Discovering China in the US of A

In response to Nigel's post:

During the Chinese New Year period, I attended the Vietnamese Student Association's Fashion Show which was organized as a fund-raiser for charity and in celebration of the Lunar New Year (the Vietnamese have the same one). It didn't make me ashamed of being Asian. There was also the Chinese Student Association's Chinese New Year banquet which was also raising money for charity as well. I didn't go. I thought it would be lame.

I'm pretty sure the two of them had many things in common. Ethnic food. The inevitable lion dance. Some Asian hop-hop performance. Various performances by dance and cultural groups Asian or not. The VSA's main event for even the fashion show *gasp. All factors that made Nigel cringe. Now, why was I more favorably disposed to one over the other? The first, probably the most important, and non-generalizable reason was that I had a few good friends in the Fashion Show. The second was that the fashion show was marketed as just that, a fashion show that coincided with the new year. The Chinese New Year banquet, billed as a Chinese New Year celebration would most certainly not fall within my idea of a traditional Chinese New Year celebration. It couldn't possibly because we (Singaporeans) all think of Chinese New Year as the time when the country shuts down, we visit family, eat a lot and get hongbaos. So it was an issue of expectations as well. I believed that the CSA's conception of a Chinese New Year celebration was sufficiently alien from mine that I wouldn't really see it as "Chinese."

However, what really is traditional Chinese culture? We (as in Chinese everywhere) have traditions and cultures, which, because of our ethnicity, is automatically tagged as Chinese. Note the plurals, though. I do not believe that there is such a thing as one Chinese culture. There are regional variations both within and without China. Someone from, say Chengdu, is certainly going to think that our Singaporean Chinese traditions are rather different (e.g. Lo Hei [did I get the spelling right?]). Granted, it is not quite as different as what Nigel witnessed but the causes are the same. What he saw was simply a manifestation of Chinese-American culture. It galled him, I think, because the American portion had changed the Chinese bit enough that it seemed almost unrecognizable. Everything changes. Cultures are no different. I think we get turned off because it has changed so much that it seems almost a rejection of what we see as Chinese culture. So we label these Chinese-Americans as whitewashed. Substitute whitewash with kantang and you get a version of the same phenomenon in Singapore but on a smaller scale. These Chinese-Americans, on the other hand, may very well think of us as backward traditionalists, hence the use of the rather pejorative word FOB (Fresh Off the Boat). Some of them think they are superior because they grew up in the States with their American accents. I think some of them are just really poseur. We just grew up in different environments though sometimes the cultural differences and bigotry makes the differences hard to overcome. It's the same in Singapore with the Singaporean Chinese and the PRCs. Ditto BBCs. This may very well just be "the vanity of minor differences."

Thus in conclusion, I believe that the spectacle that Nigel saw was not because of cultural insecurity but because it was their American interpretation and conception of their Chinese roots. Just like we are Singaporean first and not Chinese, for most of them, they are Americans first. Don't pity or blame them though it is easy to do that from an ethno/culturo-centric perspective. They are just unlike us. As we must seem to them.