Chinese-Heritage People
Chinese-heritage people live on every inhabited continent. We settled in Southeast Asia thousands of years ago and more recently moved to Africa, Europe, all the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. We are often called “overseas Chinese” to distinguish us from Chinese people who live in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
We encompass a great diversity of people and spoken languages. Although we often think of ourselves as being from our particular province (such as Guangxi or Hunan) or from one of more than fifty ethnic, minority, and Indigenous groups (such as Han, Hoisan, Hakka, or Miao), we are all Chinese.
We come from a culture that is proud of its many achievements, its global influence, and its thousands of years of continuity.
Confucian values strongly influence our culture (and others in East and Southeast Asia). Confucian ideas began to spread 2,500 years ago, in a time of wars, natural disasters, and famine that were making life chaotic and raising a family and crops difficult. Confucius [孔夫子, Kǒng Fūzǐ] attempted to codify good behavior by proposing that rulers and heads of families govern justly and wisely and that those whom they govern, in return, be loyal and obedient. Confucian values helped to center government, family authority, and literacy. Family members were to be loyal and obedient, take care of each other, and diligently work to improve themselves.
Upward mobility in the Confucian class system was based on merit, not blood lineage. Even a poor family’s son could enter imperial service by passing a competitive exam. This merit system survived, with widespread support, up until the early twentieth century.
WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO US
Overseas Chinese people have been treated badly. We have been scapegoated, exploited, and targeted with violence, including murder.
Because of restrictive laws, our men have worked mainly at difficult and dangerous jobs (like building North American railroads across mountains), jobs that others have found degrading (like harvesting Peruvian guano), and “unmanly” jobs (like cooking and doing laundry for white North American gold miners).
Immigration and tax laws have specifically targeted Chinese people (such as in Australia in 1855 and 1901, in Canada in 1885 and 1923, and in the United States in 1875, 1882, and 1924). In 1943 when the United States needed China as a wartime ally, it repealed its Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (and in 2011 apologized for the Act). But it wasn’t until the U.S. Immigration Act of 1965 that U.S. barriers to Chinese immigration were actually loosened.
In Southeast Asia, European colonial powers pitted Chinese immigrants against the local population. For example, in Malaysia Britain installed Chinese settlers as a privileged “middle-agent” buffer group. Then when Britain scapegoated the Chinese settlers for problems caused by the British, Malaysians rioted and attacked and killed Chinese people. In the United States, East and Southeast Asian immigrants have been repeatedly blamed, attacked, and murdered for being falsely perceived as responsible for the economic woes of white workers. Violence against Chinese-heritage people, and against vulnerable Asians of many national origins, has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Racism, which pits all targeted racial groups against each other, subjects Chinese-heritage people in the United States to a “model minority” myth that focuses on Chinese and East Asian upward mobility. By claiming that “culture” is responsible for the successful assimilation and economic success of Chinese-heritage people, and by ignoring the racism directed at African-heritage people, the myth divides Chinese (and some other Asian) people from other Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)* groups. It also casts us as middle agents—putting us in the familiar buffer role between white people and other GMI people. Although it creates opportunities for economic success for some assimilated Chinese people, the opportunities come at the cost of having to trample on or exploit others, especially African-heritage people. [*The peoples of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and those descended from them, and Indigenous people, are over eighty percent of the global population. These people also occupy most of the global land mass. Using the term “Global Majority and Indigenous (GMI)” for these people acknowledges their majority status in the world and interrupts how the dominant (U.S. and European) culture assigns them a minority status. Many Global Majority and Indigenous people living in dominant-culture countries have been assimilated into the dominant culture—by force, in order to survive, in seeking a better life for themselves and their families, or in pursuing the economic, political, or other inclusion of their communities. Calling these people “Global Majority and Indigenous” contradicts the assimilation.]
While some Chinese people have assimilated and succeeded, many more have been exploited and remain poor. Chinese and Southeast Asian people living in the United States have the highest rates of income inequality among their group of any ethnic group in the country. A common thread in immigrant life stories is, in fact, downward mobility. And many overseas Chinese people have a “mixed-class” experience of being poor, working class, middle class, and owning class all within a generation or two or sometimes within an individual lifetime.
