After coming to the United States, a lot of concepts that I had known from the Internet became tangible to me. I could not understand either why Americans are sensitive to what they call “Cultural Appropriation” and why leftists always reflect on their dominate position and privileges on culture. And I could not even get a clear picture of the racial problems in America. I have been thinking all these shouldn’t be problems if we can see people in an equal way.
After all, I am always confident that I can keep a constant peaceful feeling every day no matter where I live. But I’ve never realized the reason I think like that before: I have my own support system built by the Chinese language world; I know where I came from and where I am going. In an objective way, we can say that everyone can make a new choice to step into a new role and start a new journey. However, it is never easy for a person to grow up smoothly and get that kind of magic.
In China, I am the ABSOLUTE SUBJECT in my cultural context. I am not only a male, but also a Han Chinese, a Beijinger. I even get this privilege of language: my native language is Mandarin, which literally means the standard official language in China. So I could weave my subjectivity in my mother tongue. I have always lived in such a natural way. Of course, there are so many injustices and unfair events to the various others in China. These tragedies have often prompted my sense of crisis which urges me to think differently by putting myself in their place. But anyway, all of these only happened in China. I never think like this for foreign topics: all foreign languages, including English, are just a kind of tool, another treasure waiting for me to find out.
Ultimately, the reason that I can see English in a quite equal and common way is that I cannot really relate to it. Therefore, the identity of the minority is not a big deal for first-generation immigrants who just want to earn big money in a foreign country. But things are totally different for minority-race people born here: They are THE OTHER in the English world. They must put themselves in the position of others if they start to learn English—which means the textbooks made by locals. They will define themselves by white people’s rule. I guess this is the reason why the white girl who wore a cheongsam(or “qipao”) got accused of “Cultural Appropriation”. A Chinese would likely say “thank you for loving my culture!”, but a local Chinese American may think “if even you can wear my own cultural garments, how can I speak for my culture?”. Wherever they live, the minority are always stereotyped and thus othered by the dominant ethnic group in various insidious ways—think of the strange costumes that the minority delegates at Two Sessions every year.
Many of my friends who are disaffected from the Chinese government might find it hard to understand such an alienation feeling for minority people and get confused by the truth: why in the United States, such a free and progressive country, do people still suffer from this? Indeed, America has done a good job of popularizing modern common values. But every family has its own problems—or we can say that, once a common language is established in a certain area, such problems always happen. In China, children’s language gets polluted by the Leninist Party. They would repeat the party’s propaganda such as “capitalism is bad and all foreigners are hostile to us” when they grow up. In America, American children learn reflection of privileges, racial conflicts, and LGBTQ issues when they are even relatively young. They construct their view of the world in this way. They learn too much unnecessary reflection before they learn how to be proud of themselves. I don’t mean that Chinese-American kids must learn ancient Chinese poems to be proud of their ethnic identity. What I want to say is that the construction of one’s subjectivity is essential to everyone when we are under endless invasions from a vicious language environment.
This feeling of mine was proven. Last month, I joined a thanksgiving party hosted by a local Chinese Christian church. I fortunately met a decent Chinese-American lady who just finished her British literature Ph.D. and worked as a professor in a college. I wanted to learn more about English world culture so I asked her to give me a reading list of American literature. I chatted with her. She told me that she was born in New Jersey. Her parents are Taiwanese, but she can speak Mandarin in a perfectly standard northern China style: No Beijing accent r-colorization like me, but all retroflex is pronounced pretty precisely. “My pronunciation just got influenced by classmates from northern-east China.” She said.
We talked about American literature and ethnic topics. She used Chinese enumeration comma to enumerate all ethnicities in America in her text. Oh my gosh, it’s even hard for Chinese young people to use that punctuation correctly. Most people just use a space instead of an enumeration comma in their writing. I guess only less than 10% of the whole Chinese people can do it well. But she could use it smoothly in a perfect right way. “You must have worked hard on learning Chinese when you were young,” I said. “Huh, my experience is quite special for an ABC. I just loved the Chinese language and Chinese culture when I was young. I can’t say the exact reason for that. I just love it so I put much effort into it. It is a very natural process for me.” She replied. I think that for someone like her, who grew up in a bilingual background, both Chinese and English are either subject and other to her. I really envy her.
