A Chinaman's Chance (3 page)

Second-generation American life in particular. The child of immigrants is the purest embodiment of the contradictions of America. In that son or daughter—who, no matter how old, will always first be a son or daughter—is the sensation of perpetually wondering whether one's true self is somewhere else. To Americanize is to shed and to accumulate, to wipe the past away and to frantically try to satiate a hunger for memory. The first generation—my mother and my father—had to contend with their own forms of loss, but by the time they came to America they had deep foundations of Chineseness. The third generation—my daughter—has intermittent experiences of what W. E. B. DuBois called the “double consciousness” of minority identity. But in the second generation, my generation, the doubling is ubiquitous. Faith in something lasting, an original creed, is precious. And elusive.

—————

I've realized lately how devoid of rites my life has been. The first time I ever bowed three times to honor a dead ancestor was at my father's funeral. I did it only because other people were doing it. It was the first time I'd witnessed these people I knew—family friends, my uncle, my mother—doing it. Now, whenever I visit my father's grave, I always end my silent, tearful visit with three bows, the last one deepest and held for a beat longer than the first two. I bow even though no one is looking. I do not visit my father as often as the rites say I should. When I arrive, I sweep and polish his grave and flat bronze memorial marker—his “spirit-tablet,” as the Confucian texts call it—pulling at strands of grass that threaten to encroach the clean border of marble. His grave sits on a hill facing a tree and a river—the wide silent Hudson, far enough upstream that it seems as still as a lake. To sit here is to contemplate the unceasing current beneath the stillness. It is to find in nature what the rites were meant to make a person embody.

When I was a boy and my father was sick, I did not have prayer or church or the organized comforts of a faith tradition. The first time my father was hospitalized, my mother encouraged my sister and me to pray. We found an old Bible with a thin, flimsy black leather cover that looked as if it had been used by itinerant preachers a century earlier. I still do not know where it came from. But the Good Book was as bewildering to me then as
The Analects
would be later. It gave no guidance about how to pray in this situation, what to say in the midst of this crisis. So my mother—brave and, I realize now, so young—simply encouraged us to make up our own prayers—“Pray God take care of Daddy”—and we prayed together silently.

It didn't feel sufficient. I began privately to devise my own ritual, my own convoluted ways to ward off the badness. I would refine it in the weeks and months and years ahead. There was a certain doorway where I'd stood when I'd learned my father was in the hospital, and so in that doorway I would stand when no one else was around, facing the jamb, getting right up close to it, and letting a deeply private obsessive-compulsive liturgy unfold: counting tiny steps to and fro, muttering in Chinglish, praying to a kind of god with whom I had no acquaintance, slapping my own cheek periodically to banish dark thoughts of death, inhaling and sighing. And when my father recovered that first time, it confirmed that these rites I had invented had worked. And so I continued them, prophylactically, to keep my father alive. This was my expression of filial piety. It was an autodidact's hodgepodge prayer, with all the sincerity and hybrid incoherence of the self-taught. It was superstition and fear speaking a pidgin tongue of hope and devotion. It was my Chinese American prayer.

—————

I ask Chinese Americans, especially others of the second generation, what makes them Chinese. They have many answers. No one ever mentions Confucianism. The closest they come is to speak of respect for elders and an acute awareness of social hierarchies. Otherwise, when they describe how they are Chinese, they speak of having social styles that are “more blunt and, um, ‘efficient' (?) than white Americans.” Or of “the ability to play at Chinese one-downmanship,” that reflexive minimization of one's own accomplishments, especially in the company of other Chinese Americans. They speak of cravings for Chinese food. They speak of red envelopes and hot pot on special occasions. Mainly, though, they speak of difference, of being constantly reminded of the condition of not being white: “My name,” says one, is what it means to be Chinese; “My slight accent,” says another. They speak of being anointed as representatives of their race, marked as the point from which white schoolmates and neighbors could extrapolate a fuller picture of Chineseness.

