identity construction

Identity Construction of the Chinese Diaspora, Ethnic Media Use, Community Formation, and the Possibility of Social Activism Yu Shi Transnational flows of capital, global political and cultural interpenetrations, and advanced transportation have made travelling, migration, exile, and other forms of displacement common experiences of different groups of people worldwide. ‘Borderlands’ (Anzaldua, 1999) are ‘the normal locale of postmodern subjects’ (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992, p. 18). These itinerant subjects who experience more than one culture along their travel or migrating routes are caught up at the intersection of multiple, sometimes conflicting, subject positions, and do not feel at home anywhere. Within this global condition of movements, Chinese diaspora members constitute a major migratory population as well as a number of diverse subgroups. They differ in their places of origin, geographic distributions, patterns of settlement, population sizes, and varieties of migrants. To make it more complicated, individual subgroups’ constitutions and attributes change over time (Ma, 2003). It is difficult to capture the whole picture with a single research project. In response, the present study chooses to set itself in the diasporic context of the United States, in the hope of providing a glimpse into the diverse Chinese diasporic life. The United States, in comparison with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some European countries, has the largest Chinese diasporic population outside Asian (Commission on Overseas Chinese Affairs, as cited in Ma, 2003; Sun, 2002). According to the 2000 report of the US Bureau of Census, over 2.7 million Americans are of Chinese origin. There are also 1.3 million non-citizen Chinese in the United States from Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong who are categorized as immigrants, refugees, and people on temporary ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online) q 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1030431052000336298 Yu Shi is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, USA. Her research has been focused on identity construction and negotiation of Chinese immigrants in the United States and their media use, and on issues of race, gender, class, and culture in immigrant lives. Correspondence to: Yu Shi, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, W615 Seashore Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. E-mail: yu-shi@uiowa.edu Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 55–72 visas. If we include ‘underground’ immigrants, the population of the Chinese diaspora in the United States would reach even higher numbers. The cultural dimensions of these floating lives raise meaningful questions and provide significant topics for studies on identity formations and politics. In a parallel line, global media have built up a new virtual geography that offers migration a new kind of experience. All the models of location and dislocation ‘are mediated by one another of the media, from the epistolary technology of letters, telephone, fax, and email to the audiovisual media of photos, cassettes, films and videos, to print, electronic, and cyberspace journalism’ (Naficy, 1999, p. 4). In the global media market, cultural flows from ‘peripheral countries’ to Western cultural ‘centres’ are reinforced by technologies such as the Internet, satellite TVs, digital videos, and other electronic media, which have made Chinese ethnic media content highly accessible for Chinese diaspora members living in these Western ‘centres’. These media have merged social spheres and severed the traditional links between physical places and social meanings (Fitzgerald, 1993). In Meyrowitz’ words (1986), they have created ‘placeless cultures’ which offer the Chinese diaspora new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and communities. Therefore, ‘what is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on . . . “in-between” spaces . . . that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation . . .’ (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 1–2). In response, this study concentrates on the in-between subjectivity of the Chinese diaspora in the United States, their use of ethnic media, and also on the influences of these media over their perceptions of themselves and others. The study explores: (1) what is, if any, the ethnicmedia content that the Chinese diaspora participants of the study consume in their daily lives? (2) Why do they feel the need for ethnic cultural information? (3) What influences, if any, do these ethnic media and migrating experiences have over their perceptions of themselves and their fellow Chinese, and of Chinese cultures in general (including diasporic ones)? Finally, (4) do the sharedmedia experiences strengthen the cultural ties among members of the Chinese group as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983), and hence constitute a liminal zone within which new forms of political solidarity or even organized social interventions are possible? Before answering these questions through in-depth interviews with Chinese participants, Iwould like to layout a theoretical groundby revisiting some key concepts. Concepts Revisited: Identity, Diaspora, Media, and Politics of Identity Identities are social constructions. As defined by Hall (1996a, p. 4): Identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not ‘who we are’ or ‘where we came from’, so much as what we become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we represent ourselves. 