they say kafka was an honest writer, but honestly, i’ve never read him

Even though I’ve frequently visited the shopping venues right next to it, I hadn’t actually gone near Shenzhen’s Kempinski Hotel until today, when I came to find my parents who had just crossed the border from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. For American prices it’s a good deal to book, I hear. But I hadn’t realized just how much so it was until I got close enough to see the marble pillars and the dolled up attendants. When I saw three white people walking out of the doorway dressed in business suits I knew I was probably in trouble.

I walked up to the counter and asked in halting Mandarin if I could use the phone to call a room. The attendant looked confused, corrected my speech and then handed me the receiver. I talked to my Dad in English in front of her and the Chinese guy in a business suit, who stiffened and looked over. I thanked the lady in Chinese after I was finished and walked away to find the elevator. The fanciness of the place just astounded me as I kept walking through it – its fountains, pillars, immaculate surfaces and wide open spaces were more luxuriously over the top than anything I had seen in Shenzhen so far. Only the best for the foreign guests who frequent the Kempinski, apparently. I wondered if the waiguoren also thought of the attendant girl by the elevators, dolled up in a red skirt, coat and hat that made her look more like an instrument of the hotel than a human, as the cherry on top of the deal. She stood like a service sentinel and watched me until the elevator doors closed and I shot up to see my parents.

After many happy hugs, my father asked me if I had had any trouble downstairs. Aside from the vaguely creepy feeling of being over-watched, I couldn’t think of anything. He then told me that when he and Mom had first arrived two hours before, he had spoken Chinese to the attendants and received a cold stare and rebuffs. When he spoke English, however, the same attendants immediately became fawning and obsequious. He was still a little bothered by it. But we quickly started talking about other things – a reunion is a reunion! – and we went off to find some lunch in the nearby mall area.

Except every restaurant we tried to find was closed (it was already 2:30) and eventually we just retreated to the basement food court. I was a bit abashed by this planning failure and stayed a little quiet. By now I know that I evidently become anxious whenever I have to host people, in the sense that I feel obligated to make sure I am rolling out a good dinner party / tour experience, but today my mom and dad were guests better suited to surviving here than I was, of course. “Have you tried that place, Andrew?” “No, I don’t know how to read that sign.” “Poor thing.”

While trying to lead my parents out and around the maze of the Coastal City megamall, I realized that I had just recently felt this same kind of frustration – in the Chinatown of San Francisco, when I was with my friends on a college graduation road trip. Then I had had some kind of strange anxiety attack after my friends, none of whom were East Asian, kept asking me questions about the culture and knick-knacks they found in San Fran’s touristy Chinatown shops. One was also peppering me with questions about Taiwan and Mainland relations. I had actually been to this Chinatown once before a month ago, and could guide my friends around the more interesting shops based on that, but their questions about culture, history and the like made me feel like an impostor who could not actually guide or host as I thought I ought to be able to. I wished furthermore that my friends would stop assuming that I knew these things, however innocently. I started to go quiet again. Most of my friends noticed this and stopped defaulting to me for their questions and commentary, except the one who kept going on about Taiwan. I tersely corrected most of his misconceptions about the history that I knew about, but I felt like I was also trying to defend something that I myself had no real and authentic connection to. It all came to a head at the Chinese restaurant, where, when confronted with a menu completely in Chinese, I had absolutely no idea what to order and certainly couldn’t help my friends, most of whom took matters into their own hands and ended up with better meals than I did. The entire incident was written off as a strange wrinkle in Andrew’s psyche, but I was shaken because I knew I hadn’t felt like that since growing up in the Griffin School District forest as the only Asian kid for miles. I did indeed know a little bit more about Chinese culture than the next guy, but that scant amount made me feel obligated to play “expert” at something I knew that I was no authority at all in. The dissonance messed me up.

