Notes from the Field | Kymberley Chu, Diasporic Drifting: Experiencing Cultural Outsider/Ethnographic Insider Dynamics in Asia
“I don’t like this kind of weather; it looks ominous with the dark clouds, and it feels stuffy with no chance of a gentle breeze. I was going to say yi loh-hor [it’s raining] tapi [but] it’s not exactly accurate,” I told my friend. We sat in a hawker center, eating our noodle bowls and sharing a pizza. In this section of the food court, it is partially enclosed by an open-air metal roof structure, and the plastic tables are dull red, fading away. In the background, a small Buddhist shrine, public bathrooms, food stalls with lighted-up signs, and people meander around, pondering what to eat. “There’s a Hokkien word for this weather; it’s called kek hor,” she enthusiastically informed me. I became mesmerized because this Hokkien word captured a state of liminality: it was a stuffy kind of hot and humid, but the dark clouds didn’t give in to the rain yet. Here, in the field, I felt out of place despite having the looks to ‘fit in’ on Penang Island.
“Penang Hok-kiàn-ōe bu siang Johor Hok-kiàn-ōe” [The Penang Hokkien dialect is not the same as the Johor Hokkien dialect] was a repeated sentence, often spoken in a dismissive tone, I heard in my fieldwork by passersby, urban residents, or food vendors at the hawker centers I usually interacted with. In addition to dialect differences, my Chinese language skills were a rudimentary, uneven mix of heritage-based and textbook-based experience (普通话). It is in between fieldwork sessions, during coffee breaks or lunch, whenever locals lepak [relax], that I navigated awkward frictions regarding what kind of Malaysian I was.
Traditionally conceived as a societal truth set in stone, many older Malaysian-Chinese interlocutors, also discussed in intellectual life and literature references, have problematized a central tension: the political dichotomy of Chinese-speaking Malaysian Chinese in opposition to English-speaking Malaysian Chinese. As a contemporary social dynamic, this dichotomy suggested antagonism between the two identities, never a possible slight chance of reconciliation. My fieldwork presence stirred a central friction: What does a third category of Malaysian-Chineseness mean? How does one navigate the mutual yet uneven usage of reconciling Chinese-speaking, English-speaking, Malay-speaking, and Malaysian Chinese dialect skills as a diaspora anthropologist?
How is ‘home’ constructed by the anthropologist? Returning from the imperial metropole, how do diasporic anthropologists cultivate and contend with cultural belonging during their fieldwork lives? Living in one’s ‘country of origin’ as an adult is not the same as spending their childhood summers there. Subject positions do not exist in isolated silos. Thinking with the literary works of David Palumbo-Liu and situating my doctoral training in Euro-American academia, I will focus on the political dynamics between Asia and America. Palumbo-Liu’s slash in his ‘Asian/American’ framework acknowledges the mutual interplay of Asian and American cultural formations at specific historical moments (Palumbo-Liu 1999). In these cultural interactions, particular conceptions of Asian identities are constructed in resistance to specific notions of the US empire and its neoliberal hegemony. For example, Palumbo-Liu questions the core formation of the hyphenated Asian-American dichotomy in which individual subjects must assert their dominant identity of being “American” over their subjugated, racialized “Asianness” (Palumbo-Liu 1999 and Said 1978).
When revealing their US-trained academic credentials or stories of upbringing abroad, Asian/American anthropologists are subjected to racialized microaggressions in the field, influenced by everyday perceptions of the US empire and its uneven collaborations with local modes of domination (e.g., casteism). Although subjected to the colonial trope of perpetual foreigner in the United States, I was often teased by older Malaysian interlocutors for being a “banana” (香蕉) due to my heritage language skills. Often met with wary skepticism, they always asked me where home was in the world, when I would return home ‘abroad’, if I was ‘too young’ to do a PhD, and if I carried foreign citizenship. Although social teasing is prevalent in Malaysia, I felt alienated by the hostile social infrastructure where diasporic anthropologists are harshly judged for their language skills and lack of cultural belonging without receiving collective support. Here in Malaysia, I am perceived as another kind of cultural outsider, marginalized by the intersection of my ethno-linguistic, gendered, classed, and educational backgrounds, particularly for not acting “Chinese” enough.
