| Chapter : | Introduction |
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today, the notion of “home” for most Chinese communities in Southeast Asia is still strongly linked to the geographical locale, China. Journalist and writer Lynn Pan pointed out that early Chinese overseas populations came mainly from regions such as Fujian and Guangdong. Their affiliated “homeland” is not one that was specifically defined by ethnic features or by the modern definition of race and ethnicity. Instead, home for these Chinese traders and coolies is often the village (hsiang; 鄉) or the countryside they are originally from.8 Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Evelyn Hu-Dehart explained that until the mid-twentieth century, most diasporic Chinese struggled with assimilating into their host societies and with acclimating to the local cultures and national identities. To assuage the sentiments of displacement and exile from their home country, diasporic Chinese clung to the home village, qiaoxiang (僑鄉), as a reference point for the original homeland.9 Even though, with the making of China into a modern nation, diverse cultures and dialects are subsumed under the discourse of the Hanzu (Han Chinese)—the “authentic” Chinese race and identity—Southeast Asian immigrants from southern China, such as the Fujian and Guangdong regions, still refer to themselves as Tangshan ren (唐山人; the Tang people), not Han people.10 In order to understand the complicated relationship between “China” and the Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia, it is important to trace the history of where and when the concept of “Chineseness” evolved as a racial, cultural, and national marker for the Chinese people. It is also important to study the impact and implications this category has for the overseas Chinese communities in regulating their identity construction and affinity to the distant homeland and its politics. With the growing trends of globalization and transnationalism, a study of the modern and contemporary role of Sinophone cultures and practices is necessary in order to first facilitate the problematization of the essentialized concept of Chineseness, and to then encourage the relocation of a broader and nonexclusionary concept of the Sinophone. A new conceptualization of Chineseness as an identity category should include both theoretical and instrumental functions in order to devise a contemporary significance