Krista Chan
My life as a Chinese American began like anyone else’s, with my parents. My father was an IT worker and my mother was a nurse when they immigrated to the Bay Area from Hong Kong in the late ’80s. Like many immigrants, they believed they would have better opportunities if they moved to the US, and my aunt and uncle were already in the Bay Area to welcome them. My father joined the ranks of Asian immigrants providing labor for Silicon Valley’s dot-com boom, and my mother was lucky enough to find work easily, as there was a nursing shortage at the time.
I was born a few years later and was fortunate to attend a school where Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, were a sizable minority. My relationship with my Chinese roots was complicated. I loved Chinese food, and some of my best childhood memories are Sunday dim sum brunches, visiting relatives in big-city Hong Kong, and receiving red envelopes for Lunar New Year.
At the same time, I felt a deep resentment towards my Chinese school. Speaking Cantonese at home, I felt I was lagging behind my mostly Mandarin-speaking classmates. After a week of regular school, having to sit in class on Saturday mornings to do extra homework would leave me crying and throwing constant tantrums. Of all the extracurricular activities I had the opportunity to participate in, learning Chinese was something my parents never discouraged. They spent countless hours helping me with homework and hired private tutors to keep me motivated. I remember my father giving me encouraging words like, “China is the future! And the Chinese are smart! China has invented so many things. If you want to be successful, you have to know Chinese!”
Previously, I thought my father was just being arrogant. But to my father’s delight, I continued to study Chinese throughout high school and college, and in my third year of college, decided to study abroad on my own at Peking University (PKU) in Beijing. Prior to that experience, my exposure to Chinese people was limited to my diaspora in the United States, visiting family in Hong Kong, and the occasional trip to mainland China. But at PKU, I met students from provinces I’d never heard of and made friends with students from Uighur and Mongolian ethnic backgrounds. I traveled completely alone by high-speed train between various cities, including Nanjing, Xi’an, Qingdao, and Suzhou. I toured Inner Mongolia with my classmates, staying in yurts and riding horses and camels. At the end of the trip, with the help of a friend, I organized an exchange program that brought students from Beijing to the Tibetan Plateau in Qinghai Province, where we opened a summer camp for young Tibetan girls.
Having lived in the suburbs all my life, I loved being able to travel anywhere by train on my own. China’s religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity became more familiar to me. At the same time, I was impressed by how proud everyone was of our common Chinese identity. When I introduced myself as an American, locals would give me teasing, family-like looks and say, “No, you’re Chinese! We’re the same!”
Though I came to love and appreciate the incredible diversity of my country, I still believed many of the negative talking points about China that the U.S. media taught me. The air in Beijing was thick and stifling many days. I met poor immigrants in cities and noticed glaring disparities in economic opportunity for ethnic minorities in rural areas. American missionaries told me they risked detention if the government discovered their missionary work. I thought these social issues presented valid criticisms of the Chinese government. Little did I know how that was about to change.
Shortly after returning from Beijing, the “Umbrella Revolution” began in Hong Kong, protesting against mainland China’s proposed electoral reforms. I saw images of familiar Hong Kong streets filled with crowds of protesters carrying yellow umbrellas. My friends and family also voiced their support for the movement, and news of the police’s harsh crackdown made front page news in the US media.
At the time, the only alternative narrative I had access to was through my parents. Not understanding why they weren’t enthusiastic supporters of what I saw as the civil rights movement in their hometown, I naively asked my mother, “Is it so bad to protest for democracy?” I didn’t fully understand her answer at the time, but I remember her saying, “Krista, don’t you know that when I grew up in British Hong Kong, there was no democracy? We were poor. We didn’t vote. We were Chinese, but we were ruled by the British.”
My mother’s words began to resonate with me a few years later, when riots resumed in Hong Kong over a proposed bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China. I saw images of government buildings being looted and vandalized, elderly relatives afraid to leave their homes, and widespread condemnation of the violence instigated by protesters and police.
I didn’t like the strife and political dissension it created within my own family. I understood that young people were unhappy and scared of the changes that came with a change in government, but I witnessed Hong Kong young people harboring obvious and vicious discrimination and hatred towards mainland Chinese. Even more disturbing were the images of protesters waving American flags and pleading with the US to “save” their democracy. This was in 2019, when the US was reeling in the waning days of the disastrous Trump administration and police terror against black communities was becoming increasingly evident. I wondered, “Why would they appeal to a fading democracy to save theirs?”
Most would agree that, justified or not, anti-China rhetoric has increased exponentially in the past few years. We began to hear about “genocide” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, that China created COVID-19 in a lab and is engaged in nefarious “vaccine diplomacy,” that China is enslaving and colonizing Africans, that China is trying to invade Taiwan and the Philippines, that all Chinese technology used in the United States amounts to tools of cyber espionage, and so on.
Meanwhile, memories of the poor air quality I experienced as a student studying abroad in Beijing pale in comparison to the dystopian images of orange skies caused by wildfires ravaging my home state of California during a global pandemic. I witnessed police violence and the crackdown on free speech firsthand during uprisings against police brutality in 2020 and protests against U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza today.
A positive side effect of observing these contradictions is that it has made me intensely curious about China and its history. I have begun to regularly read what is called China’s “state media,” rewatching the Chinese historical dramas I loved as a child, reading classics of Chinese history like Edgar Snow’s “Over the Red Star,” watching documentaries like “Voices from the Frontline,” which was censored by PBS for its coverage of poverty alleviation in China, and learning from scholars and activists involved with Code Pink’s “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign.
Some might say I was “brainwashed,” but educating myself more thoroughly about Chinese history and politics made me feel even more proud to be Chinese. Like many communities of color in the U.S., I grew up with an internalized inferiority complex that I had to unlearn as an adult. I was indoctrinated with the idea that Chinese people are in the U.S. because they are smart, quiet, and hardworking. We can be high-paid engineers and doctors in the U.S., as long as we are good immigrants, proud to be Americans, and never “pro-China.”
Now I know the truth: China is the greatest threat to U.S. global hegemony. And through hard work, creativity, and profound civilizational wisdom, the Chinese people have made incredible contributions to the world’s Millennium Development Goals by eradicating extreme poverty in their country and developing an environmentally friendly technological infrastructure. And they achieved all this after enduring a century of humiliation, a time of intense imperialist aggression by Western and Japanese colonial powers. Thinking about these achievements fills me with hope for the future.
At the same time, I am an American and I have to deal with the fact that I live in a harsh world where my tax money is used to fund genocide overseas and police brutality at home. But I remain hopeful because being Chinese American does not make me any different from anyone else. I want a livable planet and a peaceful life where people coexist in harmony and are cared for even in difficult times. I love my community here in the US as much as I love my friends and family in China. If the Chinese people were able to defeat the imperialists and come together to drastically improve the standard of living for the poor without resorting to colonization and slave labor, surely the masses of all races and ethnic backgrounds here on Turtle Island can do the same.
Krista is a proud Chinese American from the Bay Area who currently lives in Oakland and is involved with CODEPINK’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter and its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign.
