My Chinese American Experience

Whether warranted or not, most would agree that anti-China rhetoric has accelerated exponentially over the past few years

By Krista Chan

My life as a Chinese American begins the same way anyone’s life would: with my parents. When they immigrated to the Bay Area from Hong Kong in the late 80s, my dad was an IT worker and my mom was a nurse. Like many immigrants, they believed moving to the United States would give them better opportunities, and my aunt and uncle were already in the Bay Area to greet them. My dad would join the ranks of Asian immigrants providing a workforce for Silicon Valley’s dot com boom and my mom had the good fortune of finding work easily due to nursing shortages at that time.

I was born a few years later and was lucky to attend schools where Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, were a significant minority. My relationship with my Chinese heritage was complex. I loved Chinese food. Some of my best memories from childhood were dim sum brunch on Sundays, visiting relatives in the big, bustling city of Hong Kong, and getting red pocket envelopes during the lunar new year.

At the same time, I deeply resented Chinese school. As a Cantonese speaker at home, I always felt behind my peers who largely spoke Mandarin. Sitting in a classroom on Saturday mornings after a whole week of regular school and then having to do extra homework made me cry and throw tantrums endlessly. Of all extracurricular activities I was privileged to take part in, learning Chinese was the one my parents never let me quit. They spent countless hours helping me with homework and hired private tutors to keep me motivated. I remember my dad giving me motivational speeches along the lines of, “China is the future! And Chinese people are smart! China has invented so many things. If you want to be successful, you have to know Chinese!”.

I used to think my dad was just being arrogant. But to his delight, I continued studying Chinese throughout high school and college, and even decided on my own to study abroad in Beijing at Peking University (PKU) my junior year. Prior to that experience, my exposure to Chinese people was limited to the diaspora in the United States, family visits to Hong Kong, and occasional trips to the mainland. But at PKU, I met students from provinces I had never heard of and befriended students of Uyghur and Mongolian ethnic backgrounds. I traveled to different cities like Nanjing, Xian, Qingdao and Suzhou via high speed rail completely on my own. My classmates and I toured Inner Mongolia where we stayed in yurts and rode horses and camels. At the tail end of my trip, I helped a friend plan an exchange program that brought students in Beijing to the Tibetan plateau in Qinghai where we ran a summer camp for young Tibetan girls.

Having lived in suburbs my whole life, I loved being able to travel everywhere independently via train. The religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity of China became more tangible to me. At the same time, I was struck by the pride everyone had in their common Chinese identity. There were times I would introduce myself as an American and locals would give me teasing, familial looks and say, “No, you’re Chinese! We are the same!”

While I came to love and appreciate the incredible diversity of my motherland, I still believed many of the negative talking points about China that the US media taught me. The air in Beijing was thick and unbreathable on many days. I met poor migrants in the cities and noticed clear disparities in economic opportunity for ethnic minorities in rural provinces. American missionaries told me they risked detainment if the government ever found out they were evangelizing. I thought these social issues indicated fair critique of China’s government. I had little idea how that was about to change.

Shortly after returning home from Beijing, Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Revolution” began in opposition to electoral reforms proposed by the mainland. I saw images of familiar streets in Hong Kong flooded with crowds of protesters with yellow umbrellas. My own friends and family indicated support for the movement and news of severe police crackdowns filled the front pages of US media.

The only alternative narrative I had access to at the time came through my parents. Confused as to why they did not show enthusiastic support for what I thought was a people’s movement in their home city, I naively asked my mom, “What’s so wrong with protesting to protect democracy?” I didn’t fully understand her answer at the time, but I remember my mom saying, “Krista, don’t you know that when I was growing up in Hong Kong under the British there was no such thing as democracy? We were poor. We didn’t vote. We were Chinese but we were ruled by Britain.”

My mom’s words began to sink in a few years later when uprisings in Hong Kong resumed over a bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China. I saw images of government buildings ransacked and vandalized. My elderly relatives were afraid to go outside and accusations of violence instigated by protestors and police were rampant.

I didn’t like the strife and political disagreement it created within my own family. I could understand that young people were frustrated and fearful of change that would come with a transition in their government, yet I witnessed plainly mean-spirited discrimination and hatred towards mainland Chinese from young Hong Kongers. Even more unsettling was the images of protesters waving American flags and appealing to the US to “save” their democracy. This was in 2019, a time when the US was reeling from the tail end of a disastrous Trump administration and police terror towards Black communities was becoming increasingly visible. I thought, “Why the hell would they appeal to a failing democracy to save theirs?”

Whether warranted or not, most would agree that anti-China rhetoric has accelerated exponentially over the past few years. We started to hear about “genocide” in Xinjiang, that China started COVID-19 in a lab and was engaging in nefarious “vaccine diplomacy”, that the the Chinese were enslaving and colonizing Africans, that they were about to invade Taiwan and the Phillipines, and that all Chinese technology we used in the US amounts to tools of cyber espionage.

Meanwhile, memories of the poor air I experienced when studying abroad in Beijing as a student paled in comparison to the dystopian images of orange skies from wildfires ravaging my home state of California during a global pandemic. I saw rampant police violence and repression of free speech firsthand during the uprisings against police violence in 2020 and today at actions against US support for genocide in Gaza.

Observing these contradictions has had the positive side effect of making me intensely curious about China and its history. I started reading what was labeled Chinese “state-run media” on a regular basis. I re-asummed my childhood obsession with watching Chinese period dramas, read classic accounts of Chinese history like “Red Star Over China” by Edgar Snow, watched documentaries like “Voices From the Frontline” which was censored by PBS for its exploration of poverty alleviation in China, and am learning from scholars and activists involved in Codepink’s “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign.

Some might say I’ve been “brainwashed”, but more thorough self study of Chinese history and politics has only made me more proud to be Chinese. Like many communities of color in the United States, I grew up with an internalized feeling of inferiority that had to be unlearned in adulthood. I was fed the idea that Chinese people exist in the United States to be smart, quiet, and hard-working. We would be well paid as America’s engineers and doctors as long as we were good immigrants, proud to be American, and never too “pro-China”.

Now I know the truth is that China is the single greatest threat to US global hegemony. And that through hard work, creativity, and deep civilizational wisdom, Chinese people have made spectacular contributions to the world’s Millenium Development Goals by eradicating extreme poverty within the country and advancing green technology infrastructure. And they achieved all this after enduring the century of humiliation, a period of intense imperialist aggression at the hands of western and Japanese colonial powers. I am filled with hope for the future when I think about these achievements.

At the same time, I have to contend with the fact that I am also American and live here in the belly of the beast, where my tax dollars fund genocide abroad and police violence at home. However, I maintain an attitude of hope because being Chinese American doesn’t make me that different from any other person. I want a livable planet and I want a peaceful life where people coexist in harmony and are cared for during hard times. I love my community here in the United States just as much as I love friends and family in China. I know that if Chinese people were able to defeat imperialists and unite to drastically raise the standard of living of their poor without resorting to colonization and slave labor, then the masses of people of all races and ethnic backgrounds living here on turtle island can certainly do the same.

---

Krista is a proud Chinese American from the Bay Area. She currently resides in Oakland and is involved in Codepink's SF Bay Area chapter and the China Is Not Our Enemy campaign.