Here’s the problem: until January 6 this year, I’d never regretted my decision to become an American citizen. While I’m not yet ready to renounce what was a hard-won nationality, my adopted country has never seemed less welcoming. It doesn’t help that I’m Asian, although where else are you ‘Asian,’ except in these here United States, this large and powerful nation that, like China, holds court as a ‘middle kingdom,’ huddling against the rest of the world?
It’s been over thirty years since I pledged allegiance and I’ve become comfortable in my American skin. I don’t often speak of myself as an ‘immigrant,’ either in my professional or personal lives, because my particular experience is still atypical in U.S. immigration history, especially among Chinese-Americans, a large group with whom I can partly identify. My parents did not bring me here as a child to escape Chinese communist rule or economic deprivation in another Chinese world; I did not grow up in either a laundry or restaurant (although I’ve worked at enough restaurants where I looked the part); I do not hanker for the old country now that I’ve achieved senior citizenship; I didn’t need a roots search to recover my identity; I did not have to take a step down professionally because my English was either too accented or non-existent; I don’t have children who became ‘too ABC’ and no longer fit in their ethnic culture. Instead, by making the choice as an adult and a professional to migrate willingly, I did so with eyes wide open, and with a desire for a world where the individual counts, the way she often doesn’t in the worlds I left behind.
Recently, when the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) invited me to participate as an author in their annual fundraiser, I consciously had to re-assume my immigrant face. What do you most want to see happen in immigration reform, they asked. I surprised myself by how easily the words came to my lips for that interview. I had never heard of the NYIC – my Indian-American grad student is on their board which is how the connection occurred – nor am I part of any activist initiative to reform immigration. Of course I vote, pay taxes, care about the Constitution, follow local, national and international news, participate in literary and arts culture, donate to causes I believe in, which is more than the 45th president does or did, although he did vote, for himself, presumably. In fact, it was his anti-Chinese rhetoric that made me think of myself as different, other, foreign, inferior, undesirable, unwanted, as one of the tired, poor, huddled masses who washed onto these shores, yearning to be free, but who was way too filthy, ignorant and useless to belong to this oh-so-superior, Whites-only nation.
‘Writing,’ says the American author Don DeLillo, ‘is a form of personal freedom.’ Long before I ever read DeLillo, I had already embraced that philosophy as a way of being. Which is why, in this time of hateful, anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant rhetoric in these here United States, I resort to the pen (well, okay, keyboard) as an ‘immigrant,’ because suddenly, being an immigrant matters mightily when the very notion of immigration as central to the U.S. national character is under assault. In response to my NYIC interviewer, I found myself passionately defending the Dreamers’ right to citizenship, arguing in favor of keeping borders open to legal immigration, advocating for illegal migrants who are fleeing persecution and deprivation, insisting that immigrants are the ones who realize the American dream. Suddenly, being American has become an either-or proposition, a debate motion that ‘America should continue to be a nation of immigrants,’ and where all the money must be on the team that is for the motion, the team who must win, if I don’t want to live in a lose-lose world.
I don’t often cry over news reports. From a former home in Brooklyn, New York, I cried over Tiananmen. From my late mother’s flat in Hong Kong, I cried over 9-11, the morning the towers crumbled, and later in New York, for those wrongly incarcerated and tortured at Abu Gharib. From my former rooftop space in Kowloon, Hong Kong, I cried over the young and not-so-young protestors camped out in tents for almost four months in 2014. And in transit and at home, I still haven’t stopped crying for the many victims of irrationality as Hong Kong ends any hope for true democracy or a rational rule of law.
Now, there is a constant tremor in my heart for every Black life lost and savaged, every Asian person assaulted and terrorized, every Latino child incarcerated, alone and scared, without their parents, every girl and woman who says ‘me, me too.’ Hearing Cole Porter – the world has gone mad today – I train my sights towards the original middle kingdom, 中國, now the People’s Republic of China, where the world is even madder and badder and absolutely certain of its right to be that mad and bad. Today, the man who would be Pooh is China’s virtual emperor for life.
