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The Chinese Identity Problem Test            (for Roseanne Liang)
click here for Yellow Peril blogpost on 'Banana in a Nutshell' by Roseanne Liang


 

Question 1: Do you have a Chinese identity problem?        Yes/No

Thank you for taking the test.

What?  You want more?  Goddamn test-loving Chinese kids... Fine!

Multiple Choice Bonus Round: What is wrong with the above picture?
a) As I have seen Better Luck Tomorrow I know that the photo on Sung Kang's ID is that of a Black man.
b) Sung Kang is Korean.
c) The picture is largely irrelevant to the test. Tze Ming just thinks Sung Kang is hot.
d) All of the above.

Results:
Question One: If you answered 'Yes', try not to write poetry about it.  It probably won't end well for anyone.  Documentaries seem to work out a little better.  If you answered 'No', you win.  Congratulations! Your prize is the right to reproduce the ten succinct points below and/or bonus extra-succinct sample-card also provided below, (or a list of other succinct reasons of your own choosing) in small font on a small card to efficiently hand out to people who answered 'Yes', so you never again have to talk to anyone for hours about their Chinese identity problems when all you really want to do is have a drink and/or go to bed, with them/with someone else/by yourself/two hours ago.
Bonus Round: The correct answer is d)

(Your prize: skip to free sample Chinese Identity Card!)
 

10 (reasonably) succinct reasons why I have never had Chinese identity problems

1. I was born Chinese.

2. Therefore, anything I say, believe, or do, is something that a Chinese person is saying, believing or doing.

3. Therefore it is impossible for anything I say, believe, or do, to be 'un-Chinese'.

4. Even though I forgot most of my Mandarin/Cantonese/Hokkien/[insert relevant dialect] when I was young, I didn't do it to become less Chinese and it didn't make me less Chinese. At the time, I thought it wouldn't matter if I didn't speak Chinese, because no-one else did (at the age of 6 I didn't have a strong idea of the wider world outside Mt Roskill/Remuera/Epsom/Milford/[insert relevant suburb]). I was still more Chinese than everyone else who wasn't Chinese. I was the natural, genetic expert on Chinese-ness, and everything that was about Chinese stuff was about me personally. Kid logic is simple, but still logical.  Language loss is not an intrinsic measure of your ethnicity.*  You can always get your language back anyway. I did.

5. When my annoying relatives told me I was too Western or not properly Chinese, I thought they were stupid, because obviously I am both Western and Chinese. If their brains couldn't accommodate two things at once, then they weren't brainy enough to be Chinese. Later, I learnt about the culturally-inquisitive progressive internationalist legacy of the Tang Dynasty, which made my relatives seem even more annoying and less brainy.

6. Also, my annoying relatives who did not live in a monastic tea-garden in Beijing but in aircon high-rises in Singapore/suburban wastelands of Auckland/behind a Wellington takeaway/[insert other relevant contemporary locale], and spoke English, did not have a strong claim or monopoly on the definition of Chinese. And if they did live in a monastic tea-garden in Beijing, they still wouldn't have that monopoly.

7. Out of 10,000 years of history of the most populous country on the planet, I found it unlikely that there were not Chinese people at some point, living in China, who were not saying, believing, or doing the things I was.

8. Conservative Confucianism does not have a monopoly on Chinese history nor contemporary political life, so bringing everything back to Confucian principles of unquestioning obedience is a shoddy, half-assed way of expressing a complex culture, and it is more respectful to Chinese tradition to actually understand its many strands and contradictions.

9. Mencius, the key Confucian scholar (the Plato to his Socrates if you will), could be classified as having 'non-Chinese' beliefs if you disagree with point 8.  Principally, that authority, respect, and position, must be earned. A king who behaves like a criminal, is not a king but a criminal, and should be treated as such. Essentially, he advocated regicide. And as we know, Confucian philosophy designs its power structures in concentric rings. So you can apply all these conditions of respect to your own family.

10. There were rather a lot of revolts and social movements against authority in Chinese history. Ones famous enough to have names included the May 4th Movement, the Boxer Rebellion, the Taiping Rebellion, the Nationalist Revolution, the Communist Revolution, the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Democracy Wall Movement, the Tiananmen Square Democracy Movement and The Beijing Spring.  Whether or not they were successful, well-thought-out, or of pure motive, these things happened in China. Chinese people caused them and took part in them. And no-one ever told me they weren't Chinese.

* Just as ethnicity itself is neither wholly intrinsic nor a whole identity.  Ethnic ancestry, ethnic identity and complete psychological identity are different and overlapping concepts which together do not have to cause Chinese identity problems, but explaining why would not be succinct, and ten points is enough.