56 Y. Shi Always in process, identities undergo constant transformations and are increasingly fragmented, fractured, and ‘multiply constructed across different, often antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 4). Fragmented and shifting as they are, however, identities strive for a closure, a belief in internal coherence, and a sense of eternity (Frith, 1996), which can be achieved through retelling the stories of the past and imagining a ‘homeland’. Diasporic identities are defined by the recognition of necessary heterogeneity and diversity. They are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew along itineraries of migrating, but also re-creating the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’ (Hall, 1994). For these displaced subjects, the fiction of cultures as separate, object-like phenomena occupying discrete places becomes implausible, but the disjuncture between place and culture becomes increasingly clear. Paradoxically, as cultures are uprooted from places, ideas of culturally and ethnically distinct places become even more salient (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). Diaspora members, living on cultural borderlands or interstitial zones, cluster around remembered or imagined ‘homelands’, practise ‘authentic home cultures’, form ethnic communities, so as to re-root their floating lives and reach a closure in making sense of their constantly changing subjectivities. Media constitute such an interstitial zone for diasporic subjects. As the machinery and regime of representation in a culture, media play a constitutive rather than a reflexive role (Hall, 1996b). This gives questions of culture, ideology, and the scenarios of representation a formative and not merely an expressive place in the constitution of social and political life (Hall, 1996b). In other words, rather than natural givens, identities are formed within media as a discursive effect of a storytelling or a fashioning of certain subject positions. For displaced subjects, media provide points of identification by marking symbolic boundaries, re-linking cultures to places, and by fulfilling the desire for memory, myth, search, and rediscovery. They impose ‘an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all diasporas’ (Hall, 1994, p. 394). Moreover, as ‘moving images meet deterritorialized viewers’ (Appadurai, 1996, p. 4) in a diasporic context, media also generate collective diasporic imaginations. Such imaginations highlight the shared aspects of individual identities in terms of common culture, geography, and history, binding many discrete subjects into an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1983). Scholars have often recognized the political nature of community formation in a diasporic context and the role of media in this process. According to Bhabha (1994), when articulated from the perspective of minority groups, community formation represents a complex ongoing negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridity and hence gain a speaking position for equal rights. Appadurai (1996, p. 4) goes further to define this condition of ‘moving images’ meeting ‘deterritorialized viewers’ as an emergence of ‘diasporic public spheres’, a concept that advances its classic sense of Habermas (1989). Within a diasporic public sphere, ‘where there is [media] consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency’ which ‘when collective can become the fuel for action’ Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 57 (Appadurai, 1996, p. 7). However, can we assume such a natural connection linking media consumption to the construction of individual identities, to community formation, and all the way to collective actions? This is one of the questions that this study explores. Overall, grounded in these theoretical concepts, this study tries to delineate a diasporic media space of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. The research questions are designed to summarize their daily using patterns of ethnic media, to detect the shifting and fragmented character of diasporic identities, and to reveal the influences, if any, ethnic media have over diasporic imaginations of being Chinese and of Chinese people and cultures in general. Methodology The study adopts the method of open-ended (in-depth) ethnographic interview. According to Denzin and Lincoln (1998), ethnographic interview is one of the most common and powerful ways to grasp the meanings that people ascribe to their daily lives. The uniqueness of the method lies in the fact that its open-ended style often allows the researcher to get unintended but valuable information or observation. The interview questions of the present study are designed to generate not only answers over the meanings that the interviewees have attached to their media consumption or to a particular media text but also their personal stories and accounts of life histories and migrating experiences. These questions, as general as they may appear (see the Appendix), have served as entry points or topical areas of the interview rather than as a rigid format that neither the interviewer nor the interviewees can go beyond. They have allowed the interviewees some space to steer the direction of the discussion, and to narrow down the topics, in their individual ways, to the specificities of their media experiences and life stories. The target group of the study is not the whole Chinese diaspora community/ communities in the United States but its relatively new arrivals: students and professionals coming to the United States after 1965. Before I discuss the post-1965 immigration trend, it is necessary to define the concept of ‘diaspora’ as used in this study. Originally referring to the exile of the Jews from their historical homeland and their dispersion throughout many places, the concept has now been used metaphorically for several categories of people: expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents, immigrants, ethnic/racial minorities (Safran, 1991), or even transnational travellers (Ong, 1999). What define these diverse groups of people are their common experiences of living through cultural differences (Hall, 1994). They share similar spatial characteristics of living on cultural borderlands and with porous boundaries (Ma, 2003), where displacement and contradictions shape their identities (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992). Sometimes, diaspora members hold tight to their identities defined by the home-country nationalism or the ‘traditional culture’. However, if put into the context of their culturally diverse lives, such loyalty is more a construction of ‘essence’ and ‘purity’—as part of their identity negotiation—than 58 Y. Shi a display of them. Chinese students and professionals in the United States, as the interviews of the present study further prove, do experience and negotiate differences, confusions, and contradictions in the process of redefining their cultural identities. Also their growing consciousness of transnational Chineseness and recognition of heterogeneity and diversity demonstrate that in diasporic contexts ‘Chineseness does not need a country, a kingdom, or a state; it is a condition and that condition is sustained by its place in a community anywhere’ (Chan, 1999). Therefore it is sufficient to say that these students and professionals belong to the global Chinese diaspora group. The 1965 Immigration Act of the United States added professional knowledge and skills as a new criterion for admitting immigrants. As a result, the post-1965 