Recently, when the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) invited me to participate as an author in their annual fundraiser, I consciously had to re-assume my immigrant face. What do you most want to see happen in immigration reform, they asked. I surprised myself by how easily the words came to my lips for that interview. I had never heard of the NYIC – my Indian-American grad student is on their board which is how the connection occurred – nor am I part of any activist initiative to reform immigration. Of course I vote, pay taxes, care about the Constitution, follow local, national and international news, participate in literary and arts culture, donate to causes I believe in, which is more than the 45th president does or did, although he did vote, for himself, presumably. In fact, it was his anti-Chinese rhetoric that made me think of myself as different, other, foreign, inferior, undesirable, unwanted, as one of the tired, poor, huddled masses who washed onto these shores, yearning to be free, but who was way too filthy, ignorant and useless to belong to this oh-so-superior, Whites-only nation.
‘Writing,’ says the American author Don DeLillo, ‘is a form of personal freedom.’ Long before I ever read DeLillo, I had already embraced that philosophy as a way of being. Which is why, in this time of hateful, anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant rhetoric in these here United States, I resort to the pen (well, okay, keyboard) as an ‘immigrant,’ because suddenly, being an immigrant matters mightily when the very notion of immigration as central to the U.S. national character is under assault. In response to my NYIC interviewer, I found myself passionately defending the Dreamers’ right to citizenship, arguing in favor of keeping borders open to legal immigration, advocating for illegal migrants who are fleeing persecution and deprivation, insisting that immigrants are the ones who realize the American dream. Suddenly, being American has become an either-or proposition, a debate motion that ‘America should continue to be a nation of immigrants,’ and where all the money must be on the team that is for the motion, the team who must win, if I don’t want to live in a lose-lose world.
I don’t often cry over news reports. From a former home in Brooklyn, New York, I cried over Tiananmen. From my late mother’s flat in Hong Kong, I cried over 9-11, the morning the towers crumbled, and later in New York, for those wrongly incarcerated and tortured at Abu Gharib. From my former rooftop space in Kowloon, Hong Kong, I cried over the young and not-so-young protestors camped out in tents for almost four months in 2014. And in transit and at home, I still haven’t stopped crying for the many victims of irrationality as Hong Kong ends any hope for true democracy or a rational rule of law.
Now, there is a constant tremor in my heart for every Black life lost and savaged, every Asian person assaulted and terrorized, every Latino child incarcerated, alone and scared, without their parents, every girl and woman who says ‘me, me too.’ Hearing Cole Porter – the world has gone mad today – I train my sights towards the original middle kingdom, 中國, now the People’s Republic of China, where the world is even madder and badder and absolutely certain of its right to be that mad and bad. Today, the man who would be Pooh is China’s virtual emperor for life.
Xi Jinping & Pooh: BBC.com
b. 1953 President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since November 15, 2012
Where is Sun Yat-sen when you need him? Oh right, he’s everyone’s favorite revolutionary who ridded us of the last imperial dynasty and founded a Chinese republic, with democratic characteristics, now extinct. Besides, dead men can’t talk back.
Sun Yat-sen: HEKINT.org
1866-1925 Provisional President of the Republic of China: January 1, 1912 – March 10, 1912
I recently watched an Intelligence Squared debate arguing the motion that ‘Taiwan is Indefensible.’ One of the debaters made the point that ‘most American can’t find Taiwan on the map,’ and sadly, he wasn’t wrong. While a few more Americans can perhaps find China on the map, the majority probably don’t know the difference between a Uyghur and a Tibetan, or where Guangzhou and Shanghai are, or that Beijing and Peking are one and the same, just romanized differently. Which is why it’s profoundly puzzling that this anti-Chinese rhetoric should hold such sway over enough Americans of all stripes so that Asian-Americans must live with such fear and loathing.
