ABSTRACT
I would like to begin this chapter with an autobiographical note. Sociologists rarely take on a comparative project. Over the past decade, I happened to have the privilege and the fortune of doing fi eldwork on the ethnic Chinese of three different places: Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Thailand has been my research site since I went from Canada to Southeast Asia in 1987 where the ethnic Chinese are a signifi cant minority group in economic terms. The only place in Southeast Asia where the ethnic Chinese are a majority group, Singapore was where I taught for 14 years. Born in China, I grew up in Hong Kong and left for Canada for university studies in 1969; I returned to Hong Kong in 2001. Between 1980 and 1987, I published several works on the Chinese of Canada (Chan, 1983, 1987; Chan and Helly, 1987). The changing, multiple ethnic identities of the Hongkongers since the return of the former British colony to China in 1997 have been a matter of deep personal and scholarly concern to me. In the past three years, I have published three book manuscripts on, respectively, the ethnic Chinese of Thailand (Tong and Chan, 2001), Chinese business networks (Chan, 2000), and the social history of Singapore (Chan and Tong, 2003). In a way, the two strands of research, on the identities of the ethnic Chinese and on the Chinese business networks, have come to a head – precisely at a moment when I am using the occasion of writing this essay to refl ect on the ethnic Chinese experiences of the three places – all in an attempt to interrogate words such as Chinese diaspora, identity, ethnicity, and Chineseness. I hope to critique existing, as well as offer alternative, ways of conceptualising what it means to be Chinese in the post-modern world. Not entirely satisfi ed with the Chinese diaspora term but not able to fi nd a substitute, I wonder what it means to be hyphenated, to carry one’s house and home on one’s back, to exist in a transit, third zone ‘where words do not stick’ (Alexander, 1999) because one is sometimes much better off to remain nameless when language fails.
