Rethinking "Being Chinese"

Annie Deng

Rethinking "Being Chinese"

Vincent Chiao in a Tang Dynasty period drama.

Growing up, I have always been taught to be proud of my Chinese heritage. We are a people of "black hair, black eyes, and yellow skin", so the proverbial saying went. Even my favorite actor-singer Vincent Chiao's hit song "功夫 (martial arts)" has a line declaring that "we are proud to have yellow skin".

But this concept of "being Chinese", at least for me, never seemed to stand in contrast to anyone else. We just are. I didn't think about the people who "don't fit". So perhaps it was not so much of a self-conception of race, but rather of cultural and ethnic identity.

When I came to the United States and started facing the various discourses about "race" and "racism", I was startled to learn that there are a lot of differences that do divide, both in thought and action. 

For a long time, scientific, especially genetics discourse, seemed to support the racial divisions (Bliss 2013, Williams 2014). If each of us has DNA that is unique, and we inherit that DNA with only slight variation from our parents (a necessary condition for validity in paternity tests), does it not follow that our genes are closest to our family, clan, ethnic group, and further extended, race? Aren't the physical differences we see in skin color, eye color, hair color and texture phenotypic expressions of our genotype in those traits? So don’t we have those genes, at least, in common with people who look like us?

As it turned out, laboratory results shattered this conception of races divided at the roots, by genes. In the PBS documentary, "Race: the Power of an Illusion", students of different racial identities were asked to test and compare a section of their mitochondrial DNA and were shocked to find that in most cases, physical similarity were not mirrored in genetic similarities. The result found basically no pattern. It was not possible to identify any of the participants’ race simply by examining the corresponding DNA sample. This finding is summarized by microbiologist Pilar Ossorio in the comment:“There’s as much or more diversity and genetic difference within any racial group as there is between people of different racial groups.”

The bottom line is: there is nothing in our genes that make us Black, White, or Chinese.

And in fact, when I went to the DMV to apply for a learner permit, the lady who took my form wouldn't even let me keep my “black eyes”. “They are brown.” She told me dryly. It was at that moment when I realized that I’ve always simply taken for granted that I am Chinese and being Chinese meant those things. I never even looked in the mirror to see whether or not my eyes are actually black. And really, how is my or anyone’s skin color anywhere close to yellow, the color of bananas? So much for convenient generalizations…

I shall continue to be proud of my heritage, but not because there are differences that divide. I no longer think that there are inherent, genetic differences between races, but I must rethink what it means in “being Chinese”.

Works Cited：

Bliss, C. (2013). Translating Racial Genomics: Passages in and Beyond the Lab. Qualitative Sociology, 36(4), 423-443. doi:10.1007/s11133-013-9257-5

Williams, J. E. (2011). They Say It's in the Genes: Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 40(5), 550-581. doi:10.1177/0891241611412779

Race: The Power of an Illusion, Part 1:Difference Between Us [Video file]. (2003). San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel.

Further Reading:

The case of Peter Liang as a reflection of the Chinese community's views on racism:

Chinese Community Divided Over NYPD Officer's Indictment 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/amp/chinese-community-divided-over-nypd-officers-indictment

Video: Asians for Black Lives. (Peter Liang, Akai Gurley spoken word)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NFCEdu7QVz0

Second Generation Chinese-Americans' Open Letter to Their Parents
http://www.worldjournal.com/4277350/article-《專題》致父母公開信-亞裔二代為非裔維權