Personal Reflections on ‘An Inquiry of the Chinese American Identity’ by Stephanie Chia

At the end of my stay in the Bay Area, I was presented a Song dynasty comic collection, a gift from Victor, one of our interviewees, and an acquired friend. He message to me was – that the Chinese culture is rich in history and the Chinese language is beautiful in its own right, hence we should be proud to be ethnically who we are. Perhaps, after asking so many of our interviewees what it means for them to be Chinese, I should also take the opportunity to answer the question for myself. What does it mean to me to be Chinese?

Just like the Chinese American, I am not purely ‘Chinese’ in the sense that I was not born in China, but rather my maternal grandparents migrated to Singapore from China during the 1940s, hence I am a 3rd generation Chinese Singaporean. Moreover, my paternal ancestors come from a unique heritage called ‘the Peranakans’ or ‘Baba-Nonya’. The term refers to the descendants of very early Chinese immigrants who were born and bred in the Melacca Straits and who have partially adopted Malay customs in an effort to be assimilated into the local community. While adopting the language and culture of the Malays, most Peranakan do retain some of their ethnic and religious origins such as marrying within the Straits-born Chinese community or ancestral worship. Over the centuries, the Peranakans have evolved a unique culture that maintains many of the Chinese traditions, while adopting the customs of the land they settled in as well as their successive colonial rulers. They have their own distinct foods and a are normally categorized as having a natural propensity to embrace new cultures.

My father and my grandparents are perhaps a classic example of Straits-born Chinese. Despite being ethnically Chinese, neither my father nor his parents were able to speak the Chinese language; they were however, fluent in both English and Malay. Hence, a common colloquial Malay phrase that is often used to describe the Peranakans was ‘Orang Cina Bukan Cina’, which means, ‘of Chinese origin, but not entirely Chinese (because they cannot speak the Chinese language). It is perhaps because of this inability to speak the Chinese language, that most Peranakans of my father’s and grandparent’s generation were much closer to the Malay community than they were to the Chinese community.

As for myself, because the Peranakans are classified by the Singapore government as ethnically Chinese; I received formal instruction in Mandarin as a second language, according to the ‘Mother Tongue Policy’ in Singapore. However, despite being fluent in Mandarin, I have never felt fully ‘Chinese’ as oppose to my peers who were 3rd generation Singaporean Chinese and whose ancestors came directly from China. Hence, I never really grew up thinking that the Chinese language and traditions were of any value, simply because my father and my paternal grandparents could not speak the language and did not practice Chinese customs and traditions. In fact, the clothes which my grandparents wore were more Malay in origin (the baju kurung) than they were of Chinese origin. And yet, despite not fully embracing Chinese customs and traditions, there was no distinguishing me and other Chinese Singaporeans. I shared the same skin color and hair color. In fact, because I am fair-skinned I looked more Chinese than I was Malay, and so did my paternal ancestors. We looked Chinese, but (saved for myself) could not speak a word of the Chinese language and did not practice much of the customs and traditions. So where do I stand?

It was only upon the completion of this project that I realized that I had no excuse to forgo my ethnic Chinese identity. For me, ironic as it may be that this project was done in the Bay Area and not in China, it was still a form of going back to my roots and understanding the value of the Chinese heritage. If there was one thing I learned from the interviewees themselves, was that retaining one’s ethnic culture requires a conscious effort to find a balance between holding on to one’s roots and being able to assimilate into the new environment. Not forgetting that while one tries to assimilate into the new environment, one should be proud of one’s ethnic heritage and seek to find ways and means to constantly keep in touch with it. Perhaps, it was also in Victor’s intention that by presenting me with the Song Dynasty comic collection, it was his way of encouraging me to rediscover my Chinese ethnicity. Hence, I believe that being Chinese means going improving on my Chinese language and being cognizant of the rich cultural history that China has to offer, because Tu Wei Ming said, ‘the meaning of being Chinese is intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept and Chinese culture as a lived reality’.

And so, in the aftermath of the project, my next stop would be to rediscover my Chinese identity by understanding the evolution of my Peranakan heritage. In some ways, both the Peranakan heritage and the Chinese American heritage share a similarity in that people of dual heritage straddle between embracing their new surroundings, but at the same time grapple with how and what part of their ethnic heritage that they should retain.

