In Shirley Lim's novel, Joss and Gold, the race riots that occurred in Malaysia on serve as a pivotal event that thereafter disperses all the characters to various places. This paper addresses the undoing of hierarchies in the context of the Chinese diaspora. © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Sheila Watson, Amy Jane Barnes and Katy Bunning individual chapters, the contributors. These identities are given meaning through the language and symbolic systems through which they are represented. This scenario presents different identities dependent on two separate national positions, those of Serbs and Croats, which are picked out here as two distinctly 430identifiable peoples to whom the men involved see themselves as belonging. 1–2) This is a story about war and conflict set against a background of social and political upheaval. We’re all just Balkan rubbish.’ (Ignatieff, 1994, pp.
They think they’re fancy Europeans and everything. Those Croats, they think they’re better than us. But the question I’ve asked bothers him, so a couple of minutes later, he tosses the weapon on the bunk between us and says, ‘Look, here’s how it is. Over there they smoke Croatian cigarettes.’ ‘But they’re both cigarettes, right?’ ‘You foreigners don’t understand anything’, he shrugs and begins cleaning his Zastovo machine pistol. ‘What makes you think you’re so different?’ The man I’m talking to takes a cigarette pack out of his khaki jacket. So I say I can’t tell Serbs and Croats apart. I’m trying to figure out why neighbours should start killing each other. I’m talking to the Serbian soldiers – tired, middle-aged reservists, who’d much rather be at home in bed. Every night, they call each other up on the CB radio and exchange insults – by name. Everyone knows everyone else: they all went to school together before the war, some of them worked in the same garage they dated the same girls. The world is no longer watching, but every night Serb and Croat militias exchange small arms fire and the occasional bazooka round. I’m in the command post of the local Serbian militia, in an abandoned farm house, 250 metres from the Croatian front line … not Bosnia but the war-zones of central Croatia.
The writer and broadcaster Michael Ignatieff tells this story about the wartorn former Yugoslavia in 1993: … it’s four in the morning.
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