This is a thread I've been thinking about making for a lot of time.
I'm Chinese American; my parents were born and raised in mainland China, while I was born and raised in the US. Identity crises are pretty much clichés for Asian Americans (and PoC in general, certainly), but for me it was further complicated by the fact that ever since I became politically aware, I never felt like I could be truly proud of being Chinese. Sure, the ubiquity of Chinese food and the iconicity of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan were around, but it never felt as cool or as relevant as something like the appeal of anime, the Hallyu Wave, or Thai Buddhism. We were always kind of the "boring" Asians. The ones that originate all the stereotypes that all the other Asian Americans get saddled with. The reason that everyone got called "chink."
And, of course, the country of our heritage was being ruled by an authoritarian regime locked in a geopolitical pseudo-cold-war with the US.
My mother stopped telling other people we were Chinese sometime in my teens. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I've come to realize that it did have a lasting effect on me. Slowly I started becoming less comfortable with my ethnicity. Slowly I started feeling ashamed. Slowly I started to resent lunar new year parades and lion dances and dim sum, because they reminded me of who I was. Chinese. And being Chinese was a bad thing.
The thing is, being Chinese does come with a lot of baggage. China was the historical hegemon of the region, an imperialistic power. Its cultural weight in East Asia comes from its appropriation of others. Today its legacy is marred by a history of oppression, of aggression, of ethnonationalism, of genocide. Those are things we can't deny. It is a nation under the thumb of autocracy. It's also a nation of 1.3 billion people, many of whom are complicit in propping up the regime, many of whom who are not, all of whom are human. Dehumanization is a topic I've thought a lot about when it comes to the political struggles we face now. The question of how to reconcile a drive for universal compassion with a need to stand up for convictions and ethical values is a huge topic that's best served by its own thread ---- however, what's relevant here is the tension, the incredibly blurry line, between condemning ethical evils and dehumanizing the Other. Some people compare the CCP to Nazism, and while it's a loaded comparison, there's something to navigate there. When we relegate Nazis to the role of inhuman and consummate evil, to a pastiche of villainy, we in effect give up the toolset we need to contend with the potential of humanity to repeat its mistakes. We open the door to the alt-right, to neo-Fascism, to white nationalism.
We open the door to the CCP and Han chauvinism. Alienation is what the CCP wants. It wants Western countries to hate Han Chinese, the same way ISIS thrives off of Islamophobia. Internally the party can point to Western rhetoric as justification for their ethnonationalism, further solidifying their power domestically. Internationally, the party can radicalize disaffected, frustrated people by making them feel attacked on all sides and then offer them a way out: go back to where you "really" belong.
In effect what happens is what happened to one of my distant relatives, Qian Xuesen. Qian was a Chinese born scientist and aerospace engineer who worked at MIT and Caltech, eventually joining the Manhattan Project and further on co-founding NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In other words, he was a pivotal figure in America's scientific legacy. He was also the father of the Chinese nuclear and space program, because he was forced out of the US during the era of McCarthyism on suspicion that he was a Chinese agent. Despite advocacy and support from several key figures at Caltech and in the US military, Qian was placed under house arrest for years, eventually sent off to China, and was welcomed with open arms by the Chinese Communist Party. That's how China got nukes.
Obviously the situations aren't 1:1, but I think the cautionary tale has some merit. International espionage is a real threat, and I'm not trying to downplay that. But we are seeing a wave of ethnically Chinese academics, researchers, and professionals being targeted for investigation on the basis of their race. We're seeing many of them leave for China. We're seeing this country lose its assets and create its own enemies. At some point you have to wonder whether that's the right tack.
Chinese Americans are caught between a rock and a hard place. As I mentioned earlier, I came to resent being Chinese. I resented that such an integral part of my identity was "the enemy." A lot of us have struggled with that, no doubt. And it's not just us; other East Asian Americans catch flak, because, as I said, in the eyes of America we're all "chinks."
