All Tied-Up: The Twists and Turns of the Chinese-American Identity
By Melissa Tse
When unknown Knicks player Jeremy Lin astonished basketball fans with a
jaw dropping six-game winning streak, I was living abroad in China watching from
afar. I remember the elated response in the U.S. over Lin’s devastating 38 points in a
win against the Lakers; the controversy over Ben and Jerry’s fortune cookie-laden
ice cream; and the echo of the media-coined puns about the underdog turned
overnight sensation. In China, “Linsanity” was just as inescapable.
However, there was a bizarre obsession over Jeremy Lin in China that posed
a provocative issue to me as a Chinese-American. My Chinese friends were not only
preoccupied with where Lin studied, what religion he practiced and how much he
was paid when he first entered the NBA, they were also concerned about how he
self-identified given his heritage. I remember a conversation with a Chinese friend in
which I referred to Lin as “Taiwanese-American.” My friend, with no relation to Lin,
responded somewhat protectively. “His family has only been in Taiwan for two
generations,” he said. “The rest of his ancestry is from mainland China.”
Defending the homeland
This defensive, political outlook toward ancestry, nationality and citizenship
is common in modern Chinese culture. In her extremely thoughtful essay “Clash of
Civilizations: The Confusion of Being a Chinese Student in America,” Atlantic writer
Helen Gao investigates why the Chinese are extremely protective of their homeland.
As a Chinese student studying abroad in the U.S., Gao initially felt uncomfortable
discussing problems in China, especially as her American classmates sparred over
issues like the Sichuan earthquake or the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
For Gao (and for many Chinese), criticisms of the Chinese Communist Party
seemed not only as an indictment of China, but a personal attack as well. “I often
find myself wrestling with an instinctive compulsion to take China's side,” Gao says.
But why is there such a Pavlovian response among the Chinese to defend their
government, their culture and their nationality in its entirety, as if it were a corporal
part of them? Simply put, Gao resolves it as a social norm “instilled in them by a
nationalistic atmosphere.”
It’s enough that Chinese social norms frequently blur the distinction between
the “political with the “personal,” but as a Chinese-American, I witnessed this
dynamic further complicated as Chinese culture also conflated the concepts of
nationality with ethnicity. For many Chinese, nationality and ethnicity bears no
difference. If you are ethnically Chinese, then you, in some respects, are also tied to
the national Chinese identity at large.
Thus, Americans with Chinese heritage, like Lin, are stuck in the middle of a
metaphysical debate over how they racially or nationally self-identify. Even if
Chinese-Americans have no stance on the subject, their existence is somehow
inherently political through the racial perception of their peers in Asia. It doesn’t
matter that Lin was raised in the Bay Area or attended Harvard. What does matter is
the implicit political statement of his heritage. It’s not an issue of genealogical
precision, but a struggle for cultural pride.
Who can you trust?
When I first studied abroad in mainland China several years ago, I lived with
a Chinese student who had responded to an advertisement to share a dorm with an
American. My roommate was initially disappointed to discover that I was not
“American,” but Chinese-American. “This is a bit of waste,” she said. “How can I
practice my English with you?” No matter how much I tried to convince her that I
was a native English speaker, she was always hesitant to the heed my advice about
pronunciation, spelling and grammar.
To her, my being Chinese-American meant I was more “Chinese” than I was
“American,” and therefore, a foreigner to English. Although I was somewhat insulted
when my Chinese roommate opted to hire heavily accented English tutors from
Russia, we both still got along well. It was, after all, an exciting summer to be an
American studying Mandarin: China was still basking in its Olympic glow, street
markets were hocking President “Oba Mao” trinkets, and Shanghai held China’s firstever Gay Pride festival.
Then, catastrophe struck. In July of that year, the Urumqi riots in the Xinjiang
province overran global headlines. It was an issue of both racial and political
resonance. Protests by the indigenous Uyghurs against the Chinese government had
tragically escalated into violence, leading to 197 deaths and 1, 721 injuries. As the
riots unfolded, the Chinese government cracked down on its media censorship.
