My Great Aunt Pearl

I always thought I would get oral histories from my Chinese family here too. But the idea of "oral history" doesn't really exist here. And there's a different way of remembering when a lot of what you remember are tough times.

When I ask her if she has written down some of her stories, Great Aunt Pearl says she’d rather be happy now in life. She’d rather have people bring her food and gifts now than wait until she’s dead and gone. What will those things be worth to her then? When I’m dead, that’s it, she says.
She’s like my Granny who passed away a year and half ago. Except her body matches her gutsy mind. She just had surgery and she’s not infected and dying like both grandmothers did. She lies on her bed and when we need help, she pulls herself up, tells her Parkinson’s-forgetful husband not to bother, and shows us what to do. She admits she’s in pain, but she remains the strong and independent woman she’s always been. Her doctor told her not to do the operation without asking her children first—after all it was they who would have to care for her, he said. But she said no, she would decide to have it and hire a helper herself. Hiring help was something my grandparents could never agree to and so it’s my father who is unemployed and commuting once a week to take care of my grandfather. Strange that he’s the one in America.
Sometimes I do get stories from Aunt Pearl though. She told me this time that when my grandfather left China, even though they were in the same city at the time, she didn’t know he had gone until he was in Hong Kong. It was too dangerous for her to know, my grandfather would say.

So my grandfather snuck into Hong Kong in 1950 and then applied for scholarships to study Engineering abroad. He was accepted by Cornell University and met my grandmother there.

He didn't see his sister or the rest of his Chinese family again until 1979.

Finding roots in China

When I lived in the U.S. I never really identified much with being part-Chinese. It was as though a quarter-blood and two generations later was not enough to claim a likeness. Sure, I knew my father's father was from China (山东，济南）, but I didn't realize that he looked different from other people's grandparents until my classmates pointed it out to me in Third Grade. I didn't even realize that he had an accent until my classmate from college tried to imitate the way he talked. I knew my grandmother was born in China too, to missionary parents. Maybe that was why I didn't think anything of my grandfather's face being American--faces say nothing about where you come from.

But I remember how my tallit (a special shawl that Jewish people where once they become adults in the Jewish community) was made by my mother out of silk she brought back from China, how most of my friends in High School were either born in China or Taiwan or their parents were, and how we always had at least 3 Chinese trinkets on our shelves for the 1 American or other country's trinket. And yet, that's just how it was--somehow it never fully registered. I felt bad writing on applications that I was mixed ethnically, because it felt like 1/4 just wasn't enough to claim I wasn't white. Sure, sometimes people asked where I was from and would ask again even after I told them I was from Boston, and friends have outright told me I look "exotic" (not my favorite comment by the way). But nobody could peg me as part-Asian. If I hung out with my Chinese American friends at a restaurant, I would be the one stared at by everyone else in the restaurant. It was as though I could feel their question shooting out their eyes, "What's that White girl doing with all those Chinese girls?"

But now, after coming to China and seeing my grandfather's sister in Beijing and his little brother in Jinan, and all of their children and children's children, I will never ever question that I'm part-Chinese.

Living in rural Shanxi has given me a whole new perspective. For the first time in my life, people ask me as soon as they meet me, "Why do you look Asian?" I hear arguments behind me as I walk down the street. Within the first week that I was here, the store owners just outside of the campus were discussing and one asked me, "What are you? Foreign or Chinese?"

One young man told me that the first time he saw me playing badminton, he said to his friend, "why does she look so foreign?" The friend replied, laughing, "Because she IS foreign."

When I tell people here that my father's father is from Shandong, they are so proud. "Chinese people trace their ancestry by their fathers," said one taxi cab driver, "that means you're 60% Chinese."

