Letters From Home

Tell Me Who I Am

By Jason Ng

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It's been a month already since I came back from China, and I still haven't really been able to describe to anyone how simultaneously incredible and alienating my first trip to "the motherland" was. I guess Angel's letter is one place to start.

Jason:
I never talk about with you. I feel you very hard. You speak English very good. I like. But you can't speak Chinese, I am angry with you. Not only you half a Chinese, half an American, But also you can't speak Chinese. Don't you really speak Chinese. Why not learn from your parents. You are banana man. You only have yellow skin. But the others you is an American. Go to understand China. I think you can love China. Welcome to China.
From your friend
Angel

Angel is the English name of a Chinese girl from Tianjin, a sprawling industrial city an hour outside of Beijing. For seven weeks this past summer, I volunteered in Taiwan and China, teaching English phrases and games to students like Angel—students who don't exactly fit your stereotypes of obedient little robots, but nonetheless, who I grew to care about and appreciate. Angel's note, written to me on the second day of class after a letter-writing exercise, was perhaps the most explicit description of how I felt I was being treated during my welcome, before I came to embrace China as just another place rather than an illusory land of self-discovery. As an American-born Chinese, I may have looked like everyone else while I was there, but from the moment I opened my mouth, I made people confused, and in the case of Angel, very angry.

Luggage Lost

After three weeks of teaching in Taipei, Taiwan, I flew to China prepared to solve all of the mainland's English woes in a single whirlwind of American volunteerism. But contrary to Angel's letter, my welcome to China didn't involve a letter written in English by a 13-year-old; instead, it occurred while basking in the fluorescent lighting of Beijing Capital International Airport's lost baggage room.

My suitcase. Not here. Now, where is it? Do you know? Can you please speak slower? My Mandarin, not very good. Yes, American. Oh. Suitcase, black. My suitcase and this suitcase, the same. Do you know why my suitcase now not here? Can you help me? Who can help me?

Even though I had taken two years of Mandarin here at Brown and can speak Taishanese (a dialect of Cantonese), it sure wasn't showing in my desperate attempts to convey to them that I needed some help. Even with multiple exhortations to "please slow down please I am not fluent in Mandarin especially not your Beijing Mandarin with your randomly accented rrrr's," the message wasn't getting across. They kept talking, and I felt like the featured item at an auction, the Mandarin voices accelerating at the most inexplicable moments, lilting forward at speeds I'd never thought imaginable.

But this was more than a language problem. As I would come to realize multiple times on my trip, the root of the trouble here wasn't that I didn't speak Mandarin. The issue was that I looked like I should speak Mandarin—if I were white, they might have escorted me to the appropriate foreign services desk. I, on the other hand, had to sit in this office.

I could walk through the streets at night and completely blend into the crowd, never a second look in my direction. But the moment I opened my mouth to say anything more than "thank you" or "sorry," the eyebrows would raise and the unfortunate person on the receiving end would inevitably halt the conversation and the explanation would begin anew. Yes, I'm American. Yes, I was born there. Yes, I lived there my whole life. Yes, I look just like a Chinese person.

That line always amused me. Yes, I look just like a Chinese person. This was often followed by a look of astonishment on their part. I could almost feel them reaching out with their eyes, touching me, just to make sure I was real.

It always amazed me that a person who looked like a Chinese person (but wasn't really) was even more surprising than the actual sighting of a white or black person—which for some of the students in Tianjin was the first non-Chinese person they'd seen in their lives. In a society of such homogeneity, physical difference is such an obvious marker for other and the fact that the other teachers on the trip didn't speak Chinese was a problem, surely, but that didn't make them the freak show that I was. They could go to restaurants, point at food they wanted, and get treated to a lot of giggles from the wait staff. Me, I just got awkward looks.

My awkwardness with being in China was compounded by the fact that I tried so desperately hard to fit in with my people. I refused to think that I was an outsider here, in the one place where I should feel the most at home. I could walk the streets like everyone else, so I imposed upon others my butchered Mandarin, trying to force down the idea that I might just be another damn tourist lost in the foreign culture of an inscrutable people.