But when you are Chinese, when your nai nai living in Shanghai really is considered the enemy, it does a number on you. It doesn't help when you try to stand up for yourself that you get called a CCP shill, even though your lao lao was tortured to death by the party and your parents forced into labor camps for being dissidents. It doesn't help when you struggle with identity and being a minority and the psychological baggage of being between cultures that a smug-ass white dude has tell you exactly what you need to think about China. It doesn't help when the people who call themselves progressive allies so easily throw Asian voices under the bus.
And hell, it's not just the Chinese folks getting accused of being shills. Some of them are Taiwanese. Some of them are Korean. Some of them are Hmong. You know, people who actually have an investment in being against the CCP. They speak out too because, being Asian Americans, we can see just how disingenuous some of these armchair activists are. We can see that they don't give a shit; to them it's reality TV. They get all of that jingoistic catharsis of shouting "fuck China" but don't actually have to put their neck on the line. They get to maybe change their avatar and not buy a video game and feel smug about it but they don't understand the generational trauma of a family that was literally torn apart by the Cultural Revolution.
But, again, the key is reconciling compassion with standing for values, rather than reflexively making adversaries. So I'm asking you, the community, and those who'd call themselves allies at large, to keep this in mind. That the way we talk about China matters. That those of us who are advocating for a change in our language aren't doing so out of love for the CCP but out of a hurt that has caused deep scars, and an apprehension in a time where our brothers and sisters fear for their safety. That a language of Otherness is not only the weapon of xenophobia, but the weapon that the CCP wants us to use. That we all are in this together.
There's a lot of work to be done when it comes to this forum's treatment of topics pertaining to Asia and the Asian diaspora in general. Whether it's the blatant dismissiveness as seen in the recent thread about Biden's China-focused ad, the pervasive fetishization of Japan and South Korea, the callousness towards Muslims, or the continued casual stereotyping and racist "humor." Addressing the way we talk about China is only one small part of what we need to do to improve, but it's a step towards making this place the inclusive community we want it to be. I ask you for your help in this.
I stand with Hong Kong. I stand with Taiwan. I stand with Tibet. I stand with Xinjiang.
One day I hope to stand with a free China.
I'm Chinese American; my parents were born and raised in mainland China, while I was born and raised in the US. Identity crises are pretty much clichés for Asian Americans (and PoC in general, certainly), but for me it was further complicated by the fact that ever since I became politically aware, I never felt like I could be truly proud of being Chinese. Sure, the ubiquity of Chinese food and the iconicity of Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan were around, but it never felt as cool or as relevant as something like the appeal of anime, the Hallyu Wave, or Thai Buddhism. We were always kind of the "boring" Asians. The ones that originate all the stereotypes that all the other Asian Americans get saddled with. The reason that everyone got called "chink."
And, of course, the country of our heritage was being ruled by an authoritarian regime locked in a geopolitical pseudo-cold-war with the US.
My mother stopped telling other people we were Chinese sometime in my teens. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I've come to realize that it did have a lasting effect on me. Slowly I started becoming less comfortable with my ethnicity. Slowly I started feeling ashamed. Slowly I started to resent lunar new year parades and lion dances and dim sum, because they reminded me of who I was. Chinese. And being Chinese was a bad thing.
The thing is, being Chinese does come with a lot of baggage. China was the historical hegemon of the region, an imperialistic power. Its cultural weight in East Asia comes from its appropriation of others. Today its legacy is marred by a history of oppression, of aggression, of ethnonationalism, of genocide. Those are things we can't deny. It is a nation under the thumb of autocracy. It's also a nation of 1.3 billion people, many of whom are complicit in propping up the regime, many of whom who are not, all of whom are human. Dehumanization is a topic I've thought a lot about when it comes to the political struggles we face now. The question of how to reconcile a drive for universal compassion with a need to stand up for convictions and ethical values is a huge topic that's best served by its own thread ---- however, what's relevant here is the tension, the incredibly blurry line, between condemning ethical evils and dehumanizing the Other. Some people compare the CCP to Nazism, and while it's a loaded comparison, there's something to navigate there. When we relegate Nazis to the role of inhuman and consummate evil, to a pastiche of villainy, we in effect give up the toolset we need to contend with the potential of humanity to repeat its mistakes. We open the door to the alt-right, to neo-Fascism, to white nationalism.
