I spent the last day at Yucai Third Middle gifting these boxes to teachers and administrators as farewell presents, and taking group photographs with students who requested them. All of them have treated me very kindly this year, so while the Center for Teaching and Learning in China, the organization that brought us foreign teachers to Shenzhen, did not recommend or mention procuring farewell gifts, I still wanted to show my appreciation. I even got some wonderful farewell gifts of my own from some administrators, including a miniature crystal replica of an ancient imperial vase and a long scroll inlaid with calligraphy and paintings from Kaifeng. Students were coming and going as well, asking me to sign “yearbook” like sheets and giving me class photographs with warm goodbye messages written on their backs. One student even gave me a dual-language book, a handmade card proclaiming how moved his heart had been by my casual coursework and a little Chinese flag upon which he had written “No matter where you go, you will always be a Chinese!” And two hugs.

So you can imagine how my heart sort of fell when I woke up this morning in Fuzhou to two emails from unnamed students.

“Do you like bitch?You always sleep with bitches!!
Fuck you!!!
You deserve a foreign teacher!!!
You are so ugly!!
你还以为自己很帅是不是？！！自恋狂！！其实你丑的要死！！还留胡子干嘛！！丑死了！不要脸！！中文又不会说！！亏你还是中国人！！死在美国算了！！就好别污染了中国的土地！！
天天make love小心得Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome！！
还那么矮！！矮子一个！！
快点死到美国去吧你！！
傻子一个！”

Here’s the bottom half via Google Translate:
Do you think you handsome is not it? ! ! Narcissism! ! In fact, you die ugly! ! Why has a mustache! ! Ugly dead! Shame! ! Chinese can not speak! ! Loss you’re Chinese! ! Death in the United States forget! ! Like not pollute the land of China! !
Make love every day of getting Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome! !
Also so low! ! A dwarf! !
Early death in the United States go you! !
An idiot!

[I assume that it's Google Translate that makes it more incomprehensible.]

The second email had a picture of a dog, and some Chinese underneath it that mentioned something about the inviolability of my dog-ness and that I eat shit.

After some initial shock, I began wondering what to do. At this moment my grandma came in the room and asked me in Chinese if I was ready to come join breakfast. I smiled for her and replied in my shoddy but improving Mandarin that I would be there in a second. When she turned around to leave, I signed onto QQ, the Chinese version of AIM and GChat, and sought out a Yucai teacher to lodge a complaint.

The teacher I found on QQ was perhaps the one I had the best relationship with. She said “Oh, maybe it is because they love you too much…I have some students who hate me too.” She would look into it, she promised me, and with that I left her alone. I think I am Chinese enough to know that it’s embarrassing to drag others in to do my disciplinary work. But I was tired of these students constantly harassing me, and these words nettled me to the core.

After leaving QQ, I wondered again if this was really the best way to deal with the situation, and thought about one past episode that had also left a bad taste in my mouth. A few months ago as I was finishing a lesson for Class 12 and bidding them farewell, I overheard a girl mutter in Chinese “and don’t come back.” I raised an eyebrow and indicated my understanding. The girl flustered. “You didn’t hear anything!” she and her mates yelled at me in English. I was less than pleased. Insult me first, and then deny my displeasure the next? But I left it alone and left.

Class 12 is the one which I have the most peculiar relationship with; they were the class that claimed me the most, and simultaneously aggravated me worst. Clever and rambunctious, they were unimpressed with my lessons unless they were games, which I could sympathize with – given the circumstances of our employment, all of us foreign teachers were quite aware that our teaching was for surface appearances only, since our once-a-week “communicative language teaching” techniques are too soft and fuzzy to really help Chinese students tackle their difficult entrance examinations. At the best of times, the classes we each taught were passed in frivolous fun as ways to let kids blow off steam. Some students appreciated this levity more than we expected and more than (English) words could describe. But at the worst of times, our lessons were considered laughable, and ourselves, as foreign goofballs who were wastes of clumsy effort.