In the field, the antagonistic dichotomy of Malaysian-Chineseness has sociohistorical conditions that resulted in its contemporary formation. For example, anthropologist Yeoh Seng-Guan wrote about local Malaysian anthropologists’ barriers to fieldwork and noted the discipline’s challenges in diversely representing local ethnographic encounters. Local Malaysian anthropologists, under the training of British Malayan academic institutions in the 1950s, were left contending with the afterlives of British colonial myths (Yeoh 2015: 150-155). Specifically, colonial narratives of order and purity perpetuated impermeable demarcations of difference in social hierarchies of ethnicity and race, language and dialect, education and class (Yeoh 2015 and Douglas 1966). By unpacking Malaysian-Chineseness as a political dichotomy, just as Yeoh and anthropologist Caryn Lim have pointed out respectively in their cultural analysis, suggested the role of colonial narratives in flattening a continuum of Malaysian-Chinese identities into ‘hermetically sealed’ communities, sharply demarcated by static bundles of colonial spatial relations in Malaysia (Yeoh 2019: 150, Lim et al. 2015, and Lim 2017).
In contemporary social life, there were two relational and situational modes of affirming Malaysian-Chineseness: 1) the English-speaking ‘banana’ (香蕉) , a person situated as fluent in English literature and bound by Euro-Western modes of modernity versus 2) the Chinese-speaking person who embodies neo-Confucian values but must grapple with Mandarin-speaking hegemony that tends to displace local dialect use in Malaysia.
Although my Mandarin-speaking skills were rudimentary, some of my older Malaysian interlocutors were surprised by my more fluent Hokkien, a dominant Malaysian-Chinese dialect in Malaysia. Dialect can be a profound and meaningful way of affirming cultural belonging in Malaysia’s local landscapes, beyond institutional spaces. Speaking a dialect builds bridges in community interactions, despite the rough edges when vocabulary is mishmashed. It can also be a profoundly alienating process when one awkwardly doesn’t attune to its place-specific vocabularies, makes linguistic mistakes, and experiences gatekeeping hostility by other local dialect speakers.
Although anthropologists and their interlocutors interact in the same physical landscapes, Asian/American anthropologists encounter multiple, overlapping political terrains that shape the complex kinds of interlocutor access and social relationships they cultivate in the field. Threading across the layered terrains of Asian and American cultural formations, Asian/American anthropologists unsettle hegemonic state narratives where essentialized notions of race are ‘neatly’ mapped onto dominant and singular cases of language use.
Acknowledgements:
For their feedback and secondary literature suggestions, I am thankful to Thiago Braga, Agustín Fuentes, and Cyren Wong Zhi Hoong. Many thanks to E Lyn for our conversations in the field. Previous findings of this essay were presented at the 2025 American Anthropological Association conference roundtable entitled “Asian and Asian/American Hauntings: Ghosts in/as Multispecies Theory.” I am especially grateful and deeply indebted to the kind support and intellectual generosity of scholars Tayeba Batool, Sophie Chao, Radhika Govindrajan, Aaron Su, Yuka Suzuki, and Nga Shi Yeu for cultivating transnational solidarities across Asian/American spaces. I thank Tristan Grunow for publishing the commentary piece at criticalasianstudies.org.
This essay is based upon work supported by the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University through the Mary and Randall Hack ‘69 Fund for Water Research and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Emslie Horniman Anthropological Scholarship Fund.
References:
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Ferrarese, Marco, Joseph Goh, Julian Lee, and Caryn Lim. 2015. Review of Identity Formations in Contemporary Malaysia: Traversing and Transcending Ethnicity. In Malaysia Post-Mahathir: A Decade of Change?, edited by James Chin and Joern Dosch, 41–69. Marshall Cavendish.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Hussein Alatas, Syed. 2010. The Myth of the Lazy Native : A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. London ; New York: Routledge.
Lim, Caryn. 2017. Review of Being “Mixed” in Malaysia: Negotiating Ethnic Identity in a Racialized Context. In Mixed Race in Asia, edited by Zarine Rocha and Farida Fozdar, 155–72. Routledge.
Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American. Stanford University Press.
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Yeoh, Seng-Guan. 2019. Review of Domesticating Social Anthropology in West Malaysia: National Traditions and Transnational Practices. In Southeast Asian Anthropologies, edited by Eric Thompson and Vineeta Sinha, 141–67. National University of Singapore Press.
Kymberley Chu is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at Monash University, Malaysia. Specifically, she examines how free-ranging primate bodies and their physiologies traverse through development projects, economic valuations, and cultural histories that all mutually intersect in Malaysia's post-plantation society. For more information, her webpage can be found here and her Bluesky handle is @dialecticprimates.bsky.social.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Kymberley Chu, “Diasporic Drifting: Experiencing Cultural Outsider/Ethnographic Insider Dynamics in Asia,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, January 19, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/BBJP2599.