:: Tossed Salad and Scramble Eggs ::

:: Sunday, October 22, 2006 ::

Personal Reflections on ‘An Inquiry of the Chinese American Identity’ by Stephanie Chia


At the end of my stay in the Bay Area, I was presented a Song dynasty comic collection, a gift from Victor, one of our interviewees, and an acquired friend. He message to me was – that the Chinese culture is rich in history and the Chinese language is beautiful in its own right, hence we should be proud to be ethnically who we are. Perhaps, after asking so many of our interviewees what it means for them to be Chinese, I should also take the opportunity to answer the question for myself. What does it mean to me to be Chinese?

Just like the Chinese American, I am not purely ‘Chinese’ in the sense that I was not born in China, but rather my maternal grandparents migrated to Singapore from China during the 1940s, hence I am a 3rd generation Chinese Singaporean. Moreover, my paternal ancestors come from a unique heritage called ‘the Peranakans’ or ‘Baba-Nonya’. The term refers to the descendants of very early Chinese immigrants who were born and bred in the Melacca Straits and who have partially adopted Malay customs in an effort to be assimilated into the local community. While adopting the language and culture of the Malays, most Peranakan do retain some of their ethnic and religious origins such as marrying within the Straits-born Chinese community or ancestral worship. Over the centuries, the Peranakans have evolved a unique culture that maintains many of the Chinese traditions, while adopting the customs of the land they settled in as well as their successive colonial rulers. They have their own distinct foods and a are normally categorized as having a natural propensity to embrace new cultures.

My father and my grandparents are perhaps a classic example of Straits-born Chinese. Despite being ethnically Chinese, neither my father nor his parents were able to speak the Chinese language; they were however, fluent in both English and Malay. Hence, a common colloquial Malay phrase that is often used to describe the Peranakans was ‘Orang Cina Bukan Cina’, which means, ‘of Chinese origin, but not entirely Chinese (because they cannot speak the Chinese language). It is perhaps because of this inability to speak the Chinese language, that most Peranakans of my father’s and grandparent’s generation were much closer to the Malay community than they were to the Chinese community.

As for myself, because the Peranakans are classified by the Singapore government as ethnically Chinese; I received formal instruction in Mandarin as a second language, according to the ‘Mother Tongue Policy’ in Singapore. However, despite being fluent in Mandarin, I have never felt fully ‘Chinese’ as oppose to my peers who were 3rd generation Singaporean Chinese and whose ancestors came directly from China. Hence, I never really grew up thinking that the Chinese language and traditions were of any value, simply because my father and my paternal grandparents could not speak the language and did not practice Chinese customs and traditions. In fact, the clothes which my grandparents wore were more Malay in origin (the baju kurung) than they were of Chinese origin. And yet, despite not fully embracing Chinese customs and traditions, there was no distinguishing me and other Chinese Singaporeans. I shared the same skin color and hair color. In fact, because I am fair-skinned I looked more Chinese than I was Malay, and so did my paternal ancestors. We looked Chinese, but (saved for myself) could not speak a word of the Chinese language and did not practice much of the customs and traditions. So where do I stand?

It was only upon the completion of this project that I realized that I had no excuse to forgo my ethnic Chinese identity. For me, ironic as it may be that this project was done in the Bay Area and not in China, it was still a form of going back to my roots and understanding the value of the Chinese heritage. If there was one thing I learned from the interviewees themselves, was that retaining one’s ethnic culture requires a conscious effort to find a balance between holding on to one’s roots and being able to assimilate into the new environment. Not forgetting that while one tries to assimilate into the new environment, one should be proud of one’s ethnic heritage and seek to find ways and means to constantly keep in touch with it. Perhaps, it was also in Victor’s intention that by presenting me with the Song Dynasty comic collection, it was his way of encouraging me to rediscover my Chinese ethnicity. Hence, I believe that being Chinese means going improving on my Chinese language and being cognizant of the rich cultural history that China has to offer, because Tu Wei Ming said, ‘the meaning of being Chinese is intertwined with China as a geopolitical concept and Chinese culture as a lived reality’.

And so, in the aftermath of the project, my next stop would be to rediscover my Chinese identity by understanding the evolution of my Peranakan heritage. In some ways, both the Peranakan heritage and the Chinese American heritage share a similarity in that people of dual heritage straddle between embracing their new surroundings, but at the same time grapple with how and what part of their ethnic heritage that they should retain.

Apart from making a personal discovery of my ethinicity, this project has given me a more holistic impression of the Chinese American Community. Before embarking on the project in the Bay Area, my impressions of the Chinese American Community were formed through academic journals which hypothesised about what the cultural identity of the Chinese Americans and novels such as The Joy Luck Club and Hunger, which constantly dramatized the identity crisis which the Chinese Americans faced. However, undertaking this research project gave the Chinese American community a three-dimensional feature. Through the eyes of several Chinese Americans, we saw how their Chinese identity can coexist with their American one, and this made them unique. The Chinese American Identity is a century and a half old, but is still continually evolving. Nevertheless, the people that we’ve met and the places that we’ve visited plays testament to its dynanism. I was unexpectantly surprised at how self-supporting the community was, and as one of our interviewees remarked, ‘One could go by without speaking a word of English in San Francisco Chinatown’. Furthermore, the community was not just another tourist attraction. Like every community, it has also had its social ills in the form of troubled youths who turn to Chinatown gangs, hence, disclaiming the notion of the Model Minority, given to the Chinese.