Despite the blackouts on our television and Internet, my roommate managed
to turn up eyewitness footage of the riots. As we watched it together, it was difficult
to distinguish who were bystanders or rioters, and who was attacking whom. All we
saw were citizens assaulting other citizens, some even beating others with large
sticks. It was horrifying to watch, to say the least.
My roommate and I talked for hours about what the Urumqi riots meant for
China. We talked about how we felt about the response of the Chinese government,
and why the tensions in Xinjiang had developed to this point. My roommate vented
her frustrations about the leadership in China, particularly its proclivity to
censorship.
“I’m really glad I have a roommate I can say these things to. It would be hard
to put on an act all the time,” she said to me.
“Why would you have to put on an act?” I asked.
“Because I couldn’t say a lot of these things to an American, but you’re a
Chinese-American, so it’s different. It’s easier to talk to you because you understand
what it’s like to be Chinese. I trust you more.”
That conversation, for me, was one of those moments of socio-cultural
instruction. My roommate’s confession that she trusted me over other foreigners
purely because of my Chinese lineage was an education in how I understood not
only myself, but also how others deciphered and interpreted me in terms of my race.
I realized then that my heritage as a Chinese-American involuntarily tied me
to a larger national identity. It demanded from me a loyalty to others who were also
Chinese, strangers or otherwise, despite never living in China before that summer.
Ever since, it’s been an issue that has sparked more and more reflection, and has
revisited me frequently throughout the years.
You’ll never be American…
I wondered about the experiences of other Chinese-Americans, so I
interviewed several of my Chinese-American friends about the social, political and
ethnic implications of their own identity. From their responses, everything seems
related to one another: the defensive instinct of modern Chinese nationalism, the
squabbles over Jeremy Lin’s heritage, and the assumption that Chinese-Americans
are indebted to a larger Chinese identity. It all centered on this concept of
nationalism that Gao referred to; as Chinese-Americans, we were all Chinese, a
commonality that united us together. However, it seemed to burden us with
distinctive pressures as well. Somehow, our being Chinese was antithetical to our
American identities, leading to many misconceptions about race.
For this essay, I issued the same surveys to several of my friends about their
heritages as Chinese-Americans. One of the issues I asked about was, “Do you
identify as solely Chinese, solely American, or Chinese-American?” Every single
respondent replied with “Chinese-American.” However, when they elaborated on
what that meant to them and what that meant to others in China, I noticed a
thought-provoking trend.
In the same way my Chinese roommate intuitively trusted me because of my
Chinese heritage, several of my Chinese-American friends mentioned that many
Chinese demonstrated some form of racial privilege toward them as well. Most of
their responses were about small acts of camaraderie. While many foreigners in
China complain about their lack of acceptance in Chinese culture, this rarely was an
issue for the Chinese-Americans I interviewed, especially if they were fluent in a
Chinese dialect.
However, that wasn’t to say that Chinese-Americans hadn’t encountered
their own difficulties in China. In fact, my interviews indicated that because many
Chinese-Americans were accepted as Chinese, they were also subject to certain
cultural expectations. There were many responses from Chinese-Americans about
how these expectations felt hostile toward their being American.
One common reply in the surveys was that Chinese-Americans often discover
that many Chinese are completely unaware of what a “Chinese-American” even is.
For some Chinese, the issue of race is black and white; you’re either Chinese or
American, not both. If you appear to be Chinese and speak Chinese, then you’re
Chinese—no exceptions. One respondent of my survey candidly wrote, “Chinese
people seem to have a very hard time understanding a Chinese-looking person can
be an American.”
I’ve seen it too. Chinese-Americans who argue with Chinese citizens about
their “American-ness” often end up in a repeating loop over how they’ve selfidentified. Another respondent blatantly confessed that she frequently pretends to
be Korean whenever she is approached in China about her heavily accented
Mandarin, in order to evade such debates.
As I poured over the responses from my surveys, I considered that perhaps
the conflicts of my friends’ Chinese and American identities were an isolated sample.
For a more thorough look, I went back to representations in popular culture, i.e.
Jeremy Lin. I read articles about Lin in Chinese, including an invitation by stateowned Chinese media outlet Xinhua for Lin to play for the China in the 2012
Olympics. Then, I read the reactions of Chinese readers to this request. Some
readers recognized the ridiculousness of such a demand. Others, however, had a
nationalistic tone that seemed all too familiar to my Chinese-American friends and
me.
