Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

while forming and redefining relationships as well as confirming and re-articulating identities.”³² Hence, it is more urgent that one endorses the Chinese diaspora as a process that involves the struggle and negotiation between the myth of return and the acculturation to local realities than it is that one regard it as an essence. Luo-di-sheng-gen is much more complicated than “a choice of either becoming citizens in a new homeland or remaining Chinese nationals outside the nation-state”;³³ it is a condition that lies between the “either” and the “or” where a practice of diaspora³⁴ can be promoted to acknowledge the lived experience and local realities of the Chinese in diaspora with respect to the history of migration and the urge to acculturate to host societies. Kuah-Pearce suggested that Chinese diasporic subjects practice the layering of identities in order to accommodate the multiple identities they accumulate and adopt at different times and in different spaces. Kuah used the example of a Chinese Singaporean who describes himself as “a Singaporean, Fujianese, Anxi Chinese” to illustrate this layered identity.³⁵

Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini expressed a similar understanding of Chinese diasporic identities and subjectivities. Acknowledging Chinese diasporic identities and subjectivities as plural, Ong and Nonini argued that a diasporic Chinese person does not possess an essential Chinese identity but is “a site of difference” in which “different identities—gender, [ethnicity], nationality, subculture, dominant culture—intersect,” thus constituting that individual. His or her identity is flexible and situational depending on “particular circumstances and the configuration of social relations that constitute our everyday world.”³⁶ This flexible identity, I argue, is a prime example of the process luo-di-sheng-gen, which is a practice of diaspora. The coexistence of national, regional, ethnic, and local identities implies that diasporic identities are translational—both relational and translatable.

However, what is most crucial to the experience of the Chinese diasporic communities is the ambivalent relationship with and among Chinese languages and their strong, rich history and culture. For the