Cultural Curiosity: Thirteen Stories about the Search for Chinese Roots

by Josephine M.T. Khu

This anthology of autobiographical essays reveals the human side of the Chinese diaspora. Written by ethnic Chinese who were born or raised outside of China, these moving pieces, full of the poignant details of everyday life, describe the experience of growing up as a visible minority and the subsequent journey each author made to China. The authors―whose diverse backgrounds in countries such as New Zealand, Denmark, Sri Lanka, England, Indonesia, and the United States mirror the complex global scope of the Chinese diaspora―describe in particular how their journey to the country of their ancestors transformed their sense of what it means to be Chinese. The collection as a whole provides important insights into what ethnic identity has come to mean in our transnational era.

Among the pieces is Brad Wong's discussion of his visit to his grandfather's poverty-stricken village in China's southern Guangdong province. He describes working with a few of the peasants tilling vegetables and compares life in the village with his middle-class upbringing in a San Francisco suburb. In another essay, Milan Lin-Rodrigo tells of her life in Sri Lanka and of the trip she made to China as an adult. She describes the difficult and sometimes humorous cultural differences she experienced when she met her Chinese half-sister and her father's first wife.

Josephine Khu's lively afterword provides background information on the Chinese diaspora and gives a theoretical framework for understanding the issues raised in the essays. This intimate and rich anthology will be compelling reading for all who are seeking answers to the increasingly complex issue of ethnic and personal identity.

Genres: China

318 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This is actually pretty decent, for a very obscure essay anthology I randomly picked up at a library book sale years ago. It’s a compilation of 13 personal essays by people with Chinese heritage about growing up outside China and later traveling to visit, study or work there. The collection was published in 2001, and the contributors—eight women and five men—were born between the late 1920s and mid 1960s, and mostly visited China in the 80s and 90s. There’s admirable diversity in terms of where these writers are from: while several grew up in the U.S. and a few more moved there later, and a couple are from Europe (the U.K. and Denmark) and one Australia/New Zealand, generally the most interesting stories to me (because the least familiar) were about growing up Chinese in other Asian countries: Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan. I’d have loved to see stories set in Latin America and Africa as well—one contributor’s mother is from Colombia and her father initially migrated there, but she grew up in the U.S., while another’s sister moved to Zimbabwe, but that’s only briefly mentioned. Still, there’s quite a lot of diversity for one volume. A few of the contributors are biracial and two of them experienced interracial adoption/fostering in later childhood (one a much more positive experience than the other).

Overall, I found the stories of growing up in countries around the world somewhat more interesting than the stories of visiting China, though this may be in part due to how the essays were ordered. For most of the book, the China visits seemed awfully same-y: these authors came from families that migrated for economic reasons and when they returned to their parents’ ancestral villages and met extended family members, their visits tended to be short and unsatisfying, with language and cultural barriers that prevented them from truly connecting, and sometimes with relatives who seemed more interested in getting help with immigration or reclaiming property than forming a bond. Later in the collection, however, are a few stories by authors from privileged families, whose parents left China for political reasons. Their reunions, with relatives generally more cosmopolitan and with whom they share a common language, come across as much more rewarding.

I’m not sure whether the editor put the worst essays at the beginning, or whether I just got accustomed to the fact that these essays aren’t generally the same caliber as a book-length memoir—and trying to summarize one’s family history, childhood, and visit to China all in under 20 pages can’t be an easy task—but I struggled with the book at the beginning only to find myself appreciating it more as it went on. Particularly early on, many essays are steeped in generalities. They say things like, “Until I saw the town, I could never picture my mother’s stories, but now I could,” without describing the town, or blunt statements of feeling like “I felt very emotional upon arrival.” The later essays perhaps include more physical and emotional detail to bring the reader into their stories, and overall I did enjoy reading them (and the last one, about a woman whose mother and aunt both suffered serious mental health issues in two different countries, is particularly memorable). But this was also a reminder that memoir writing is a skill, like any other writing: living an interesting life doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll write about it in a compelling way. Several essays try to wrap up in a bow with “and now I feel at home in both countries!” in a way that felt a little tidy or trite to me, but perhaps wouldn’t to others.