The attempted emasculation of Chinese men is a significant part of our oppression (and the lie of their emasculation is internalized by both Chinese men and Chinese women born in white-dominated countries).
Chinese-heritage people are often treated as perpetual foreigners. Non-Chinese USers often cannot see beyond my Chinese face and do not accept that I am a USer, even though I was born and grew up here. While many white USers feel entitled to criticize their government, I am not allowed to. If I do, I get asked, “Why don’t you just leave? Why do you stay here?”
WHAT ASSIMILATION HAS COST US
The costs of assimilation have been high for all economic groups of overseas Chinese people. They include patterned rigidities directed at each other, loss of connection to our origins, and damage to our integrity.
Confucian philosophy included some positive ideas (for example, that people are good when they are born) that have endured. But a rigid set of gender roles, and rigid expectations of family members, has also been a legacy. Overseas Chinese people, in “making our way” in non-Chinese societies, have often adopted a version of that legacy that prescribes ideal behaviors regarding family loyalty, gender roles, and marriage partners, enforced by criticism and humiliation.
A consequence of this is how overseas Chinese people (especially women) often marry non-Chinese people, perhaps to avoid patriarchal domination. Another consequence is that patterns of loyalty and helping family members can fuel patterns of corruption in modern East and Southeast Asia. A consequence for me personally has been that even though some Chinese people regard me as “successful” in a career dominated by white men, they also regard me as “hardly Chinese any longer.”
Acquiring fluency in English and access to a middle-class life has often occurred at the cost of losing ancestral languages and a connection to Chinese culture, especially for children of immigrants.
Chinese people of mixed Chinese and European heritage who live in white-dominated countries can feel pressure to escape racism by “passing” as white.
Having to assimilate to survive has made us vulnerable to being manipulated into acting oppressively toward others. When we assimilate, we internalize the value system and historical legacies of our new home. Without our intent or consent, we become part of a social system that enacts racism toward African-heritage and other Global Majority peoples and genocide toward Indigenous peoples. Fears can drive us to be opportunistic and grasp whatever resources we can and, in the process, step on or over or exploit others.
HOW WE CAN RECOVER AND HEAL
Each of us Chinese-heritage people has a life story that includes an immigration story and an assimilation story. It may be just ours, or it may extend for generations. Most of these stories are long and complex (mine are). Telling them is part of our healing process.
It is also helpful to discharge feelings of insecurity, mistrust, betrayal, inferiority, and having to work harder than everyone else. These feelings were installed when we did not know what to do to survive. We can discharge any feelings of superiority. These may have come from being told that we were “better” as Chinese people because we had survived so much trauma, because of our long history of achievements and resistance to external forces, or because of the cultural and historical legacy of Chinese imperialism and colonization in Southeast Asia.
We can also be pleased and proud to be Chinese. This contradicts the internalized oppression that in white-dominated countries can lead to self-hatred, especially among our young people.
Telling our stories about our choices for identities, roles, relationships, families, and careers is also important.
Speaking our ancestral or childhood language in a Co-Counseling session can be helpful. The past is more vivid in its own language. And because language is tied to our regional and ethnic identities, counseling in our dialect—however imperfectly—is especially valuable in reaching for early feelings and connecting to ourselves. Speaking non-Mandarin Chinese can also help us access feelings about the oppression of regional, ethnic, and Indigenous Chinese by Mandarin-speaking Han.
Distinguishing past from present can help us heal from past trauma. We cannot change the past. It’s done, a set of facts. Certainly we can complain, cry in grief, rage in anger and frustration, and shake in terror about how terrible our past was. We can discharge about how bad things were for the people who tried to care for us, how hurt they were, and how their hurts compromised their ability to care for us, then and now. But facts may also be newly interpreted. How can we find newer (and arguably more useful) perspectives on ourselves and our histories?
If we are standing in a hole full of mud, we can be preoccupied with the mud and the hole (distressing past experiences), or we can notice that our head is not in the mud and that we can see beyond the hole (notice something other than the distressing experiences).
We can also “zoom out” to find a wider perspective on past trauma. We can notice that we survived the past—no matter how terrible it was or whether the difficulties happened to us or to our ancestors (think war, famine, natural disaster, colonization, enslavement, genocide, betrayal, humiliation, domination). We might realize that no matter how bad our experience was, we were “good enough” and our past was “good enough” to allow us to survive to the present. We might see that large, systemic forces of oppression were operating on us and on our people.
