"Wherever the sea went, there you would find the Chinese people." That was the proverb uttered with great satisfaction by my Chinese primary school teacher four decades ago, as if being scattered far and wide in a perennial desperate attempt to escape from starvation and death in their homeland is a matter of national pride for the Chinese.

The proposal to create a global Chinese village through the Greater Chinese Cultural Circle by Tiong Hiew King et al probably has some expressed business, cultural or other agenda. But it is certainly encouraged by the fact that, by and large, the Chinese people have "done well" all over the world.

For those uninitiated, "doing well" is often the ultimate criteria by which the moral worth of any Chinese is judged by his fellow Chinese in Malaysia and probably elsewhere in the world. It means flourishing in business or such other endeavours that will benefit the self and the family. Almost invariably, it is measured in the very un-Confucian terms of material achievement.

Honouring the family has always been a big deal for the Chinese, because Confucius himself was supposed to have handed down his edicts on the supreme importance of one's filial and other duties to one's blood and kin.

The success and the clannishness of the "overseas" Chinese have always led to a mixture of envy and contempt among the indigenous peoples wherever they settle down, earning for themselves such unsavoury titles of "Chinamen", "Chinks", "Gooks", "Yellers", "slants"etc.

To those among the local population outside the Chinese enclaves of the Chinatowns, which must also include the imagined Chinatowns expressed in the exclusive self-image of "we Chinese", the Chinese will always remain an eternal enigma.

So successful

These Chinese people seem so, well, inscrutable, so hard to understand, and yet so successful in what they do. Why? How do these descendents of raw labourers, builders of railways, diggers of gold and other precious metals, operators of restaurants, provision shops, and laundries rise to such prominence in commerce and industry, in the professions, and in the world of academia and politics?

The clannishness of the Chinese people had a lot to do with their success stories, but that would take another book to explore. Suffice it to say here, that out of the total number of registered societies in Malaysia, easily three quarters of them are Chinese clans, guilds and associations.

These Chinese clans, guilds and associations - formed on the basis of blood, regional, language and other ties are the closest thing you have of a powerful grass-root civil society network. It is also an exclusively Chinese network.

Through their local penetration and national (and international) linkages, and with the massive resources they can mobilise at all levels, these Chinese clans, guilds and associations have become a powerful vehicle of preserving, sustaining and transmitting the collective identity of the Chinese people. They become the bedrock upon which the national system of Chinese schools, Chinese newspapers, Chinese businesses, Chinese religions, and Chinese political parties is erected.

Again, you wonder: what is that single most powerful motive force that drives them in their single-minded zeal for collective destiny? From what primordial source do they derive that sense of collective self-identity? In short, in their perception of themselves, what makes a Chinese a Chinese?

A clue can be found in the language of their ethnic narrative. Whenever a bond has to be recalled and renewed, especially in times of urgent political mobilisation against a perceived common foe, the Chinese will resort to that ancient myth of common genealogy: "We Chinese are all Sons and Grandsons of the Yellow Emperor".

The incantation of the name of the Yellow Emperor, or Huangdi, is sufficient to bring out that glint of mutual recognition of brotherhood among a group of Chinese-educated Chinese, cementing that emotional linkage embedded in a common ancestry. What makes a Chinese a Chinese is supposed to be in his blood, the lineage of which can be traced to the first progenitor of the entire Chinese race.

Famous book

It is in reference to this common ancestry that Lynn Pan gave the title to her now famous book Sons of the Yellow Emperor. In it, she did an excellent job tracing the footsteps of the Chinese diaspora in their exodus to all corners of the Earth over a period of quite a few centuries, recording their earlier sufferings and their subsequent struggle for survival in exile. It was mainly a story of blood, sweat and tears, of which my parents' experience in Sarawak was a part.

Even then, Lynn Pan's mission was to give as factual an account as possible of this global phenomenon called the Chinese diaspora. Hers was not one of critical reflection on the nature of Chineseness. She merely accepted the myth of the Yellow Emperor as a given parameter, which could serve as the unifying leitmotif of her moving tale of woe and tribulations suffered by the scattered Chinese people.

My query remains: who was this mystical Yellow Emperor who gave to all Chinese the ethnic symbol of the dragon worldwide, who supposedly initiated the Chinese practice of ancestor worship, and who was so virile as to produce one quarter of the world's population to-day?

The truth is probably buried forever in the sands and mists of time. What we have are myths and legends, which tell the ancient tale of a wise and brave tribal chief who unified a motley collection of warring tribes on the plains of the lower reaches of the Yellow River four or five thousand years ago.

All kinds of super-human qualities have been attributed to the Yellow Emperor. His martial prowess was amply shown by his conquest of his realm, so he must have been well versed in the art of war. When fighting a decisive battle in a fog with his arch enemy Chiyou, another tribal chief, he ensured his advantage in victory with the aid of a compass-like chariot.

But he was also a sage king, who loved his tribesmen like his own children. He laid down a moral code, and devised the rudiment of an administrative system. Many inventions originated from his court, such as the Chinese art of writing in ideograms, the coining of bronze money, the theory and practice of medicine, the building of boats, the raising of silk worms, and of course the all important art of agriculture. He was reputed to have died at the age of 110 amidst much fanfare and cosmic disturbances.

Legends being legends, they are not meant to be taken literally. In reality and this is purely conjectural the chap they call Huangdi was probably a highly successful tribal Alpha Male with a penchant for politics. With the invention of writing during his time, he did mark the end of the pre-historical, Neolithic period, and heralded the dawn of written Chinese history.

Single progenitor

In reality, it is unlikely that a whole civilisation could have been founded by any one individual. It is even more unlikely that the Yellow Emperor could have been the single progenitor of an entire race of Chinese people, for that would entail incest, and would threaten to wipe out the whole population. In short, Mr Huangdi had been deified and mythified beyond his ken.

The blood ties evoked in the incantation of the mantra "Sons and Grandsons of the Yellow Emperors" is an imagined communal bond, and so is the slogan which has gained popularity in recent years: "Descendents of the Dragon".

They may be convenient in demarcating an imagined border within which a common exclusive group identity is defined, but they are based on perceptions, rather than matters of fact.

The idea of a common bloodline may have given meaning to their sense of self-identity, but it is merely the wilful wishful extrapolation of the concept of family or clan writ large, to cover the entire race. Their origin is probably steeped in the distant feudal past of the Chinese people, in the mistaken belief that human blood possesses some supernatural mystical powers of salvation.

Therefore, the idea of a Chinese race unified by blood is a myth, just like all other racial myths of the world. The term "Sons and Grandsons of the Yellow Emperor" is a metaphor at best, and a misnomer at worst.

If my observation is acceptable, then more questions scream out for urgent answers.

When Confucius taught that "within the four seas, all men are brothers", did he mean the four seas surrounding the long coastline of mainland China merely? If so, how would that doctrine of Chinese Universal Brotherhood regard people from outside the geographical or imagined China?

In brief, when the metaphorical archetype of blood brotherhood is taken to mean literally, will the Chinese sense of ethnic self-identity not be vulnerable to the osmotic corrosion of racist sentiments? I am asking this difficult question: how racist can any Chinese be?

For a tentative exploration into this sensitive, almost tabooed subject, we may have to dip into the vast sea of Chinese history.

(To be continued next Saturday)


NOTE: This columnist is grateful to one letter writer Abdullah Yeoh for his correction of my mistake regarding the findings of the Chang Han Yin's survey in Singapore on Chinese wanting to be born again as Caucasian or Japanese. However, his correction on a matter of fact does not invalidate my view that the question was loaded in the first place.