friendly fire

In the Malaysia post I talked about China’s racial homogeneity and how it is a far more definitive element of the Chinese identity than most people realize.  After 6000 years of inexorably assimilating minority tribes and even conquering outsiders (the Mongols and Manchurians) into the Han culture, the Children of the Yellow Emperor all harbor a kind of cultural superiority complex that is at the same time extremely isolationist.  Think of American exceptionalism without the Manifest Destiny expansionism, mix that with your knowledge of the Imperial Chinese tribute system in the Middle Ages, and you’ll kind of get what I’m talking about.

What I didn’t talk about was how this affects me personally.

A few weeks ago the chummy gate guard waved me over for a chat again.  I had just been returning from a shopping expedition and had a plastic bag of goods with me.  “Let me see what you got,” he chuckled, and summarily started rooting around in it.  He had helped me carry some luggage up to my room when I returned from the New Year holiday and since then it’s been chumtastic.  He has occasionally shown me how to say a few Chinese words and also too has offered to call me up to hang with his friends (”of which I have many!” he assures me).  Making friends in China can be so instantaneous.  One second you are exchanging names and the next you are having your shopping bags poked through and your purchases criticized.

One of the odder things though is how insistent he is that I should be dating someone here.  <Don’t go back to America,> he implored me once.  <Stay here.  China is changing and is strong.  You are one of us.>  I told him that my contract would expire in June and that I already had plans for next year.  <No, stay here.  Find a Chinese girl.  Get married and have many little babies.>  I raised an eyebrow but he just went on.  <Out there in America, people treat you so badly!  And they are so tall!>  He motioned with his hand to demonstrate for me just how tall.  <It’s so embarassing.  But here, you are among equals,> and motioned again with his hand at our shoulder heights.  I was starting to get kind of annoyed.  Good intentions or not, he didn’t know what kind of morass he was stepping into with me.  At that moment one of the Junior 1 English teachers who I will call “Su Ming” (this blog apparently has Chinese readers now) passed through the gate.  “Oh hello!” she chirped at us and hesitatingly came over to see what we were talking about.  Chummy Guard just kept right on going.  <What if China and America get into a war one day?> he said, then cast a weighty look in my direction.  <Fighting your own people!  What a terrible thing!>  I just sighed.  Su Ming looked a little disturbed and said something quickly to him that I didn’t catch.  <Well, who knows?> he replied with a shrug.  After a small silence Su Ming said “well, I am going to go back now.”  <I will go back to the dormitory with her,> I told Chummy Guard.  <Ah…> he said and smiled.

Well.  I have been plenty irritated with Americans who only see China as a Communist threat or a trading imbalance to be contained and pressured, and to have found the same kind of alarmist attitudes in China about America was dismaying.  But Chummy Guard’s preoccupation with my love life was a little more immediately pressing.  I had been fairly certain that his eyes had been jocularly drilling into my back as I walked away with Su Ming, calculating potential matchups.  After that, every time I walked out the gate he would call out <Going out to find a girlfriend?> and I would always try to brush it off with a laugh.  Once in an effort to get him to stop I tried to tell him that I already liked someone at home.  He listened dubiously for a moment and then dismissed it.  <Find a Chinese girl!  Don’t go back!> he repeated.

Let’s take a moment to study the following quote, which Kamolika shared with me:

[In America,] only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-although that’s what we tell ourselves-but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger.

Maybe surprisingly, it was written by Obama in his memoir Dreams From My Father. I thought about it for a while after this encounter with Chummy Guard.  How dare he just dismiss my possible ideas, opinions, and desires by insisting that I stay here?  What was I, just some kind of Chinese baby-making daddy?  Did it ever occur to him that I might actually have a life somewhere else?  The comment about tall foreigners lingered with me too.  You try all your life to ignore racial slurs about your difference, and then your own “people” go and stab you in the back by telling you to just give up on it.  I am not like you, I wanted to yell.  You can’t swallow my identity.  You’ve mistaken me for an ordinary Chinaman…

…hey, wait a second.

Obviously Obama’s quote is not about the problems of Chinese American identity; it’s about how America’s politically correct racial sensitivity still can’t escape its own Eurocentrism.  But those of us “half-breeds” and in-betweens who have to always negotiate through this racial sensitivity also work with this bomb of enlightened Eurocentrism planted within us, and we find it difficult to figure out just who exactly stole our identity first.  When I was little and my hick classmates made fun of me for the food I ate, the clothes I wore, and the last name I had, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that their accusations were unjust because they were inherently untrue.  All I knew is that they weren’t true of me.  (To whit: the food was raisin bread, the clothes were sweat pants, and the last name is Dutch.)  And just like this, it happens.  As soon as the question changes from “why are you making fun of me for being who I am” to “why are you making fun of me when I am so much like you,” your ethnic identity has just been hijacked.  For many of us born in between, we never knew how to phrase the first question at all.

Even now, when I am here in China with my American colleagues, sometimes I become annoyed by listening to their discussions about the backwards practices of the Chinese.  Mockeries of the nation unconsciously and all too easily slide into mockeries of the people, and in my presence one of my friends even slipped with a “what a crazy race.”  When I complain about it, the Americans look at me curiously.  What?  Don’t worry, they say, we know you’re different.

You’re one of us.

<You’re one of us,> said Chummy Guard again one night when I came back.

He looked me up and down and then rather reproachfully asked <Why aren’t you interested in girls here?  Su Ming treats you very well.  And there is another teacher who is single and needs a boyfriend.>  I sighed again and told him <too troublesome!> with a laugh and tried to go.  <Do you something something something?>  I didn’t know what he said, but somehow his tone was reproachfully sly.  I looked at him funny.  He looked back at me with an even more odd expression.  I pulled out my iTouch dictionary to translate, which he immediately grabbed and poked at for ten minutes, successfully managing to delete two of my saved word lists.  <Hey, give this useless thing to me and I’ll throw it into the dump for you,> he grumbled.  After another five minutes we managed a translation, and I understood it when he repeated <Do you look down on women?>  I was a little flabbergasted.  Before I could collect my wits, he punched in another sentence into the iTouch.  <Is something wrong down below?> it read.  I looked at him and he smirked at me cheekily, and discreetly pointed towards my crotch.

People really do get chummy fast here.

—–

When I tell people here that I am spending this year in search of my identity, I have a feeling that some of them nod politely and dismiss it as a hippie pursuit of fuzzy humanism that has no valid justification.  But those of us whitewashed Asian Americans, the ones who grew up in the boonies and dealt with the racism of small-town America, really did have our cultural identities stolen.  An example: a kid singles you out and says you eat dogs.  “I don’t eat dogs!” you say, and you try to distance yourself from such barbaric practices.  Then you come to China and you see everyone in fact does eat dogs.  What are you supposed to think now?  Another example: an American comes to you with a mocking expression and facetiously bows, then toddles away laughing his head off in the floral print bedsheet he has used to imitate what he thinks is the customary dress of the exotic East.  Edward Said would have a field day.  You aren’t going to be caught dead in this shit.  But then you come to China, and you realize that this is indeed the local culture.  Your culture.  And there is nothing ridiculous, facetious, or small about it at all.  It is old, it is marvelous, it is so inherently rich and vast and you have let someone else steal it from you by taking mocking advantage of your insecurities.

But you also have diverse experiences and American ideals that should not be waved away by the Chinese.

I told my mom about this episode on the phone one night.  She sounded sympathetic.  “It is like being caught between two parents who both want you for themselves,” she said.