The Identity of the Chinese in Australian History
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1321816600001100Keywords:
Theorising about identity, Chinese identity, Asian identity, Australian identity, inclusivityAbstract
Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.
References
See for example The Living Tree: the changing meaning of being Chinese today. Edited by Stanford, Tu Wei-ming: Stanford University Press, 1994.
Kong, Lily; ‘“We're not Asians’: Reinterpreting National Identity among Singaporean students in Australia.” Paper presented at Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis, Sydney, 18–20 February 1999.
See the Ouyang, Yu, “Representing the other: the Chinese in Australian fiction, 1888–1988.” PhD Thesis, La Trobe University, 1994.
Yuanfang, Shen, “Dragon Seed in the Antipodes: Chinese Australian Self-Representations.” PhD Thesis, ANU, 1998.
See my article, “The Chinese communities in Australia: The way ahead in a neglected field of research” Journal of Intercultural Studies 10, 1989, pp 33–47.
Gungwu, Wang, “Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective” in Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991, pp 1–21; and “Among Non-Chinese” in The Living Tree, pp 127–146.
Wang, L. Ling-chi, “Roots and the Changing Identity of the Chinese in the United States” in The Living Tree, pp 185–212.
Wang, , op.cit.
Darnell, Maxine Lorraine “The Chinese Labour Trade to New South Wales 1783–1853. An exposition of motives and outcomes” PhD Thesis, University of New England, 1997.
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See for example Ang, Ien, “To Be or Not to Be Chinese: Diaspora, Culture, and Postmodern Ethnicity” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, 21, 1993, pp 1–17.
There were several panels on qiaoxiang at the International Convention of Asian Scholars in Leiden in June 1998.
Ryan, Janice P., “A study of the origins and development of Chinese immigration into Western Australia: the colonial recruitment system and its effects on the Chinese from the different dialect groups, as evidenced in the areas of law, morbidity and mortality, 1880–1901”, PhD Thesis, University of Western Australia, 1989; Anne Atkinson, “Chinese labour and capital in Western Australia, 1847–1947” PhD Thesis, Murdoch University, 1991.
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For instance my grandfather was known as Charles Hunt in Australia, and a village uncle sought advice about anglicising Chan Dak Choy and came up with Thackeray, after the English author, for Dak Choy. Unfortunately he misspelt it and there is now a very well known Chinese family in New Zealand with the name Thackrey.
Wang, , “Roots and Changing Identity”, p. 204.
It was during this period that one full-blooded Chinese, Charles Lee, was climbing up the ranks of the Australian diplomatic corps.
See Chan, H.D.M., “Racial Tension and Human Rights — the Chinese Experience in Sydney”. Report commissioned by the Human Rights Commission of Australia, 1986.
See Wilton, Janis, “Chinese voices, Australian lives” op.cit.; Shirley Fitzgerald, Red Tape, Gold Scissors — the Story of Sydney's Chinese, Sydney: State Library of NSW Press, 1996.
See for instance the recent book by Annette Shun Wah and Greg Aitkin, Banquet: ten courses to harmony, Sydney: Doubleday, 1999.
And across the Tasman in New Zealand over the past two or three years there have been clan and locality reunions, and the publication of clan histories and histories of district associations in New Zealand.
Wang, L. Ling-chi, op.cit. p. 208.
A new Chinese senator has taken up his seat in the Senate of the Federal Parliament. There are now three Chinese members of the Upper House of the NSW Parliament. Three Chinese were leading candidates in the September 1999 elections for the Sydney City Council, one was elected.
See Ouyang, Yu, Songs of the Last Chinese Poet. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1997; Sang Ye, The Year the Dragon Came. St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 1996.
I am pleased that my Chinese colleagues identify me as a huaqiao, although I am, of course, a huayi!
Ling-chi, Wang, op.cit., p. 198.
Eliot, George, Daniel Deronda quoted by Michael King, Being Pakeha Now. Reflections and Recollections of a White Native, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1999, frontispiece.
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Unpublished paper at the opening of the Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora at the Australian National University on 27 February 1999.
“The Chinese communities in Australia: The way ahead in a neglected field of research” Journal of Intercultural Studies 10, 1989, pp 33–47.
May, Cathie R., Topsawyers, the Chinese in Cairns, 1870–1920, Townsville, Qld.: James Cook University History Department, 1984.
Brown, Helen, Tin at Tingha. Armidale: Brown, 1982, p. 35.
Watson, James L., “Renegotiation of Chinese Cultural Identity in the Post-Mao Era” in Popular Protest & Political Culture in Modern China. Learning from 1989, edited by Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. & Elizabeth J. Perry, Boulder: Westview Press, 1991, p. 73.
For a discussion of the bilingual and bi-nation situation developing in Canada and New Zealand the work of Will Kymlicka is useful, see in particular: Multicultural citizenship: a liberal theory of minority rights, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, and the briefer discussion in States, Nations and Cultures, Assen: Van Gorcum, 1997.