Class 12 embodied both the best of times and the worst of times. Usually they paid as little attention to my lessons as they could, chatting with each other loudly while I lectured, playing video games, or making fun of me in Chinese. Only competitive games could get their prolonged attention, and to be fair, they excelled at them, showing the full range of their cleverness. But they also treated me like a celebrity buddy instead of a teacher, always reaching out to shake my hand and calling my cell phone at all hours of the day (I never found out how they discovered my telephone number, and they refused to tell me). Even the videos you saw from Monkey Ray on this blog came from that class. It was all a lot of affection, but a little too much and was starting to get in the way of work, I thought. So after “don’t come back” girl opened her mouth, I decided to try an experiment to see if I could draw a line in the sand. That evening I logged onto their QQ chat network and started ruffling feathers, asking for the name of the offending girl. My inquiries were met with some alarm. “Why is he making such a big deal out of this?” they typed to each other in Chinese they assumed I didn’t understand. “andrew, just forget it, OK? u are being sensitive to much,” a few told me in English. Eventually, a few students came forward. “Andrew, the girl is a friend of a friend of mine, and they tell me that she was only joking, and that it is not a big deal, OK?” I was dubious, having actually seen her disposition in person. But if they were going to play Spartacus, there wasn’t much I could do.

After that episode I warily retreated again from dealing too much with Class 12 outside the classroom. But the celebrity idolizations continued. My phone kept ringing, and they found new phone numbers to call from faster than I could log each number into phone memory. A few girls tried to bully me into having lunch with the class, and they kept badgering me about it till the end, refusing to accept my explanations that I had no time. My email inbox filled. That was okay; it was less of an intrusion than the phone calls, especially since I had given them my email address, but some of them seemed more like love letters than regular emails, one girl even going so far as to dedicate a post in her blog to me. It was nice to a point; after which it became a little worrisome (especially in the comments where I noticed they were trading my phone number around like it was a Pokemon card). I recognized that I was not only dealing with some cultural gaps; in teaching middle school students, there would also be a maturity difference, and while communication might help bridge the first, only about five years could fix the second. So I decided to try to put some more distance between my students and I.

But distance hadn’t worked, as this email evidenced. I reflected again on that time, and how uncomfortable my sleuthing around for the girl’s name had seemed to make them. The teacher on QQ to whom I had reported today’s email had also seemed to want to downplay it as much as possible. Maybe my raising a scene was just as culturally off-putting for them as their evasions were for me. I suppose it is, after all, pretty American to raise hell. In China, maybe it’s better for everyone’s pride if the conflict can be dealt with quietly, and as few people implicated in public as possible. And Andrew, shouldn’t you know how to deal with these things? You’re a Chinese, aren’t you? According to the mystery student’s email, no, I’m evidently a lousy excuse for one. But Chinese or not, I can still play anthropologist.

Maybe it would be better if I engaged with the surly kid myself. I replied to the email telling them that I was very upset, and asked if they really meant these opinions. A more thought-out, cordial reply came back. “In China,do not reply another’s email is a very not polite thing. I know, I am a little 过分。So, I am sorry. I hope you will reply your students emial in the future.” Well. It is so “very not polite” that it’s worth telling me that I sleep with dogs, that I’m narcissitic and that my beard is ugly? I mean, come on! My beard is quite handsome.

Then I thought that perhaps the kid just didn’t think that he or she had really been that offensive, as terrible as it sounded to me. I recollected that every day in class I routinely overheard my students telling each other in casual Chinese to fuck off, or that they’d fuck each other’s mothers. “We were never like this when we were growing up,” my parents noted. “We were very good.” Be that as it may, I also remember one day speaking to one of my favorite students from Class 7. She was in the middle of telling me about her family when a boy came by to tease her in Chinese. She whipped her head around and let fly in Chinese “I hope your baby is born without skin” and then turned back to me sweetly without missing a beat. “Oh, you understood that?” she said, not very shy. The class laughed around us.

