Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

obviously different from the Chinese Americans in San Francisco. The increase in contact between Chinese of different countries actually highlights the diversities and the need to respect these diversities. Even the Chinese-educated Chinese Malaysians who may share many similar literary interests with people in China or with “Chinese-educated” Chinese in the Philippines, may have different subjective experiences of being Chinese.⁴⁴

Claiming that the experience of being Chinese for the “people of Chinese descent” or Chinese diasporic subjects is subjective and varies among communities, Tan downplayed the haunting presence of Chineseness as closely tied to the myth of China as the only possible homeland or motherland for the Chinese diaspora. When the affect of being Chinese is marked by difference and is seen as processual, diasporic subjects’ identification with their respective national societies becomes legitimate without their having to incessantly struggle with a narrative of losing their imaginary homeland (China) to their original ones (local national societies). This recognition also allows diasporic subjects to avoid drowning in melancholia and to acknowledge their identities as varied and creolized and as generative or even productive, not restrictive.

Instead of imagining a global Chinese community, Aihwa Ong brought forth the significant role of the Chinese diaspora in her research on Southeast Asian Chinese communities by claiming that Chineseness for diasporic Chinese is mobilized by “strategies of capital accumulations” in a transnational context.⁴⁵ She wrote the following in the introduction to Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality:

My larger goal is to redirect our study of Chinese subjects beyond an academic construction of Chineseness that is invariably or solely defined in relation to the motherland, China. Those of us outside China have been regarded as “a residual China” or as minorities in host countries, that is, as less culturally “authentic” Chinese. Rather, I argue in this book, the contemporary practices and values of diasporan Chinese are characteristics of larger questions of displacement, travel, capital accumulation, and other