The dangerous allure of Diaspora Chic.

Sometimes I think I will go to China to make my fortune. I am not alone, of course: Hardly a week goes by without a reminder that China is the business opportunity of the century. But the siren song that beckons me is not just the ring of a thousand cash registers opening. It is also the call of my Chinese ancestors. Come back, they cry, like spirits from an Amy Tan novel. It is your destiny.

All right, "destiny" is a bit melodramatic--and I don't really hear those voices. Yet, as a Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American, I am made to feel about not doing business in China they way Ken Griffey Jr. might have felt if he had never gone into baseball: like someone who squandered an inheritance, who failed to capitalize on a rare alignment of circumstance and skill.

Why such regret? I have, after all, no particular knack for business. I have no million-dollar idea to test on a billion-plus consumers. That I should feel this way testifies, I think, to the magnetic pull of "Chineseness," whatever that might mean--and to the growing allure of diasporan identity.

Consider the question of the "overseas Chinese," which is how people in China and Taiwan refer to the 30 million or so ethnic Chinese who live elsewhere. The idea is simple: There is China, which is filled with Chinese; and there is the rest of the world, which, to varying degrees, is sprinkled with Chinese. The ethnocentrism is manifest, as is the essentialism. ("You can take a Chinese out of China, but you can't take the China out of a Chinese.")

In Southeast Asia, such willful distinctiveness has made the ethnic Chinese the so-called "Jews of the East," a middleman minority parexcellence. In the United States, though, something quite different has unfolded. I am not an overseas Chinese. And the presumption that Chinese-Americans are merely Chinese people who happen to be in America, who could just as easily be in Indonesia or Malaysia, strikes me as fallacious, even dangerous. (The same presumption flavors the coverage of Clinton's "Asian money" scandals, as Robert Wright recently argued in Slate.)

Yet I suspect that if I were ever to do business in China, I might change my tune. I might want to have it both ways: to impress my Chinese partners with an insider's knowledge of America, and to impress my American partners with an insider's knowledge of China. The second insider claim is much less true than the first. It is perhaps even false. Still, the possibility of having my identity and eating it too helps keep the China-bound entrepreneur in me astir.

T his ambivalence of self--and this flirtation with intellectual dishonesty--is at the very heart of a contemporary trend that I call Diaspora Chic. Everywhere we turn today, it seems fashionable to conceive of American minorities as communities in exile, sojourners who owe greater fealty to their racial kinfolk, wherever they might live, than to their own neighbors, whoever they might be. This attitude is associated with left-wing multicultural academics, but multinational businesspeople hold it too. In their shared view, the locus of cultural and economic sovereignty is now the diaspora; the unit of human agency, the race.

Thus, Joel Kotkin and others cheerily predict that a handful of "tribes"--the Chinese, the Indians, the Jews, and others--will make the global economy hum and whir. In geopolitics, the dour Samuel Huntington also sees tribes but predicts a tectonic "clash of civilizations." On the airwaves, networks like Telemundo and Univision alchemize a Hispanic identity that transcends both region and country. And on our campuses, kente cloths, ancient tea ceremonies, and native dance performances signify not only a resistance to whiteness but also a yearning, among even the most assimilated, to be abroad at home.

T o be sure, there is something to be said for the emergence of diasporan identities. To the extent they reveal cultural connections across borders, they are illuminating. To the extent they are driven by the ever easier migration of people and capital, they are inevitable. But in the end, Diaspora Chic can only disappoint.

First, it's based on a contradiction. Diasporan identity holds that the "motherland" is worthy of sustained loyalty. Yet in almost any diaspora--whether black, yellow, brown, or white --the dispersed are far better off, at least materially, than those "back home." For most hyphenated Americans, a trip to the ancestral lands is enough to reinforce the point--assuming, that is, that there are ancestral lands to speak of. Where, after all, does one locate the home base for the "Asian" diaspora or the "African" diaspora?