One netizen wrote: “[Lin should] come back to China, after all, he is a Chinese
person.” Another commentator expressed the same sentiment, but couched it in
terms of Chinese hegemony: “China as a country is strong now, people [like Lin] will
naturally fly back to China.” Other posts were more drastic: “The [Chinese]
Basketball Association should think of a way to make Lin renounce his American
citizenship.”
Even within allegedly educated circles, Chinese-American representation still
seems overly simplistic. For instance, Amy Chua’s infamous Wall Street Journal
article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” essentially implies that it is impossible
to be both American and Chinese, because one culture is always at odds with the
other. For Chua, to be raised “Chinese” means to study hard, to attend a reputable
university, to transition into well-compensated career and then retire to securely.
To be raised “American” is to barely scrape by academically, play after-school
sports, and then, as Chua neatly puts it, end up “lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and
pathetic. “
But what seemed even more confusing to me about Chua’s “tiger mother”
mantra is that Chua herself is Chinese-American. I wondered, is Chua ashamed of
her American heritage in the same way Chinese-Americans are pressured into
prizing their Chinese heritage above all else?
One heartbreaking response from my survey shed light on this issue for me.
Regarding the way Chinese-Americans comprehend their identities in childhood,
one respondent replied, “My parents used to tell me to my face that Americans
would never accept me as ‘American’…It was a long process to understand what it
meant to grow up with and between two cultures.”
Although each survey respondent identified racial pressure from various
sources (parents, classmates, friends, strangers), they all demonstrated a shared
agony. They all knew too well about the difficulties of reconciling their conflicting
identities, the tension of abiding by Chinese social norms and the struggle for their
own existential independence. It was a balancing act that loomed over many of my
friends for most of their lives.
Homeward bound
So what does this all mean? After spending a year living and working abroad
in China, I’ve realized that this is where my education in the humanities comes in.
One of the last discussion points I issued to my friends was about Asian-American
studies. I asked: “How well-educated do you think American college students are on
Chinese history, language, culture or politics?” They all unanimously replied that
most American college students were extremely uneducated about China. But when
I asked how to improve such a problem, many of my friends weren’t so sure. Many,
in fact, were even skeptical about pushing for more of an emphasis on AsianAmerican studies.
At first, I was surprised with these responses. Shouldn’t we stress for a
greater range of ethnic comparative studies? Haven’t classes in Asian-American
studies corrected many of the misconceptions about us? Why were some of my
friends unconvinced of this? I discussed this over and over with them, read articles
about Asian-American studies and debated on blogs over the importance of such an
education. After much consideration, perhaps I better comprehend their point of
view that there’s more to what we learn in the classroom.
In my surveys, for instance, I had interviewed a variety of ChineseAmericans: engineers, architects, writers, students, parents, teachers, etc. Some of
them had a formal liberal arts education, others hadn’t. But still, they all seemed
engaged, at one point or another, in a liberal arts discussion over their race.
Whether that discussion about their race took place in childhood, in a classroom, in
an Internet chat room or in a coffee shop, they all participated in what my education
in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences always welcomed: critical thought,
curiosity, broad-mindedness and communication.
While, I still strongly advocate a greater stress on ethnic comparative studies,
I’ve realized that the humanities are everywhere. We certainly witness it in our
universities, but perhaps we don’t give its manifestation elsewhere enough credit.
There are so many others ways to participate in the humanities: enrolling in an
ethnic comparative studies class, learning another language, picking up a great piece
of literature or supporting these events here at Arizona State University. But there
are also several unexpected ways where you’ll unearth the importance of
humanities, such as volunteering with refugees or teaching English outside of the
United States. You’re even welcome to start a conversation here on this blog in the
comments section. Whatever you decide though, I promise you’ll witness the
humanities vigorously at work.
Melissa Tse graduated from Arizona State in 2012 with dual B.A. degrees in English
literature and Mandarin Chinese. She is a recipient of the Boren Scholarship and a
graduate of ASU’s Chinese Language Flagship Program.
Patrick Johndro, a 2012 graduate from Indiana University in East Asian studies,
assisted with the Chinese-English translations in this essay.