Tag Archives for nationalism

Jeremy Lin: diplomatic pawn and diasporic subject

Source: Colorlines.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard that Asian America, China, and Taiwan have gone completely Lin-sane for Jeremy Lin. Not only are Asian Americans claiming him as a hero, but China and Taiwan are also trying to latch on to his success. I don’t particularly care for basketball, but since I’m researching diasporic membership and globalized nationalism, I find this struggle to “claim” Lin to be quite fascinating.

Is he Chinese or Taiwanese?

China and Taiwan see Lin as a diasporic subject. Chineseness or Taiwaneseness is something you are born with, in contrast to Americanness which can be acquired. Even if he only has US citizenship, he is still part of the Chinese/Taiwanese nation, and so they have a right to claim him as one of their own. The New York Times’ adorable story about Lin’s grandmother in Taiwan touches on these competing claims: Continue reading →

Anchor babies and double-no parents

This virulently xenophobic full-page newspaper ad from Hong Kong caught my attention yesterday. What’s most interesting about this is that the anti-foreign sentiment is directed at Mainland Chinese:
Here, the Mainlanders are depicted as locusts. The image of the locusts on Lion Rock is juxtaposed with an image of Hong Kong’s skyline, symbolic of the city’s wealth and development.

The following slogans are in largest type:

  • 你願意香港每 18 分鐘花 $1,000,000養育「雙非」兒童嗎？ (“Do you agree with Hong Kong spending HKD 1 million [USD 129,000] every 18 minutes to take care of ‘shuangfei’ children?”)
  • 香港人，忍夠了！(“Hong Kong people have had enough!”)
  • 反對中共殖民！杜絕「雙非」孕婦！(“We oppose colonization by the Chinese Communist Party! Put an end to ‘shuangfei’ pregnant women!”)

“Shuangfei” 「雙非」(lit. double-no) means that neither the father nor the mother is a Hong Kong resident. This terminology can be compared to the “anchor baby” discourse in the US—local people accuse visitors and undocumented migrants of giving birth in their hospitals so that their children can have a favorable passport and access to the other privileges of developed territory citizenship. Though Hong Kong has been a part of the People’s Republic of China since 1997, under the “one country, two systems” policy it has its own passport, which allows for more freedom to travel than the Mainland passport.

I was struck by the similarities between the rhetoric in this poster and the “anchor baby” rhetoric in the US.

Because the US grants citizenship via jus soli, all children born in the US are given US citizenship, regardless of the citizenship of the parents. While the targets of “anchor baby” discourse are usually poor Mexican or other Latin American women, wealthy Mainland Chinese mothers have also been accused of taking advantage of US citizenship rules.

Continue reading →

Chinese/Taiwanese nationalism and family tensions

Inside I could pierce right through all the gripes and excuses and knew instantly what was going on in that Taiwanese sister-in-law’s head: she looked down on the Chinese. She wasn’t disrespectful toward her in-laws because she was a bitch; she was disrespectful because she saw them as second class citizens.

Akyrpti at 8Asians wrote a fascinating blog post about Chinese-Taiwanese mixed marriages and the ensuing family tensions. Since I’m working on a master’s thesis that looks as intra-ethnic conflict and nationalism in diverse Chinese communities like Los Angeles, reading this post made me super giddy. (Nerdy, I know.)

It was clear the Taiwanese sister-in-law thought she and her own Taiwanese family were better than the Chinese. The sister-in-law would make snide remarks like “I come from a family of higher education than yours” or “I grew up pampered, privileged…I am not used to your cut-throat dog-eat-dog uncultured way of life. My culture is different.” In every argument, the last remark uttered would have something to do with being Chinese and being Taiwanese. “We’re just different.”

It seems that every group of Chinese has something to say about every other group of Chinese at every level of specificity. Ask my parents (ethnic Chinese from Vietnam) to talk about the Mainlanders, the Taiwanese, the Hong Kongers, Cambodian Teochews, Cantonese from Vietnam who assimilated too much to the local culture… it’s not going to be pretty. (And yet at the end of the day they will still insist that everyone is Chinese!)

My husband’s uncle married a Taiwanese woman. The whole Chinese family hates her and speaks utter ill of her. She would not let the in-laws, my husband’s grandparents, see her children. They all live in Taiwan and it was only when the grandmother was on her deathbed that the Taiwanese woman relented to a meeting. She bundled up her kids in masks and rubber gloves to greet the grandmother, explaining that she “didn’t want the children to get infected.” (Infected with what?) When the grandmother, on her deathbed mind you, wanted to give these grandchildren a hug and a kiss, the Taiwanese woman barred it and said no. Then they all left, didn’t come back, and spent the rest of their stay in China shopping. The grandmother died broken-hearted.

If everyone is running away from everyone else because they think the other group has cooties, I don’t think Chinese reunification is necessarily a reasonable goal.

Photo: “I love the country; I love the national (Republic of China; Taiwan) flag.” Creative Commons credit: Carol Lin.