Read Online A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu - Free Book Online Page A

league of its own for scale, reach, duration, and influence. In the Philippines, for instance, the Chinese constitute 1 percent of the population but control 60 percent of the wealth. Long before Amy Chua became the Tiger Mother, she wrote a book called World on Fire predicting that backlashes against such “market-dominant minorities” would result in waves of ethnic political conflict and violence. Picture it: tens of millions of Overseas Chinese as the kindling for transcontinental conflagration. A world on fire.
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    There are nearly four million people of Chinese ancestry in the United States, making this “the largest overseas Chinese community in North America and the fourth-largest in the Chinese diaspora,” says Wikipedia in its entry on Chinese Americans. I don’t doubt the accuracy of the statistics. I do note, however, the usage here of “overseas Chinese.” The implication persists that Chinese Americans are merely the local branch of some Global League of Chinese. One reason why is that some Chinese Americans and many Chinese nationals living here indeed see themselves this way. But the main reason is that no country this century will pose a greater competitive challenge to the United States than China.
    The treatment of Chinese Americans has always depended in great measure on the strength or weakness of China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when China was at its weakest, the treatment was at its worst. We are now in the midst of an experiment: What happens when China is at its strongest?
    The more powerful China becomes, the more Chinese Americans are perceived as vessels of such power. The more discomfitingly assertive China is, the more Chinese Americans are seen as discomfitingly assertive in their dealings. The more underhanded, the more deceptive, the more inscrutably treacherous China’s moves appear, the more Chinese Americans are assumed to be all these things.
    China’s magnetic force seems so powerful now that it can pry loose from American society veins of precious talent, no matter how deeply embedded, and pull them straight back across the sea. In some tellings, we Chinese Americans are those veins of ore. Or maybe it’s a different story of magnetism. Maybe we Chinese Americans are loose iron filings lying around in the open hodgepodge tray of America, just waiting for that day when— zing!— the great magnet will approach and we can fly up from the tray and (re)attach ourselves to the core from whence we came.
    Consider this, from the New York Times , page 1, column 1, June 6, 2013. Headline: “China Seen in Push to Gain Technology Insights.” Dateline: Shenzhen, China, where a government research institute is financing all manner of high-tech innovation. Storyline: Prosecutors in the US have charged three “Chinese scientists” at the New York University School of Medicine with accepting bribes to funnel research findings and other secrets to the Shenzhen institute.
    Midway through the article there is a quote from Frank Wu, a legal scholar and dean of Hastings College of Law, warning against drawing overbroad conclusions about the activities of people of Chinese ancestry in America. The article then goes on for many paragraphs, each amplifying a sense of vague unease, and inviting the reader to draw, well, overbroad conclusions. Only at the end does the article return to the actual case of the three accused Chinese scientists at the NYU School of Medicine.
    Here is a question it does not explore: Are those “three Chinese scientists” Chinese or American? Here is another question it does not explore: Shouldn’t it matter?
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    American-born Chinese.
    It’s the title of an acclaimed popular graphic novel by Gene Yuen that chronicles the awkward suburban adolescence of a son of Chinese immigrants. It is also the title many such children are given