Nationality and Ethnicity

I should start out with an apology. I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with my posts. This one in particular was supposed to coincide with National Day, celebrated October 1 to commend the founding of the People’s Republic sixty years go.

I guess you could say that my style is not that of impulse blogging. I wouldn’t go so far in the other direction to say that I maul over my posts for days on end, meticulously correcting mistakes, wittily adding in bits of symbolism every which way the reader turns. The way I’ve been working with the task that is this blog is to decide what topics I want to write about and queue them up to be expanded and finally published.

For example, this post has been in planning stages since mid-September. I felt that this timing would be appropriate to elaborate on the ongoing topic here of identity and nationalism.

I started out by saying that I would first identify myself as American before Chinese American and never Chinese except in ethnicity or ancestry. Regarding my trip to Italy, I explored the perceptions of those locals towards nationality and how it relates to ethnicity.

Some background—I would be close to the first to tell you that nationalism is an entirely fictitious concept. Ultimately we are all humans, and scientifically speaking there is more genetic variation within ethnicities than among different ethnicities, hence the terms “ethnicity” and “race” have no scientific basis. Nationalism, a concept that I push as a separate from race and ethnicity, then, would be even more artificial, especially since we are taught in primary school that Americans all have immigrant backgrounds (minus the Native Americans) and come from all walks of life.

I also have to say that I follow nationalism quite a bit. I feel I share a great deal more in common with a fellow American than with, say, a Chinese national. With common upbringing and (most likely) a common mother tongue, there just seems to be more to relate to whether there really is or not.

In the hand of irony though, the first person to question my nationality, requiring me to defend myself, was at the opinion of a guy from Massachusetts. Of note is the fact that I haven’t had to defend myself against my roommate, who, in a fell swoop of fabricated statistics, quasi-neoconservative opinions, and resistance to learning a single word of Cantonese, has found my being in the four percent of Americans in the Asian minority an acceptable thought.

And here I present two events: the first in my Traditional Chinese Society class, and the other with a good friend of mine here.

This little discussion in my sociology tutorial actually took place something like a month ago. Usually, it’s an insignificant occurrence when something like this happens to me because it happens more often than I’d like, but this time it was in an academic environment, involving an offensive on my perception of myself.

In discussing nationality and ethnicity as the topic of the week for that class, the topic over overseas Chinese came up. I made my point that while I have no problem identifying my ethnicity as Chinese, I would always stop short of calling myself Chinese in the general sense and overseas Chinese in that it appears that I have some sort of allegiance to China.

I don’t.

To say that I do would imply that I have Chinese nationality or citizenship, that I have the right to be in China, or that I have parents that do. A typical conversation would go like this:

“Why don’t you call yourself Chinese?”

“Because I’m not from China. I was born, raised, and educated here in California.”

“But your parents are from China.”

“Not really.”

“But your grandparents are from China?”

“And where are your grandparents from?”

The answer to that is rarely the United States.

But in class it was a bit different, it was a local student trying to convince me that I could not be anything but Chinese. This was weird, because all my life I have found that Chinese and Chinese Americans hesitate to call me one of them due to my lack of fluency in any Chinese language, yet prototypically perceived Americans refuse to see me as one of them as I look different from them.

If you couldn’t tell already, I identify more with the prototypically perceived Americans, though I like to believe that everyone who wants to call him- or herself American living in the United States is entitled to do so regardless of (primary) language spoken or customs or practices that happen not to be the societal norm. This guy though was using my appearance to say that I could not be anything other Chinese, which, while it happened a few times back home, was less common than not.

So with a different audience I had to defend myself in a different way. I used Chinese nationality law. Being an American both by birth and by blood, I figure to call myself Chinese in the same way, I would be able to be granted Chinese nationality in some form—but I can’t.

My father’s parents were Chinese nationals, though left when the Nationalists were in power. As a result, it would appear to be virtually impossible to find all the appropriate documents to prove that they had citizenship, then that my father had citizenship because of them. But even if my father were to have citizenship, it would likely not be conferred to me. My thinking is that even in U.S. nationality law, a citizen (natural-born or naturalized) must have lived in the U.S. for a certain period of time before his or her citizenship can be given to his or her children born outside the United States. And my father has never set foot outside of North America, much less lived in China for any period of time.

On the other side, my mother’s birth in Hong Kong to Chinese parents makes her a Chinese national in theory as of 1997, when her British National Overseas status was commuted with the handover. However, she was naturalized as an American long before I was born, and has made no effort (understandably) to claim PRC citizenship. In addition, as she has been naturalized, she may be rendered herself ineligible for PRC citizenship.

So me, being born American by virtue of being born in the United States and by virtue of being born to two American parents, makes me ineligible for PRC citizenship under nationality law that makes clear that children born abroad to Chinese parents (which mine were effectively not) are not Chinese if they gain a different citizenship on birth.

And another reason why I hesitate to grant myself allegiance to China is the fact that my mother’s family emigrated from China specifically because of the Communists and what they did to the family that I never met.

So when my roommate bought a deck of playing cards that sported Chairman Mao Zedong on every face, he slammed it down on the desk in front of me to show what he had just done. His motivations behind why he bought that deck of cards, as well as a stereotypical People’s Liberation Army hat I don’t agree with and feel are quite crude, but that’s no matter as long as he doesn’t bring it in front of me.

As I pushed my hand across my forehead, sighing in a miniature fit of displeasure at my roommate’s misguided intentions, he mistook my disgust and assured me that “James, they’re not offensive or anything.”

Yeah, he didn’t get it, nor do I expect him to.

In my second note, we were all at Lamma Island enjoying some seafood after a long hike in hot weather. A good friend of mine asked me about how my family hierarchy works if I claim to be so American.

I think my response satisfied her question.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

She said that at funerals, for example, the Daoist priest would call up nuclear families one at a time, in a certain order, based on their family hierarchy. I told her that at the last funeral that I attended, which was my maternal grandmother’s, we didn’t have any of that. The service was presided over by a Methodist leader and at the end we went up to say our goodbyes in no specific order.

This reminds me of when I was little and asked m mother about something to that effect. I brought in family hierarchy in the same manner as the English royal family and she just brushed off my question, because it really didn’t matter.

And so national day is celebrated—this year the sixtieth anniversary of the Communists taking over China, the founding of the People’s Republic. Out in Victoria harbor a half-hour fireworks show of massive proportions started at 8:00pm.

Good luck.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.