A Chinaman's Chance (6 page)

CHAPTER 3:
Overseas Chinese

Di·as·po·ra
n
. A dispersion of an originally homogeneous entity, such as a language or culture.

Diaspora is dispersion. From the Greek
diaspeiro
: “I scatter.”

Diaspora is the scattering about of seeds.

Diaspora, says the Bible, is exile.

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It's remarkable, when you think about it.
A tiny
nation of islands populated by a ragtag amalgam of Nordic, Germanic, Frankish, and Celtic people ends up casting its hybrid seed all over the planet. On every continent and virtually every country you can find lineal descendants of this British tribe. And their behavior is truly tribal. Whether in Nairobi or Delhi or Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Panama City, these British keep to themselves, speak their native tongue, socialize with and marry each other, maintain a distinctness that is both cultural and genetic and so strong that it becomes hard to distinguish between mores and genes. Almost everywhere they are to be found, these Britishers are in positions of outsize power, wealth, and influence. They are overachievers. They have their own interlocking networks for doing business and influencing politics. They are often the object of resentment and conspiracy theories in the non-British ethnic majorities that surround them. But they have proven as resilient as the cockroach, surviving the centuries and adapting to varied terrains of politics, economics, and climate. This is the remarkable story of the Overseas British.

Actually, it's not. Or, rather, it's not the way we are used to hearing the story of those whose descendants hail from Britannia. This narrative, in this context, strikes us as both foreign and familiar. It's foreign because we simply don't talk about the British and their progeny this way. Whether as Anglo-Saxons or as WASPs or merely as whites, they are just there, the norm, the background against which other groups, particularly in America, have historically been noticed and measured. But it's familiar because this story—of a clannish tribe that is dispersed around the world yet assiduously maintains its essential distinctiveness, refusing to assimilate and on some level unassimilable, its members in diaspora using secret methods to insinuate themselves into host societies and attach leechlike to the vessels of lucre and influence—this is a story we have indeed heard before.

We've heard it told of the Jews, and still do, though it is generally not polite anymore to say it.

We've heard it told of the Chinese, and still do. Politeness has little to do with it.

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Who ever says “the British in America”? The British by now are just the base stock of the American soup, their genes intermingled and their names (Williams, Johnson, Adams) carried by descendants white and black. The Irish, as others have described, long ago became white. But “the Chinese in America” still sounds somewhat appropriate, even
current
—that is, it doesn't have quite the anachronistic, even absurd ring of “the British in America”—because Chinese people in America still have a high enough FQ (foreignness quotient) to prompt a millisecond flicker of doubt in the eyes and hearts of our compatriots. Flash my visage across a screen, and then ask your subject to think of a country. If he is an American, his first reflexive association is still China. Another millisecond later, when he hears my standard American English, when he sees my facial muscles move with an American openness or sense of irony, when he hears me laugh with a wide open mouth, when he notices countless other cues of comportment, he will make that instant adjustment and tell himself, “Oh—American.”

—————

China's arrival as a great power is the furthest-reaching geopolitical narrative of our time, more significant than wars on terror and Arab uprisings, more economically consequential than financial collapse and near-Depression. But it's already been so assimilated as background knowledge, as a veritable law of nature, that it hardly occurs to us to imagine in detail the reach of the coordinated Chinese push for global domination. From time to time, though, a reminder of that coordination and intention arrives with sobering force. A simple world map in the
New York Times
accompanying a 2013 essay called “China's Economic Empire” shows the places all around the planet, from Congo to Costa Rica, from Greenland to Siberia to Sudan to Uzbekistan, where Chinese foreign direct investment, Chinese laborers, joint ventures with Chinese state-owned enterprises, Chinese energy pipelines, Chinese extraction of iron ore and other commodities, Chinese pressure to force the relaxation of local rules on wages and standards, Chinese controlling interests in other nations' iconic companies like Volvo and Smithfield Farms and Club Med, Chinese ownership of whole ports in Greece and other choke points of global commerce all add up to one thing: a plan to take over the world commercially, a push that the essay calls by turns “unstoppable” and “disturbing,” “aggressive” and “rapacious.”

