Immigrant

Note: I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts since Friday; had to spend some time appending the latter half of the post, oops! Gizelle’s small question launched me into a long, meandering post about identity (my favorite topic!) – apologies that I never shut up about it =)

There is a conversation I’ve had in many forms with many people across the years. Yesterday, Gizelle asked me this almost as explicitly as it has ever come up.⁽¹⁾ I was mentioning my interest in potentially working abroad for a short while, and I mentioned Shanghai.⁽²⁾ She asked me, “As an Asian American, would you ever date an Asian [mainland Chinese]?”

It’s a reasonable question that I’m sure I’d get from the aunties if my parents had more friends and relatives. But that very upbringing (isolated from other adults, with only my parents as direct influence) rolls up into my answer itself. I was talking to my coworker about being 1.5 generation and what it meant just earlier this week, and that “breakthrough” moment I had in early college when I realized that I neither associated fully with APAs or “Asian Asians”, even though I mostly grew up in America. The cadre that resonates most with me is not Asian nor Asian American, but rather, immigrant.

There is increasingly more literature about third culture kids and their lifestyles. I had a great conversation with one of my coworkers, Chiara, who is a third culture kid through and through. I never knew any third culture kids as a high school student in Texas, so college was the first time I was exposed to them. As jobs become increasingly transnational, TCKs are becoming more and more prevalent. Much less glamourized, though far outstripping TCKs in historical legacy, is the immigrant culture. “America was built by immigrants” as they say, and everyone came from immigrants at some time, but the predominant connotation of the term is negative at worst, neutral at best. It seems to express a persistent state of foreignness, or a transient state of incongruity with one’s environment that is shed when assimilation occurs. Even in as much literature as I have read about diasporas and particularly the Asian American community, the leaders seem to fight for their rights as “Asian Americans” — they are a part of the American community too.

The fact that I feel I lie in the cracks between that identifier excludes me from the discussions of what it means to be a citizen of one place, or even a hyphenated American. There is a large overlap between Asian, Asian American, and this amorphous space in-between, but as the cohort of 2nd gen Asian Americans raise their children, the dynamics will change. I can see it changing before my eyes. As young children, our parents dashed around speaking in Chinese at grocery stores, stammering at parent-teacher conferences and struggling to make their own in a foreign country. Twenty years later, they’ve grasped the language, bought their houses (a bit of the American Dream) with cash, paid off their children’s college debt and are just now learning what American football is.

At the same time, Asia has gone on without us. Among the overseas Chinese diaspora spread throughout Asia, wealth is often ubiquitous. To be an immigrant in America, which I have always honored and respected, seems to sometimes be a decision worth second-guessing. For all of its opportunities and rolling landscapes and kindness, it is also a land full of hate and cruelty, even amongst brothers, much less between strangers. On the other hand, the country left behind is such a successful “awakening dragon” that many hai gui are swimming back in droves, for all of the pollution and corruption. There is no single good answer on where to grow up, where to find affinity, and where to call home. “Home” sits like an anachronism on my tongue.

The hardest part for me to reconcile is that there is a distinct cultural background that I do not share with the Asians remaining in their homeland, but am not so comfortable taking on the mantle of Asian Americans who are gradually integrating into this country of transplants and finding their own place. For people like me, the children of immigrants, the stories that form the cultural myths and legends of our childhood are neither uniquely the emperors of China nor the Founding Fathers of America. Our heroes are the ones who brought us from familiarity to strangeness, and risked everything — our parents. Some came because they had no choice, and some came by an alluring opportunity. But I have been trained to have an eternal gratefulness to the ones who gave me this opportunity, internalized as deeply and faithfully as religion firms and shakes your conviction.

