Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

local experience of distinct overseas Chinese communities in their host societies. Wang explained that this hegemonic approach, which has persisted for centuries in history, “sees the overseas Chinese communities as de facto extensions or colonies of the motherland, China.”²⁴ It advocates a very different stance from luodi-shenggen—namely, luoye-guigen (落葉歸根; “return to one’s roots”).²⁵ The concepts of overseas Chinese, huaqiao (華僑), Chinese people, huaren (華人), and people of Chinese descent, huayi (華裔)²⁶ are products of such discourse.

In opposition to the luoye-guigen paradigm, and equally repressive of the overseas Chinese experience and cultural (re)production, is the approach of zancao-cugen (sic; 斬草除根),²⁷ which Wang translated as “the total elimination of racial identity and cultural heritage.” Even though I find the Chinese term Wang appropriated to describe the process of total assimilation rather narrow, for it limits the relationship between the overseas Chinese communities and their host countries to a delimiting dichotomy of victim versus victimizer (the victims are forced to erase their cultural identity), the expression zhancao-chugen does expose the existing dangers of total assimilation—both the voluntary and involuntary denial of one’s ethnic and cultural identity. Despite the oppositional stances represented by both paradigms in treatments of the field of overseas Chinese studies, they share a common trait: they designate the overseas Chinese identity exclusively as either a China-centric or a fully assimilated one. This simultaneously distances the overseas Chinese from their lived experience and hinders their constructing a habitable space in which their local experiences and ethnic identity could coexist. Thus, Wang criticized these two paradigms as “chauvinistic, regressive and approaching the anachronistic.” As an alternative, he underscored the potential of luodi-shenggen to reject

the extreme positions of both and views the Chinese minority to be an integral part of each country’s citizenry, to be treated with equality and justice. This approach also posits the racial and cultural heritage of the Chinese and treats the overseas Chinese as a cultural asset in the building of more enlightened societies in our