After a few more emails exchanges, the kid sent one that read “And,you are a Chinese,but you said you wasn’t a Chinese,and I think you don’t love China. I am very disappointed……
Ok,goodbye…I don’t want to talk to you either…”

Arguably, this is the point that bothered me more than threats of fucking (the word is so cross-cultural) or AIDS-getting did: that I wasn’t “Chinese.” (I don’t think I ever actually said that I wasn’t Chinese to my students, but for that matter I also never claimed to be handsome – they said that of me, and I always demurred. Very perplexing, and possily pathological.) Anyway, it’s not that I think I have anything to prove in that department. But an accusation of my un-Chinese-ness is not exactly how I wanted to end a year in which I was trying to explore my Chinese-ness and Chinese society. It is such a narrow-minded, jingoistic thing to hold against me. Suddenly things clicked together – crazy people who jump off buildings, crazy people who stab kids, crazy people who emigrate and raise Amy Tans and Maxine Hong Kingstons and crazy people who torture landowners and intellectuals with public beatings. The feeling was as if, upon being kicked out of the circle of hospitality and told to fuck off, I saw all of China’s shames and pathos as an outsider might. I didn’t want to consider this the definitive picture of China. But as I’ve walked through the haphazard and gritty market streets of Fuzhou with my grandma clutching at my arm, I kept wondering if my time in Shenzhen had been spent being entertained by a pleasant fantasy, a superficial veneer of politeness underneath which still lay a distrust of my belonging, my loyalty, and my identity.

If so, it might be because much of the treatment and goodwill towards me here has been extended on a perhaps shaky basis: the assumption that I am just like them, and that my Chinese blood speaks for the rest of my body and mind. On occasion, these same kinds of all-encompassing assumptions on the part of Americans have bothered me too, though they manifest in an opposite way – because my thinking and behaviors are American, my foreign colleagues sometimes maintain that they ought to override whatever ancestry I have. When you come to America, you’re expected to speak perfect English or at least be learning to, and you had better assimilate into American culture, otherwise you’re a lazy immigrant. If you’re one of the Overseas Chinese who is returning to the Mainland, you are forgiven some eccentricities, so long as you can already speak your “mother tongue” perfectly and you fervently proclaim your love for your “mother country.” Both of these attitudes are so narrow-mindedly tiresome.

America and China are opposite sides of the coin in ideology and culture, but in the demand to assimilate with the majority to the exclusion of all else, they are just the same as the rest of the worst of humanity. “You’re either with us, or against us,” said Bush, and Minutemen rednecks and the Arizona legislature nod their heads in agreement. “You’re either one of us or you’re not,” says this student, and every Chinese guy who told me to shave off my beard to look “more Chinese” and the students who whispered that I was “a Japanese” in class think the same. How terrible our tribes can be.

Interestingly, though, while America’s worst will villify and persecute the “other,” mainstream Mainland society seems to not care to deal with it at all. Cultural isolation and holding us “foreign experts” at a polite arm’s reach away from doing any real work/damage in class demonstrates this. In fact, it seems to be that it’s the things that the Chinese don’t consider as “other” that are threatened instead – me and certain contested geopolitical territories. (If they can read between lines, that should be the dig that gets this blog banned for good.)

I had realized this a few months ago, but my student’s accusation brought it to mind once again. It touched a nerve because it was right for all the wrong reasons – all of them offensive in their narrow-mindedness. It’s true that I don’t love China – that would imply a blind devotion. I’m an independent thinker, like the best of Americans. Hell, I don’t even love America (though I appreciate it). But isn’t it a very Chinese characteristic to still be proud of your family, no matter how shitty it is? I am proud of China. I’m proud to be a part of the singular, magnificent heritage and culture it has stewarded, even if I am wary of the racial homogeneity and circular logic that also sustains this pride. I can’t love faults like those. And the longer I have been here, the more I have seen. But I became teary at the Olympics opening and I still defend China’s perspective when Westerners bludgeon it with their neoliberal New York Times accusations. No matter what you think, you can’t escape your ancestry. Blood is thicker than water and rhetorical arguments.