But there is more.

David Hackett Fischer, the historian of American political culture, wrote a book that has deeply influenced how I see myself and immigrants and the children of immigrants.
Albion's Seed
describes in fascinating detail how colonists from four distinct regions of Great Britain bequeathed to what would become the United States four very different regional folkways. Thus a thread of righteous, reticent, self-leveling Puritanism runs across the upper continent from Boston to Minneapolis to Seattle. An aggrieved underdog Scotch-Irish streak is marbled throughout Appalachia. The hierarchical, honor-obsessed pride and prejudice of royalist Cavaliers was passed to the plantation South. An egalitarian pluralism was carried by the Quakers into the Delaware Valley. As much as our nation's culture is marked today by homogenized McFranchises, there remain all around us vestigial and sometimes fully expressed forms of these and other distinct lines of ethnocultural descent.

So it is that most Chinese Americans I know, even in our assimilated lives, operate with a stronger-than-average sense of rite, propriety, social context, and obligation. To look closely at the attitudes and behaviors of all those who protested that their lapsed Chineseness amounted only to a taste for hot pot is to discern the persistent influence of Confucian culture in a hundred ways. When we were children, we were praised for
dongshi
(“understanding things,” “having social judgment”) or scolded for being
meiyouyong
(“of no use to others”). Our grandmothers nodded approvingly when we addressed them in the proper tone and formal second person: “
Ta hao you limao
,” they'd say to our parents—“he is so polite” or, more literally, “he so has politeness.” We heard the tone of scorn in phrases like
diulian
and
buyaolian
—“throwing away face,” “rejecting face”—that conveyed the worst of all social crimes: insufficient regard for the regard of others. We understood that
jia—
family—was an enclosed sphere around which other parts of society orbited.

But Chinese Americans of the second generation or beyond are not, even in the most isolated ethnic enclaves, simply good Chinese boys and girls transplanted whole into the American heartland. Our form of Confucian ethics has mutated: attenuated in some places, enlarged in others. The environment has forced the mutations.

Consider Maya Lin. She took her stand early, at twenty, when her design for the Vietnam Memorial was selected and she withstood a storm of criticism from veterans and politicians. She is an icon now. She towers above other public artists, not in the performance-art manner of a dissident among sheep like Ai Wei Wei, but in a disciplined and quiet way—a Way, as Confucius would say—that recalls Chinese landscape painters a millennium ago. Her father, an immigrant from China, was a ceramicist at Ohio State University. His aesthetic was Chinese and Japanese. His openness to letting young Maya explore and tinker in his workshop was American. And though in childhood she rarely contemplated her Chineseness—“I grew up almost oblivious to my Asian heritage,” she writes—she has become “increasingly conscious of how my work balances and combines aspects of my Eastern and Western heritages.” In her book
Boundaries
, Lin gives a succinct statement of purpose: “Each of my works originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings, not just the physical world but also the psychological world we live in.”

There is something spiritual in this, but as with Taoism or Confucianism the spirit is humanist. The gods are not in the picture. It is for us, the living, to dedicate ourselves. Her acts of creation mark her as a fearless individual. Her works, from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington to the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama to the Langston Hughes Library in Tennessee, situate her in the psychological world of America. People like Maya Lin have managed to hold on to the most beneficial parts of the Confucian meme even as they have absorbed the most vital and exceptional strands of the American. This is evolution, but it is
intelligent
evolution—not the result of impersonal genetic algorithms that weed out unfitness and spit out survivors, but the result of a cultivated intention to splice, synthesize, and preserve the most adaptive traits for another generation. To design. To make original hybrids—seeds not only of Albion but also of Cathay and many points between.

