The Accidental Asian by Eric Liu
From the Amazon.com Review: As a second-generation Chinese- American, Eric Liu has grown up with an awkward relationship to race and ethnic identity. He can follow a conversation in Chinese, although he would have problems if he tried to take part in it; as for the written language, he is functionally illiterate. He would be the first person to question which of his personality traits are "Chinese" or "American," "Asian" or "white," or none of the above, and The Accidental Asian is, in fact, a rigorous self-examination -- not merely about the costs and benefits of assimilation, but about whether assimilation should even be viewed in those terms.
Whether he's recalling his adolescent frustration with "Chinese hair" that just wouldn't permit itself to be styled, examining the history of Chinatown, or pondering the mixture of fear and fascination with which China is viewed by Americans, Liu writes with admirable personal intensity. It doesn't matter whether you consider The Accidental Asian to be a memoir or a batch of interconnected essays; once you've read it, you will be forced to consider for yourself what place, if any, race has in America today and will have tomorrow.
Silk Road by Jeanne Larsen
From the cover: It is on the Silk Road that Greenpearl's story begins. The daughter of a powerful general who guards the volatile lands bordering Tibet, she is kidnapped by Tibetan raiders, and sold into slavery.
Greenpearl nevertheless embarks on a threefold quest to regain her freedom, to reunite with her mother, and to master the art of language. Her path leads her to play many roles: she becomes courtesan, woman warrior, poet, and writer before her destiny is fulfilled.
A novel as rich as the lore of ancient scrolls, as turbulent, dramatic, and exciting as a marketplace storyteller's wares, Silk Road is as unusual and magical as China itself. Its heroine, Greenpearl, is a young woman who must learn to follow her heart to discover the secret at the center of her complex and varied life.
Mounted Archers: The Beginnings of Central Asian History by Laszlo Torday
Way back in the second century B.C., on the remote northwestern frontier of China, a tribe of mounted archers overran the land of another. Though a commonplace event in those days, this incident initiated a nomad migration which threw the whole of Central Asia into turmoil and led to the fall of a remarkable Greek kingdom in distant northern Afghanistan.
Dr. Torday has painstakingly pieced together the trail and identity of the warlike tribes involved, using evidence of contemporary Chinese annals, Greek authors, scattered coins, a few surviving names, and some legends which have been recorded. We learn who the Huns really were, why the wolf and the bird who fed Romulus and Remus were also known in Siberia, how the horn came to be a symbol of might all over contemporary Eurasia, why the earliest Sarmatian tribes called themselves "men of the river", and how an early Indo-European language came to be spoken at the edge of the Taklamakan desert.
Mounted Archers is the first monograph to cover the history of this migration from China to the Hindu Kush, and from its antecedents to the time when the migrants came to rule all of the land from the Aral Sea to the mouth of the Ganges. It is a work on a scale every bit as epic as the journey it recreates.
"The Rise of the Dumpling Queen" by Jane Parish Yang
For thousands of years a traditional greeting in China, especially among people in rural areas, was not Ni hao? [How are you] but Chi le ma? [Have you eaten?]. This was a legitimate concern to peasants when famine was sometimes just one poor harvest away. After 1949, a more common greeting among urban residents was Ni shu shenme danwei? [Which work-unit are you attached to?]. Since such benefits as your housing, medical care, and children's education depended on your work-unit assignment, this was an important question to ask of new acquaintances. Nowadays, according to a recent article in the China Daily Business Weekly, people greet each other with the question: "Have you hooked up to the Internet [yet]?"
This anecdote tells us much about the phenomenal pace of social and economic change in China today, as does this story of the dumpling queen of Shanghai, quoted from the China Daily Business Weekly of August 10, 1998:
Despite severe competition in Shanghai's frozen food markets, Pillsbury, the US-based multinational food company that owns the Green Giant and Häagen-Dazs brand names, recently opened a venture in China to produce frozen dumplings... Instead of creating a new brand name, Pillsbury will market the product under the Wanchai Ferry name, a renowned dumpling brand in Hong Kong.Note that Zang Jianhe had left China for Hong Kong in 1978 to seek new opportunities for herself and her family. China, emerging from the Cultural Revolution, the so-called ten years of chaos from 1966-1976, was still a society tied to state communes and state-owned enterprises."I'm very confident of my frozen foods, although there are dozens of frozen food brand names vying for the local market," said Zang Jianhe, founder of Wanchai Ferry and now vice-president of Shanghai Pillsbury... Together with two daughters, Zang emigrated to Hong Kong from Qingdao 20 years ago at the age of 32. She had to take three jobs concurrently to raise her daughters. After losing her jobs, Zang began to sell dumplings made with her family recipe at the Wanchai Ferry in Hong Kong.
After 20 years of hard work, she has become a very successful businesswoman in Hong Kong. Local people call her the "Queen of Dumplings," and her Wanchai Ferry brand has won the coveted title of Hong Kong Famous Brand, issued by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council.
Under the household registration system, your place of residence determined your work opportunities. Even if there was no work in your area, you still were not allowed to transfer residency to another part of the country. It was possible to transfer horizontally from one rural area to another or from one smaller city to another, but it was especially difficult to transfer vertically from rural areas to large urban areas, especially to desirable locations such as Beijing, Tianjin, or Shanghai.
This residency system, in place since 1958, reinforced the commune system by preventing peasants from leaving the land to move into the cities. It was not until 1980 that some migration was allowed into urban areas to work in newly-established light industries or to start out as an individual entrepreneur, a concept so radical that there was no suitable term to describe one's leaving the collective. Finally, an expression was devised, getihu, or "individual entity household," which played off the term for collective in Chinese. As you might imagine, many linguistic issues similar to this one have arisen in the past 20 years.
