1

When my friend told me that her father had once compared her to a banana, I stared at her blankly. Then I realized that her father must have meant that outside she had the yellow skin of a Chinese, but inside she was white like an American. In other words, her appearance was Chinese, but her thoughts and values were American. Looking at my friend in her American clothes with her perfectly straight black hair and facial features so much like my own, I laughed. Her skin was no more yellow than mine.

2

In kindergarten, we colored paper dolls: red was for Indians, black for Afro-Americans, yellow was for Chinese. The dolls that we didn’t color at all—the white ones—were left to be Americans. But the class wanted to know where were the green, blue or purple people? With the paper dolls, our well-meaning teacher intended to emphasize that everyone is basically the same, despite skin color. Secretly I wondered why the color of my skin wasn’t the shade of my yellow Crayola. After we colored the dolls, we stamped each one with the same vacant, smiley face. The world, according to our teacher, is populated by happy, epidermically diverse people.

3

What does it mean to be a Chinese in an American school? One thing is to share a last name with a dozen other students, so that you invariably squirm when roll-call is taken. It means never believing that the fairy-tales the teacher read during story time could ever happen to you, because you don’t have skin as white as snow or long golden hair. “You’re Chinese?” I remember one classmate saying. “Oh, I really like Chinese food.” In the depths of her overfriendly eyes I saw fried egg-rolls and chow mein. Once, for show-and-tell, a girl proudly told the class that one of her ancestors was in the picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware. I promptly countered that by thinking to myself, “Well, my grandfather was Sun Yat-sen’s¹ physician, so THERE.”

4

In my home, there is always a rather haphazard combination of the past and present. Next to the scrolls of black ink calligraphy on the dining room wall is a calendar depicting scenes from the midwest; underneath the stacked Chinese newspapers, the L.a. Times. In the refrigerator, next to the milk and butter, are tofu and bok choy from the weekly trips to the local Chinese supermarket. Spoons are used for soup, forks for salad, but chopsticks are reserved for the main course. I never noticed the disparity between my lifestyle and that of white Americans—until I began school. There, I became acquainted with children of strictly Caucasian heritage and was invited to their homes. Mentally I always compared the interiors of their homes to my own and to those of my mother’s Chinese friends. What struck me was that their homes seemed to have no trace of their heritages at all. But nearly all Chinese-American homes retain aspects of the Chinese culture; aspects that reflect the yearning for returning home Chinese immigrants always have.

5

Chinese immigrants like my parents have an unwavering faith in China’s potential to truly become the “middle kingdom,” the literal translation of the Chinese words for China. They don’t want their first-generation children to forget the way their ancestors lived. They don’t want their children to forget that China has a heritage spanning thousands of years, while America has only a paltry two hundred. My mother used to tape Chinese characters over the words in our picture books. Ungratefully my sister and I tore them off because we were more interested in seeing how the story turned out. When she showed us her satin Chinese dresses, we were more interested in playing dress-up than in the stories behind the dresses; when she taught us how to use chopsticks, we were more concentrated on eating the Chinese delicacies she had prepared. (Incidentally, I still have to remind myself how to hold my chopsticks properly, though this may merely be a personal fault; I can’t hold a pencil properly either.)

6

After those endless sessions with taped-over books and flash-cards, my mother packed us off to Chinese School. There, we were to benefit from interaction with other Chinese-American children in the same predicament—unable to speak, read, or write Chinese nicely. There, we were supposed to make the same progress we made in our American schools. But in its own way, Chinese School is as much of a banana as are Chinese-Americans. A Chinese School day starts and ends with a bow to the teacher to show proper reverence. In the intervening three hours, the students keep one eye on the mysterious symbols of Chinese characters on the blackboard and the other on the clock. Their voices may be obediently reciting a lesson, but silently they are urging the minute hand to go faster. Chinese is taught through the American way, with workbooks and homework and tests. Without distinctive methods to make the experience memorable and worthwhile for its students, Chinese School, too, is in danger of becoming completely Americanized. Chinese-American kids, especially those in their teens, have become bewitched by the American ideal of obtaining a career that makes lots and lots of money. Their Chinese heritage probably doesn’t play a big part in their futures. Many Chinese-Americans are even willing to shed their skins in favor of becoming completely American. Certainly it is easier to go forward and become completely American than to regress and become completely Chinese in America.

7

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to go back to Taiwan or mainland China. Through eyes misty with romantic sentiment, I can look down a crooked, stone-paved street where a sea of black-haired and slanted-eyed people are bicycling in tandem. I see factories where people are hunch-backed over tables to manufacture plastic toys and American flags. I see fog-enshrouded mountains of Guilin, the yellow mud of the Yangtze River, and the Great Wall of China snaking across the landscape as it does in the pages of a National Geographic magazine. When I look up at the moon, I don’t see the pale, impersonal sphere that I see here in America. Instead, I see the plaintive face of Chang-Oh, the moon goddess. When I look up at the moon, I may miss my homeland like the famous poet Li Bai did in the poem that every Chinese School student can recite. But will that homeland be America or China?

8

When the crooked street is empty with no bicycles, I see a girl standing across from me on the other side of the street. I see mirrored in her the same perfectly straight black hair and facial features that my Chinese-American friend has, or the same that I have. We cannot communicate, for I only know pidgin Mandarin whereas she speaks fluent Cantonese, a dialect of southern China. Not only is the difference of language a barrier, but the differences in the way we were brought up and the way we live. Though we look the same, we actually are of different cultures, and I may cross the street into her world but only as a visitor. However, I also realize that as a hybrid of two cultures, I am unique, and perhaps that uniqueness should be preserved.