Marco Roberts
Fall 2022
“When the Cultural Revolution was still happening, I thought that we were the most fortunate to live under Mao. But later China opened up economically, I realized that there is another world… I thought the Western world must have been really rich.”
Every immigrant to the United States has to embark on the most momentous decision of their life – to migrate from their place of birth to a new country, to drop their previous legal nationality for another. For Alice, that decision was informed by her love for her would-be husband, David, an American who studied abroad at Peking University, who she met at a disco one fateful night in 1991, in Beijing.
The decision to become an American citizen was particularly consequential in hindsight for Alice, as China does not allow dual citizenship. This change in legal identity however, did not always reflect in Alice’s self-identification as Chinese, an identity which she would cling to, but in ways different than before and how she remembered it, after settling in the United States.
She grew up in Beijing during the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution and the beginning of China’s economic reforms of the 1980s. Although quite poor, the little means they had growing up did not affect her or anyone’s sense of self-esteem. In her view, her family was not different from anyone else’s, because people during Communist China before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were quite equal. Nobody looked down upon anyone, because “being poor… was the norm”.
As a girl who grew up in the capital, her experience perhaps differed from folks from other cities, towns, or from rural China, but the perception of equality was still strong. Any inequality that existed existed on a much smaller scale than China today. One of the major culture shocks she experienced in moving to the United States was the sense of esteem attached to one’s wealth.
Living on such means did not prevent her from having a happy, wholesome childhood. She has 4 siblings, all of whom are much older, so the dynamics in her house had a lot of competition. Among her favorite memories from childhood were riding bikes with friends around the old neighborhoods of Beijing (Beijing in the 1970s barely had cars), or when the weather was snowy.
Chinese New Year, and other festivities were also things she looked forward to, because generally those were occasions where her family would have special, festive, meaty foods that they would generally eschew throughout the year to save money.
As she entered adulthood, Deng Xiaping’s economic reforms allowed many foreign companies (both European and American) to set up in China. Unlike the rest of her family, who took up more traditional jobs, she decided to work for a French promotion company, which led her to interact with many foreigners and people of international backgrounds.
Her desire to leave China for the West was in part, fueled by curiosity of what the West had to offer that she did not have growing up.
“When the Cultural Revolution was still happening, I thought that we were the most fortunate to live under Mao. But later China opened up economically, I realized that there is another world… I thought the Western world must have been really rich.”
She initially wanted to travel to New Zealand to study English, but after meeting David, that changed. After David proposed to her, she decided to settle in the US, marry her future husband and obtain her US citizenship.
“They thought of us Chinese people as really poor…they think it to the point where they think that we’re ‘walking with our heads down’ in China. That everybody’s suppressing us. Almost as if we were suppressing ourselves, that it was inherent to us, which is totally a lie.”
Alice’s first job in the United States was working as a busser at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Cruz, CA. Her boss liked her a lot and subsequently promoted her to become a cashier, and to answer phone calls for people ordering food, which made Alice quite nervous due to the language barrier.
“I barely knew money in the US. And I needed to learn about the different types of coins and currency stuff in America, like dollar, nickel, penny… I was kind of freaked out initially.”
“I basically learned from scratch, learned from experience… I had to learn the vegetables in English, Broccoli, cauliflower, rice…”
Alice did not recall necessarily having a dream job after moving to the US. Living in the US with her husband was more than she could wish for.
“I didn’t really have a choice. I just felt like any job that will provide for myself… And then I married my husband, and started a family, so we decided to ‘dream together’.”
She came to America when she was 25 years old (in 1992), and her initial impressions of the US were how she imagined it before she came – wealthy, and dreams achievable if one worked hard for it. She felt very fortunate to be in the US.
But after around 10 or so years living here, she began to see it differently, especially after she became involved with American politics. Becoming a citizen and then a frequent voter has made Alice more disappointed in a lot of things about the US that she did not realize before, particularly regarding American attitudes towards the world and world cultures.
Although blatant racism was not something she remembers experiencing when she first came (though she explains that she never paid much attention to it), she did comment on a savior complex and condescension she encountered in the U.S.
“They thought of us Chinese people as really poor…they think it to the point where they think that we’re ‘walking with our heads down’ in China. That everybody’s suppressing us. Almost as if we were suppressing ourselves, that it was inherent to us, which is totally a lie.”
