Conclusion: Meditations of Two Perpetual Outsiders on “Chineseness” and “The Family”

Abstract

What does it mean to “be” Chinese? The question is a false one, and one of the foremost ethical and political duties of our time is to rephrase the question entirely. One would have thought that the existentialists had dispelled all varieties of essentialist humbug, but the point needs to be continually consolidated—being is precisely nothing, a tabula rasa.

To ask what it means to “be” is to remain at the level of a Socratic dialogue. That is to say, asking “What is Chinese?” is scarcely different from “What is beauty?” or “What is truth?” Surely the proper question to ask is “Which beauty? Which truth? Whose beauty? Whose truth? Whose Chineseness?” It is Nietzsche who reveals the destitution of essences, who reduces truth, beauty and culture to little more than a series of subjective, amorphous discourses masquerading as eternally objective ideas. Man thinks truth into being, truth assumes the shape of thought. To realize this is to situate these discourses in the realm of politics, the dimension of power. If Chineseness, the family or the Chinese family is a discourse, it must be spoken by someone to have any meaning for our time. The question, as such, is, “Who speaks?” We must speak for Chineseness, the family and the Chinese family or allow it to be spoken for. To speak, then, is to speak in a voice that is entirely one’s own, a voice which separates itself from the vacuous jabber of the crowd, which refuses to be suppressed.