In his best-selling book
When the Chinese Rule the World
, the English political commentator Martin Jacques writes of the power of the “Overseas Chinese,” the worldwide diaspora of Chinese who have become something of an advance force—scouts, pioneers,
infiltrators
—for China's imperial economic ambitions. During the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he writes, in some nations thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of Overseas Chinese organized to demonstrate in support of the Games (and to outshout critics of China's Tibet policies). In Ho Chi Minh City, in Canberra and Nagano and other capitals, these prideful, increasingly vocal people of Chinese descent are just a small part of a vast forty-million-strong network of people who, according to this idea of the Overseas Chinese, are Chinese first and Chinese last.

This idea long predates the contemporary era of Chinese might. Indeed, its origins lie in periods of Chinese weakness across the centuries. When the Qing Dynasty began to falter in the nineteenth century, its control of the country eroded by warlords within and imperialists from abroad, great waves of poor, unskilled Chinese dispersed to other lands. All across Southeast Asia, but also across Latin America and Europe and Africa, countless Chinese sojourned and settled. It is not surprising to learn there are over 9 million Chinese in Thailand or nearly 7 million in Malaysia. It is a bit more surprising to learn there are 600,000 Chinese in France, over 300,000 in South Africa, and 1.1 million in Peru.

In most of the nations where migrant Chinese settled, their communities started out isolated and spurned and had to make a virtue of necessity. They maintained social and cultural coherence, creating closed networks and associations for mutual aid and investment. Most were coolie laborers, living in brutal conditions, though in many places they eventually became merchants and middlemen, brokers and bargainers. Some became prosperous; all were assumed to be part of a vast ethnic conspiracy, and they provoked resentment for their clannish ways, their alien tongue, their insider dealings and secret code for success.

This, of course, is not just a Chinese story. So-called middleman minorities, like Jews throughout Europe and Indians in East Africa, have often achieved vastly outsized clout. But the Chinese diaspora is in a league of its own for scale, reach, duration, and influence. In the Philippines, for instance, the Chinese constitute 1 percent of the population but control 60 percent of the wealth. Long before Amy Chua became the Tiger Mother, she wrote a book called
World on Fire
predicting that backlashes against such “market-dominant minorities” would result in waves of ethnic political conflict and violence. Picture it: tens of millions of Overseas Chinese as the kindling for transcontinental conflagration. A world on fire.

—————

There are nearly four million people of Chinese ancestry in the United States, making this “the largest overseas Chinese community in North America and the fourth-largest in the Chinese diaspora,” says Wikipedia in its entry on Chinese Americans. I don't doubt the accuracy of the statistics. I do note, however, the usage here of “overseas Chinese.” The implication persists that Chinese Americans are merely the local branch of some Global League of Chinese. One reason why is that some Chinese Americans and many Chinese nationals living here indeed see themselves this way. But the main reason is that no country this century will pose a greater competitive challenge to the United States than China.

The treatment of Chinese Americans has always depended in great measure on the strength or weakness of China. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when China was at its weakest, the treatment was at its worst. We are now in the midst of an experiment: What happens when China is at its strongest?

The more powerful China becomes, the more Chinese Americans are perceived as vessels of such power. The more discomfitingly assertive China is, the more Chinese Americans are seen as discomfitingly assertive in their dealings. The more underhanded, the more deceptive, the more inscrutably treacherous China's moves appear, the more Chinese Americans are assumed to be all these things.

China's magnetic force seems so powerful now that it can pry loose from American society veins of precious talent, no matter how deeply embedded, and pull them straight back across the sea. In some tellings, we Chinese Americans are those veins of ore. Or maybe it's a different story of magnetism. Maybe we Chinese Americans are loose iron filings lying around in the open hodgepodge tray of America, just waiting for that day when—
zing!—
the great magnet will approach and we can fly up from the tray and (re)attach ourselves to the core from whence we came.

