Letter from the Motherland

A friend of mine once pointed out that when white people move to other countries, they’re considered expats, but when anyone else does it, they’re just immigrants. I remembered his words years later as my plane touched down in Beijing Capital International Airport. I would be there for the next two months, working at a nonprofit and practicing the language. My friend’s observation left me pondering a difficult question: As a Chinese American “coming home” to my motherland, what was I?

The first weekend made this question complicated. On Saturday night, all of the American college students flocked to the foreigner-dominated Sanlitun bar district. One favorite evening haunt, Elements Club, advertised the following deal: 100 RMB cover charge, but free if you were a “laowai” (foreigner).

Whether or not you were considered a “foreigner,” we quickly learned, depended less on the color of your passport and more on the color of your skin. The entire point of the laowai promotion was to attract more white people to the club. When I asked about the terms of the deal, the hostess at the front enthusiastically explained to me that I was, in fact, Chinese, since I “have a Chinese face"—I always have been, though the entirety of my life had been spent in America. Welcome home! Despite the fact that I had come back to China to reconnect with my heritage, I found, to my surprise, that I resented this.

The resentment showed through in small ways. I found myself relying on English more at restaurants and shops; taking care to dress the way I did back home; avoiding the local food; even exaggerating the imperfections of my spoken Chinese, and feigning ignorance of local customs. I did this, I realize now, in order to impress upon people that I was indeed American—not out of a sense of superiority, but rather one of insecurity. Because, as it happened, the hostess at Elements had stumbled upon a difficult question: Was I Chinese, American, or Chinese-American?

Perhaps the struggle of every person of Asian descent growing up in America lies in parsing the ambiguous terms of that hyphen. Is it to be understood in the same way as the hyphen connecting two surnames, indicating an unbreakable blood bond from two sources—mother-and-fatherland, so to speak? Growing up, the hyphen itself provoked a small sense of anxiety in me: That it symbolically connected the two countries made me wonder, quite strangely, whether my very soul was to be found in that ambiguous blot of ink or somewhere 30,000 feet over the Pacific, where my parents passed over in a plane when I was asleep and halfway between four and five. And finally, there was the disheartening order of the words, suggesting that I was somehow Chinese first and American second—the latter just a coincidence of geography, recent immigrant history dwarfed in significance by the ponderous certainty of my bloodline.

Standing next to my college friends in Sanlitun that night, I considered the possibility that it was all an act: That I had been Chinese all along, merely “passing” as American using an elaborate costume of language, fabric, and manners.

Oddly enough, what finally empowered me to let go of this internalized racist myth of the “perpetual foreigner” was observing my father, a man even less obviously “American” than I. Everybody knows that there are few pastimes more American than enjoying the outdoors: Thoreau’s immortal utterance on “living deliberately” is as etched into our collective consciousness as the pledge of allegiance. At the beginning of last summer, I accompanied my father on a series of hikes. First on the trails around our home in California; then to the Bay Area local favorite, Mission Peak; and finally, to the Grand Canyon, where my father and I, along with a group of 30 of his friends—all Chinese Americans—set out at dawn to hike from one rim to the opposite rim, and back.

I will never forget the scene from the campsite the night before: The classic American set-up of tents and portable cooking ware, only with a few modifications. We communicated with each other in an effortless Chinglish. The Tupperware on the picnic tables was filled with dumplings and steamed rice, not sandwiches. No one was wearing flannels, since my dad’s crowd—mostly engineers in Sillicon Valley—preferred the high-tech, ultra-light gear that comes out every year.

Here was the classic American pastime, executed flawlessly by a group of Chinese immigrants without a hint of awkwardness or imitation. “Happiness is not so complicated,” my dad said to me on the long drive back to California, as we passed through the vast expanse of Arizona. And he was right.

After this trip, I ditched the hyphen for good. I was no more Chinese-American than I was second-class. My father was no hyphenated American, and neither was I.

Hansen Shi, ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.