Could it be that America is more racist than anyone suspected?
Here in my East Coast enclave, there is some safety in numbers, although New York City no longer feels as much my city as it once did. After all, too many life-threatening attacks against Asians – Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indian, we still all look alike I guess – have occurred in the subways I too ride, the streets I too walk, the spaces I too enter. Must I too wish for a transformation that reflects back in my mirror Toni Morrison’s bluest eye? Is whiteface the only dream left? My American husband (being of Irish-Polish ancestry, and born here, he can just be ‘American’ as opposed to hyphenated) accompanies me out these days more than he ever did because suddenly, nowhere feels safe anymore. In the over twenty years we’ve been together, we’ve never felt unsafe at home, even in rural, conservative, Northern New York where we also reside. Similarly, I always felt safe in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and the Chinese mainland. Covid aside, with its brutal quarantine rules, friends now warn against my returning to Hong Kong, and travel to the Mainland for work or pleasure is suddenly a lot less compelling.
As for democracy, which appears to be the root of our problems in the world according to some, could it be that all the capitalist (specifically, American) globalization advocates somehow got things terribly, terribly wrong?
Supreme leader Pooh was once a welcome figure, a leader who inspired confidence, who would create a positive future for China, who could broker the balance of power dynamics between the West and Asia. How quickly that changed, as he evolved from his Pooh-likability into a species of marauding Panda. Still extremely popular, China’s president and paramount leader virtually has a democratic-with-socialist-characteristics mandate to Sinocize all ethnic groups into a suitably Han visage. Once upon a time, America might have opened its borders to welcome Uyghur refugees fleeing persecution; today, immigration is a political hedgehog that’s too prickly to the touch.
There’s a certain amount of online chatter these days about fostering a more collective identity. The problem is, identity evolves from coming to terms with who we are, and right now, we Americans don’t know who we are, any more than we can define the meaning of ‘we.’
Meanwhile, a collective voice whispers in a majority of younger Republicans who do not believe the election was stolen. Another voice is audible among Americans, regardless of party affiliation, who uphold a tradition of America as an immigrant nation. There are activist organizations who address the racial and social inequities that have contributed to an increasingly partitioned nation. Once upon a time, a British colonial government partitioned nations willy-nilly into the post-colonial tragedies of today. How ironic that the largest former colony, one that – unlike Hong Kong, the last colony and my birthplace – actually overthrew its British rulers and declared independence, should today self-partition, willy-nilly towards such present and future perils? The problem is, the voices of reason are scattered squeaks, a dissonant chorus, muted by the louder, collective autocratic roar that is singular, focused, unwilling to concede, confident that its appeal to a racist superiority will win the day, even though pure Whiteness, like pure Han-ness, is the grandest delusion of the self-declared chosen few. We are all equally pure mongrel, whether in the U.S., China, or the rest of the world. Yellow peril be damned; I’ll listen to Duke Ellington’s ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ instead. The greatest danger arises from within the U.S. and all nations that have ever accepted immigrants, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender or the birthright anyone thinks they deserve or are owed. The danger arises from among those who embrace the deplorable as their stranglehold on power. Power corrupts, but not if corruption is its own reward.
When will those disparate squeaks become enough of a chorus to drown out the roar?
To what should this immigrant’s eye turn? A neutral country to settle until death as America spirals into chaos? Or should she continue to write from within her adopted home, to voice the experience of someone who will continually question democracy, patriotism and the meaning of being American on what is becoming a path less and less willingly taken? Where is Frost when you really need him? Or should she, like Dickinson, snuggle safely in alabaster, hoping for a resurrection?
The balance of superpowers has never been more fragile as I teeter precariously between the U.S., China, and the rest of the world. Give me mongrel or give me death. It’s still too soon to give up on the future of this country, and world, of immigrants.
Could it be that America is more racist than anyone suspected?
