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.”

(You have no idea how much I am looking forward to upgrading to a new four pound laptop next year. I am thinking feathers and pixie dust weight. Like nothing at all!)

I’m starting to realize how variable teaching can feel like. Last Wednesday I became grumpy after I attempted to get the kids to practice their speaking skills in a game of Telephone (kids line up in rows and I give one end a sentence to say. They report the sentence up along the row like a bucket brigade might, and then the last kid runs up to the board to write down the sentence and I check for consistency). Cheating abounded, which was alright in and of itself (I can play marshal alright) but one of the better students started yelling “this is a dumb game, let’s play hangman.” Annoyed, I singled him out to copy sentences while everyone else played.

At the end of class I went to him and told him I wanted to talk to him. He ducked his head and opened his arms in an invitation that seemed too obsequious to be at all sincere. I asked him what he felt the flaws of the lesson plan had been, and what he thought I could do to better assist his education. He said in near-perfect English, “because everyone cheats at this game it loses its value and becomes meaningless. Vocabulary practice would be helpful.”

I had learned already to not mind the trouble kids who sit in the back and heckle in Chinese; they have decided to be lazy and I do not need to bother with them. But when the intelligent and studious ones develop an attitude, I do become very annoyed. I thought of a time long ago when I interrupted my sixth grade math teacher’s lesson to ask what the homework assignment would be. He stopped the class to reprimand me on my lack of respect and patience. I remember feeling ashamed but also rather unjustifiably upbraided; I had only meant to be more efficient. But I learned about propriety and how to behave under a certain code of conduct that day. On Wednesday I guess I learned the difference between a smart kid and a smart ass.

Yet, when I try to structure classes to challenge them better, I sometimes am met with absolute befuddlement, as I had been right before Smart Ass’s (which I shall now deem him henceforth) class. Then it is like pulling teeth, no matter how engaging I try to be and how many little hooks I lay (a lesson plan can have hooks just like a pop song can, I’m learning). I still need a class to be upbeat and to be paying attention to me. Today, for instance, I did a lesson on slang words and culture. The first class was rioting in choruses of “wanna”s and “gonna”s and fist bumping each other out the door. The second kept scribbling at their geometry homework and looked up to humor me with one-word responses only when it seemed necessary.

Many of my dear friends are engaged in teaching programs right now for their career ambitions of doing a real version of my fake job. (Emmo, your comments on previous teaching posts on this blog have definitely helped me improve my classroom-management schemes.) I Skyped with Preet, currently doing her Master’s at Columbia for bilingual education, the other day and also asked her if she knew what I could do better. “There are going to be days like that all the time,” she told me. Yen related a conversation she had with one of her own professors that seemed to echo my sentiments – “how am I going to teach in a way that will challenge the good students and pull up the slower ones?” “It’s a common feeling, Pouw,” she said.

I suppose what makes it all worth it are the days when an entire class seems electrified, and when quiet students come up later with questions in better English than you thought they had. I also have to place my course and this year in perspective, I’m learning: today I asked another of the brighter students “how can I make this lesson more interesting?” after a particularly distracted session.

“I think there are some students who just do not understand enough English to know what you are saying,” she chirped. “Do not worry about them though.”

“But even you were working on your math homework during class!” I pointed out.

She paused mid-chirp. “Well, we have midterm examinations next week and some feel that this class is not as important.” Smiles.

I really can’t argue with that – these kids are under a lot of pressure, and sometimes when I step into a classroom to take over from the last teacher I can’t understand what’s written on the board myself (does a physics introduction to levers and fulcrums really have to begin with a problem involving 3 fulcrum points at once?). If I were a real teacher, with real grades and real material that might be useful for most of them, I could deserve their respect and attention. But I’m the Conversation teacher. Not the English teacher. I should remember what this year is to me – an out, an escape route, a relaxing year off before medical school starts. The students certainly seem to treat my class as a relaxing 45 minutes off from their normally intense days. I guess I shouldn’t take it too seriously myself.

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.

“Oh, your parents are here – they must have known that it was 重阳节!” say the other teachers. Today is the Double Ninth holiday (according to the Chinese lunar calendar). When I ask them what the day marks, nobody seems to be able to tell me (”Hmm…actually I do not know, maybe it is just a traditional holiday?”) but whatever it is, it somehow involves old people (”sometimes it is called Senior Day”) and climbing mountains (”we’re going to climb the mountain now! Are you coming?”). Those two associations seem kind of contradictory to me, but oh well, that’s how the paradigm shifts, I guess.

….Except this still isn’t the way I wanted them…Ryan, can you tell me sometime how you embed your Flickr photo albums into your blog posts?