If I'm not with other foreigners can sometimes get away with pretending I am Chinese until they ask. Especially on trains with dim lighting and with older men who don't see very well or don't inspect you very closely. On trains people seem more unsure, because I say excuse me in Chinese and have started mumbling to myself in my second language. Even when I pull out an English book and start reading, I've still had people ask me, "Where are you from?" instead of "What country are you from?" because, as they will explain to me after I reassure them that I'm foreign, "I wasn't sure if you were Chinese." A couple of times an older man has babbled to me in Mandarin (usually in a very thick accent) about this or that for about 10 minutes before realizing. This is somewhat common, because older men and women are quite respected by the younger and they know if they would like to talk and give advice, young people are a safe and (at least superficially) attentive audience. And who better to talk with than a young woman who is rather quiet but seems to be listening intently with lots of smiles and nods. (My giggle is a blessing and a curse, as my friends have figured out that a giggle doesn't mean I know what they're saying, it means I'm watching other Chinese smile around them or it means I'm completely lost.) And so goes this one way conversation with this older man: him telling me what he thinks about this or that and me smiling and nodding, struggling to understand his thick country-side accent and wondering how I can gracefully insert into the conversation that actually, I am a foreigner and could he please speak a little slower? Eventually, a younger man sitting across from me, who has been watching me intently the whole time, asks me where I'm from and I am given a moment of silence in the conversation in which to tell the truth. Then the older man turns his head toward me and inspects my face as if wondering why he still didn't see "AMERICAN" written in Neon letters across my forehead before. He nods and settles back into the stiff seat and conversation, asking me how I adjusted coming back to China after being in America for so long. The young man across from me looks with soft, dark eyes at my face and then back to the old man, seemingly shrugging at the whole situation with his gaze.

I continue to be questioned by people. Many have asked if I am from XinJiang (the large Northwestern Province of China where Turks and Kazakhs are common) because of my deep-set and lighter-colored eyes. The other day at the subway stop in Beijing I started chatting with some vendors by the parking lot while I waited for my cousin dad's cousin to pick me up. Within the first few sentences of the conversation, one of the young men leaned forward and peered at me through the dark: "你是什么民族？“　"What ethnicity are you?" As soon as I explained that I wasn't a Chinese ethnicity, I was an American, it took them (as it takes many people) a minute to register:
"But you speak standard Mandarin..."
"You are very pretty..."
"You have pretty Mandarin."

And then as it sunk in that I was a real American who could speak Chinese I was bombarded with the usual questions we get every day here:
"How did you learn Chinese?"
"How long have you been living here?"
"Which place is better?"
"What is America like?"
"How many Yuan to a Dollar?"
At which point, my cousin arrived, observed what was happening, motioned to me (with the same emphasis that grabbing my arm and pulling me would have had), and we left quickly with me shouting out a polite goodbye! ...

But really, I think knowing and having family and close friends in China makes me far more Chinese than any sort of thing I've inherited from my blood. When a Chinese friend, Bobby, told me, you now know enough about Chinese people to kill a Chinese, I was horrified.
"What does that mean?!" Lynn, another Chinese friend, and I exclaimed at the same time.
He explained that it meant that I knew the subtleties of face, of culture enough so I could hurt a Chinese person very deeply if I wanted to.
"But she would never want to!" Lynn exclaimed.
"But I wouldn't want to!" I echoed.
"True," he accepted, "but what I mean is that Anne has become very Chinese herself."
I couldn't completely disagree with that. Taigu had changed the way I interacted with people a lot, and I found myself acting "Chinese" in ways that surprised strangers I met and made my foreign co-workers laugh.
"If you stay here for a few more years," he told me, "you will know everything about Chinese culture and people."
I wasn't sure what that meant, or how I could possibly know everything in a few more years, and since I had become at least that Chinese, I certainly wasn't going to accept the complement and instead I proceeded to insist it certainly wasn't true. But I was secretly complemented that he thought I could understand something about Chinese people.

I myself have often doubted that I'm actually understanding Chinese people and culture better considering how much I still ask myself "did I just do something wrong?" after seeing things play out not exactly as I had planned...but it is reassuring to hear that at least my friends thought I understood something.

I've had other friends follow the comment, "You are more Chinese than the other foreigners" with, "you should marry a Chinese man."
"...Or" they add as though giving me a little more leeway, "a half-Chinese man."

I smile and laugh politely at this. It's kind of a funny statement when, when by definition, I'm not even half-Chinese myself.