Posted by
zenithdream on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 2:40:42 AM
Identity is a difficult subject to discuss because it is so personal, and it is even more difficult to describe someone's identity clearly in a country like the USswheresjust about everyone's family came from somewhere else. My professor, until she left Eritrea, always considered herself Eritrean.When she got to America, however, people looked at her and saw a black woman, not an Eritrean woman. Similarly, Japanese, Koreans and Chinese people come to the US and are often just called "Asians".Appearance is used as the main condition for identity, although appearances can be quite deceiving.
Is there a difference between a Chinese person born in
China and a person born in the US to parents from China?Most people would agree that there is.There are certain phrases that people frequently use insgroupsto define the Chinese-American identity. The two most commonly heard terms are "ABC", meaning an American-born Chinese, and "banana".The former is often considered an acceptable label for people of Chinese descent born in the US; in Canada there is the corresponding term "CBC" for Canadian-born Chinese.The second term, banana, is usually regarded as derogatory or offensive, and it refers to someone who is "yellow" on the outside but "white" on the inside.
The phrase ABC is used so commonly that many people think it is an appropriate description of Chinese-Americans.However, the phrase hides what I think is a very dangerous belief about identity. Identity is developed and learned, not given at birth.To say that someone is an American-born Chinese is to suggest that if that person were born anywhere else in the world, he/she would still be fundamentally Chinese because Chineseness, the quality of being Chinese, is inherent in this person.It implies that an ABC is Chinese first and just happened to be born in the United States.Yet being Chinese is not an inherent quality that one person has simply because he or she looks Chinese.Just about every Chinese-American recognizes that there are huge differences in personality, behavior and physical appearance between themselves and their native Chinese counterparts.
These differences are what the term "banana" addresses.Bananas are yellow-skinned but with white insides - for people, this is meant to describe individuals who look Chinese but whose "insides", that is, their behavior and personality, are "white".But this also carries a demeaning and offensive undertone: that these people are only half-real, they are neither completely Chinese nor actually white. Even worse, the term is sometimes used to suggest that Chinese-Americans really wish that they were white.Being white, of course, is assumed to mean being American, which is a third misconception.Not all Americans are white, and in not too many years the majority of the population in America won't be white (i.e. of purely European descent) at all.