These approaches can loosen the grip of powerful emotions on our minds and behavior in the present. New interpretations of past events can affect how we think of ourselves and our people. We can recover our ability to think and act more effectively.
We want to heal because feelings can have real consequences. For example, many of us carry feelings of insecurity, which can pull us to accept or seek positions of apparent “security,” which can include an expectation to act oppressively toward others. Then if we act oppressively, we are vulnerable to being blamed or scapegoated by those with superior economic and political power and to being attacked by those whom we have oppressed. For example, anti-Chinese race riots in British Malaysia, in which Chinese people were scapegoated and attacked, may have been due in part to Chinese immigrants having been recruited to, and perhaps also seeking, “middle” positions.
We have inherited and internalized certain oppressions as part of assimilating to our new homes. Thus, many of us who have lived for years in a country do not think of ourselves as being part of it. Claiming our new homes and our responsibilities as citizens of our new homes, and recovering our minds, can help us unite with each other against oppression.
Recovering our abilities to think, speak, and act can help us resist being treated oppressively and in turn resist oppressing others. For example, we can resist how white people unjustly blame us, or China, or Asia, for world events and how white people or white-dominated countries use us, or China, or Asia, to do their “dirty work.”
An example of being blamed: Discussions of the climate crisis often focus on China as a greenhouse gas emitter. China is presently the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. But in 2020, because China’s population is four times that of the United States (the second-largest current emitter), each mainland Chinese person’s contribution to carbon dioxide emissions averaged less than half of each U.S. person’s. Further, historically, Europe and the United States contributed most of the accumulated emissions, while China contributed barely any.
Examples of being used to do “dirty work”: China, and other countries in Asia, especially Southeast Asia, produces goods and services for people in “the West.” Western comfort and convenience, and even “green solutions” (solar panels, electric vehicles), depend on trade and manufacturing policies that exploit Chinese and Southeast Asian labor, compromise the integrity of Chinese and Southeast Asian ecosystems, and hurt Asians’ health because of air and water pollution. Also, to make the West more “green,” China does the “dirty work” of mining the lithium and cobalt essential to electric vehicles, solar panels, and other “green” solutions and ends up oppressing people of the African nations from which most of these minerals are extracted (continuing Western policies of imperialism and colonization).
We need to notice where politicians and the media in North America, Australia, and Europe blame China (and other developing nations, including India) to distract attention from their own countries’ roles in the climate crisis.
In fact, economic, ecological, and health systems are globally interdependent—so all participation in the global supply chain contributes to China’s role in the climate crisis. Everyone needs to face their involvement honestly, so they don’t pursue policies that sacrifice one group’s well-being for the enrichment or convenience of another, and so that oppressive, destructive policies can be interrupted and transformed into life-sustaining policies.
On an individual level, we can counsel on every time our integrity has been compromised—for example, on when we’ve acted to benefit ourselves at the expense of others. We can counsel on where our feelings (for example, fears) have led us to be manipulated into acting oppressively.
Doing this work will help us find our rightful place, with integrity, not out of entitlement but out of choosing to speak and act toward a common good for all people.
SUGGESTIONS FOR OUR ALLIES
Here are some places for our allies to counsel:
- Where you do not recognize Chinese-heritage people as members of the Global Majority
- Where you overlook us, ignore us, or otherwise make us invisible
- Where you believe that Chinese people (and Asians generally) are like white people, are “just another stripe” of white people
- Your first contact with anything Chinese (food; an acquaintance; film, news, or cartoon images)
- Where you are tempted to ask Chinese-heritage people, or other Asians, to “take charge” of such tasks as organizing or being the treasurer, secretary, emissary, technical support person
- Where you are tempted to exploit our labor and goodwill instead of making solid relationships with us
- How you respond when we get scared and become silent or go away
- Where you may reach out to us instead of other GMI people because we look assimilated and more friendly to you
- Ways we have been pitted against each other and other GMI people
- How we are your siblings, your family; know that we want you in our lives
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
(Present Time 207, April 2022)