talking about. I have scraps of Mandarin and scraps of Hokkien, but I'm not fluent or comfortable speaking Chinese. My first language is English and I'm really good at that. Probably the language I'm next best at is Malay -- I wouldn't call myself fluent, but give me a few months of study/immersion and I'd be OK.

I don't want to give the impression that being Malaysian and being Chinese are mutually exclusive, or that being Chinese and being American are mutually exclusive; I worry that this post is setting up a binary I don't believe in. Of course things are more complicated than that -- you're not just one or the other, you can be both. But I do think you do have to lose something of what you might have been in order to become what you are. The world being what it is, it's difficult to be Chinese as the Chinese from China define it and be 100% American as the Americans define it. That begs the question: why let other people define what you are at all? You shouldn't, of course. It wouldn't fly with me if somebody from China told me I wasn't Chinese. But they'd probably speak Chinese and think Chinese more than me. I don't know if this is just the insecurity of the diasporado speaking, but I feel there's some truth in this -- they'd probably have more of a right to define what being Chinese means. Because my grandparents and great-grandparents left, I don't get to own their stories anymore, not in the same way.

Man, I was going to give a simple clear example to illustrate what I was saying and I got sidetracked in disclaimers. But the disclaimers are important! Let's get back to my example, though. So I don't speak Chinese. And I could speak Chinese -- I have friends who had exactly the same amount of education and exposure as I did and they're fluent. I just suck, basically. But that's just kind of the way I am, and it's also a function of the way I've grown up. I wouldn't speak, I wouldn't even think in precisely the way I do if I had grown up in China.

And I don't regret that. The other day I was sitting in a cafe with my friend P, who is Malaysian Indian, and I leant over the table and said sadly to her, "The person next to me has a smell." In Malay. And we gossiped airily about that person and various other persons in Malay. That's not something I'd want to give up. It's something I treasure -- not gossiping about other people in languages they hopefully don't know, I mean, but the sense of camaraderie I have with P because we share that experience of being Malaysian and growing up in Malaysia. We have that in common. It is precious.

I wouldn't have that if my grandparents had stayed in China and brought up generations of Chinese-Chinese kids. But if they had, maybe I would have been able to speak to my grandparents. Cephas was not perhaps super close to his grandparents, but his grandfather used to tell him stories about fighting in WWII before he died. All my stories about my grandparents came to me secondhand.

I'm not trying to duck responsibility. If I'd wanted to hear my grandfather's stories, I should have learnt his language and I should have asked him. But do you see, that might have been easier if things had been different.

So that's my question. That's what I've been asking myself. Do we lose something by being who we are, we of the diaspora? What do we lose? Can we claw that back somehow -- is that possible, is it worth it?

I'd be interested in your answers, but not if you haven't considered this question before. I mean -- if you're some kinda immigrant, you've probably wondered about this before; the question has arisen, in some form or other. If you aren't, it may not have occurred to you, and more pertinently for the purposes of this post, I am not so interested in what you think. You see, other people try to impose their definitions on us enough as it is; I would rather hear about how we define ourselves.


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