As an immigrant, nothing is deserved and everything was given. It demands an unparalleled gratefulness and obligation to strive for the highest standards. The dream of rags to riches is more glorious than inheriting a pedigree of wealth unearned. In that way, I relate more to the Horatio Algers of the 19th century (all the waves of Irish, Italians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and various transplants) more than the high-flying nouveau riche of Asia today. I’m reading “Crazy Rich Asians” by Kevin Kwan (upon Anthony’s recommendation) and while it was supposed to be amusing, instead it makes me sick. It is a satire of the class but the level of extravagant spending and luxury felt almost blasphemous to me. The lack of gratefulness these rich heirs and heiresses assumed was the antithesis of everything that I knew and valued; it challenged everything moral that I based my life on. Only in reading it and feeling how disgusted I was did I realize that far from being cut astray morally and floating in atheistic, sacrilegious nihilism, I have taken some teachings quite seriously to heart. That is: I am the children of immigrants, people who gave up the comfort and familiarity of what they knew to take the plunge into a new, drastic change. My parents are the only family members I have that live anywhere outside of Shanghai, and while they have a handful of friends, it sometimes dawns on me how utterly alone they are. Even in New York, there are dozens of people I know and am happy to see, while they have just a handful in this whole country. Some immigrant parents transitioned smoother than others and I was blessed enough to have a comfortable economic background growing up, but I will never forget the feeling of gratefulness and obligating duty. It was drilled into me as if by Pavlovian response, and any time I see a story of that type of immigrant sacrifice, I am near tears. I have a very difficult time finding any commonalities between myself and Christianity, so I sometimes wonder if the awe I feel in the struggle and sacrifice my parents went through for me and my brother is somewhat relatable. When anyone does anything for me, I feel a possibly over-reactive connection of gratefulness and love and awe. And in the way of stoic, hard-ass Asian parents, I express that awe and appreciation with a straight face, blunt words, and a lot of silent stewing on the side.

So when Gizelle asked me that question, I told her my honest answer: while I would not exclude anyone by that standard, it would be a little disappointing to be with someone who didn’t know the feeling of dutiful immigrant appreciation that was drilled into me. Asian Americans who have been in America for at least a generation are more settled and comfortable with the idea of being American. Asians in their homeland don’t seem to understand the struggle and sacrifice as I present it — America seems like a happy fun land of Justin Bieber and iPads, not of dealing with ignorant racism or bumbling around in a foreign language or even the joy of finding a community within a larger world.

Perhaps I took this lesson a bit more seriously than others (as the dutiful “guai” daughter I was), or maybe my theory of “1.5 generation” holds some weight. I was old enough to know that the life my family is living now is not all here ever was, but young enough to be raised against two standards and ways of life. If someone were to come to me and ask me to immigrate indefinitely, I’m not sure what I would say. The world has changed so that the circumstances of this move are not even the same anymore. Distance seems less hazardous, wealth permits frequent travel back and forth, and staying connected is as easy as an iPhone and a global data plan. There will be no more long nights, watching my mother huddled against an old phone wracking up long distance charges for a precious ten minute phone conversation. Grandfathers flying back for hospitalization might not be the last time their grandkids ever see them. With squadrons of children raised in multiple cultures, these divisions between “homeland” and new land seem quaint and outdated, like an imperial colony in the 21st century.

So in some ways, the “immigrant” cadre I feel I belong to may be a rapidly dying species. Global travelers, nomads of the world, third culture kids, and jet-setting executives are abound. I live in New York now, which means almost no one I meet is actually from New York for more than two generations. That time is gone, and the “immigrant” identity I remember is something frozen in time from twenty years ago, when my family first got off the plane at JFK. That feeling of home in so many places and nowhere all at once is a rush of identity, nostalgia, confusion, longing, and loving memories that I could wax poetic for years trying to describe. Hopefully I won’t have to…

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1. I love talking to Gizelle; she’s like an older sister/mother/auntie/friend combo. A lot of people who are a few years older than me don’t have that “older” type of feeling, and she pulls off the older/wiser but not “holier than thou” persona perfectly.

2. No expat plans on the horizon, but it’s a bit of a pipe dream. I’d like to know the feeling of having a real extended family, improving my Chinese, plus I love the city and there’s so much business/design work there.