I could clearly feel the difference in temperament between her and other local ABCs I met, which we call “banana Chinese”. The latter seems like a normal white person in America: always has a big confident smile on his or her face, which makes people feel easy but might be a little superficial and frivolous. However, many of them cannot have good communication with their parents, and they are perplexed by the given identity of minority. But She is more like me: she doesn’t like the fusty meta narration given by Chinese government propaganda and ancient Chinese culture, but still gets her own motivation from the Chinese language world. During the days people expressing their anger about Urumqi fire, she texted me the famous two lines of poetry:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
That is the power of language: You can be an American in China, and be a Chinese in America. Wherever you live in, there are always some people understanding you support you. You can always imbibe courage and motivation from it, and keep a constant peaceful feeling in your daily life, and be no longer lonely. “I’ve never seen an ABC like me.” That’s what she said.
This is how understanding a language and the culture behind it can shape people with a sense of mission. Like the host of the podcast “the Weirdo” Wang Qing, a journalist who works in Europe for many years said: Although Chinese young people are deeply traumatized, they at least know what problems they want to solve and have the motivation to move forward; European young people have lived too comfortably since childhood, and probably the biggest imaginary enemy in their life is climate change, and the lack of mission also leads to the lack of a sense of vitality in their lives.
We can also discuss this topic in a bigger picture. I find it is a pervasive topic in almost every culture that second-generation children cannot relate to their successful parents’ culture. Many of my friends are second-generation Beijingers, their parents worked hard and got a place to live in Beijing, the most privileged city in China. As for me, a third-generation Beijinger, things are quite the same: My grandfather was from a small town in Shandong province. He got a huge amount of pension provided by the party and enjoyed his life for twenty years after his retirement in his sixty. Even now, he often forwards some news of that small town in Shandong—although he has never been there again since 2008.
He identifies himself as a Shandonger in Shandong and a Beijinger in Beijing. He feels naturally for the double identities. He thinks he is a successful Shandonger who got the seat of subjectivity(i.e. got the citizenship of Beijing and the pension) and feels complacency in his life. He also thinks that our offspring are too fragile and useless. Not like most of my family, he was quite happy when I told him I wanted to make a big money in America. He is eighty-five now, he replied to me with a big smile: “Your grandma and I are very healthy. No worries for us. I guess we can live to at least ninety. We will visit you after you succeed in settling down in America.”(Fine, they did get recovered from COVID-19 three days after the infection.) Although I am a third-generation “Banana Shandonger” who has been assimilated partly by the culture of Beijing as well, but anyway, the Shandong dialect is just a branch of Mandarin, and My grandfather, my father, and I share almost the same philosophy of struggle in studying hard. We couldn’t possibly disagree with each other more than a fraction of the conflict between the ABCs who don’t speak each other’s language and their fathers.
Of course, what I talked about before doesn’t mean that I agree with the vlogger who said “decided never to learn English again”. In contrast, I feel how absurd her opinions are from the point of view of fighting against the hegemony of language. It might be a source of tolerance and solace for minorities within the United States to not mandate speaking English well. However, for a wider group of foreigners, it will make it impossible for those, who live in late-developing countries, to catch up with Americans, which will only solidify the global technological and cultural hegemony of the United States and increase the impact of the English language hegemony on the world. Back to the personal experience of the vlogger herself, things get even weirder: As a Manchu with her own unique language, she was converted first to the Chinese world and now to the English world. The deeper root for her has disappeared since long time ago. What does she really need to oppose? I don’t mean that everyone should succeed in the culture and mission of their ancestral history, and fight for their own subjectivity. But there are too many people go gentle into that good night without any hesitation, which is quietly ignorant and unfortunate.
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