I told the student this. “I am proud of China, but it is different. You grew up in only one country, with one culture. I do not think you understand our feelings.”

He or she responded with an ameliorating “well, can you tell me now if you are already back in America?” and “Are you really going to report me?”

Hahaha, you’re a funny kid. Little fucker.

—-

I was waiting at Immigration in the line for foreigners, one of the few Asians there.  I had my nose buried in a book I had just brought back with me from Hong Kong when a white guy carrying a full load of suitcases stooped down to grab a bag I almost bumped into without seeing.  ”Oops, sorry,” I said by reflex.

He grinned.  ”Must be a hell of a good book, you’ve been reading it this whole time on the ferry from Hong Kong,” he said.

I smiled.  ”Well, you know, it’s a hell of a boring trip, too.”  He laughed and walked forward in line.

We came up to the immigration windows side by side and kept up our conversation.  He was in Shenzhen for a trade show, just in from a month of travel around the world, and was due to go home to Atlanta soon.  I told him I was finishing a year of English teaching here.  The eyes of the Chinese immigration officers darted from me to him, and back again.  We were cleared, and parted amiably at the baggage inspection station.

At the exit of the ferry terminal there was the usual crowd of men holding signs for just-arrived people and others lounging around who perk up seeing you come.  I noticed that the man I was just talking to was accosted by one of the perky latter, who summarily took his suitcase for him and began leading him and his wife towards the parking lot.  They looked confused but game and followed, seemingly more to chase after their suitcase than anything else.

Something clicked in my head and I gave chase too.  ”Hey, did you say you were going to Futian?” I called out.  The couple stopped and turned in their tracks.  ”Uh, no, we’re going to Shenzhen,” they replied.  Confused, certainly – Futian is a district of Shenzhen.  I felt, weirdly, like a local, just for a brief moment.  ”We’re supposed to go to the Marriot?” the man added.  By now we were beside the Chinese man’s car, a bright red sedan with the trunk already popped open, the driver in the middle of stuffing the accosted suitcase into it.  He too was looking at me quizzically.  ”Well, I’d recommend going by one of the official taxis,” I said, and pointed over to the line.  ”He’s a black cab driver,” I added when the man pointed at the driver.  ”Oh, well, thanks a lot, then we’ll get a taxi then,” said the man.

But I was already moving away fast and barely acknowledged the thanks.  I wanted to get out of the Chinese driver’s gaze as soon as I could, having plucked his day’s wage from him – for a foreigner!

—–

The Starbucks experience in Hong Kong is much different from that in Shenzhen.  In Hong Kong, the inside of a Starbucks feels much the same as the outside of one.  It’s all the same, everywhere, there – clean surfaces and modernist tendencies.  But in a Shenzhen Xing Ba Ke, the difference is like a pressure gradient, catching you up in a sweeping gust towards an interior space that feels like an oasis of Western cleanliness, predictability, and manners.  I spend a lot of time in them.  By now the baristas at the Coastal City location recognize my face, and at SeaWorld they greet me by name.  Not my proudest accomplishment in traveling the world, but it makes things feel a little more like home.

As I was settling into a chair and wiring up my electronics for a session of writing, the decibel level of the place suddenly ratcheted up, like it had become a Chinese bus at rush hour.  But the brash, grating yelling was in English.  I was confused and looked around.  A gaggle of adolescent boys had stormed in, speaking loud obscenities with the arrogant confidence of those who assume nobody else in the room can understand them.

“Fuck you!  Let’s go hang out at Matthew’s place.”

“No, you pussy.  What, you actually got something?  You don’t need to get something at Starbucks to hang in one.  What?  A muffin?  God, you’re such a nerd.”

