Liu - A Chinamans Chance: One Familys Journey and the Chinese American Dream

Also by Eric Liu

The Gardens of Democracy: A New Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government (with Nick Hanauer)

Imagination First (with Scott Noppe-Brandon)

The True Patriot (with Nick Hanauer)

Guiding Lights: How to Mentorand Find Lifes Purpose

The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker

NEXT: Young American Writers on the New Generation (editor)

Contents

Prologue

My father, who had an ironic sense of humor, took a certain delight from the phrase a Chinamans chance. People dont use that nineteenth-century expression anymore, but most of us still know what it means: no chance in hell. Dad sometimes liked to jest, about prosaic situations like getting to the store before closing, that neither he nor I had a Chinamans chance. Of course, he tried hard all his life here to prove that saying wrong. So have I. So have nearly four million Chinese Americans.

The Census tells us that Chinese Americans today have among the highest incomes and highest levels of education of any ethnic group in America. Our senses tell us that there is more to the picture. There are Chinese American stories of striving and struggle that dont fit the box of a government form or the narrative of the model minority, from families whove been here many generations to lone migrants who arrived yesterday. And the gleaming promise and looming menace of modern China colors the perception of people who look like meand indeed colors our own self-perceptions.

The great American kaleidoscope of migration and acculturation, the tumbling fractal dance of colors colliding, of fusion and diffusion, has turned for over a century and a half for the Chinese of America. With each generation we have changed this countryits laws and voice and palate and face. The kaleidoscope gyrates still, but now in a world where the Chinese of China also have something to say about what it is to matter and to have influence and to be seen .

What does it mean to be Chinese American in this moment of China and America? It means being a vessel for all the anxieties and hopes that attend the arrival of China on the world scene. It means creating a new template for American immigrant arrivalthe Chinese cannot be reduced to new Jews; the history of the Chinese in America is unique, and richer than most know. It means being a test case for some of the great questions of our day: Does Chinese culture somehow confer a competitive advantage? Is it possible for America, the planets most efficient hybridizer of cultures, to capitalize fully on the talents and passions and character of those of us of Chinese ancestry?

Here, in the pages to follow, are the reflections of one Chinaman on chance: on the role of chance in his own familys journey, and on the chance America still has to be something greater than the sum of its many tinted parts.

CHAPTER 1: What Confucius Didnt Say

The Master said, At fifteen, I set my heart on learning; at thirty I took my stand; at forty I came to be free of doubts; at fifty I understood the Decree of Heaven; at sixty my ear was attuned; at seventy I followed my hearts desire without overstepping the line.

This passage from The Analects of Confucius (Book II.4) has always stirred in me a mix of aspiration and anxietythe aspiration to seek ever-greater wisdom; the anxiety of not feeling quite age-appropriately wise. A kind of ethical clock ticks loudly in my brain whenever I read these words of the Master. They remind me of the passage from Ben Franklins Autobiography in which he describes himself at age twenty making a list of personal virtues (temperance, frugality, cleanliness, humility, and so forth) and keeping a daily chart of his adherence to each. I didnt discover Franklins regimen of structured self-improvement until I was well into my thirties. The discovery led me both to push myself and to kick myself: I ought to be more like thatbut its too late to become like that!

I am now forty-five. I am not yet free of doubts. In five years I am supposed to understand the Decree of Heaven. I confess to you I do not know the Decree and cannot claim to have mastered it. I do know, however, that the Chinese term for Decree of Heaven tian ming translates more accurately to heavenly fate. And I am beginning, maybe right on schedule, to appreciate the meaning of fate.

Fate is another word for the die is cast. Fate is a set of patterns 99 percent unseen and only 1 percent within our kenand its that tantalizing 1 percent that generates our entire sense of free will and of personal responsibility to make or remake ourselves, to change or fulfill our destiny. Perhaps 99/1 is the wrong split. Maybe its 80/20. Or 51/49. I am not yet free of doubts. But I am old enough now, and have moments enough of wisdom, to realize that many forces unseen and unwitting have bent the strange loop of my identity: my ways of seeing people, refracting the light of situations, facing history, dreaming. For so many years I have imagined myself as the author of my own story. I have imagined identity to be a matter simply of what I choose to identify with. Like so many Americans, I have cherished the liberty of such choice.

I had to claim it early. When my father died, we both were too young. He was fifty-four and I twenty-two. I had no choice but to choose my own way, to start crafting a story of self and place with what I had at hand. And I came to imagine that anything at hand must have been of my own making. Like so many Americans, I imagined myself self-made. But today I stand more than two decades from the death of my father, and fifteen years into fatherhood myself. And now I see myself more clearly: not as the author solely, or even primarily, but more as the page; less the calligrapher than the parchment, absorbing the ink and scripts of others.

When she was eleven, my daughter, Olivia, decided it would be amusing to make up sayings by Confucius. She scribbled on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, giggling as she wrote, leaving chunks of hurried script that looked like graffiti or furtive notes to a classmate:

Birds must live off the bird feeder to survive the harsh winter. I know this because Ive seen it happen with my own two buggy eyes.

Confucius

Simply Xerox.

Confucius

Confucius does not like to look in the mirror and see any man but Confucius.

Confucius

If you want a flower to grow, you must wait until springtime, for that is when I talk to the bears around me.

Confucius

In your pocket, there is pocket lint.

Confucius

To have tossed off such absurditiesthey read like the comedic tweets of someone with the handle @FakeConfuciusshe must have come into contact at some point with Confucian epigrams and then later with the fortune-cookie bastardizations of those epigrams. Perhaps she saw, as I once saw when I was her age, a white person on TV or in the hallway at school squint his eyes, fold his mouth into an obsequious grin, and utter in a fake accent and broken English: Confucius sayyyy.... She must have absorbed the American notion that to be Chinese is to be wise, often inscrutably, and profound, often misleadingly. She must also have picked up on the idea that to be Chinese American in the twenty-first century is to be able to make fun of it allthe Chinese, the Americans, the pictures each has of the other, the eminently laughable self-seriousness of anyone advertised as a Master, the earnestness of people (like her father) who seek insight from Masters. But where and when these patterns of thought took hold in her I cant say.