On not speaking Chinese: living between Asia and the West

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 Ang's 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 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 couldn't speak Chinese; in the West I was different because I looked Chinese. From this autobiographical beginning, Ang goes on to reflect…