—————

When you grow up Chinese American, you sometimes surprise yourself by how you unconsciously filter everyday experience through a Chinese screen. When I was eight or nine, my comprehension of Abbott and Costello's “Who's on First?” routine was impeded by my assumption that they were saying, “Hu's on First.” I'd just learned to play baseball, so it made sense that another Chinese guy, someone named Hu, would be in the game. How that connected to the rest of what seemed to be the joke I couldn't tell. Subtler is when my daughter, Olivia, began to address my partner, Jená, by Jená's childhood nickname, Nay Nay. Except that Olivia, who would've been seven or so and had just started learning the pinyin transliterations of Chinese words into English, automatically spelled it “Nei Nei.”

I remember as a teenager in the 1980s listening with pricked-up ears to the pop-punk song “Turning Japanese”: “I think I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so.” I listened for racism in those lyrics or the voices (and didn't find any). I listened for racism in the way others, even my friends, listened to and resang the song (and didn't find any). I listened for people who might want to inject a random mutation into the song and start singing, “I think I'm turning Chi-i-nese, I think I'm turning Chi-i-nese, I really think so” (and didn't find any). Such was the vigilance of the minority boy, ever on the lookout for hints of ethnic hostility.

But it turns out that in the second decade of the second millennium of the Common Era, Americans are
really
turning Chinese. People without my ten thousand generations of black-haired Chinese genes are running more of the flow of their everyday lives through Chinese filters. There is the material of popular culture:
feng
shui
consultants,
qi gong
classes, mu shu pork burritos, and so forth. But beneath these are deeper patterns of thought. In medicine, crime prevention, technology and new media, education, urban planning, business leadership, and parenting, a new language is coming to the fore. It's a relational language, a language of context and webs of social norms. It's a language of holism that transcends rugged individualism and adds a horizontal axis to the vertical mode of American striving.

And it's not just among liberals and ex-hippies that this awareness of holism has come to the fore. Consider a book that has sold as well in the United States as
Confucius from the Heart
has in China: Rick Warren's
The Purpose-Driven Life.
That book, by the evangelical minister of an Orange County megachurch, uses the language of Christianity the way Yu Dan uses the language of Confucius: to remind us that we are part of something greater than ourselves. The first line of Warren's book: “It's not about you.”

Is there a less American-sounding sentence? The fact that tens of millions of American believers of all races and backgrounds have hungered to be told this suggests to me that we are in the early days of a great synthesis. What will the fusion of East and West look like? It will take a myriad of forms. Most important among them will be shifts in imagination: new stories we imagine for this nation. In another book I have argued that great citizenship means recognizing that “society becomes how you behave”—that there is no way to rationalize one's bad acts with the assumption that they'll be balanced by someone else's good acts; that if you choose to become more civil or courteous or compassionate, or less, you set off a contagion that makes society that much more all those things, or less. When I wrote those words, I realized that I was expressing a Confucian truth.

It was a revelation, just as the character-by-character excavation of
The Analects
with my mother has shown me all the ways that, in spite of her upbringing and mine, I am deeply Confucian. I am oriented toward duties, I think about webs of relationship and obligation, and I think of life itself as a demand for constant self-cultivation. Yet, situated in America, I have come to express this Confucianism in the language of the American creed. I speak of liberty as responsibility. I read Adam Smith not for
The Wealth of Nations
, which was co-opted a century later to justify laissez-faire capitalism, but for his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, which reminded readers that no market can last without trust, cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, and the social virtues. I assert a vision of patriotism in America that's more about barn raisings and D-Day than about rugged individualism and lone cowboys.

All this represents more than just the ethical wish fulfillment of one Chinese American. It also restates a forgotten foundation of American identity. In
Inventing America
, the historian Garry Wills applies to the Declaration of Independence the same method of textual deconstruction that he later applied to the Gettysburg Address in
Lincoln at Gettysburg.
Inventing America
describes how several thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment—Adam Smith, David Hume, and, even more, the lesser-known Francis Hutcheson—shaped Thomas Jefferson's patterns of thought and infused in the words of the Declaration a coherent and truly revolutionary moral vision. The vision, now undetectable to most Americans, was this: every right is a duty. Wills puts it thus: