| Line |
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In kindergarten, I learned the Pledge of Allegiance.
Or rather, I learned to imitate it. The words spilled
out of my mouth in one long jumble, all slurred and
sloppy. I'd stand tall and put my right hand over my
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| 5 |
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heart, mumbling proudly. Even then, I understood
that "'Merica" was my home-and that I was an
American.
Still, a flicker of doubt was ever present. If
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| 10 |
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I were truly American, why did the other American
people around me seem so sure I was foreign?
By the time I was a teenager, I imagined that I was
a "dual citizen" of both the United States and China.
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| 15 |
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I had no idea what dual citizenship involved, or
if it was even possible. No matter, I would be a
citizen of the world. This was my fantasy.
When I got to college, I decided to learn more about
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| 20 |
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"where I came from" by taking classes in Asian
history. I even studied Mandarin Chinese. This had
the paradoxical effect of making me question
my Chinese-ness. Other students, and even the
teachers, expected me to spout perfectly
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| 25 |
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accented Chinese. Instead I stumbled along as
badly as the other American students next to
me. Still my fantasy persisted; I thought I
might "go back" to China, a place
I had never been.
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| 30 |
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President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China
in February 1972 made a visit seem possible
for me. That summer, China cracked open the
"bamboo curtain" that separated it from the
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| 35 |
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West, allowing a small group of Chinese
American students to visit the country
as a goodwill gesture to the United States.
I desperately wanted to be one of them, and
I put together a research proposal that got
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| 40 |
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the support of my professors. With a special
fellowship, I joined the group and became
one of the first Americans, after Nixon,
to enter "Red" China.
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| 45 |
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In China I fit right in with the multitude.
In the cities of Shanghai and Suzhou, where
my parents were from, I saw my features
everywhere. After years of not looking
"American" to the "Americans" and not
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| 50 |
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looking Chinese enough for the Cantonese
who made up the majority of Chinese
Americans, I suddenly found my face on
every passerby. It was a revelation of
sameness that I had never experienced at
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| 55 |
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home. The feelings didn't last long.
While in China, I visited my mother's
eldest sister; they hadn't seen each
other since 1949, the year of the
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| 60 |
|
Communist revolution in China, when
my mother left with their middle sister
on the last boat out of Shanghai. Using
my elementary Chinese, I struggled to
communicate with Auntie Li. My vocabulary
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| 65 |
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was too limited and my idealism too thick
to comprehend my family's suffering from
the Cultural Revolution,* still very much
in progress. But girlish fun transcended
language as my older cousins took me by
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| 70 |
|
the hand and dressed me in a khaki Mao
suit, braiding my long hair in pigtails,
just like the other young, unmarried
Chinese women.
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| 75 |
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All decked out like a freshly minted Red
Guard in my new do, I passed for a local.
Real Chinese stopped me on the street, to
ask for directions, to ask where I got my
tennis shoes, to complain about the long
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| 80 |
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bus queues, to say any number of things
to me. As soon as I opened my mouth to
reply, my clumsy American accent infected
the little Chinese I knew. My questioners
knew immediately that I was a foreigner,
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| 85 |
|
a Westerner, an American, maybe even a
spy-and they ran from me as fast as they
could. I had an epiphany common to Asian
Americans who visit their ancestral
homelands. I realized that I didn't fit
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| 90 |
|
into Chinese society, that I could never
be accepted there. If I didn't know it,
the Chinese did: I belonged in America,
not China.
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*During the Cultural Revolution, Chinese leaders used the Red Guard—young soldiers—to impose desired behaviors on members of Chinese society.
