Culturally-Challenged of My Own Heritage
When I was in the first years of elementary school, I couldn’t answer the questions of where I was born and which city my mother grew up in in China because I honestly didn’t know.
I had to ask my father where I was born (in Beth Israel hospital in Boston) and which city my mother was from (a village called Taishan in Guangdong province in Southeast China) and this was when he came to get me after school one day in his car. He dropped me off at home before heading to work (he worked nights at the time).
In the early and formative years of my life, my parents hardly spoke to me.
The Chinese culture was important to my parents but they never told me anything about it. All I know of it now comes from observation, Amy Tan novels and asking my father occasional questions about certain information I stumbled upon such as the old belief that if a girl didn’t finish eating all of her rice every time she ate some, she’d end up marrying a man with pockmarks (of which my father confirmed was true).
There are many parents who talk great lengths to their children about where they came from (‘they’ meaning the parents), what’s culturally important and surrounding their children non-stop with influences of their former homelands. Even I imagine that I may talk to my children (If I had them; I need to speak hypothetically here) more than my parents ever had in the first years of my life.
I’m of the opinion that if parents wanted their children to know about their heritage, then they need to be more involved with their children in order for their children to know something about it.
I don’t feel bad but only confused (and I never cease to feel this way) when I inquired relatives about why I couldn’t live on my own, why they often talked about me and if they could talk about something else, and why did they adamantly and strongly differentiate between light and dark-skinned people? I was always told that I wasn’t like a Chinese person and would never understand (I was also laughed at quite a lot and never taken seriously.)
I remember when my mother said that renting a part of our living space out to black people was out of the question because they had huge families, always made a mess and broke everything and left behind foul smells (I don’t know where all of this came from), my father used to say that we lived in the US and that they couldn’t treat people accordingly based on their skin color. Nevertheless, there was no getting out of perceiving lighter-skinned people as ‘better’ anyway.
I remember when I was in China and I was considering working in that country a third year but, hopefully, not at the university where I was completing my second year teaching at the time, and I was in the process of applying for positions elsewhere when I received a message on Skype from a recruiter. The recruiter asked me to send a photo of myself (this is standard in many countries) and when I did that, she replied that, though, I had good qualifications, she couldn’t hire me because I wasn’t white. Now, we were on Skype, so, this wasn’t easy, and I did my best to point out that I had a degree in English literature, had some teaching experience in China, and had a native command of the English language and would she like to converse with me to hear my voice? She answered that ‘only white people need apply’ basically because she cared about keeping up a certain reputation, and she could see that my last name was ‘Chow’ (a common Cantonese surname) and wrote, “Your parents probably don’t like China because they didn’t teach you how to think like a Chinese.” I honestly wrote back to ask her to explain but she never did.
All of my life, I’ve had people advise me to learn about my culture but I haven’t been in touch with it that much and, yes, it’s fun to learn about it on my own and I hope to visit Xinjiang province (northwest China) and Tibet one day but I’ve always been an outsider when it came to my sitting in Chinese social circles.
All I remember are the Chinese in Boston telling me that I wasn’t intelligent, didn’t type fast enough (this happened at a Chinese neighbor’s house when I was eight or nine before computers are like how they are now), too clumsy, too fat, and liked non-Chinese people too much (it wasn’t that I liked people who weren’t Chinese more; they just happened to be easier to stand). I’ve always been criticized for not being Chinese but, at the same time, no one has ever given their time to show me what were considered valuable to the Chinese people nor have ever shown me anything positive about Chinese culture, and, most of all, no one has ever smiled at me and welcomed me into learning about Chinese culture.
Actually, I don’t think I’ll ever possess a Chinese mindset as I was born and raised in an environment that was almost not Chinese.
A lot of people have accused me of not showing enough interest and not studying more about China. I’m puzzled as to how much studying counts as ‘studying’ to these people, in fact, because I’ve read about foot-binding, the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese versus the Mongols, Taoism, Confucianism, the massacre in Nanjing during World War II (I visited the memorial dedicated to those who perished when I took a train trip to Nanjing as well as reading a book by Iris Chang about the incident years prior that time), ‘bird’s nest drink’ (which is supposed to lighten the complexion and is super expensive and of which I’ve been advised to buy and consume because my skin isn’t ‘light’ enough), the Chinese love for ginseng (particularly Korean ginseng), etc.
People have even confronted me of preferring ‘white culture’ over Chinese culture which is hardly the truth considering that I often move away from white Americans when I hear them abroad, even pretending that I don’t speak English (really, but only rarely). I don’t prefer any culture actually but I may have only been heavily influenced by Western thought (I don’t know) and this is only because I’ve always been told that I’m ‘very American’ and there’s never been a time when anyone has felt that I was Chinese when they got to know me longer and hear more of my baritone and monotonous (and the Chinese language is the extreme opposite of monotonous) voice.
No one has ever gotten up close and personal with me about Chinese culture and I wonder if anyone can ever understand me when I say this. Even when I was in China, I was almost always alone and, when I was among Chinese, people treated me exactly like a foreigner.
However, the early and adolescent years are crucial. I’m way past those years of my life. My mind and heart are set.
Chinese or not, my identity is fixed.
I am the way I am.
I was left alone growing up to create myself and that’s that.
This is me.
I’m my own human.
(Just a product of this modern era, I suppose.)
