Wild and Woolly Sects
Sometimes I think I will go
to China to make my fortune. I am not alone, of course: Hardly a week goes by
without a reminder that China is the business opportunity of the century. But
the siren song that beckons me is not just the ring of a thousand cash
registers opening. It is also the call of my Chinese ancestors. Come
back , they cry, like spirits from an Amy Tan novel. It is your
destiny .
All
right, "destiny" is a bit melodramatic--and I don't really hear those voices.
Yet, as a Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American, I am made to feel about not doing
business in China they way Ken Griffey Jr. might have felt if he had never gone
into baseball: like someone who squandered an inheritance, who failed to
capitalize on a rare alignment of circumstance and skill.
Why such regret? I have, after all, no particular knack for
business. I have no million-dollar idea to test on a billion-plus consumers.
That I should feel this way testifies, I think, to the magnetic pull of
"Chineseness," whatever that might mean--and to the growing allure of diasporan
identity.
Consider
the question of the "overseas Chinese," which is how people in China and Taiwan
refer to the 30 million or so ethnic Chinese who live elsewhere. The idea is
simple: There is China, which is filled with Chinese; and there is the rest of
the world, which, to varying degrees, is sprinkled with Chinese. The
ethnocentrism is manifest, as is the essentialism. ("You can take a Chinese out
of China, but you can't take the China out of a Chinese.")
In Southeast Asia, such willful distinctiveness
has made the ethnic Chinese the so-called "Jews of the East," a middleman
minority par
excellence . In the United States, though, something
quite different has unfolded. I am not an overseas Chinese. And the presumption
that Chinese-Americans are merely Chinese people who happen to be in America,
who could just as easily be in Indonesia or Malaysia, strikes me as fallacious,
even dangerous. (The same presumption flavors the coverage of Clinton's "Asian
money" scandals, as Robert Wright recently argued in Slate.)
Yet I
suspect that if I were ever to do business in China, I might change my tune. I
might want to have it both ways: to impress my Chinese partners with an
insider's knowledge of America, and to impress my American partners with an
insider's knowledge of China. The second insider claim is much less true than
the first. It is perhaps even false. Still, the possibility of having my
identity and eating it too helps keep the China-bound entrepreneur in me
astir.
This ambivalence of self--and this flirtation with
intellectual dishonesty--is at the very heart of a contemporary trend that I
call Diaspora Chic. Everywhere we turn today, it seems fashionable to conceive
of American minorities as communities in exile, sojourners who owe greater
fealty to their racial kinfolk, wherever they might live, than to their own
neighbors, whoever they might be. This attitude is associated with left-wing
multicultural academics, but multinational businesspeople hold it too. In their
shared view, the locus of cultural and economic sovereignty is now the
diaspora; the unit of human agency, the race.
Thus, Joel
Kotkin and others cheerily predict that a handful of "tribes"--the Chinese, the
Indians, the Jews, and others--will make the global economy hum and whir. In
geopolitics, the dour Samuel Huntington also sees tribes but predicts a
tectonic "clash of civilizations." On the airwaves, networks like Telemundo and
Univision alchemize a Hispanic identity that transcends both region and
country. And on our campuses, kente cloths, ancient tea ceremonies, and
native dance performances signify not only a resistance to whiteness but also a
yearning, among even the most assimilated, to be abroad at home.
To be sure, there is something to be said for
the emergence of diasporan identities. To the extent they reveal cultural
connections across borders, they are illuminating. To the extent they are
driven by the ever easier migration of people and capital, they are inevitable.
But in the end, Diaspora Chic can only disappoint.
First, it's based on a
contradiction. Diasporan identity holds that the "motherland" is worthy of
sustained loyalty. Yet in almost any diaspora--whether black, yellow, brown, or
white --the dispersed are far better off, at least materially, than those "back
home." For most hyphenated Americans, a trip to the ancestral lands is enough
to reinforce the point--assuming, that is, that there are ancestral lands to
speak of. Where, after all, does one locate the home base for the "Asian"
diaspora or the "African" diaspora?
When
people speak of such pan-ethnic continental clans, they are merely
regurgitating American definitions of race. For it is in America, not Asia,
that a connection is presumed among people of Chinese, Thai, Filipino, and
Pakistani descent. It is in America, not Africa, that an Ethiopian is
interchangeable with a Ugandan.
Besides, once you remove the mystic overtones of blood ties
and kinship, diasporan identity reduces to a piece of circular reasoning. What
binds together the millions of Chinese outside of China? Why, it's their
Chineseness, of course. And what is Chineseness? That which binds together
Chinese. Entire conferences and whole scholarly volumes have been devoted to
this catechism, with roughly the same results.
Granted,
there exists, in the form of a rich language and history, what Huntington would
call a "core Sinic civilization." That culture and those values, however, are
not intrinsic to people of Chinese descent; they are transmitted--or
not. And whether they are in fact transmitted to "overseas Chinese" depends on
choice: on consent rather than descent. Which means that in the diaspora,
Chineseness is not a more authentic way of being; it is just a decision to act
Chinese. And the diaspora itself is not a foreordained grouping; it is, to
borrow Benedict Anderson's description of the nation, an "imagined
community."
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with that. We
move, after all, in many imagined and invented communities--religious, ethnic,
ideological. But self-styled diasporan idealists must also face the paradox
that diasporas matter only in a world of states. The romantic dream of a world
with no borders and only itinerant "tribes" is a luxury--indeed, a folly--that
only the citizens of a liberal state could indulge. Those who have a tribe but
not a liberal state--say, the Kurds--know well that a diaspora can do little to
defend anyone's rights.
Finally,
Diaspora Chic suffers from this irony: Though it is partly a protest against
white dominance, it surrenders American identity to the white folks. So long as
minorities strike a pose of diasporan dispossession, they give tacit approval
to a notion of "prior" Americanness that excludes them. After all, if everyone
else is an expatriate, only "native" whites are real Americans. And that
is a tragic concession.
It is tragic because it is so fundamentally at odds with
the transformative character of this nation. Diaspora Chic ultimately fails not
because it promotes national self-destruction--a little less Anglo-conformity
won't doom us--but because it promotes national self-deception. The diasporan
ideal depends on the delusion that Americans can reverse the
cross-contamination of our cultures, our bloodlines, and our psyches--that if
we dream hard enough, we might return to a prelapsarian state of pure
identity.
I suppose we will always be
tempted to reconfigure our affiliations, to reinvent our identities. We would
hardly be American if we did not. But the inconvenient fact remains: Americans
have far more in common with one another than with our diasporan brethren
around the globe.
