http://books.google.fr/books?id=gdGubgTGIDcC&pg=PA229&lpg=PA229&vq=emily+yeh&dq=Emily+Yeh&as_brr=3&hl=zh-CN&output=html&sig=ACfU3U0nF76f3bvAuLGP4mLZVFXoK6bObw


Will the real Tibetan please stand up! Identity politics in the Tibetan diaspora
Emily Yeh (university of California - Berkeley)
Emily Yeh is a Taiwanese-American. She married an exiled Tibetan.


    In january 200, I attended a pre-Losar party sponsored by the Tibetan Association of Northern California with a friend whom I shall call Drolgar, a Chinese-educated Tibetan woman who had recently come to the US to continue her studies. Walking up to the bar, she asked to buy two soft drinks in her flawless Lhasa-dialect Tibetan. The two Tibetan women behind the bar, both exiles from India, looked at each other in disbelief, one saying to the other loudly in Tibetan,”Oh! She’s Tibetan! I thought she was Chinese.” Embarrassed, we both took our drinks and walked quickly aways. Several monthes earlier, the two of us had attended another party,
this time at the home of a mutual Tibetan friend in Berkeley. Towards the end of the evening, one of the women,who was born in Kham but had lived for many years in India, called across the room,”You knw, I really did think you were a Chinese woman when I met you today. You really do look like a rgya mo.” The same woman had commented to me earlier on how much she thought I looked like a Tibetan. According to another Lhasa woman, now that I had learned to speak the Tibetan language, I had “become the same as a Tibetan”. These and other incidents of mistaken Han-Tibetan identity finally led to a long conversation in which Drolgar ask me plaintively, “I feel I am really Tibetan inside but all the other Tibetans think I am Chinese. How can I make myself more Tibetan?” She went on to explain that when she met other Tibetans she immediately and intuitively recognized them as Tibetan. But, she wondered, if she could step outside her own body and meet herself, would she get that sense of Tibetan-ness which she felt to be her true essence, or would she see a Chinese woman as so many other Tibetans do?.

The conversation made me uncomfortable: how could I, a Chinese-American, try to answer a Tibetan woman’s question about how to be more Tibetan, especially given deeply held and often politically strategic beliefs in the existence of an essential Tibetan identity, as well as in the highly polarized context of exile in which all things ‘Chinese’ become the ‘other’ against which (at least some) Tibetan self-presentations are made. My usual glib explanation about why I can sometimes “pass” ---long hair, turquoise earrings, a lot of time in the sun- seemed suddenly offensive, as if I were suggesting that there was no more to fulfilling a deeply held desire to be recognized as Tibetan (with all its implications) than surface adornment. While a completely essentialist notion of identity is clearly untenable, so too is one in which identity is a voluntaristically chosen act, like picking a set of clothes to wear in the morning. How can one ensure that other people recognize and accept one’s identity as the one that one blieves it to be, especially when categories by which identities are named take on multiple meanings? As Lisa Malkki (1997,71)states in her study of Hutu refugees.

Identity is always mobile and processual, partly self-construction, partly categorization by others, partly a condition, a status, a label, a weapon, a fund of memories, and so on. it is a creolized aggregate composed through bricolage.

This formulation of identity is a useful starting point for raising question about Tibetan communities and identity both in exile and in Tibet. What are the relevant markers of Tibetan identity and how do they differ in different sites of Tibetan identity-formation, particularly in the homeland of Tibet itself, in refugee communities in South Asia, and in the proverbial melting pot of the United States? What role does “categorization by others” play in identity and the social life of Tibetan communities? How is Tibetan-ness understood, experienced, contested, or enacted by differently situated Tibetans and how does this bear on political position, relationships to all things “Chinese”, or the problematics of recognition or “passing”? in this paper I address these questions vis-à-vis the experiences of the Tibetan community in the Bay Area of California, US. To a lesser extent, I also address the cultural politics of Tibetan identity in India, in Lhasa, and in “inland China”(内地) in order to compare different sites in which Tibetan identiy is claimed and performed. In doing so, I wish to step back from a focus on “the Tibetans” as an unproblematic collective to ask instead about the fissures or fragments encompassed within the category “Tibetan”.

Although it may well be impossible to talk about representations of Tibetan culture without discussing the way Tibetan are imagined by West, I try specifically to address Tibetan presentations of self to other Tibetans, rather than to Western supporters. I believe this is possible and necessary even if there is “a whole set of multicultural and transnational mechanisms through which “authentic” Tibetanness is scripted by Chinese and Westerners and is internalized by Tibetans in performances..” That is, while mimesis, a complex mirroring relationship through which representations come to affect who and what the represented consider themselves to be, must thus shape Tibetan subjectivities (see discussion of racialised images and “passing” below), an exclusive focus on western representation and consumption of Tibetan culture obscure certain veryday practices which are also partially constitutive of identity. By focusing on some seemingly mundane details of social relationships, I discuss a variety of alternative Tibetan subject positions, all of which are valid and all of which struggle with questions of authenticity.
The relatively new Tibetan communities in the US such as the one in the Bay Area are especially interesting place to consider such cultural politics, given much greater freedom from both state and

”

when a person keep seeking "identity", it is the clear sign he or she is insecure.

what are you calling me? a chinese? an american? a chinese american? an asian? an asian-american? whatever! does that matter? maybe matters to you, but for me, it hardly matters.

[ Last edited by ipfreak at 23-9-2008 12:22 ]