“Screw you!”

They must have been expat kids from the nearby international schools.  The civilized Chinese patrons of Starbucks glanced over and visibly tried to ignore them.  The staff awkwardly buffed tables around the little gang of ingrates.  I tried to also, but the snatches of conversation insisted on hurling themselves into my ears, especially when one boy called out both mine and my brother’s name.  ”Andrew, Matthew, come on, let’s go.”

“Fuck you!  We’ll stay right here for now, this is cool.”

“He’s an AMERICAN, so he for sure knows!”

“Well, YOU did it with a BLACK GIRL!”

The noise quiets for a moment as if the group is mutually weighing the severity of this accusation.  On the other side of the room I am mentally slapping my forehead in disgust.  Separating the world into racial lines has been, I have found, a characteristically Chinese habit, borne out of centuries of willful cultural isolation.  But I shouldn’t have forgotten that Westerners, especially bratty kids, have already perfected the art.

The group briefly digressed with a show of hands as to what exactly constituted second base.

Punks.

—–

I had returned to the tailor for a third time, to get fitted for two suits: a gray one with a hatched pattern, and a navy blue set with thin dark pinstripes.  Luohu Commercial City, where the Chinese woman named Stephanie Lark operates her shop, has been painted to me before in terms essentially amounting to a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” but some of the best tailors and deals can be found there all the same, and Stephanie with her excellent English and trained eye has made it into the tourist recommendation books even in sartorial Hong Kong.

“I think I’d also like to get a suit made with a Mandarin collar, and a topcoat as well,” I mentioned to her in passing.  I was standing in the hallway with half a suit on, and two of Stephanie’s assistants poking and pinching it.  ”这样合适吗?” one asked me.  ”这样不错.可不可以把裤子弄断一点?” I responded slowly.  In a manner more professional than I’m used to here, they didn’t bat an eye at my Chinese.  ”可以,” they affirmed.

Stephanie passed by.  ”Sure, we can talk about another suit,” she breezed.  She noticed the assistants talking between themselves about my fitting.  ”你听得懂他们说什么吗?” she said, asking if I understand anything they said.  I laughed and replied in Mandarin that I got a little of it, but maybe it would be better if she parsed over things again with me one more time.  She smiled and I took the suit off behind a jury-rigged curtain in their tiny office, and jumped back into my casuals.

Together we looked over my options.  ”What kind of material would you like for the topcoat?” she asked me.  She pointed to three fabric samples pinned to the wall.  ”This one is very heavy, but the herringbone pattern is very nice.  Will you be in a warm or a cold place?”  After some discussion we settled on a medium weave.  ”Send me a picture of the design you want,” she told me, switching to Mandarin, and then we started in on the Mandarin-collared suit my mother and grandmother recommended that I try.

“Of course we can do a Mandarin-collared suit,” Stephanie had said when I asked her about it a week ago.  ”This is the traditional Chinese clothing!”   Now she was taking my shoulder measurements for it.  ”Do you want satin buttons?  If you want a very traditional look, we can do that for you.”  I hemmed.  ”No, that is okay, I am fine with regular buttons.”  ”Ok, what about the pockets?  Do you want two or four?”  I thought of the four-pocketed military jackets that Mao was always seen in photographs wearing and hemmed again.  ”Two is going to be okay, thanks.”   She looked at me and laughed.  ”Oh, so you want to be both East and West with this, right?”  ”I have to be,” I said a little sheepishly.

After the measurements were done, she wrote everything down on a sheet of paper and then paused to look in the air for a bit.  ”Hmm…”  She scribbled down a number, and then handed it to me.  ”I will give you a discount on the topcoat, but please do not tell anybody else I sold it to you for this little, otherwise I will get in a lot of trouble!”  I voiced my thanks.  ”Oh of course – you may have an American passport, but you are still one of us, you are still Chinese!”

