ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an interdisciplinary discussion on diasporic Chineseness with data from an empirical study with the Chinese community in Birmingham, England. The British Chinese diaspora in 21st century is dramatically changing into intrinsically superdiverse transnational social context. In such a context, “loss” and “hope”, “roots” and “routes”, “old” and “new” are dynamically interweaved with inter- and intra-communal complexity. Speakers of different Chinese varieties, dialects and accents intermingle with each other, creating new hybridity as well as conflict, new images and voices as well as new forms of social inequality. This chapter discusses such speakers’ multilingual practice at a community business meeting in the Birmingham Chinatown. Interactive and narrative data is extracted from the audio-recorded meeting discourse for analysis and discussion. The discussion includes three points: (1) defreezing diasporic Chineseness from a static culture heritage affiliated to the past; (2) emphasising the intra-communal nuance in group kinship and distinction in translanguaging practice; and (3) new creations of diaspora built on hybridized notions such as “two-mother” heritage for the future.