We open the door to the CCP and Han chauvinism. Alienation is what the CCP wants. It wants Western countries to hate Han Chinese, the same way ISIS thrives off of Islamophobia. Internally the party can point to Western rhetoric as justification for their ethnonationalism, further solidifying their power domestically. Internationally, the party can radicalize disaffected, frustrated people by making them feel attacked on all sides and then offer them a way out: go back to where you "really" belong.
In effect what happens is what happened to one of my distant relatives, Qian Xuesen. Qian was a Chinese born scientist and aerospace engineer who worked at MIT and Caltech, eventually joining the Manhattan Project and further on co-founding NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In other words, he was a pivotal figure in America's scientific legacy. He was also the father of the Chinese nuclear and space program, because he was forced out of the US during the era of McCarthyism on suspicion that he was a Chinese agent. Despite advocacy and support from several key figures at Caltech and in the US military, Qian was placed under house arrest for years, eventually sent off to China, and was welcomed with open arms by the Chinese Communist Party. That's how China got nukes.
Obviously the situations aren't 1:1, but I think the cautionary tale has some merit. International espionage is a real threat, and I'm not trying to downplay that. But we are seeing a wave of ethnically Chinese academics, researchers, and professionals being targeted for investigation on the basis of their race. We're seeing many of them leave for China. We're seeing this country lose its assets and create its own enemies. At some point you have to wonder whether that's the right tack.
Chinese Americans are caught between a rock and a hard place. As I mentioned earlier, I came to resent being Chinese. I resented that such an integral part of my identity was "the enemy." A lot of us have struggled with that, no doubt. And it's not just us; other East Asian Americans catch flak, because, as I said, in the eyes of America we're all "chinks."
But when you are Chinese, when your nai nai living in Shanghai really is considered the enemy, it does a number on you. It doesn't help when you try to stand up for yourself that you get called a CCP shill, even though your lao lao was tortured to death by the party and your parents forced into labor camps for being dissidents. It doesn't help when you struggle with identity and being a minority and the psychological baggage of being between cultures that a smug-ass white dude has tell you exactly what you need to think about China. It doesn't help when the people who call themselves progressive allies so easily throw Asian voices under the bus.
And hell, it's not just the Chinese folks getting accused of being shills. Some of them are Taiwanese. Some of them are Korean. Some of them are Hmong. You know, people who actually have an investment in being against the CCP. They speak out too because, being Asian Americans, we can see just how disingenuous some of these armchair activists are. We can see that they don't give a shit; to them it's reality TV. They get all of that jingoistic catharsis of shouting "fuck China" but don't actually have to put their neck on the line. They get to maybe change their avatar and not buy a video game and feel smug about it but they don't understand the generational trauma of a family that was literally torn apart by the Cultural Revolution.
But, again, the key is reconciling compassion with standing for values, rather than reflexively making adversaries. So I'm asking you, the community, and those who'd call themselves allies at large, to keep this in mind. That the way we talk about China matters. That those of us who are advocating for a change in our language aren't doing so out of love for the CCP but out of a hurt that has caused deep scars, and an apprehension in a time where our brothers and sisters fear for their safety. That a language of Otherness is not only the weapon of xenophobia, but the weapon that the CCP wants us to use. That we all are in this together.
There's a lot of work to be done when it comes to this forum's treatment of topics pertaining to Asia and the Asian diaspora in general. Whether it's the blatant dismissiveness as seen in the recent thread about Biden's China-focused ad, the pervasive fetishization of Japan and South Korea, the callousness towards Muslims, or the continued casual stereotyping and racist "humor." Addressing the way we talk about China is only one small part of what we need to do to improve, but it's a step towards making this place the inclusive community we want it to be. I ask you for your help in this.
I stand with Hong Kong. I stand with Taiwan. I stand with Tibet. I stand with Xinjiang.
One day I hope to stand with a free China.