—–

In the end, I guess it’s not absolutely necessary that I figure out what exactly is down these tunnels.  It’s been a privilege that I had the chance in life to just uncover their presence at all, maybe.

You can’t conquer every mystery and paradox you see.

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.

The history of Fujian Province and its habit of letting loose its inhabitants upon the seas is partially to blame.  Craggy hillsides covered by mist-covered forests coat the area with the richest ecology amongst the seaboard provinces, and yet because of this topology Fujian’s development and agriculture have historically lagged behind the rest.  So the Fujianese turned to the sea for both their diet and their livelihood, and after the Ming Dynasty sent the Chinese seafarer Zheng He abroad to explore the world in the 15th century, many Fujianese emigrated to the Southeast Asian countries he landed at to develop trade relations.

Later exoduses of Fujianese migrants would occur during the transition from the Ming Dynasty to the invading Manchurian Qing Dynasty in the 17th century, and over the next two centuries of Qing rule, Ming loyalists and ethnic Han dissidents based in or with ties to Fujian would rebel against the Qing. Among them was the pirate Coxinga, who chased Dutch colonialists out of Taiwan and established its first Chinese state from which to fight the Manchurian dynasty. There is a gigantic statue of Coxinga in Xiamen, where he is much celebrated because he and many of his followers came from Fujian. Dad believes that we are descended from one of Coxinga’s top ministers, and for a few days after this genealogical discovery he danced around the house telling my mother that she had married the son of a pirate king. Mom is very patient.

Dad’s revolutionary ancestry also includes Oei Tjie Sien, who fathered one of Indonesia’s richest business magnates of the 19th century, Oei Tiong Ham, or the “Sugar King of Java.” Old Man Oei set his son up for greatness by giving him the reins of the Kian Gwan Company that he started in Indonesia after first fleeing Fujian and the Qing armies marching down on it. That had been during the height of the Taiping Rebellions, when anti-Qing revolts were springing up everywhere and being violently put down. By 1860, the Qing had wiped out everyone save for those in remote Fujian, where the last of the Taiping revolutionaries were huddling, and as an anti-Qing conspirator himself Oei did the smart thing and got out of dodge. By doing this he was following the other Fujianese of his era who had already come to Indonesia, Malaysia, and other Southeast Asian countries, where even now regional Fujianese dialects like Teochiu, Hakka, and Hokkien are taught to baby Chinese 华裔 before Mandarin is.

More recently, a third wave of Fujianese emigration has flowed towards the Eastern seaboard of the United States, with New York City’s Chinatown as a preferred destination. According to Jennifer Lee, these recent emigrants have over the last three decades come mostly for work in Chinese American restaurants, sometimes making shady deals with Fujianese snakeheads to get into the States illegally. Just as Fujian and Guangdong are neighboring provinces in the Mainland, so too now are older Chinese Americans usually of either Fujianese or Cantonese extraction, with the Cantonese having a stronger presence in the West Coast thanks to the San Francisco Gold Rush.

But my family owes its own global spread to having left China much earlier during the first and second waves of Fujianese emigration. With more time since then and now, we have all become more Westernized thanks to our adopted countries (Holland, Germany, Canada, and America, to name a few), where all save my father’s immediate branch of the clan (a unique situation that I won’t get into) have lived for at least a few generations now. Those who stayed in Southeast Asia have also become very accustomed to Western ways thanks to the centuries of colonial imperialism in that sector, and a few have even broken into Western histories themselves (Oei Tiong Ham’s daughter married Wellington Koo, making him I suppose a kind of great-grandfather for me, and grandma Oma frequently mentions that we are somehow related to Singaporean statesman Lee Kuan Yew, though I don’t know how and it’s unlikely he knows either).

