by their Chinese immigrant parents. âABCâ is the shorthand form, and itâs kind of a putdown, said with gentle derision or outright dismay. âYou ABCs think if you know how to order dim sum you Chinese.â Or âYou ABCs canât handle spicy food.â Or âYou ABCs think you can just get whatever you want without working for it.â I can hear many Chinese parents, not just mine, addressing us kids as âyou ABCs,â with exactly the kind of overgeneralizing dismissiveness that offends, say, African Americans when theyâre addressed by whites as âyou people.â
The idea is that because we were born in America we canât quite hack it as Chinese. We donât have the chops(ticks). We know too little about Chinese culture. We speak too little of the language too poorly. We take for granted all the little luxuries of this affluent, materialistic society. Weâre soft. Weâre a watered-down imitation of the real thing, with a diluted work ethic, a diluted appreciation for tradition. Nothing about being âAmerican-bornâ is meant to be a compliment.
Yet the very wording âAmerican-born Chineseâ implies that, in spite of the corrupting effects of my American environs, I am, at bottom, Chinese. To be called âABCâ by your parents is to hear both their grief that you are changing and their belief that you wonât. I do not recall ever hearing someone of my parentsâ generation address their kids as Chinese American, much less simply as American. We were American-born, not American.
It takes no small amount of wishful thinking to imagine second-generation people like me, people who grew up in the American mediasphere and civic square, as essentially Chinese. What makes that clear is being viewed from the vantage of our supposed âco-ethnicsââthe Chinese in China. If I am truly simply an Overseas Chinese, an American-born Chinese, then I should be able, on short notice, to shuck off the costume of my Americanness, make a crossing back to my homeland, and be united again with my blood brethren.
Indeed, never in history have so many Overseas Chinese, particularly from America, wished to go back to China. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born undergraduate and graduate students who now comprise the largest foreign student population in the United States; most intend to return after their studies. Then there are immigrants from China who had perhaps intended to settle in America but now look for opportunities to do business in China. And last there are the children and grandchildren of those immigrants, born and raised in the United States but now similarly drawn to go âback homeâ in search of opportunity. The opportunity is there. Many ABCs are getting rich today, starting their own ventures in China or working for big American companies that need the smoothing, intermediary presence of bilingual Chinese Americans.
But make no mistake. When we are in China, we ABCs are reminded many ways a day that we are not truly Chinese. We may look Chinese. But cab drivers and street vendors can size us up instantly and address us a bit dismissively with tiny shards of broken English. This is microevidence of a tectonic shift in attitude. It wasnât long ago that a Chinese American touring or working in China was treated by the average Chinese with a touch of deference, not as a less-than but as a more-than. As Chinese-plus. That has changed.
When Gary Locke was governor of Washington, his 1997 âhomecomingâ to his familyâs ancestral village, Jilong, was a glorious occasion. His grandfather had immigrated to America in the 1890s, finding work as a houseboy in Olympia, Washington, less than a mile away from the governorâs mansion that Locke would come to call home. The Chinese media treated Locke like a celebrity, following him at every stop and showering him with adoration. They played up his
The idea is that because we were born in America we canât quite hack it as Chinese. We donât have the chops(ticks). We know too little about Chinese culture. We speak too little of the language too poorly. We take for granted all the little luxuries of this affluent, materialistic society. Weâre soft. Weâre a watered-down imitation of the real thing, with a diluted work ethic, a diluted appreciation for tradition. Nothing about being âAmerican-bornâ is meant to be a compliment.
Yet the very wording âAmerican-born Chineseâ implies that, in spite of the corrupting effects of my American environs, I am, at bottom, Chinese. To be called âABCâ by your parents is to hear both their grief that you are changing and their belief that you wonât. I do not recall ever hearing someone of my parentsâ generation address their kids as Chinese American, much less simply as American. We were American-born, not American.
It takes no small amount of wishful thinking to imagine second-generation people like me, people who grew up in the American mediasphere and civic square, as essentially Chinese. What makes that clear is being viewed from the vantage of our supposed âco-ethnicsââthe Chinese in China. If I am truly simply an Overseas Chinese, an American-born Chinese, then I should be able, on short notice, to shuck off the costume of my Americanness, make a crossing back to my homeland, and be united again with my blood brethren.
Indeed, never in history have so many Overseas Chinese, particularly from America, wished to go back to China. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born undergraduate and graduate students who now comprise the largest foreign student population in the United States; most intend to return after their studies. Then there are immigrants from China who had perhaps intended to settle in America but now look for opportunities to do business in China. And last there are the children and grandchildren of those immigrants, born and raised in the United States but now similarly drawn to go âback homeâ in search of opportunity. The opportunity is there. Many ABCs are getting rich today, starting their own ventures in China or working for big American companies that need the smoothing, intermediary presence of bilingual Chinese Americans.
But make no mistake. When we are in China, we ABCs are reminded many ways a day that we are not truly Chinese. We may look Chinese. But cab drivers and street vendors can size us up instantly and address us a bit dismissively with tiny shards of broken English. This is microevidence of a tectonic shift in attitude. It wasnât long ago that a Chinese American touring or working in China was treated by the average Chinese with a touch of deference, not as a less-than but as a more-than. As Chinese-plus. That has changed.
When Gary Locke was governor of Washington, his 1997 âhomecomingâ to his familyâs ancestral village, Jilong, was a glorious occasion. His grandfather had immigrated to America in the 1890s, finding work as a houseboy in Olympia, Washington, less than a mile away from the governorâs mansion that Locke would come to call home. The Chinese media treated Locke like a celebrity, following him at every stop and showering him with adoration. They played up his
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