With very few exceptions (such as in the lead up to WWII, when overseas Chinese in SE Asia financially supported the fight against the Japanese, or earlier when Sun Yat-Sen spent time in Malaysia and Singapore), overseas Chinese already led full lives incorporating other plural identities; with very little thought given to the mainland. It was only when they wanted something from us that we had to think about them at all.
Sadly, people constantly measuring our (and each other's) Chineseness is also not new. Hundreds of years ago, Straits Chinese people were asked to define how Chinese they were: did they speak any Chinese languages? Were they the right ones? Did they dress Chinese? Did they perform rites for their dead parents?
The deeper story is, diaspora Chinese have tended to be southerners far from centers of Chinese power; many of us are descendents of anti-imperialist rebels, too (Boxer rebellion)
right now the center of power in China is not Manchu, but Han (previously, many overseas Chinese had overlapping thoughts about anti-Manchurianism and anti-Qing)
some in the diaspora like this and think that a rising China and Han Chinese superpower is a good thing (I do not)
our lives are now more removed from China. our grandparents might have thought 'study in china / go back was a possibility, it does not exist at all for most of us
I used to stress about this more, but I have since decided it's all made up.
The people who speak Mandarin who think I'm any less Chinese for having a 'silted Mandarin accent?' I could just as easily say, they're not Chinese either because they don't speak the languages I speak.
But instead of doing that I will simply lean harder into the one thing I like about my cultural identity: being southern Chinese means being a migrant, a sojourner. Someone who lives many lives, different places
i'm glad this is more or less settled in this century (in the mid 40s to 60s it was not so clear)
many of us are citizens of other countries.
we like those countries, most of the time.
we like speaking the languages of other countries. we also like speaking our languages at home, or with each other. we are not chinese citizens.
in the constant migration and movement, i personally like that i have to think deeply about what any of this means to me, and choose how much i want to engage.
i think this is at once harder and at once more satisfying.
i love when i meet chinese nationalists who speak of our 5000 years of glorious history. because i have spent time poking at this history, i can say: which part of it, exactly, are you proud of?
wang gungwu: born in surabaya to parents from china, lived in ipoh, became a federal malaya citizen, was a japanese subject, british subject, was a chinese subject, lived in singapore, lived in australia
has written extensively on what it means to be overseas chinese. unlike him, i only have to worry about my own experience; he had multiple shifting colonial and cultural identities throughout his life
i no longer allow someone else to tell me exactly how (or how not) chinese i am.
in these weird times (lots of northern chinese are now also leaving china and making perilous journeys to do so), i'm happy to model the southern chinese experience of finding new homes in unlikely places. but if they want me to cling to or relate to a country that didn't exist when my relatives left, i have no interest. some of the tv/ music / food is very good, but none of it is mine. neither are the politics.
@skinnylatte Interesting points. The expectation of influence over diasporas has caused so much trouble in the last century, eg Nazi Germany claiming German speakers elsewhere, and Putin using Russian speakers as a wedge. Very dangerous, particularly to the people they're trying to claim loyalty from.
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