In 1985, residency cards were issued in response to the new mobility in society, in effect granting a measure of legitimacy to the movement of people toward the jobs, though this was also a way for authorities to keep track of people.
Also in the early 1980s the commune system was broken up and a household-based production system implemented. The contract system, based on land use contracts granted for 15 years from 1980-1995, guaranteed the government a certain quota of grain from each farming household. The household, in turn, was allowed to sell grain produced above the quota on the free market and keep the proceeds. Today, contracts have been renewed for a 30-year period until 2025, meaning that stability in the countryside is guaranteed for another generation of farmers.
The success of this new system can be seen by the statistics: In 1978, 91 percent of farmers worked the land full-time, but by 1995 this percentage had fallen to 63 percent as farmers became more efficient, grain production soared, and surplus rural workers turned to non-agricultural activities such as handicrafts, small retail, seasonal wage labor, and work in township enterprises.
Some of those surplus workers began looking elsewhere for opportunity, and a huge floating population, at present estimated to be between 80 and 100 million people, began migrating from rural areas to small and medium-sized cities and provincial capitals within provinces, and to larger cities. Especially popular destinations are cities along the eastern seaboard, where many of the early Special Economic Zones, fueled with foreign capital, have established factories. In 1980 the rural population made up 81 percent of China's total population; by 1996 that percentage had fallen to 71. In that year urban areas accounted for 29 percent of the population, or some 359 million people. This number is expected to rise to 630 million by 2010.
Thus, the first change that the dumpling queen illustrates is the rapid upward mobility of people able to apply their skills to the right opportunities and the movement of people from places lacking opportunity to places that offer opportunity. In 1978, for some that meant leaving China. For others, in the 1980s and 1990s, that meant leaving poor rural areas in the hinterland to migrate to the great urban centers along the eastern seaboard.
The second change illustrated by the story of Zang Jianhe has to do with the role of Hong Kong and foreign capital from multinational corporations in the economic transformation -- called in Chinese, gaige kaifang, "restructuring and opening up." Hong Kong expertise fueled the changes in southern China around Guangzhou so much that a mega city has grown up, stretching from Hong Kong across the border to the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen and all the way up the Pearl River Delta to Guangzhou. There was a saying that "Hong Kong learns from the West, Guangzhou learns from Hong Kong, and the rest of China learns from Guangzhou."
The third change that the dumpling queen story illustrates has to do with alterations in consumer lifestyle over the past 20 years, the rise of a middle class with disposable income, and the emergence of a Chinese yuppie class every bit as self-indulgent as our own in the West. For example, the entrance of Western fast-food chains into China has led to a rapid proliferation of Chinese-style restaurants catering to the newly emerging middle class in urban centers. Quick, clean, and convenient, these places appeal to single-child families eager to please their "little emperors."
I am, of course, describing only a small segment of the total Chinese population, certainly not the 800 million of what has been termed the "working poor" in rural areas and small towns or those who have left for the factories along the coast. We're talking here about the nouveau riche and the salaried class found in the 36 largest cities in China. Although those cities make up only 6.8 percent of the country's population, they account for 39 percent of total income. The ten largest cities, 4 percent of the population, account for 22 percent of total income. This group as a whole -- somewhere between 45 and 60 million people -- has an annual per capita income of $187. This figure may seem tiny to us, but it represents considerable buying power in China.
Finally, the story of the queen of dumplings illustrates the persistence of certain aspects of the traditional culture within a rapidly modernizing and Westernizing sector of the economy. After all, the dumpling queen is selling dumplings, not frozen hamburgers or French fries. But this is traditional culture without the leisure time or family or group bonding that produced the product in the first place: families, relatives, and friends gathering around a large table to roll the dough and stuff the dumplings. Also, due to the institution of a strict one-child policy in urban areas for the past 20 years, there may no longer be a group at home with whom or for whom to make the dumplings.
The next time you read a story in the newspaper about China, remember the rise of the dumpling queen and how her story helped to illustrate the tremendous changes that have taken place here.
Lawrence's "Building Bridges Through Practical Chinese" internship program, made possible by a National Security Education Program (NSEP) grant in 1996, also illustrates some of these points. The kinds of tasks to which our interns were assigned can serve as a gauge of changing business conditions in China.
During the summers of 1998 and 1999 we placed a total of 11 interns with the following companies in China: four interns, two each summer, with Kimberly-Clark in Beijing and one with Monsanto in Beijing; one with Kohler in Shanghai; two with the Appleton Mills plant outside Shanghai; two with Manitowoc in Hangzhou; and one with a mail-order firm in Guangzhou.
Their projects have included helping to build information technology infrastructure, regularizing personnel procedures, producing career development plans and expectations for middle management, and examining staff loyalty and retention issues. Interns have worked on projects dealing with customer rights and complaint procedures, links with marketing and sales forces, local promotion of products, relations with distributors, information bulletins for governmental and non-governmental personnel in life sciences, and public relations work with informational web pages.
We have found that students with a good, functional, working knowledge of the Chinese language and a good understanding of Chinese culture have much that they can contribute to an American or joint-venture business in China, but we have also discovered that these students must have very specific skills in business and office procedures necessary to function in an increasingly sophisticated and technological marketplace. And, as Chinese language and culture instructors, we too have learned much from the companies and business managers who have sponsored the interns.
[Originally printed in Lawrence Today: The Magazine of Lawrence University, Fall 1999, pp. 28-31.]
