Negotiating the Voices

Because of the diversified nature of the Chinese community, existing in an ongoing state of reflection and having to establish and re-establish one’s positionality thus becomes inevitable. In Soni-Sinha’s (2008) experience, her class background and education were critical in helping her gain access to the entrepreneurs and managers in India but these identities also distanced her from the workers and artisans in the beginning. During my fieldwork, the plethora of positions I occupied were evident, regardless of whether the ascriptions accorded by the field participants’ were synonymous with my own perception of my identity. In one instance, my ethnicity dominated. During an incident when I professed a preference for chicken thigh meat over breast meat, one of the individuals present in a social gathering who was half-Chinese-half-White proclaimed, “you Chinese like to suck on bones”. In another situation, my nationality stood out. During an interview with a Chinese woman from the PRC, she talked at length about the ‘moral degradation’ of her younger fellow countrymen. She said that she would only say this to me because I was not a PRC Chinese. In such instances, being of a different nationality had its advantage because participants were more willing to be open in their critical musings. In another example, a Singaporean and a Malaysian were very frank and straightforward in expressing to me, their negative impressions of PRC Chinese.

89 At other times, being of a different nationality had its disadvantages. For instance, when another PRC Chinese tried to explain to me how the overseas PRC Chinese were in tune with the latest trends in mainland China, she invoked many social examples from home. Even if I were to be privy to the social trends that she mentioned, without an in-depth grasp of the culture in PRC, I was not able to fully appreciate the analogies she was drawing. Such examples reinforced the fluidity of identities I possessed and highlighted the shifting insider- outsider status I had.

Labaree (2002) has provided a good review of the literature on insider-outsider position from proponents of it being two mutually distinct constructs to those arguing insiderness and outsiderness being on a continuum. Further scholarship raised the idea of multiple insiders and outsiders as well as the notion of positionality being an ongoing process of evaluation. It is necessary to be aware of the multiple attributes associated with one’s positionality (Palmer, 2006) but it is insufficient and perhaps wasteful to be merely cognisant and passively negotiate around identities ascribed by the participants to the researcher. As Narayan (1993: 673) articulated, “a person may have strands of identification available, strands that may be tugged into the open or stuffed out of sight”. Thus, and following the overall standpoint of the thesis, identities need to be proactively engaged with during the research process, rather than ignored or dismissed.

Gender, as one of the status identities, was ‘deployed’ during Mazzei’s and O’Brien’s (2009) research. They postulated that researchers “can read which of their attributes matter in a particular field setting (and field interaction), come to understand the scripts operating about these attributes, and then, usually strategically negotiate their gender and / or host of identities to build access and rapport” (2009: 363). Active positioning was adopted to

90 accentuate commonalities and mitigate differences with their participants in conducting a successful and ethical research. However, when the groups’ characteristics and individual interests are diverse, such a strategy becomes more complex. Indeed, Ravitch and Wirth (2007: 77) are of the view that “these choices can be difficult, as their impact can affect not only the research process and outcomes, but professional relationships and situations both during and after the research”.

Relatively speaking, I am more academically qualified than most, if not all, of my research participants. Amongst them, there are elderly men who are established within the Chinese community in Liverpool. Instead of playing up my educational achievements, I downplayed them in order to establish rapport before and during the interview. Instead of introducing myself as a Ph.D. student or a postgraduate researcher, I merely said that I was a student who was very interested to talk to them to hear their views, perspectives and opinions. Through doing so, the elderly men who were community leaders or established men in the community were more likely to be helpful. It could be a case of male chauvinism at play because more traditional Chinese men of earlier generations tended to relegate women to lesser and unimportant roles. Their male egos may feel threatened by an educated woman, and a much younger woman in this instance. However, there were other times when I needed to play up my educational qualifications in order to build rapport. Especially for Chinese people from the Fujian province as well as lesser educated women in the community, they were very ‘honoured’ that an educated person was willing to talk to them and to listen to their stories. In these instances, I did not downplay my qualifications but I also took care not to sound too arrogant in case it annoyed my potential participants. These encounters stressed the need for me to realign my positioning now and then depending on the situations which were often assessed at the start of interactions.

91 Whilst acknowledging the benefits of active positioning in the field, the strategy should not be executed to the extent of tampering with the site in the sense that the researcher becomes the initiator of an outcome. Ultimately, the researcher, being present in the field, can influence the voices of the researched. Drawing upon the example of chicken thigh meat, after I explicitly requested that I wanted chicken thigh over breast meat, fellow Chinese people made the same requests, albeit meekly. Similarly during the interviews, it was paramount that I avoided professing my agreement or disagreement with remarks made by the interviewees. There were times I strongly dissented with some of their views but I would only express them if the participants asked me. Even when I articulated my different viewpoints, I made it a point to state them objectively and with much reduced emotional fervour.

Although it is recognised that knowledge is intersubjectively negotiated by the researcher and the researched, the researcher’s assertion will have ramifications on the dynamics between the participants themselves, hence fundamentally altering the nature of the field site. Unless the researcher’s non-interference would bring about life and death outcomes, such as McGettigan’s (2001) diving into a river to save a fellow tour member during his participant observation, a researcher must be reflexively deliberate about whether his / her actions are leading and not merely contributing to the development of field dynamics. Even though I agree with Mazzei’s and O’Brien’s (2009) call to read scripts and position oneself strategically, another equally pertinent consideration when actively positioning oneself is the plausibility of the researcher’s role in spearheading dynamics.

92 The most authentic and reliable interview method would entail obliterating interviewer effects as it offers an understanding of natural settings and events as well as genuine information volunteered by participants. It can be argued that carrying out such a study is almost impossible as the physical presence of a researcher can have some bearing on how participants react. The Hawthorne effect13 aside, the essence of research requires a researcher. Instead of trying to be invisible, the researcher should instead be mindful of his / her position and make reflexive decisions to negotiate the field. With roots in feminist research, reflexivity is defined by Mehta (2008: 240) as “the conscious attempt to identify how we as researchers influence the research process and how the whole research process is structured around issues of dominance and power, gender, class, age and race”. Active positioning tempered with reflexivity to avoid creating otherwise artificial settings and events would thus be the middle ground I am arguing researchers should tread.