Here in my East Coast enclave, there is some safety in numbers, although New York City no longer feels as much my city as it once did. After all, too many life-threatening attacks against Asians – Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indian, we still all look alike I guess – have occurred in the subways I too ride, the streets I too walk, the spaces I too enter. Must I too wish for a transformation that reflects back in my mirror Toni Morrison’s bluest eye? Is whiteface the only dream left? My American husband (being of Irish-Polish ancestry, and born here, he can just be ‘American’ as opposed to hyphenated) accompanies me out these days more than he ever did because suddenly, nowhere feels safe anymore. In the over twenty years we’ve been together, we’ve never felt unsafe at home, even in rural, conservative, Northern New York where we also reside. Similarly, I always felt safe in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and the Chinese mainland. Covid aside, with its brutal quarantine rules, friends now warn against my returning to Hong Kong, and travel to the Mainland for work or pleasure is suddenly a lot less compelling.
As for democracy, which appears to be the root of our problems in the world according to some, could it be that all the capitalist (specifically, American) globalization advocates somehow got things terribly, terribly wrong?
Supreme leader Pooh was once a welcome figure, a leader who inspired confidence, who would create a positive future for China, who could broker the balance of power dynamics between the West and Asia. How quickly that changed, as he evolved from his Pooh-likability into a species of marauding Panda. Still extremely popular, China’s president and paramount leader virtually has a democratic-with-socialist-characteristics mandate to Sinocize all ethnic groups into a suitably Han visage. Once upon a time, America might have opened its borders to welcome Uyghur refugees fleeing persecution; today, immigration is a political hedgehog that’s too prickly to the touch.
There’s a certain amount of online chatter these days about fostering a more collective identity. The problem is, identity evolves from coming to terms with who we are, and right now, we Americans don’t know who we are, any more than we can define the meaning of ‘we.’
Meanwhile, a collective voice whispers in a majority of younger Republicans who do not believe the election was stolen. Another voice is audible among Americans, regardless of party affiliation, who uphold a tradition of America as an immigrant nation. There are activist organizations who address the racial and social inequities that have contributed to an increasingly partitioned nation. Once upon a time, a British colonial government partitioned nations willy-nilly into the post-colonial tragedies of today. How ironic that the largest former colony, one that – unlike Hong Kong, the last colony and my birthplace – actually overthrew its British rulers and declared independence, should today self-partition, willy-nilly towards such present and future perils? The problem is, the voices of reason are scattered squeaks, a dissonant chorus, muted by the louder, collective autocratic roar that is singular, focused, unwilling to concede, confident that its appeal to a racist superiority will win the day, even though pure Whiteness, like pure Han-ness, is the grandest delusion of the self-declared chosen few. We are all equally pure mongrel, whether in the U.S., China, or the rest of the world. Yellow peril be damned; I’ll listen to Duke Ellington’s ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ instead. The greatest danger arises from within the U.S. and all nations that have ever accepted immigrants, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender or the birthright anyone thinks they deserve or are owed. The danger arises from among those who embrace the deplorable as their stranglehold on power. Power corrupts, but not if corruption is its own reward.
When will those disparate squeaks become enough of a chorus to drown out the roar?
To what should this immigrant’s eye turn? A neutral country to settle until death as America spirals into chaos? Or should she continue to write from within her adopted home, to voice the experience of someone who will continually question democracy, patriotism and the meaning of being American on what is becoming a path less and less willingly taken? Where is Frost when you really need him? Or should she, like Dickinson, snuggle safely in alabaster, hoping for a resurrection?
The balance of superpowers has never been more fragile as I teeter precariously between the U.S., China, and the rest of the world. Give me mongrel or give me death. It’s still too soon to give up on the future of this country, and world, of immigrants.
XU XI 許素細 is Indonesian-Chinese from Hong Kong and author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. A diehard transnational, she co-founded Authors at Large and currently occupies the William H.P. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.
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