And so, as the exterior world went about recognizing China, re-establishing diplomatic relations and initiating trade and cultural exchanges, these young Chinese-Americans found themselves wrestling with a very different and infinitely more complicated interior problem: how to recognize a country to which they were inextricably bound by heritage, but to which they had never been. But their sons and daughters looked with a deep ambivalence on the idea of having to awaken a dormant Chinese side in themselves. When political barriers began to fall in the 1970's, older emigrants welcomed the chance to end their long and agonizing exiles. Living in the confinement of Chinatowns with parents who spoke broken English (''tear and wear on car,'' ''college drop-off'') and who clung to the old Chinese way, they felt an indelible sense of otherness that weighed heavily on them as they tried to make their way into middle-class American life.
Seeing old China as hopelessly backward, and contemporary China as besmirched by Communism, many in this new generation of Chinese-Americans wanted nothing more than to distance themselves as far as possible from the zuguo, or motherland.īut, unlike the children of European emigrants, they had obviously Oriental features, which made it difficult for them to lose themselves in the American melting pot.
While the members of the older generation who had grown up in China before Mao Zedong were at least able to bring a sustaining fund of memory with them into exile, the younger generation was denied even this slender means of connection to the ancestral homeland. Those millions of emigrants who were part of the great Chinese diaspora - beginning in the middle of the 19th century when indentured laborers went to California, and ending in the 1950's when millions of refugees fled Communism - were left almost completely cut off from their homeland. In 1949, when the Red Army marched into Beijing, America's ''special relationship'' with China abruptly ended, and so hostile did our two countries become toward each other that people on both sides of the widening divide seemed to lose the ability even to imagine reconciliation.Īpart from the international crises, and even wars, there was another consequence, which, although more subtle, was equally tragic.
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