nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 2, 2006

The author, Dana Wu, hangs out on the beach on Gulangyu Island in Xiamen, China.

An American in China
::Our annual youth issue

By Dana Wu
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

I have a confession to make: Sometimes, when I am in China, I almost wish I were white.

It has nothing to do with the way Chinese people perceive me or the respect I gain from them. My reason is that being unmistakably foreign would make my identity a lot easier to explain to the locals.

I am obviously of Chinese descent. I have the long black hair and sufficient Mandarin skills to prove it. However, when I open my mouth and a foreign language comes rolling off my tongue, my background sparks interest in many locals.

“Ni shi na li ren?” The question inevitably comes, from curious waitresses and street peddlers alike.

With its various connotations, the question asks a combination of “Where are you from?” “Where were you born?” and “Where do you belong to?”

My first attempts at answering this question resulted in much frustration, exacerbated by my limited Mandarin skills. In one particularly memorable incident, I was getting my hair cut and had just gotten off the phone, speaking English, with my parents.
“Ni shi na li ren?” asked the hairdresser.

“I’m American,” I responded in Mandarin.

Something about a Chinese-looking girl saying “I’m American” in Mandarin just didn’t sit right with him.

“You don’t look like you’re an American. You look Asian. And you even speak Chinese!”

I was confused. American and Asian are mutually exclusive groups? Since when? After a few more confused words, I realized that my hairdresser thought I was claiming to be white because I said I was American.

“Well, my parents are Chinese. They’re from Fujian Province.”

“Oh, so you aren’t American then.” The hairdresser scoffed as politely as possible (I was paying him to cut my hair, after all). Above the roar of the hair dryer, he turned away from me and chatted merrily with his co-workers about this crazy Chinese girl who thought she was American.

But I am! I wanted to tell him. I felt discouraged by my inability to communicate my ideas clearly. But I realized that further persistence would be to no avail, as our ideas of being American entailed entirely different concepts.

All I could muster was, “Um, I live in America. I was born in America.”

In mainstream Chinese culture, as reflected in the all-encompassing question “Ni shi na li ren?” the concepts of ethnicity, nationality and identity are jumbled into one. The typical answer for a Chinese resident might be, “I’m from such-and-such province/hometown,” meaning he or she was born there or lived there at some point and identifies with that province or hometown.

The haircut incident forced me to rethink how I introduced myself. In later situations, I finally conceded to calling myself the closest thing to “Chinese American” in Mandarin: a “zhu zai mei guo de zhong guo ren.” I am a Chinese person living in America.

The words come off terribly clunky and unnatural, especially for a language as concise as Mandarin that has the ability to express so much meaning in so few words and syllables. Somehow, it doesn’t have the same ring — or meaning — as “Chinese American.” I am not just a Chinese person displaced from my Chinese roots in America. I am a Chinese American!

Even at home in America, I run into similarly frustrating situations. To sort things out, we have different terms available for use — ethnicity, nationality and identity. However, people of all ethnicities have to deal with incorrect questions all the time.

“What is your nationality?” one might ask. Well, I’m … American.

Or, even worse, there is the conveniently ambiguous “What are you?”

I am always slightly taken aback by this one, no matter how many times I’ve heard it. What am I? After a brief pause, I can only respond, “Oh, you mean my ethnicity?”

Take advantage of the English language: Nationality is a political label defining which country’s passport you hold. Ethnicity is based on where your family’s roots are. And identity is … well, who you are.
So, “Ni shi na li ren?” you ask?

Can I answer you in English? I consider myself Chinese by ethnicity, American by nationality and Chinese American by identity. It’s complicated, but hey, that’s what we get for being a country of immigrants. I like to think that it’s worth the confusion.

Dana Wu can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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