See Dad? I have been listening to your family stories after all! : )

I know all this thanks to Dad’s industrious work uncovering his family history, and I even know that his ancestral village (which is as important an identifier here in China as how old you are or what you do for a living) where all these revolutionaries, barons, and runaways presumably came from is now the Fujianese city of Zhangzhou. Mom’s 老家 is also in Fujian, near the rapidly developing township of Shishi (its English name “Rock Lion” is a little cooler). So despite also being in Fujian, Fuzhou is hardly our ancestral village at all and my relations there can’t even speak its particular dialect. It’s just where my relations happen to live today.

Those relatives include my grandmother Popo and her cousin’s family. I know a lot about my father’s family history, but my mom’s ancestors must have been more civil than my dad’s revolutionary troublemakers because they largely stayed in China. As a result, most of them still speak Chinese as their primary language, and communication with them has been difficult for me. I hoped that by visiting them for two weeks I could get to know them better and improve my Chinese.

What followed were two weeks of pleasant quiet and jaunts about the city with family. Many thanks to cousin Vivien, whose excellent English and willingness to take me on daily adventures around Fuzhou helped to improve both my Chinese and my conception of Chinese cities and societies better than a whole semester of being in Shenzhen did. Also many thanks to Jiu Gong and Jiu Po, my granduncle and grandaunt, who cooked wonderful hotpot and found breakfast treats every day, and to Biao Jiu and Biao Jiu Ma, Vivien’s parents who provided me and Popo with a guest room, helped drive me around places, and showed me the inner workings of the lightbulb factory where Biao Jiu Ma works as a QC supervisor. And of course it was wonderful to see my grandmother, who I can now have a good conversation with! Besides trying to fit everything presented to me into my stomach (I think I’ve gained a few pounds just from being there), Vivien also took me to see a zoo, the Fujian Provincial Library, the youth-frequented Dongjie Street where we met a young cardshark magician, a new old-looking place (a reconstructed street mimicking old Chinese architecture with open shops and boutiques) where I think we were briefly caught in the background of a CCTV childrens’ broadcast, and many other sights.

Among family, the self-doubts I have about my place and identity in China as a 华裔 melt away, and I was comfortable with just being me again. While the Chinese family unit is popularly known in the States as intrusive and overbearing thanks to stories like The Joy Luck Club, being in Fuzhou reminded me of how sacredly it is regarded here as a support network that keeps people grounded and secure in a country that can sometimes be as brusque and unforgiving as it can be friendly. After coming back to Shenzhen, I’ve noticed that I’m now more comfortable talking to Chinese people and less conscious about my identity, and that now I speak Chinese a little more loudly, a little more confidently. It’s still a long ways away from feeling like the “homecoming” one aunt suggested, but it’s a start towards answering the question I posed to myself in coming to China that historical knowledge alone couldn’t satisfy: my place as a Chinese American and how I can mediate the gap between my heritage and my personal identity especially when Mainland Chinese seem to have a different concept of the Overseas Chinese heritage than we do. This deserves its own post so I won’t go into it here, but I have the sense that I could not have made the progress I have without feeling at home amongst my family in Fuzhou. I can’t help feeling like it’s been stumbling upon a fundamental “duh” that everyone around me has known since childhood!

A tidbit I only figured out recently: the “Fu” in “Fujian” is the same word that you often see on lucky signs during Lunar New Year, as it means “fortune.”

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.

…Lee, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1980s, said she resented Lim’s characterization of traditional script as obsolete. “Chinese characters are so beautiful, why would you give that up?” she said. “How could 5,000 years of history go away that easily?”

Simplified characters were introduced in the 1950s by the Chinese communist regime to improve literacy rates among the country’s mostly rural population.

At the time, anti-communist politicians and refugees fled and settled in Taiwan, where they continued the use of traditional script.

Before diplomatic relations were established between the United States and China in the 1970s, the traditional form was commonly taught here. To switch to the simplified form says something about Taiwan’s place in the world and who speaks on behalf of Chinese culture, said David Lee, past president of the Arcadia Chinese Assn.

