Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

34 Chineseness as a Moving Target
imbibed valuable information from such unofficial interviews. My cultural and linguistic
background were perceived by the community members as part of the we-group and
my linguistic background, trilingual in the community language, Dutch and English was
often called upon to offer certain help, e.g., to act as an interpreter, to contribute for the
establishment of a new Chinese school, to act as an advisor for the school curricula. I
have attempted to complete these friendly requests as a volunteer, and as a
consequence, spent a lot of time and energy. But at the same time, I had gained my
participants’ personal trust. In my experience, being a member and an insider of the
community helped me to make insightful observations, and being trained as a
researcher enabled me to collect, approach and analyze the data in a more ‘detached’
way.
The third fieldwork period was from January 2011 to August 2011. The scope of the
observations was extended to the wider Chinese community, i.e., linguistic landscaping,
internet ethnography and collecting online and offline community documents
and newspapers. During the fieldwork in the school, I observed that I as an
ethnographer, and the participants as ethnographees attended various social spaces
next to the normative Chinese language classroom, such as online social forums and
organized community activities, which provided meaningful ways for maintaining
channels of communication and high rates of participation. The ‘netnographic’
observation was made in three different online communities. First, the Asian and Proud
community on Hyves; the Dutch version of Facebook. It was established in the same
year as Facebook in 2004, but stayed local and was extremely popular among Dutch
youngsters. The forum in this online community I focused on was Welk Chinees dialect
spreken jullie? (Which Chinese dialect do you speak?). The forum can thus be read as an
archive of discourses of Chinese-Dutch identities voiced within an informal peer group
setting that is not organized by researchers. The voices contained in this forum are
complementary to the voices I had been recording in the school, thus giving us
additional insight into Chinese complementary education in the Netherlands from the
perspective of both those who have (almost) completed and those who have quit their
complementary education. The data thus provided rich ethnographic detail of the
constraints and regrets or missed opportunities teenagers have experienced with
respect to learning Chinese. As the community’s members aged and Hyves lost terrain
to Facebook, the community was mostly abandoned some time before the social
network site was closed down in 2013. The detailed description and analysis of the
online communities will be presented in Chapter 6.
The second online community I focused on is the social network site, jonc.nl, the
online platform of JONC (Jongeren Organisatie Nederlandse Chinezen), an organization
for Dutch Chinese young people in the age range of 18 to 35. It targets Chinese who are
raised in the Netherlands in order to make them more aware of their Chinese heritage:
‘The accent is not on integration anymore […] these young people are ever more
alienated from their Chinese ancestors, but they are still conscious of their Chinese
roots […] JONC tries to cherish this heritage in a context of Western openness.’ 7 For
this study, I focused on two short discussion threads of the jonc.nl platform. They were
part of the section Vakantie (holidays) under the heading Lifestyle which discusses
7
See www.jonc.nl, Over ons, last viewed on 28 December, 2015.