This feeling must have passed in high school, when I became less of a racial abnormality amongst the Vietnamese faces, and in Los Angeles, where of course the vast Asian-American community made it so that nobody had to bother going to the whitewashed Andrew for cultural information, and left him happily alone. I had already been planning to go to China before the San Francisco Chinatown thing happened, but afterwards I knew I had to go through with the sojourn, for whatever reason. If I am feeling like I need to be a better spokesperson for my cultural roots but I can’t because I don’t know where I should set my feet down in the soil, then I need to find out for myself where I stood.

My dad was thinking the same thing, but in relation to his own China story. Thirty-seven years ago to the day, he had crossed the Lo Wu border point into Hong Kong and started his life anew for the third time, and coming back was making him think hard and deep about the ways the China he had lived and watched had risen, progressed and stayed the same. In my room now with my mom hovering around poking at my cabinets and drawers looking for signs of dilapidation that she could fix, my dad and I looked out my window at the masses of students playing basketball in the school courtyard, and we began to talk about how popular this particularly-American sport was here. The conversation went back to the Kempinski hotel staffers’ cold stares and how the Chinese seemed to bend over backwards for foreigners, and then to a repeat story of my aunt’s bad experiences in China a few years ago because of this seemingly anti-Chinese Chinese bias. Dad started telling me about his life growing up in Beijing, his perceptions of China while away and China’s current place in both the world and in its peoples’ hearts. He described his understanding of China’s relationship with materialism and the state of its current culture. While he was speaking I realized that I was averting my eyes and thinking of other things. I posited a half-hearted and rambling attempt at a counterargument for something he said. I wondered why I was being so uncooperative, and tried to rein myself in to respect and listen to him better. I’m still wondering why I was like that, especially since I usually agree with him on most things of my own accord anyway. I was still wondering when I started writing this post, hoping that writing things out would help to clarify my thoughts (and explain my behavior to Dad!).

Writing like this is always cathartic for me; it is the structuring of events and impressions into stories, which is essentially what I am trying to do in China, I think – to find my own China story. I came here looking for answers for the questions about my own relation to China and Chinese culture as a second-generation Chinese-American, but when I try to present this as a valid and distinct cultural territory of my own, I still do not have a firm enough grasp of even the language to be able to stand on my own ground without it collapsing under my feet. I am still so insecure about it that my own father’s recollections of his own China story initially sound to me like somebody else stepped into the path of my questions and said “hey those are silly questions, here are some real answers.” And to further frustrating extent, it is irrefutably undeniable that my own China story really is pretty stupid. While my generation and I get all twisted up over superficial identity politics, our parents’ generation endured real turmoil, both eventful and psychological, throughout social upheavals and the challenges of immigration. Their story is going to be the story that defines all subsequent stories. Compared to that, being Chinese-American is always going to mean being the privileged child unaware of the nature of your own privilege, no matter how far into China you try to go. Or it means not being American enough for the Kempinski Hotel. Or it means being a yellow commie rat fink to most everybody else.

Okay, so that last sentence was a little overly bitter, but you get the idea (and I like how it looks so I’m going to keep it there). It doesn’t matter. Because what I have realized recently is that the only thing that can banish these concerns is to develop a genuine individual sense of security where your sense of self-worth rests comfortably deep within your soul, and isn’t pegged to any kind of particularly cultivated behavior, cultured letters, or worthy accomplishments like I previously put mine into. All those things are for shit here, where I’m deaf, dumb and illiterate. I need to remember how to really be comfortable with myself (without taking the shortcut of escaping from myself, of course) and then maybe one day I’ll be so free and unconscious that I really will be able to join a new Asian-American community while still paying my respects to the generations that came before me.


These guys seem to know how to go about doing that pretty well. (It’s a promo video for this – I went to the one in Los Angeles two years ago. Most of its backing is from the Korean-American community, but it’s for APAs in general.)

Anyway, on to tomorrow! My classes have been cancelled – the kids are taking examinations again – so I have the whole day free to adventure around Shenzhen with my poor tired parents. Their feet are still hurting from their Hong Kong adventures, I think.

Edit: I felt pretty good right after I wrote this, but as usual now I’m wondering if I actually clarified things as well as I would have liked. I guess there is always room for a third draft, some other day.