HONG KONG — Under the distant gaze of Queen Elizabeth II's portrait on a shelf in Alfred Ko's office, a plaster bust of Mao Tse-tung rubs shoulders with a replica of the Goddess of Democracy, symbol of the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square.
Colonialist, Communist, democrat: This jumbled iconography of China's past reflects the conundrum of Ko's identity. Being Chinese--in or outside China--isn't simple. And Ko, living in British Hong Kong in the months before China reclaims the territory, has found it's often contradictory.
After the bloody army crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, said Ko, who was then a student in Canada, he considered--and rejected--getting a Canadian passport.
"I didn't feel like I belonged there," he said. "I'm Chinese."
Better to face an uncertain future in a China-controlled Hong Kong, Ko reasoned, than to live as a foreigner abroad. The People's Liberation Army may have forestalled or even killed his dreams for a democratic China. But it did not dim what he felt defined him most--his sense of being Chinese.
There are many versions of what it is to be Chinese. About a fifth of the world's population--including most of the 1.2 billion people in China and the estimated 30 million "overseas Chinese" in 109 countries around the world, including Hong Kong--is considered ethnic Chinese.
But differences in dialect, religion, ideology and cuisine divide the greater Chinese nation at least as much as different languages, religious denominations, cultures and cuisines divide Western Europe.
"China is really multinational--almost like a continent itself--like Europe," said Wang Gungwu, a Singapore-based scholar who has spent a lifetime studying the Chinese diaspora.
But as the recent furor over disputed Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea demonstrated, there is also something about being Chinese that transcends geographic borders and ideological differences.
Joining hands in protest against the erection of a lighthouse on one of the rocky Diaoyu islands by the right-wing Japan Youth Federation were Communist mainlanders, overseas anti-Communist dissidents, Taiwanese Nationalists and Taiwanese separatists, Hong Kong democrats and Chinese Americans.
For a moment--and not the first--bitter rivals united against a common foe. In this case--and not for the first time--the foe was Japan.
