To do so, we’ve read a collection of poetry written by Japanese Americans about the internment during WWII, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. It has been a fortnight full of enlightening ideas regarding what your ethnicity means to others and to yourself, and how one adapts culture, and creates hybridity. The guest professor (the entire course has been taught by guest professors, except for the first 2-week segment taught by the coordinator, Dr. Tom Keene), Sarah Robbins, has facilitated a series of great class discussions, getting us really deep into what it means to be Asian-American.

Somewhat by coincidence, my own curiosity lead me weeks earlier to a book on the new release table at Barnes and Noble– one that delved into the curious incident of a Powerball lottery that had several dozen winners, all of whose numbers had been identical and inspired by the same thing: a fortune cookie. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, written by New York Times writer Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, 8), takes the reader  on a  journey into everything you’ve never imagined behind the ethnic food we love so much; and, Lee argues, it isn’t really all that “ethnic” anyway. Chinese American food is essentially American food, says Lee, and from there she shares stories about the origins of the fortune cookie, the international argument caused by soy sauce, the dangerous lives of Chinese deliverymen, and a heart-wrenching tale of a Chinese immigrant family who was nearly torn about by working and living in a rural Georgia town.  I have found this book to be an interesting addition to my own understanding of the Chinese-American experience. Though it focuses on food, who can really argue that food is not a basic playing field for cultural exchange, no mater what your ethnicity or geographic location? Even without knowing a person’s language or culture or history, they can share with you their food. And so, through this familiar medium, Lee explores the whole globe to define “Chinese food.”

I am going to share an expert here, because I think it is an excellent illustration of the way we see cultural hybridity today, and how “assimilation” itself may be changing in meaning. Her sentiments in this passage echo almost exactly a point we touched upon today in class– when a minority combines itself with the majority, what elements of each culture are retained, which are lost, and to what extent might each be a bad or good thing? By giving up parts of your own culture to assimilate, how much becomes a personal loss? And what happens when walls or bumps arise between the two cultures one may be living in that might cause someone to step back an reevaluate their identity? She adds to it an interesting additional point: when the minority or immigrant population becomes an integral part of mainstream society, that society itself adapts to it, and appears different than it used to. We can see this most clearly all around us in the United States. As shes says earlier in her books, we often think of apple pie as being quintessential “American”– but when is the last time you had apple pie, and when is the last time you are Chinese food? Exactly. Probably in the last week or so. Interesting…

I think it is a testament to the writer, and a great cultural learning tool, that we can see elements of the Chinese American experience in her own exploration of American Chinese food.

I’ll leave you with her words:

“As much as the mainstream changes the immigrants, the immigrants change the mainstream. As recently as three decades ago, being American often meant distancing yourself from your immigrant ancestry. In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, ‘Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.’

Even our definition of ‘assimilation’ is changing. The old-school definition referred to how a minority blended into a majority. Now social scientists are pushing a new definition: the convergence of disparate cultures. The popularity of Chinese food shows that assimilation may no longer require that minorities be subsumed into the majority. Instead, in a country where 20 percent of the population consists of immigrants and their children, assimilation means convergence from all sides.

…

In reality, General Tso’s chicken is arguably as American as it is foreign, Chinese only in the way that burritos are ‘Mexican’ or spaghetti and meatballs is ‘Italian.’ These are ‘native foreign dishes’– ‘native’ because they originated here and may exist nowhere else, but ‘foreign’ because they were inspired by other cuisines. American Chinese food has developed its own identity– so much so that it is sold in Korea, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic as its own distinct cuisine. “

The assignment (for my World Since 1945 class) is to research an event of international political significance that has taken place between 1945 and 1999. Approaching it at a specific angle– versus just attempting to do “the Vietnam War”– we need to examine three primary sources relating to that event. So basically, I need three sources coming from the time period that the event occurred, analized and compared in 5 pages. I’ve not done much yet in my career in history with primary sources, and that is essentially the bread-and-butter of an historian’s job. Examining the documents (journals, letters, government documents, etc.) that remain from history give us the real insight. It is when the analysis comes in that books and essays are created, giving us the perspectives we may have on history. You have historians to thank for compiling and tidying much of the history you know.