This project also could not have been possible without my co-partner, Janice Chua and I certainly could not achieve as much in this project had I done it alone. In many ways, our work together has also made me realise both my strengths and my weaknesses, as well as how we seek to compliment each other in terms of personality and working habits. While I was generally more interested in having a thorough theoretical and historical understanding of the Chinese American Diaspora and their evolution since the 1850s, Janice pulled the scale to balance through the practical aspect of the project. Crucial to our project, the varied interview sample size we obtained cannot have been achieved without her; she never fails to miss the oppurtunity to talk to strangers whom she thought would be an interesting case study for our project and engagement them in a conversation and thereafter an interview. Moreover, while I was always more concerned about having a narrow focus, Janice was always there to remind me that we should allow the door to remain open just in case a golden oppurtunity arrives, and true enough, having a broad mindset in this project proved to be rewarding.

Finally, in my years at Warwick, I have met an overwhelming number of Mainland Chinese overseas students. Prior to this project, I have asked a few of them what it means to be Chinese and whether they would consider the Hua Qiao (The Chinese Diaspora) in America to be at all, if not the least bit, Chinese. While some of them have been to San Francisco, others have only heard about the large Chinese American Diaspora there, and yet, many mainland Chinese students do not consider the Chinese living in America as ‘Chinese’. More often than not, these Chinese Americans are termed by them as ‘Xiang Jiao Ren’ (Banana people) yellow on the outside but white on the inside. It is with all intent, that this project seeks to tell the Chinese American story through the accounts of 20 Chinese Americans and an experience in the Bay Area. It is with hope that others, especially the Chinese from the Mainland, will take an interest in the lives of their cousins overseas and what they face, being geographically displaced from the cultural entity.

:: Stuffy 10/22/2006 03:35:00 PM [+] ::
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Two years is a short time, but the feeling of being a finalist is that when you look at the in-coming freshers, you kind of see yourself and how you were when you were they're age. I didn't really feel it last year when the freshers came in, but this year seemed so much more pronounced.

Maybe because being back on campus again reminded me of my first year experience on campus, maybe its because I have the same seminar tutor who taught me when I was first year - and mind you, his distinct teaching style hasn't changed. Maybe its because I'm not living with anyone I know again. But all in all, I begin to see the change in myself, how I was two years back and how I am now. The changes are sutle, but nevertheless, I am still rooted in my own personality and character as I was 2 years back, so there hasn't been anything very excitingly drastic.

Anyway, apologies to Adeline for sounding really disinterested and angsty on MSN, but thanks for being there and being so understanding with my temperament. I owe you =)

:: Stuffy 10/20/2006 05:04:00 PM [+] ::
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Apologies for not having kept up on this space for quite a while. The past three months have been indescribably hectic and I must have been semi-conscious not to suddenly realise that I haven't been writing on Tossed Salad and Scramble Eggs for an entire three months. But then again, three months is a short time. The last two and half weeks of school just went by and I hadn't had the time to breathe. I feel as if my breathe has been compressed and that I'm only using half the capacity of my lungs, that even if I stop breathing now, it doesn't really matter.

I'm currenlty on a semi-adrenaline because I finally found my thesis statement to my dissertation after three weeks of arduous 'thesis-searching'. I can only hope that my supervisor would agree with it. I can only further hope that I'm not out-of-date on the subject matter and that I'm inline with current sentiments, especially since things on this subject are so terribly volatile. I can only brace myself and again - hold my breathe.

I'm also currently finalising my report on the Chinese American Identity with Janice. The project has been a fruitful one, but conveying our ideas and articulating our message is of utmost importance. Extra effort has to be put into this given the heavy academic schedule this year.

But in other news, despite the weariness which will probably persist throughout this academic year, I have alot of people to thank. God placed friends, boyfriends, sisters and parents for a reason, and they are perhaps a reminder of His grace. I'd like to thank my Warwicksians for taking me out during the first week of school for a belated dinner. I don't think you guys would have known how close I was to jumping into a pond that day, so thanks for raising my spirits. Also thank Victor for the very beautiful Song Dynasty comic collection. I'm still reading it and making progress on my Mandarin. Most importantly, to thank John for making a very special evening and to my parents for their surprise parcel. Thanks for the calls (Thanks Tat) and texts that were sent. I'm sorry if I still haven't replied to them, but I will. I write this out as a constant reminder to take deeper breaths so that my lung capacity will not shrink to the point that I stop breathing.

:: Stuffy 10/17/2006 05:34:00 PM [+] ::
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