The problem is that the anxieties never go away. Every capitulation to the “white gaze” comes with shame; every stand you take for authenticity triggers its own questions about what constitutes authenticity. And once you feel comfortable with the integrity of your work, someone says something that flips everything around, and you’re right back staring at your own lying face.
— Jay Caspian Kang, The Many Lives of Steven Yeun, New York Times
(This will be a long one. And no moral at the end :P)
1.
My mom used to say: if she had a choice, she would have gone into journalism or linguistics. She loves languages. Though- it is never clear to me whether she loves “languages” or just English, and whether she loves “English” or the hopes and dreams English can get, and has gotten, her.
She is an electronic engineer by training because she had good grades, and EE was the best major. This dynamic is still somewhat true today but was very much true back then — doing a Humanities degree implies that your grades were not good enough for STEM, and your parents would feel ashamed in their social circles. “Your grandma would’ve never let me choose a Humanities degree,” she said, “so I’m happy that you can feel the freedom I never did to study whatever you want.”
She went to the then-best (maybe still best) engineering school in the country, which is located in Beijing. There is this thing in China where how good your grades must be to get into a university depends on where you are from, and discrimination between regions can run more severe than many forms of racism. It is well known that people from Beijing have the easiest lives — best educational resources, lowest entrance requirement. Many Chinese people would happily trade a Green Card for a Beijing identity (which is in many senses harder to get than a green card).
What this means is that, a good-enough grade for the best major at the best school is not good enough to compete academically with her actually-outstanding classmates from outside Beijing — or so she has always believed. It is unclear to what extent this was true. Years later, she told me that she found her and my dad’s college transcripts and was surprised to find that their grades were rather similar. (My dad, who is not from Beijing, was widely considered top student during their college years.) She had always believed that she was way behind everyone else and was only there because she was from Beijing — which she was fine with since she didn’t enjoy the major anyway. So much of her worldview, and mine, and everyone else’s, is shaped by an intricately arranged set of expectations that define how we understand what’s going on. What lays beyond is Kant’s noumena — not only unknown but unknowable.
It is also impossible to tell to what extent it is true when she said that she got her first private sector job only because she had an internal reference and spoke enough English to carry on a conversation. “It was the beginning of private sector hiring in China. There were many more qualified and more experienced engineers than me,” she declared, “but most older engineers couldn’t speak English, and we had to work with teams in America. My English isn’t very good but I can say what I need to say. So I got the job.”
2.
As is still true today, almost all Chinese people judge English skill by accent. Things like “your English is so good you have no accent” or “she says she’s been in America for 20 years but she still has a bit of an accent” are said without second thought. A friend who majored in English in college in China told me that they had to pick “British accent track” or “American accent track” and spend two hours each day practicing. She watched the entirety of Friends while her classmates listened to BBC in their sleep, hoping the rhythm would soak through in their dreams. It is so natural in one’s understanding of how language works that it is difficult to find words to challenge it. And even if I did, I’m usually met with blank stares or a dismissive “you only say this because you already have a great accent.”
I do, in fact, have a great accent. And I have been proud of it for many years. I am still proud of it, but I mostly keep it a secret. It is a pride not resulting from a sense of having accomplished something or being better than someone, but an internalized description of one’s self after numerous times someone approvingly said “you sound so native”. It becomes part of one’s identity.
My mom used to listen to a radio show on her commute that was hosted by someone who “speaks perfectly accent-free English”. She loved how she seamlessly transitions between English and Chinese words in the same sentence. “That’s how you know you’ve really mastered the language,” my mom tells me.
I did briefly get there, but only after it stopped being cool. I was towards the end of the first wave of Chinese international students to go abroad (I went to Canada in 2005), and had the misfortune of having everything we were promised turned on its head once people who were a couple years ahead of us failed to deliver. “You will speak such perfect English after two years in an actual Canadian school” became “actually there are people living in Canada for ten years without speaking English”. “Studying abroad opens your eyes so much you will stand on a much higher level on the cosmopolitan scene” became “actually a lot of these are just spoiled rich kids who went on an extended vacation”.
All of these happened a couple of years after I left — enough time for me and my immediate circles to solidify the rosy dreams of what a life abroad promises, but not enough time for me to have a say in how it changed. When I began high school, none of the English speakers I interact with can pronounce my legal name in any way remotely recognizable to what it actually is (which has led to me being marked absent at least once). When I finished high school, it was considered a concession to racist culture to adopt an English name like I did. When I started to feel like I belonged, everyone knew I didn’t “really” belong until I started making English-speaking friends. When I finally made actual English-speaking friends, it was seen as being “one of those people” — inauthentic, forgetting one’s roots, trying to whitewash themselves, etc.
