A Chinaman's Chance Read Online Free Page B

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