> I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four.
That description itself is part of the point. “Chinese-American” is a very American way of framing identity: ancestry remains explicitly attached to nationality even when someone has spent essentially their entire conscious life in the United States.
If someone moved to the United States at four and then spent all of their formative years there, I would not automatically treat their perspective on China as meaningfully more “inside” than that of an ordinary American. They may have Chinese family, speak the language, retain cultural habits, and have much stronger personal ties to China than the average American, but their actual socialization - the schools they attended, institutions they dealt with, media they consumed, peer culture they grew up in, and political and social assumptions they absorbed was overwhelmingly American.
I’ve encountered the same pattern among people from my own native country who were raised abroad. Their connection to the country can be entirely genuine, while their understanding of contemporary life there is still largely mediated through parents, relatives, diaspora communities, occasional visits, and inherited cultural memory.
So if the subject is what present day China is actually like from the inside, I would give that perspective roughly the same evidentiary weight as that of a well informed American unless the person later spent substantial time actually living in China.
That says nothing negative about their identity. It simply means that ancestry and family background are not substitutes for having grown up inside a society.
cloudie78 · · focus · HN ↗
> I’m a “first-generation” Chinese-American who moved to the States at the age of four.
That description itself is part of the point. “Chinese-American” is a very American way of framing identity: ancestry remains explicitly attached to nationality even when someone has spent essentially their entire conscious life in the United States.
If someone moved to the United States at four and then spent all of their formative years there, I would not automatically treat their perspective on China as meaningfully more “inside” than that of an ordinary American. They may have Chinese family, speak the language, retain cultural habits, and have much stronger personal ties to China than the average American, but their actual socialization - the schools they attended, institutions they dealt with, media they consumed, peer culture they grew up in, and political and social assumptions they absorbed was overwhelmingly American.
I’ve encountered the same pattern among people from my own native country who were raised abroad. Their connection to the country can be entirely genuine, while their understanding of contemporary life there is still largely mediated through parents, relatives, diaspora communities, occasional visits, and inherited cultural memory.
So if the subject is what present day China is actually like from the inside, I would give that perspective roughly the same evidentiary weight as that of a well informed American unless the person later spent substantial time actually living in China.
That says nothing negative about their identity. It simply means that ancestry and family background are not substitutes for having grown up inside a society.