“CHINESENESS”
There are many ways in which “Chineseness” can be understood. Andrea Louie addresses contested notion of Chineseness in her ethnography, Chineseness across Borders (2004). Louie examines the ways in which Americans of Chinese descent experience identity as they return to
China on “roots” tours and culture camps sponsored by the P.R.C. Louie argues that she is a
“‘living oxymoron’ who fits neither into the category of ‘foreigner’ nor ‘Chinese [though she is
‘racially’] a ‘descendant of the dragon by virtue of [her] black hair and yellow skin” (2004:14-15). Clearly for Louie, “race” in the sense of Asian physiognomy is an insufficient marker to be
“fully” Chinese. Rather, she sees “Chineseness” as something that can “be stretched to include the many people of the diaspora, and at other times to distinguish one group within the category from another;” for example, Chinese from the Chinese-American Other (2004:21). Moreover, she
“takes Chineseness to be an open signifier, a fluid and contested category that encompasses a diversity of political, ‘racial,’ and ethnic meanings within shifting and varied contexts” (2004:21).
While Louie addresses the particular ways in which Chinese-Americans, and U.S. and Chinese government projects negotiate the construction of “Chineseness,” other scholars have addressed the broader notion of diaspora from a variety of perspectives – including displacement, victimization and sacrifice, cultural struggles, and cultural hybridity (Ong 1999). As I discussed in the introduction, many scholars acknowledge that diasporas are inherently transnational in that they link the global and local and “have the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of ‘national culture’ and ‘national identity’ which are firmly rooted in history and geography”(Ang 1993:13). Moreover, they challenge the hegemony of a “mythic homeland” even while they emphasize ties to that homeland (Chow 1991). Ang envisions a conception of diasporas that addresses the tension between the notions of “where you are from” and “where you are at”
that results in a “creative syncretism” that seeks to reconcile these different cultural perspectives and through this process yields hybrid cultural forms (Ang, 1993: 13; van der Veer, 1995).
While this understanding of transnational communities stresses that “culture” may be produced as well as lost in this process, the nature of a syncretic and hybrid culture is, like
core-periphery and center-margin paradigms, dichotomous and therefore problematic.21 Furthermore, transnational communities are indicative of the problems of representation and identity construction that are attendant to the time-space compression created as places move closer together within a new space of flows resulting from electronic media and transportation innovations (Harvey 1974). Consequently, Featherstone’s conception of a “third culture” that functions within a “third space” more effectively captures the tensions and resistance inherent in negotiating this process (Featherstone, 1990, Ong and Nonini, 1997). Furthermore, as Yeoh and Willis note, it is critical to acknowledge that third space diasporic journeys are not merely de facto points of resistance, but rather, as new spaces, they may also be appropriated by conservative forces such as the state (Yeoh and Willis, 1999:13). The importance of this distinction becomes clearer in looking at the interconnectedness of the various parties involved in Chinese-U.S.
transnational adoptions, especially state and family, in examining the politics of cultural identities and self representation and the strategies that are utilized by adopting parents and will be utilized by adoptees as they grow older (Hall, 1990).
Although scholars have long been interested in the topic of migration, they have recently become increasingly attentive to the impact of transnationalism and globalization on definitions of modernity and identity and have further emphasized the need for incorporating political economy approaches at the local as well as at the global level (e.g., Anderson, 1991; Appadurai, 1995; Anagnost, 1997; Constable, 2001; Gao, 1998; Ong, 1999). The term globalization is typically used to refer to international economic forces; however, Ong’s use of the term
21 Core-periphery models, developed by Wallerstein and others, are political economy approaches that examine the exercise of power and “shift attention from communities bounded within nations, and from nations themselves to spaces of which nations are components” (Kearney, 1995: 549). The center-minor relationship was developed by Rey Chow to explain the positionality of minorities within a community (Zhong, 1999, p.120).
transnationalism has a broader dimension that addresses social processes which literally act across nation-states and thus transcend conventional geographic and social boundaries (Ong, 1999). In this way, the Chinese experience can illustrate the inadequacies of earlier scholarly approaches to migration.
If one adhered to the earlier paradigm of overseas Chinese studies in which to be Chinese ‘overseas’ was to be part of an imperfect residual China, diaspora might be seen as a negatively defined and inferior phenomenon. But [there] is an affirmative view of diaspora as a pattern that marks a common condition of communities, persons and groups separated by space, an arrangement, moreover that these persons see themselves as sharing (‘we Chinese’). This pattern is continually reconstituted by the literal travel of Chinese persons across and throughout the regions of dispersion, and it is characterized by multiplex and varied connections of family ties, kinship, commerce, sentiments and values about native place in China, shared memberships in transnational organizations and so on. (Ong and Nonini 1997:18).
Ong argues that in an age of capital mobility, the state has established new relationships with citizens and noncitizens, creating a flexible citizenry whose “transnational practices and imaginings” (promoted by global technologies, such as the Internet) reflect a realignment of cultural identities that are both promoted by the state and outside of it (Ong, 1999). In her discussion of adult Korean adoptees, Eleana Kim argues that Ong’s notion of postcolonial hybrid subjects may be “more compelling in theory than in practice” because of the alienation and disorientation experienced by many adult adoptees (Kim 2005). However, my research indicates that the rapidly growing Chinese-U.S. transnational and transracial adoptive families, unlike their earlier Korean counterparts, represent a new form of realigned cultural identities that utilize technologies and the state to construct an “imagined” model of the family that will have a unique relationship with Chinese communities in the United States and a particular perspective on
“Chineseness.”