“They feel sad about us. They want to help us, but in a sort of condescending way, where they look down upon us as children in a way… It harmed my [self]-esteem a bit.”
The appeal of the “American Dream” played a huge role in Alice’s motivation to migrate to the United States. But the politics behind her arrival – the collapse of the communist bloc just years earlier – gave her story an extra layer.
Alice’s story with a political purpose through the lens of the Capitalist West, one which treats her as a model immigrant who was “rescued” from communist tyranny by the capitalist world of endless opportunities. She felt that these sentiments translated perhaps into the way she was treated compared to other immigrants. She also feels that the U.S. has generally become less welcoming to immigrants over time.
“I just think Americans are a little bit arrogant. I think there needs to be more global awareness, which the US has a lack of, I think… They think everybody has to be thinking the way that they think… that part kind of bothers me.”
When asked how she identified herself, Alice would always carefully present herself as both Chinese and American, but with careful word choice.
“I am a proud Chinese… I was Chinese. I am Chinese.”
Yet, she always seems to narrate her Americanness in terms of “becoming”
“I am very proud to become an American citizen”; “I am lucky to become an American citizen.”
For her, Americanness represents more of a legal identity, one which she is bound to by virtue of citizenship since 1997. She’s proud to have it for the benefits it brings, and she is proud of the many aspects of being American, like the value of freedom of expression, which she perceives a lack of in China.
But deep down, America does not represent for her the same sense of symbolic patriotism. And yet, just because she feels a deep sense of cultural and identitarian patriotism to China, does not mean her political identity or sense of comfort lies there. Alice has expressed frustration about the current Chinese government’s authoritarian nature as something that has further contributed to a sense of distance she has from her country of birth.
Alice has become a frequent voter in the US, and feels a deep sense of duty as an American citizen. She calls the US her home. But this was not always the case, especially in the initial years, after just marrying her husband, she explained:
“He was my home.”
America functioned as a home for her by virtue of her husband being from there, not because it had taken on the physical meaning of a home.
Despite preserving her sense of identity as one of being Chinese first and foremost, she explains that living in the US, with her family and kids again has made her settle down in the US.
The political environment in China and relations between the two countries has reinforced her view that she would likely not return to live in China again for the rest of her life, which she feels quite sad about, given her deep roots in her home country.
Alice’s sense of identity was always fluid and complex. Questions of allegiance, symbolism, ethnic identity and nostalgia, as well as convenience and comfort all play a role in shaping her sense of being, and how she wished it to be passed on.
Pressures to assimilate also played a role, but was not as big of a factor in Alice’s case, as she and her husband would end up moving back to China together to raise their two kids, as American expats abroad.
While Alice felt that it was important to pass down her cultural heritage onto her children, she never recalled feeling overly strong about it. Perhaps this was because having her kids grow up in China for 12 years made it natural for her children to be immersed in her native tongue growing up. She and her husband did make a conscious decision to send both children to a Chinese language elementary school before switching them over to Western education.
“I was actually more worried about their English than their Chinese, since they grew up in China [despite being American], and since [their father] was so busy with work, my kids saw him less and so I thought they should keep up their English actually.”
China in those 12 years as an American expat easily took on a meaning of home for her, and a familiar one at that, since it was her country of birth.
But that sense of comfort was different than before, because she came back to her birth country as an American citizen, a foreigner, legally bound to another country, but spiritually conflicted.
Alice is 55 years old now, a mother of two – one, a 17-year-old high school girl, the other, a 20-year-old college student. She currently resides in the US.
Looking towards the future, among Alice’s chief concerns is the dire direction of US foreign policy. What worries Alice the most is rising US-China tensions, which she feels has contributed to anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment in the country. She worries about herself and her family, most of whom still live in China amidst the increasingly tense political environment.
“I am very pessimistic about the current administration, the Biden administration, he’s not encouraging. He always wants to poke China. Poke the bear.”
“[Pelosi’s] visit to Taiwan… makes the world less safe and brings us closer to war.”
She worries about the prospects of anti-Chinese sentiments in the US, so much so to the point where she and her husband both are considering moving out of the country to escape what they both perceive to be a dark inevitability. These tensions not only risk a confrontation between two nuclear superpowers, but a painful clash between two sides of herself – American and Chinese.