On Not Speaking Chinese

On Not Speaking Chinese by Ang, Ien. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780415259132.

In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalisation and diaspora. The starting point for Angs discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself "faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty" - surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She writes: "It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of `Chineseness in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldnt speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese". From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect upon tensions between `Asia and `the West at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of `Chineseness in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate `Chinese with `Asian identity. Ang then turns to `the West, exploring the paradox of Australias identity as a `Western country in the Asian region, and tracing Australias uneasy relationship with its Asian neighbours, from the White Australia policy to contemporary multicultural society. Finally, Ang draws together her discussion of `Asia and `the West to consider the social and intellectual space of the `in-between, arguing for a theorising not of `difference but of `togetherness in contemporary societies.