Apart from making a personal discovery of my ethinicity, this project has given me a more holistic impression of the Chinese American Community. Before embarking on the project in the Bay Area, my impressions of the Chinese American Community were formed through academic journals which hypothesised about what the cultural identity of the Chinese Americans and novels such as The Joy Luck Club and Hunger, which constantly dramatized the identity crisis which the Chinese Americans faced. However, undertaking this research project gave the Chinese American community a three-dimensional feature. Through the eyes of several Chinese Americans, we saw how their Chinese identity can coexist with their American one, and this made them unique. The Chinese American Identity is a century and a half old, but is still continually evolving. Nevertheless, the people that we’ve met and the places that we’ve visited plays testament to its dynanism. I was unexpectantly surprised at how self-supporting the community was, and as one of our interviewees remarked, ‘One could go by without speaking a word of English in San Francisco Chinatown’. Furthermore, the community was not just another tourist attraction. Like every community, it has also had its social ills in the form of troubled youths who turn to Chinatown gangs, hence, disclaiming the notion of the Model Minority, given to the Chinese.

This project also could not have been possible without my co-partner, Janice Chua and I certainly could not achieve as much in this project had I done it alone. In many ways, our work together has also made me realise both my strengths and my weaknesses, as well as how we seek to compliment each other in terms of personality and working habits. While I was generally more interested in having a thorough theoretical and historical understanding of the Chinese American Diaspora and their evolution since the 1850s, Janice pulled the scale to balance through the practical aspect of the project. Crucial to our project, the varied interview sample size we obtained cannot have been achieved without her; she never fails to miss the oppurtunity to talk to strangers whom she thought would be an interesting case study for our project and engagement them in a conversation and thereafter an interview. Moreover, while I was always more concerned about having a narrow focus, Janice was always there to remind me that we should allow the door to remain open just in case a golden oppurtunity arrives, and true enough, having a broad mindset in this project proved to be rewarding.

Finally, in my years at Warwick, I have met an overwhelming number of Mainland Chinese overseas students. Prior to this project, I have asked a few of them what it means to be Chinese and whether they would consider the Hua Qiao (The Chinese Diaspora) in America to be at all, if not the least bit, Chinese. While some of them have been to San Francisco, others have only heard about the large Chinese American Diaspora there, and yet, many mainland Chinese students do not consider the Chinese living in America as ‘Chinese’. More often than not, these Chinese Americans are termed by them as ‘Xiang Jiao Ren’ (Banana people) yellow on the outside but white on the inside. It is with all intent, that this project seeks to tell the Chinese American story through the accounts of 20 Chinese Americans and an experience in the Bay Area. It is with hope that others, especially the Chinese from the Mainland, will take an interest in the lives of their cousins overseas and what they face, being geographically displaced from the cultural entity.

Book Review

Title: The Chinese in America

Author: Iris Chang

Publisher: Viking, The United States, 2003

Synopsis

In an epic story that spans 150 years and continues to the present day, Iris Chang tells of a people’s search for a better life and the determination of the Chinese to forge an identity and a destiny in a strange land and, often against great obstacles, to find success. She chronicles the many accomplishments of the Chinese immigrants and their descendents in America: building the infrastructure of their adopted country, fighting racist and exclusionary laws, walking the racial tightrope between black and white, contributing to major scientific and technological advances, expanding the literary canon, and influencing the way we think about racial and ethnic groups. Interweaving political, social, economic, and cultural history, as well as the stories of individuals, Chang offers a bracing view of not only what it means to be Chinese American, but also of what it is to be American.


Thoughts and reflections

I came to the Bay Area not having done much reading except for Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and May Tung’s psychological book on identity (Thankfully Stephanie provided the balance by reading a lot and photocopying stacks of background reading for me to read on the plane) Upon arriving in the Bay Area, the inertia for reading increased as I kept thinking to myself: “If I want to read I could always do that back in Singapore or in the UK. Why should I fly across half the globe only to coop myself in the library? I should be going out to meet people and talk to them.” However, chancing upon Iris Chang’s book in Victor’s (one of our Chinese American interviewee who became our friend) home, I decided to pick it up and the book was so engaging that I could not put it down till I’ve finished reading.