era has witnessed an increasing trend of young students and professionals coming to the United States for various economic and political reasons, and for better education and personal fulfilment (Tong, 2000). The growing portion of students and professionals among new diaspora members has altered the profile of the Chinese diaspora, partially changed the historically stereotypical ‘coolie’ image of the group, and reinforced some positive features of their lives. With better educational and occupational backgrounds, they will become a conspicuous force in the Chinese American economy and politics in the near future (Ling, 1998). This study chooses to concentrate on this specific group within the Chinese diaspora. Mostly first-generation diaspora members, they do not share with people who otherwise grew up in the United States the same social history and lifestyles that the dominant society embodies. They are also less likely than their second-generation counterparts to identify with people in the dominant society on both social and personal levels (Lum, 1996). Given the educational background and the professional goal of the ‘untraditional’ diaspora members, universities are usually their first stops in the United States (Ling, 1998; Miscevic and Kwong, 2000; Tong, 2000). Therefore, the study chooses the Chinese diaspora group in Iowa City, a Midwestern university community in the United States, as its focus of investigation. Iowa City is a typical university town in the United States. According to the 2001 report of the Friendship Association of Chinese Students and Scholars (FACSS), a major organization of Chinese diaspora members there, Iowa City has an estimated Chinese community of 2,000, including over 500 students from Mainland China, over 100 from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some Southeast Asian countries, and about 1,400 researchers, professors, and other professionals working for the university or the university hospital. Living within a university environment, Chinese diaspora members there have Internet access across the campus, and a Chinese-language collection in the university’s main library, including 77,000 volumes of Chinese books, 300 current popular and academic journals, and 500 movies from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. If living in university-allocated student apartments, they can also watch Channel Four news aired twice a day from Mainland China Central Television (CCTV). In short, Iowa City, hosting the target diaspora group of students and professionals and various Chinese ethnic media materials, constitutes a typical case worthy of investigation. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 59 Specifically, the study involves six participants. Each participant is an expert practitioner of his/her mass-mediated world, knowledgeable in the most detailed and intimate ways of how it is put together and how it shapes their identities. The small number of interviewees allowed for greater depth and sensitivity in the interviews, enabling the interviewer to grasp the details of their everyday world, which provides entry points to their complex cultural condition of living on ‘borderlands’ and to their ongoing process of identity negotiation. The interviewees were recruited through ‘guanxi’ or ethnic Chinese social networks. The recruiting process tried to encompass as much diversity as possible in terms of participants’ age, gender, regional place of origin, academic disciplinary affiliation, year in the United States, and personal life histories. To briefly describe the participants: Holly is a graduate student in communication studies. Her family moved to Hong Kong from Mainland China in 1985. A permanent resident of Canada, she spent one year in Vancouver before she came to Iowa City in 2001. Also a graduate student in communication studies, Will came to Iowa City in 2000, before which he worked as a journalist for three years in Mainland China. Josh is a doctoral student in operations research, calling himself a mathematician. Coming from southwestern Mainland China in 1997, he has been in Iowa City for almost five years. Yolanda is a finance major. Coming to the United States in 2001, she is the newest arrival in the group. Zack and Mandy are a couple. Zack studies educational statistics while Mandy is in psychology. They are the only Christians in the group, baptized one year after arriving in Iowa City. With ages ranging from mid-20 s to mid-30 s, all six interviewees obtained their master’s degrees from elite universities in Mainland China or Hong Kong, and are pursuing a PhD degree or a second master’s in the university. To some extent they are representative of the new waves of immigrant professionals and students coming to the United States after 1965 in terms of place of origin, educational background, and general diasporic experiences. Each interviewee participated in a 50–90minute conversation with the researcher, which covers, but is not limited to, the seven pre-designed topical areas shown in the Appendix. Contextualizing the Chinese Diaspora: a Life of Paradoxes Echoing Ma’s argument that diasporic life is inherently diverse and contradictory (2003), the Chinese diaspora members interviewed in this study gave conflicting, or at best paradoxical, accounts of their perceptions of themselves, their lives ‘here’ and ‘back home’, and of Chinese people and cultures. Their answers demonstrate an increased level of cultural complexity, and doubts and confusions that they often experience, which explains their imagination of home as a culturally bounded and unique place, as well as their persistent desire to return. Such imagination and desire are largely fulfilled by consuming Chinese media. As Shohat & Stam (1996) contend, media are an empowering vehicle for communities struggling against geographical displacement and cultural alienation. Given this close tie between media and diasporic cultural feelings, it is important for us first to experience the confusions and paradoxes 60 Y. Shi of diasporic lives in order to obtain a contextualized understanding of why media are central to diaspora identity construction. First, the diaspora participants’ sense of distance from old ways of life is coupled by their mystification of ‘return’. Zack denied that the tension between his parents and him over his religious belief is a cultural one: ‘the misunderstanding between us is caused only by geographic distance, because it is hard to persuade them over the phone. Once I return, I am sure I can convert them to Christians.’ In his imagination, cultural