But there are a lot of interesting family stories in here, by writers with very different family circumstances. Mostly it seems to be their fathers that the authors associate with “Chineseness,” in part because the mixed-race contributors all(?) have Chinese fathers, but even where both parents are of Chinese origins. Many also found their fathers difficult or inaccessible. Some visited China because it was important to their families, while in other cases it seems to have been more about outsiders policing their identities and identifying them as Chinese even when they didn’t particularly identify that way themselves, until finally the authors themselves wanted to know more. They have a variety of reactions to China as well—some identify strongly with the country, others appreciate being able to blend in physically while feeling like outsiders culturally. Several do spend a significant amount of time working or studying in the country. Some speak a local language—though not always the “right” one for the circumstances—while others don’t.

Overall, I am glad I read this. The essays overall are engaging and I was glad to have a window into these interesting experiences, although I sometimes wanted more from them. And I generally struggle with multi-author anthologies (and this topic is not personal for me), so I could see other readers appreciating it more.

[Vivian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This anthology of autobiographic essays focuses on the overseas Chinese experience in countries from Pakistan to Italy. In each one the writer also traveled to China or to the places their ancestors or parents came from. Many came from Toisan, the same region my family came from.

I don’t think reading these stories makes my own impressions of my trip to Grandpa’s village any different. I’m still trying to figure out how a journey like that changes a person, like how I was asking Michael if he thought tracing his genealogy affected the way he lives now. (He said not really.) Reading these stories, a lot of people felt more aware of how not-Chinese they were, instead recognizing their Americanness or coming to terms with being culturally part-Chinese. People who did feel more at home in China often came from places that didn’t allow their families to enter their society fully, barring them from citizenship, for instance.

Maybe that’s why I find something like nationalism so interesting – it’s shaping identities, and then making that identity do things. So then “Chineseness” is something that the Chinese government or maybe activists try to fabricate and define by highlighting certain “Chinese” traits like having black hair and eyes, eating dim sum, whatever. And then that official definition comes into conflict with other definitions of what it means to be Chinese, like those imagined by the West (English/French/American Orientalism) or those made up by diasporic Chinese communities. Some people wrote about how they understood “Chinese” to be “Cantonese-speaking,” because that’s what they saw around them. Kip Fulbeck’s hapa project showed one guy saying that he said he knew kung fu, so no one would mess with him in school.

This quote from the epilogue stuck out to me:

“One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure where one belongs. Identity is a name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty” (Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist – Or a Short History of Identity”, 19).

I guess I didn’t really fit into the Chinese or Asian American community (or whatever I thought it was) in Fullerton, or Cerritos, or wherever. We went diving with white kids; other Chinese Americans we knew played tennis. I rejected diving so I could read and write more instead. I wonder where personality versus community interact, give or take? Like how maybe some Asian American artists might want to explore other ideas while feeling a pressure or a desire to pay homage to their heritage?

I’m wondering again about modern/old societies again. If all these new studies about human interactions, group dynamics, and communities came about largely through the growth of urban spaces in the late 1800s/early 1900s, I wonder what it was like in ancient cities? Even if life in those places might not have been like our cities today, no metro or urban sprawl as we know it, wouldn’t there still have been some sort of weirdness, where people who never knew about each other were suddenly living side by side? Wouldn’t there have been crowds, nightlives of some kind, maybe a village sprawl? I wonder how minority groups then defined themselves, if maybe they didn’t have nationalities to draw on. Maybe that’s where something like religion or language came in, and they would differentiate themselves through that.

[vicalicalic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just utterly fascinating, the Chinese community outside of China. Covered this one at uni for an Overseas Chinese class and I never ever forgot about it.