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Too Chinese for the United States, too American for China. Where can Asian Americans like me call home?

 


But after nodding, he switched to English and yelled “back where you fucking king come from”.

These scathing words are familiar to Asian Americans living in the United States. But it was shocking to hear the phrase that was shouted at me in China.

At the time, I let out a laugh: as a Chinese-American, I have now been told to go out of each country for the other. It was a moment of realizing that no matter where I go, I will always be a stranger.

I was born and raised in America, but for the last few years I have lived in Beijing, Hong Kong and now Japan – where the majority of people around me look like me and assume I am from . At first, it gave me an inexplicable – albeit superficial – sense of belonging that I never felt in America.

In the United States, my answer to the constant question “where are you from?” is never enough. When I say America, it’s almost always followed by, “But where are you really from?” Countless times, I have been asked why I can speak English “without an accent”. And the racist experiences of Asian American women are inextricably linked with misogyny. We had almost every part of our body (eyes, hair, feet, mouth, skin, and even private parts) assessed on the basis of our race. Our personalities are regarded by outsiders as servile.

Recently, as tensions between the United States and China have escalated, with rhetoric on both sides turning toxic, I have also faced animosity in China for being American. Chinese state media fueled anti-American nationalism, calling the United States an “enemy of the world” at the height of the US-China trade war. Meanwhile, in America, about nine in ten adults view China as a competitor or an enemy, according to a Pew survey. “There is this constant theme that when there is tension with an Asian country, people who are Asian Americans or who look like Asian Americans are often scapegoats,” he said. said Christopher Lu, former cabinet secretary to Barack Obama on CNN.

The irony is that Asian Americans often have a traumatic, complex, or even non-existent relationship with the faraway country for which they are held responsible.

This American life

My parents immigrated from China to the United States for higher education before I was born.

Later, my grandparents, who had been farmers in China, came to America to help take care of my sister and me. They woven pieces of their Chinese lifestyle into the fabric of our suburban American home, doing what felt most familiar to them. They turned our backyard into a vegetable garden, using the produce for Chinese dumplings and other comfort foods.

My grandparents never had the opportunity to go to school. They learned to read and write Chinese themselves and proudly passed on their knowledge to their grandchildren. Chinese has become my first language.

I could barely speak English when I started kindergarten. My mom was worried about my strong Chinese accent, so we started speaking more English at home. From there, I became more aware of my “Chinese character”.

In elementary school, I asked my parents to stop packing Chinese food for lunch. I only wanted PB&J after being teased for bringing brown-colored tea eggs – one of my favorite foods – to class. The other children thought they were rotten eggs.

Times like these made me want to be considered the American that I am. My family, their traditions and those of other Asian Americans in my community were part of the America I knew – a melting pot of cultures.

In fact, it was China that felt like a foreigner. On every annual summer trip there, I felt like a tourist, and deep down, I wanted to be treated like one. I was so proud to be an American.

But with each visit, I learned more about my family history and witnessed China’s rapid development.

First, we would visit my father’s village in the country, and he would show me and my sister the mud hut he had once called his home. He often reminded us that during the Cultural Revolution, my grandmother had to water only one portion of porridge each day to feed six people.

Then we would visit my mother’s family in Hubei Province. More than a dozen of us crowded around a small table, eating bowls of sesame noodles, as his family recounted different memories of trauma, full of political persecution and suicides.

My family told stories of poverty and oppression as if they were just childhood memories. To my sister and I, they were allegories with one lesson: We should be thankful that we were born in the United States – a free, tolerant, and wealthy society. As immigrants, they would say, upward mobility can only happen by lowering your head and working on the rest.

Over the years, however, I began to notice the narrow gap between the lives of my relatives in China and mine in the United States. The villagers in my father’s country town slowly earned electricity, running water, cars and telephones. My cousins ​​in the city no longer wanted clothes from America as gifts – they liked styles in China more.

In fact, there was hardly any material goods we could bring from America that they couldn’t already find in China. Yet, as their physical quality of life improved, their access to information deteriorated, as the Chinese government tightened controls and censorship on the Internet.

And as the pandemic spread around the world, the news they read increasingly differed from mine.

A defining moment

I was living in Beijing when the coronavirus outbreak began, reporting cases of mysterious new pneumonia in Hubei Province in December 2019.

My cousin, a nurse, worked on the front lines at the zero point of the pandemic near Wuhan. We kept in touch, as she worked long periods without sufficient protective gear, feeling the anguish of being separated from her newborn son and family. My other loved ones were strictly confined for months, faced with fear and anxiety brought on by the pandemic. The same stress that we all experience now.

When the pandemic hit the United States, my mother called me to tell me that she desperately wanted to wear a mask outside. One of our close family friends had died of Covid-19 in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic, and my mother was sure the virus was far more deadly than most people thought at the time.

But she feared being discriminated against as a “Chinese woman with Covid-19”. At the same time, my American-Asian friends were telling me that they had been spat on, yelled at in the streets and even verbally assaulted in restaurants for “bringing the virus to America”.

Meanwhile, China and America have engaged in a war of words over the pandemic. Then, US President Donald Trump regularly referred to Covid-19 as a “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” stoking the racism and hatred that fueled the attacks against Asian Americans.

The Stop AAPI Hate advocacy group documented more than 3,795 incidents of hate against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States during the pandemic, including the murder of six Asian women in spas. ‘Atlanta, which sparked rallies across the country.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said China represents “the greatest American geopolitical test of the 21st century,” as the only country with enough power to challenge the current international system. Meanwhile, since 2010, China has been calling for a “new model of relations between great powers”.

The difficult question for US leaders now is how to effectively confront Beijing, without aggravating discrimination at home against people who appear to be Chinese. This means making clear distinctions – for the public – between the Chinese Communist Party, the 1.4 billion people in China, and millions of Chinese heritage around the world.

“Since Asian Americans have been in this country, we have been treated like strangers, like people who cannot be trusted,” said Lu, the former cabinet secretary. “You can go back to the 1800s with the Chinese railway workers, the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the rise in trade tensions with Japan in the 1980s.”

As I see conversations between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies spiraling into childish bickering, I can’t help but think of all the Asian American lives uprooted or lost as a result of geopolitical conflicts that slip away. under their control.

I also think of the younger me, who just wanted to be accepted as an American, and how desperate she would feel to know that even today she would be seen as “the other” – no matter where she went.

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