Consider this, from the
New York Times
, page 1, column 1, June 6, 2013. Headline: “China Seen in Push to Gain Technology Insights.” Dateline: Shenzhen, China, where a government research institute is financing all manner of high-tech innovation. Storyline: Prosecutors in the US have charged three “Chinese scientists” at the New York University School of Medicine with accepting bribes to funnel research findings and other secrets to the Shenzhen institute.

Midway through the article there is a quote from Frank Wu, a legal scholar and dean of Hastings College of Law, warning against drawing overbroad conclusions about the activities of people of Chinese ancestry in America. The article then goes on for many paragraphs, each amplifying a sense of vague unease, and inviting the reader to draw, well, overbroad conclusions. Only at the end does the article return to the actual case of the three accused Chinese scientists at the NYU School of Medicine.

Here is a question it does not explore: Are those “three Chinese scientists” Chinese or American? Here is another question it does not explore: Shouldn't it matter?

—————

American-born Chinese.

It's the title of an acclaimed popular graphic novel by Gene Yuen that chronicles the awkward suburban adolescence of a son of Chinese immigrants. It is also the title many such children are given by their Chinese immigrant parents. “ABC” is the shorthand form, and it's kind of a putdown, said with gentle derision or outright dismay. “You ABCs think if you know how to order dim sum you Chinese.” Or “You ABCs can't handle spicy food.” Or “You ABCs think you can just get whatever you want without working for it.” I can hear many Chinese parents, not just mine, addressing us kids as “you ABCs,” with exactly the kind of overgeneralizing dismissiveness that offends, say, African Americans when they're addressed by whites as “you people.”

The idea is that because we were born in America we can't quite hack it as Chinese. We don't have the chops(ticks). We know too little about Chinese culture. We speak too little of the language too poorly. We take for granted all the little luxuries of this affluent, materialistic society. We're soft. We're a watered-down imitation of the real thing, with a diluted work ethic, a diluted appreciation for tradition. Nothing about being “American-born” is meant to be a compliment.

Yet the very wording “American-born Chinese” implies that, in spite of the corrupting effects of my American environs, I am, at bottom, Chinese. To be called “ABC” by your parents is to hear both their grief that you are changing and their belief that you won't. I do not recall ever hearing someone of my parents' generation address their kids as Chinese American, much less simply as American. We were American-born, not American.

It takes no small amount of wishful thinking to imagine second-generation people like me, people who grew up in the American mediasphere and civic square, as essentially Chinese. What makes that clear is being viewed from the vantage of our supposed “co-ethnics”—the Chinese in China. If I am truly simply an Overseas Chinese, an American-born Chinese, then I should be able, on short notice, to shuck off the costume of my Americanness, make a crossing back to my homeland, and be united again with my blood brethren.

Indeed, never in history have so many Overseas Chinese, particularly from America, wished to go back to China. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese-born undergraduate and graduate students who now comprise the largest foreign student population in the United States; most intend to return after their studies. Then there are immigrants from China who had perhaps intended to settle in America but now look for opportunities to do business in China. And last there are the children and grandchildren of those immigrants, born and raised in the United States but now similarly drawn to go “back home” in search of opportunity. The opportunity is there. Many ABCs are getting rich today, starting their own ventures in China or working for big American companies that need the smoothing, intermediary presence of bilingual Chinese Americans.

But make no mistake. When we are in China, we ABCs are reminded many ways a day that we are not truly Chinese. We may look Chinese. But cab drivers and street vendors can size us up instantly and address us a bit dismissively with tiny shards of broken English. This is microevidence of a tectonic shift in attitude. It wasn't long ago that a Chinese American touring or working in China was treated by the average Chinese with a touch of deference, not as a less-than but as a more-than. As Chinese-plus. That has changed.