I remember that prior to reading this book, most of the time I displayed little interest in dates and I could never figure out how Victor and Stephanie could remember things like “ The Chinese Exclusion Act” or “ Paper Sons” etc as if it was in their blood. Despite explanations about how the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in May 6 1882 restricted the number of Chinese immigrants to the US, somehow to me, these were merely distant dates. It was only after reading Iris Chang’s chapter on the Exclusion Act that I manage to get a better picture of the history of the Chinese in America. I saw how difficult it was for them to settle down in the United States, the kind of subtle racism that they faced. Sometimes I find it difficult to tell people exactly what I learnt from my readings. It could be because I didn’t learn much or learn well, or perhaps reading and understanding the history just provided me with some sort of “invisible glue”, such that next time when an interviewee says something, I’ll be able to piece the pieces together based on what I’ve read. It is the “Oh yes, Iris Chang also mentioned something like that about the Chinese American in her book” kind of response that tells me I have not read the book in vain.

I had such experience in the Silicon Valley. Having read the chapter “High Tec vs Low Tech” prior to interviewing the Chinese American in the Valley, I felt that I could identify a lot of their responses with what Iris Chang wrote. Somehow because our interviewees were mainly white collared workers in the Valley, I felt that when asked about their identity, most of them were able to bring out their professional identity readily. They also appeared to be more confident and comfortable about their Chinese identity, perhaps because they are able to look beyond their outward appearance, and are fully aware of their value to their respective organizations.

Learning points on identity

In her introduction, Iris Chang clearly states that in this book she seeks to

1. Identify the push and pull factors of immigration
2. Chronicle what happened after immigration. Did assimilation take place?

She also highlights an important caveat that immigration does not occur overnight, rather it happens in different waves. Hence, the identity of the Chinese American immigrants would most likely differ based on their different experiences and circumstances.

· The first wave (1849 era) of Chinese immigrants was known as the “gold men” who came primarily because of the gold rush in California. They came to the United States in search of a better life and fortune. However, many also suffered as miners and countless died while building the railway linking the East and West coast.
· The second wave (post 1949) comprised mainly anti-communist elites. They also had smart and scientifically directed children.
· Finally, the third wave (1980s onwards) encompassed Chinese of all socioeconomic groups and backgrounds, who arrived as Sino-American relations thawed and as the People’s Republic of China began its rocky transition from a pariah communist state to a tenuously connected capitalist one.

Understanding the reason for Chinese immigration provided a sense of history which aided in my understanding of why perhaps first generation migrants felt more attached to China and their Chinese heritage, as compared to the second wave of migrants who came to America because of the push factor back in China.

Chang also introduced two pertinent principles relating to identity formation

· Judicial principle of jus soli which means the “law of the soil”
· Racial principle of jus sanguinis which means the “law of blood”

According to Chang, ethnic identity is a matter of personal choice as much as indisputable racial appearance and heritage. Increasingly, the concept of Chinese American is being replaced by a new racial identity of “Asian American” because of interracial marriages. In 1967, the number of interracial marriage soared after the Supreme Court declared all anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional. The word “Happas” which originated in Hawaii was originally used to describe children of white merchants and native Hawaiians. Now “Happas” is used to describe all mixed race people of some Asian ancestry.

As the Happas grow in number, they are asserting their freedom to celebrate the richness of their heritage, as are other multiethnic individuals. These trends provoke new questions like: What is racial identity? Who gets to decide it? The government? The experts? Or the people themselves?

Below is an excerpt from Chang’s conclusion that I believe help to shed light on the trenchant questions raised.

“ Though some find it convenient to see race as solid blocs of humanity, easily organized and controlled by bureaucracies on the basis of shared interests, the reality of individual life defies such neat compartmentalization. In reality, race is----and has always been---a set of arbitrary dividing lines on a wide spectrum of color, blending, almost imperceptibly, from one shade to the next.

Perhaps one day we will rediscover a basic truth---that while identity may be shaped and exploited by the powerful, its essence belongs, ultimately, to the individual. America was founded on this concept, but never achieved its ideal.

The subjugation of individual rights to the group, leading inevitably to ultranationalism, has long been a cause and justification for war and genocide across the planet. It was to escape the oppression of group identity---the burden of racial antagonisms, inherited by blood---that thousands of Chinese and other immigrants abandoned the homes of their ancestors, for unknown future in a strange land. Only time can tell if their journey will have been successful. This will depend entirely on whether America can continue to evolve towards the basic egalitarian concept upon which it was founded--- that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creators to certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. For it was the haunting, elusive dream that such a place really existed that first drew many of the Chinese to American shores.”