Going To Self-Denial School

If I wasn't already fucked up enough as it was—looking "just like a Chinese person" and thinking that I was one but in the end turning out to be this strange unclassifiable other—the actual teaching of class posed another attack on my sense of self. My first class in Tianjin consisted of 30 kids, ages 11-18. According to my program, I was forbidden to speak Chinese in class. In a way, the rule makes absolute sense. The moment the kids catch wind that you can speak, all intentions of keeping the class an English-only immersion program are irreparably lost.

On the first day at Wei Shan Lu Middle School in Tianjin, the school held an opening ceremony for us. Five teachers were sent there to teach two classes of 30 and 20 kids. We all sat and listened as the principal gave a lecture on the importance of taking advantage of the opportunities that these Americans would give them. A student representative then gave a short speech and introduced each of the teachers. It was all rather cutesy: Alex, a senior at Columbia, was introduced as "the intelligent teacher"; Emily, a sophomore at NC State, was introduced as "the pretty and beautiful teacher"; finally, it was my turn: "Please say hello to our Chinese teacher, Jason."

Normally I would have relished the hilarity in such a situation, but instead, I blanked. I didn't know how to react. It felt a bit like a slap in the face, and when I was asked to come up to the podium to say a few words I answered along the lines of:

"Hi, my name is Jason. I was born in New Jersey, in America. I study English in college. This is my first time to China. I don't know much about Chinese people, so you will have to teach me about your country. I am here if you have questions about America. So if you have questions about China for me, bad. Questions about America, good. Thanks."

Here I was in China, trying so hard to delude myself that I belonged, and then I started my first day in class by denying my ancestry. I still don't really know why I said it. I would like to think it was for professional reasons, an attempt to legitimize myself to the students as an English teacher. But I also remember being angry, hearing myself reduced to this single adjective that described who I wasn't. Or was. Or who I thought I was but actually wasn't. Or maybe I was like, "Fuck, why can't I be pretty or smart? Why do I have to be just Chinese?" I wanted to be like my fellow teachers, blissful in their comfort of not having to navigate the "Who am I?" game.

Luggage Found

I should have known things would get better once the Beijing Airport contacted me with news of my found suitcase. After wearing other people's clothes for two days, clothes that included a St. Patrick's Day T-shirt, I could finally begin to feel comfortable within my own body. From there, things got easier. Working with energetic teenagers for seven hours a day made me too exhausted to even worry about trivial matters like identity—between preparing lessons, sleeping, and doing what little travel I could during those precious off-hours, there wasn't time for me to sit around and mope about how I didn't truly belong. Every day was a blur of activity, and as the days piled on, I got to form genuine relationships with not just my students, but with certain shopkeepers and workers at the hotel we stayed at. Our maid had the keys to our rooms, and every day we came back from work we would chat about simple things like the weather and what kind of tea we liked. She also had trouble categorizing me at first, leading to the confused, incredulous stare I was so used to, but with every subsequent interaction with her, and people like her, I grew to accept my place.

I eventually came to accept the fact that this country and these people weren't my country and my people. I learned to cope with the daily interrogation from the cab drivers and the neverending questions about why I didn't speak Mandarin. I even learned to appreciate moments of mistranslation. While shopping with a friend for a Chinese herbal patch, goupigao, I inverted the first and last character and mispronounced the second character. A half-dozen female pharmacists soon surrounded the two of us, and once they deciphered the name, we laughed together about the miscommunication.

And at school I even got around to explaining to my students how I knew Cantonese, and taught them some basic words, like numbers and phrases in the other Chinese dialect. That seemed to be an acceptable answer for them: the kids could now peg me as not this mysterious beast with no past, but as a person born in a different part of China. And in the ultimate reversal, I eventually came to be more than just "Chinese," I even became (relatively) "pretty" in their eyes. Two other male teachers led another class I didn't teach in, and they related to me a story, likely exaggerated, about how one day they asked one of their students which of the two of them she wanted to marry. She said without hesitation, "Jason."

I had dinners with the kids, played basketball with them, did sticky pictures, and received their gifts on the last day of class. In the end, I left China with a box of goupigao, a new fake Jansport book bag bargained down to $7 US (I still overpaid) packed with some gifts from the kids, and a better sense of who I was. Not really as Chinese as I thought. But enough for me to be comfortable with.

Jason Ng B'06 likes snapping turtles.

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