I still remember the night my mom came back from a recruitment event and asked me, point blank, “if there is a chance for you to go to Canada for high school, would you like to go?” Without hesitation, my 14-year-old self said “yes”. Nobody we knew had ever considered the possibility of doing something like this — we had always wanted to explore studying abroad for college, but that was years away. My mom was surprised at my lack of hesitation, and started the process soon afterwards. “If you hesitated, I might’ve tried to persuade you out of it,” she later said. Most of my middle school classmates couldn’t tell the difference between Canada and California; most of them did not own passports. “Your grandmother ran away from home so she could go to college,” my mom later said, “your grandfather ran away so he could join the military. Your dad left home alone to come to Beijing. You are doing it at a much younger age and much greater distance. But it’s in your blood.” The blood of an adventurer, of someone with great ambition, unafraid of the unknown. That was me leaving China at age 15.
Two years later, age 17, I became “one of those rich kids who couldn’t succeed in the much more rigorous Chinese education system and so had to go get gilded abroad. Not even good enough for America.” I hadn’t even finished high school.
Could I have succeeded, if I had stayed? What was true was that my motivation for leaving was not in search of an easier path, but of a different path. And I was happier even when I struggled. But as long as it remained true that I was happy, there was no space for me to explain that it was simply different.
At around the same time, it stopped being “cool” and started being “pretentious” to mix English and Chinese words. I consequently trained it out of my system. I recently started doing it with a couple academic friends who don’t seem to mind (and also do it themselves). But I always have to hedge it first.
3.
I always hedge.
I don’t have a strong desire to belong or to stand out. I navigate a lot of social situations in a haze — people tell me “you belong here because X” or “you don’t belong there because Y” and I tend to just accept it. I think I unreflectively assume that identities are defined by other people, and so I try to make sense of how others see me and maybe adapt accordingly. Nevertheless, I am routinely surprised by the inconsistency.
My high school was huge. With two thousand students, it was big enough to have multiple East Asian student circles: the Koreans would all sit in one big circle at lunch, occasionally joined by the handful of Japanese. Cantonese speakers would have their own circle because many did not speak Mandarin. The CBCs (Canadian-Born Chinese) were at the top of the food chain, though often not quite top enough for white circles. They form their own circles, sometimes with the Cantonese (because many of them understand some Cantonese).
I, of course, belonged to the Mandarin circle. primarily by exclusion from others. Most Mandarin-speaking students were from southern parts of China, with very different cultures. I remember the shock when a friendly acquaintance apologized for not paying me back the $4.95 she borrowed from me for coffee the previous day. I had never talked money with friends before this. Back in Beijing, we would take turns paying for food, with the tier of restaurant roughly tracking each person’s family financial status. If I buy someone coffee because they forgot to bring money, they just had to buy me something small back at some point. The amount of rough debt tracks the degree of friendship. It was considered a denial of friendship and a sign of disrespect if one person is too keen on buying things back (and, yes, friends have been lost over this). Paying back in precise dollar amounts was the utmost taboo.
Is this a good system? Probably not. But it was what I grew up with. I quietly decided that I could never be friends with this person and took the money she offered me the next day. I also acquired a new paranoia — if I had borrowed from someone for coffee or even lunch, I would never have remembered to pay them back, and that would probably offend them. I stopped having people buy things for me. If I forget to bring money, I would just not get that coffee. Come to think of it now, I still have that paranoia.
There were, roughly speaking, two kinds of Chinese students in my high school circles: the “gilders” who are very rich, have strong conservative (often patriarchal) family ties. They will never consider moving abroad for life or dating anyone outside their region (in fact, many of them go by arranged marriages). They are here for two or three years so they can get a brag-worthy degree before returning to China to inherit the family business. The other kind are the immigrants. Their parents tend to be skilled workers with limited English and modest means. Their academic decisions are usually made with an eye to the local economy and with great regional constraints.
I, of course, belonged to neither group. My family never really struggled financially, but both of my parents worked salaried jobs. There was no question that I would have to actually get good grades, go to a decent school, and find an actual job. For this reason, I was more incentivized to invest in my life there — to get to know the culture, to make friends — because I had the freedom to stay.
On the other hand, I was not an immigrant. I had to “go back to China” in the summer because that’s where my family was. I couldn’t take a gap year because I was on a visa. But again, I could study whatever I wanted even if it had poor local job prospects. I didn’t have to stay local. I had the freedom to leave.
One should never complain over having too much freedom.
4.
I sometimes feel like I have no childhood.
I actually have a very happy and extremely ordinary childhood. It’s just that there is no one to talk about it with.
When I first started making Canadian friends, I spent hours upon hours sitting with them, quietly listening to them reminisce over their shared childhood memories: the music that was popular, the stories around those music, the middle school social hierarchy, the commercial that got everyone talking. They were not childhood friends themselves, which makes it all the more engaging. They talked about the same thing from slightly different angles, fascinated by the differences, comforted by the familiarity.