“In the heart of Taiwan, it’s a crisis because the Taiwanese feel they are so small, there’s nothing they can compete with China, not militarily, not with population,” Lee said. “But if there’s something they can . . . insist upon, it’s culture and the language. And script is part of the culture.”

Personally I have invested all my time into learning simplified text, and even though I am mostly still illiterate in this country, it is always an ironic relief to see Mainland China’s 简体字。 Only here am I ever able to use what I’ve learned – not in Taiwan, not in Hong Kong, and not even in any Chinese community or establishment anywhere in America. This feeling of linguistic isolation really gets to me when I look at menus and signs written in Traditional script in America, as if even despite my best efforts I never will broach even the slightest bit back into that cultural heritage.

Even when I passed the immigration and customs border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, I remember breathing in a warm feeling of recognition and belonging when I saw the sign “Welcome to Hong Kong” hanging from the bridge awning – and then breathing it out in a sigh of disappointment when I saw it repeated in Traditional script underneath. Chinese-Americans don’t have a shared sense of community spirit yet – as evidenced by the article – and we are each different in how we relate to our heritage, but for me and the importance I place in language and the written word, this is my Chinese-American dilemma: implicit sensations of belonging and exclusion, always confusingly wrapped into each other in the same current of cross-purposes whenever I see Traditional script.

It sounds like I am a proponent of Simplified for selfish purposes. I won’t deny that, and I won’t deny Traditional its beauty or the implicit meanings and connotations that it richly holds which I won’t ever be able to understand to the same level that I can analyze an English text (sadly). But languages have turning points where they change and evolve – English itself softened its angular Teutonic inflections after the Norman conquest of England, which forced French influences upon it to such an extent that even Middle English is drastically different from Old English. And even after that, major events served to twist it even further into its modern form today, and Modern English is also proving to be very malleable.

I think I know literary scholars who would be on both sides of this argument: those calling for the preservation of the cultural richness of Traditional, and those who would be excited to see the evolution of a new dynamic iteration of language (whether or not Simplified is that, I don’t know, but it’s a change at least).

Unless they’re ethnically Asian, many of whom found that Chinese tutoring schools and Chinese parents would rather have a white person teach their children English. There being no equal opportunity laws in China here, this is done quite openly, and I know of a few ethnic Americans who have been sent letters plainly telling them that their application was appreciated but not of the, hm, persuasion they were seeking. And that’s just for the ESL chain schools and institutions; the individual families who could hire personal tutors for their children don’t bother asking them at all.

Happily, this situation has been much different for me, mostly because I am in the more open-minded Nanshan District I think (these suspicions being confirmed only a few days ago by one of our program coordinators, which I can write about later). I have had one tutoring offer already (though it was put on ice later for lack of participants), and nobody here seems to doubt my English skills. But still, I haven’t and probably won’t do any teaching work outside of Yucai Third Middle, simply because…of time!

Already I have found plenty of things to do:

- Run and work out at the gym on Gongye Ba
- Practice three different musical instruments (guitar, piano and erhu) and even doodle around with jazz piano when I can
- Write fiction (which still hasn’t really gotten anywhere yet, but I’m hoping to at least start before NaNoWriMo officially starts
- Practice Chinese
- Catch up on my reading list (Working right now on Yu Hua’s Brothers and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore)
- and oh, a new project, try to figure out some music production software like Sony ACID or FL Studio.
- PS: maybe one day make a video montage too.

So suddenly having all these projects to do is taking time away from keeping this blog as current as I’d like, to speak nothing of finding additional employment! But I reason it this way: with so many projects and hobbies to find fulfillment in, for me right now, time is more valuable than money. Especially with medical school looming imminently in the near future, I think this year is my year to basically take care of everything that would otherwise manifest as a terrible, terrible midlife crisis (band, anybody?). I may not have as much pocket change as other expats, but I’m not really here for the reasons other expats are, either. More on the that (which I’m still discovering anyway) later.