In her introduction to this special issue of Cross-Currents, Lorraine Paterson sets the scene for the featured articles and provides the context from which they emerged. This endnote essay works to a reverse formula, seeking if not to unweave then to unsettle the notion of bounded coherence and to spotlight instead the inchoate nature of any project to document the past. Rather than braiding together threads of our contributors' articles to signal the thematic coherence of this suite of papers on “mediating Chineseness,” I work instead from key themes presented in this collection to gesture towards loose ends and unstitched seams. Mirroring the genre of Willmott’s memoir essay, I invite reflection on these in-between spaces and the possibilities they represent for developing new approaches to the articulation, study, and mediation of “Chineseness” in Cambodia.

In 1981, social anthropologist William Willmott declared, “Today, no-one identifies themselves as Chinese in Kampuchea [Cambodia]” (1981:45). He certainly had the authority to publish such a statement. Having conducted sustained fieldwork on Chinese community formation in Cambodia from 1962 to 1963, Willmott offered an unprecedented examination of social structures, political organization, and patterns of identification among urban Chinese in his monographs, The Chinese in Cambodia (1967) and The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia (1970). However, subsequent to his research, Chinese communities suffered terribly during the repression of the Lon Nol government between 1970 and 1975 and the atrocities of the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Willmott thus declared Chinese communities—and a willingness to identify as Chinese—destroyed. This understandably pessimistic vision turned out to be unfounded; the next extensive research done on Chinese in Cambodia by Penny Edwards and Chan Sambath in 1995 showed Chinese communities rebuilding. However, the descriptions of these communities showed a complexity of identity formation—from recent immigrants, “the raw Chinese,” to the five “traditional” Chinese dialect groups—that differed markedly from the indexes of identity applied by Willmott in his initial analysis. Academic ideas of how Chineseness should be configured had shifted and complicated; ascribing identity had become increasingly problematic...