Naturally, I had no part in this kind of conversation. Even if they could explain to me what was actually going on, I would not have appreciated the nostalgia, much as the same way I could not translate my childhood into a language that was remotely interesting even to myself. It’s also not like I would much prefer the conversation to be something else — I understand the intimacy that comes with this form of meandered chatting and I’m glad I was seen as a part of it, even if I could not take part.
What else were they supposed to do? Not talk about what friends talk about? Not invite me?
5.
It feels strange to learn some new social rules that are completely the opposite of the ones you learned a while back, and to have everyone else around you acting like of course this has always been the case, how did you miss the memo? I don’t think I ever gotten over the strangeness. But I did get used to it.
When words first got out that I was “going to be a philosopher” and “getting to be a Doctor one day”, every Chinese person’s first reaction was “your parents must be very rich”. It was a widely known fact that only rich people get Humanities degrees and only rich people get Doctorates. It was a source of social pride for parents to “be able to raise a daughter to be a Doctor” — it implies that the family is well enough off that the child is not expected to work for many years.
The first time I heard someone say that they borrowed money from their parents had will have to pay them back soon, I had to restart my brain to install an update. Of course I have mastered this new code now, much like I’ve mastered numerous other codes before it. I learned to hide my own attitudes towards money, which were probably not mine to begin with. I learned that my position in this realm is a privileged one. Though, I suspect it’s not the same kind of privilege as in other codes, but there is no one to ask.
I learned some rules, lost some, and learned some more. The friend who was an English major expressed admiration over my unapologetic admission that I did a Humanities degree. “Smart people can do Humanities degrees too!” she said. I knew exactly what she meant. During my undergrad, the general sentiment is this: if you are really smart, you go into engineering. Failing that, you do business. Failing that, you do economics, which is a Humanities degree filled with Asians looking for easy degrees.
I don’t know how many of those economics students were looking for easy degrees, but I did know the fact that it was very Chinese-student-heavy and had a lot of negative associations as a result. I steered clear of economics my entire undergrad career for this reason. By the time of my Master’s, however, it looked like I was on “team Humanities” with them.
It was easier (though no less confusing) when I was on the “standard track” of high school to undergrad. Many Chinese students are on the same track, so it’s easy to find bits and pieces to fulfill my needs. Even the occasional northerners. Sure, none of them studies philosophy or psychology, but we don’t have to talk about that. We can talk about pulling all-nighters or going shopping, or how demanding your engineering degree is.
It is more difficult now that there exist fewer rules for me. — Rules still exist, of course, they just aren’t for me. I don’t have a typical international student story — I have been on a visa, sure. But I have been on one for years. Most of my friends are not “back home”. My parents don’t have unrealistic expectations of what I should do. I understand exactly why people talk about the weather. In fact, I have learned to talk about the weather with strangers myself. I don’t actually know which singer is most popular recently.
My extensive schooling outside my birth-country makes many immigrant stories resonate, but I am not an immigrant. I don’t know how the parliament system works and I’m not eligible to do that cool internship program. My parents need visas to visit me. I am ineligible to go to med school. Most of my identity-forming years were spent in Canada, but I’m not “Chinese Canadian” because I’m not Canadian.
6.
None of this is meant as a complaint, by the way. I really could not care less how I am categorized, and I do realize other people have way more serious problems than me. But every so often I feel the pressure of a kind of expectation, like “you need to come fight for/with us”. I see the expectation clearly, but cannot decipher the subtext enough to differentiate between “… because you are obviously one of us” and “… as an ally, obviously”.
And because the subtext is often both taken as obvious and forever shifting, the anxiety that I will inevitably misstep, or have already misstepped without knowing, never goes away. Like the thought I might not pay a friend back as a way to confirm our friendship or mixing my English and Chinese words to show that I’ve mastered a language, I’m constantly worried that the rules have changed and I was too slow to pick up the memo.
When I was little, the first three things a stranger would ask you upon meeting you for the first time were: what’s your name? How old are you? How much do you (or your parents) earn? It was impolite to stare someone straight in the eye. One should never refer to one’s elders by their full names.
But if these lost rules are a loss at all, they are a loss for everyone equally. And most of them probably aren’t a loss worth mourning after, so it feels petty to mourn after the denied chance to mourn. In any case, I did leave my birth place in search of something different, and have since found many things different.
They told me to like this thing, so I did. Now they tell me to like something else instead. And I’m happy to switch over. And I don’t even mind if they say I was wrong in liking this thing before. I just want there to be another witness of the fact that something has changed.
— But those stories are still yours to tell.
— They are. I just don’t know what kind of stories they are.
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