'Peripheral' Chinese-Americans and the cultural politics of Chinese diaspora, transnationalism, and return

The ethnic category of “peripheral” Chinese Americans encompasses ethnic Chinese who do not come from mainland China but come from other parts of Asia and Southeast Asia such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. In the struggle with their hybrid and diasporic identities and their double marginality, these “peripheral” Chinese Americans have to confront not just U.S. Orientalism but also Chinese nativism's claim to cultural traditionalism in the name of racial authenticity. The latter is achieved through the historical and ideological workings and transformations of Chinese return, and its influence on the formation of a Chinese transnational imaginary. The impact of return on this imaginary emerges in the 1997 Hong Kong handover, which one can theorize as a mass-mediated, globalized space where the ideology of return is disseminated to an imaginary community of diasporic Chinese. The handover and its terrifying Other, Tiananmen Square, form critical and contradictory aspects of the diasporic consciousness of Hong Kong Americans, forcing them to engage in cultural negotiations, as Marilyn Chin's poetry in The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty and Wayne Wang's Chinese Box illustrate. One finds another configuration of return in a Chinese cosmopolitanism that forges a link between transnational capital and neo-Confucian humanism. Going beyond a critique of this alliance, the work of Li-Young Lee presents the beginnings of a critical alternative to this cosmopolitanism. The multiply-inscribed identities of “peripheral” Chinese Americans also suggest the theoretical importance of hybridity and the challenge it presents to Chinese return and the contradictions of cultural identity formation. Although Shirley Geok-lin Lim's academic memoir Among the White Moonfaces effectively uses cultural hybridity to unhinge the hegemony of Western imperialism and “Third World” cultural chauvinism, it fails to address the questions of class privilege and institutional elitism. And finally, as a Singaporean-Chinese in the United States, I write myself into this project through an analysis of my response to the Michael Fay incident and an examination of Fiona Cheong's poetics of innocence in The Scent of the Gods, in order to foreground the Singaporean American's struggle to overcome the politics of inertia.