For my topic, I have chosen the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that Mao Tse-tung began in communist China in the 1960′s. His confidence that tradition and intellectuals would ruin the socialist society was so strong, thousands died in the wake of their attempted obliteration. This is when the Red Guard came to be, and images  still linger of young children in their Maoist uniforms patrolling their country for “revisionists” who posed a threat to the state.

From this period of Chinese history I will draw several primary sources and narrow it down to the three that best bring varying viewpoints to the table. My initial research returned several works of compiled documents from the state and Mao, a compilation of first-person accounts of the response of Chinese villagers and peasants, and several works from reporters and diplomats from abroad who experienced the Cultural Revolution firsthand while there. I will be going through these sources and others, and hopefully narrowing it all down to my main three points of view on the singular movement. From there, I will look at the Cultural Revolution as an entity and use those three viewpoints to analyze it; vise-versa, I will use the context of the Cultural Revolution to analyze what is said in the documents I choose.

Sitting at the start, this seems like both a daunting and exhilarating project. But at the same time, this is an essential part of doing research– looking at primary sources. And I couldn’t ask for more flexibility in the topic, nor for a better topic. China is, after all, full of intrigue for a foreigner. So, I must get started.

A good illustration of my reasoning came with the field trip my history class took to Anyang, an ancient Chinese city and the location of the famous oracle bone inscriptions.
Before visiting the site, we were assigned some reading about the meaning and significance of the oracle bones and their messages, the tombs of leaders and their wives, and the human sacrifices and huge graves that were prepared in their names, including the burying of entire carriages with the horses that would “pull” them in the afterlife. Although I found this type of tomb preparation a bit absurd, I felt prepared and was interested to visit these relics.

What I found were some rather subtly announced “recreations” of what the oracle bones might have looked like during the time of their use, which were displayed outside. Inside a little room, the “real” bones lay in a dimly-lit pit, in piles of indiscernible rubble. Owing to the condition of these, I was dubious to believe that even these “authentic” ones were the oracle bones, laying in that condition.

The clincher for my dismissal of authenticity came when looking at the human sacrifices: skeletons laying in pits under round glass enclosures, soaking in the sun so the tourists could marvel over them. Doesn’t it seem a bit odd that “ancient skeletons” would be exposed to various weather and temperature conditions for the sake of attracting tourism?

Seems to me that thousand-year-old human remains might have to be contained in proper storage. Upon close inspection, it was clear that some of the skeletons were real. I don’t doubt that—I’m sure some humans were sacrificed, or at least utilized after dying anyway, when this site was being established. Perhaps during the Cultural Revolution? Punishment for political insurrection?

Another example is the Shaolin Temple. It’s beautiful, no denying that, and the site itself has a long and significant history in China and within Buddhism. The tour guide then explains that the temples were destroyed many times, and the most recent ones were built in the 1980s.

Oh, OK. That takes away some of the grandeur the visit may have held for me. I’ve lived in houses much older than that.

The phrase I like to use to explain my process of viewing history now is the old aphorism of taking life “with a grain of salt.” I can absorb the things I see— the temples, museums, mausoleums, relics, pagodas, walls, and their stories—and appreciate what they stand for, and what they mean to the nation who holds them as part of their past. I then move on, knowing that what these stand for is much more important than the actual items or sites themselves. It is unwise and unnecessary to consider these things as more than they are—and placing undue authenticity on them just doesn’t make sense to me.

This process builds on something I learned last fall in a “world language and culture” class. In reading any set of statistics, one can often see the agenda of the publishers of such information. My professor— herself an absolutely brilliant and delightful intellectual—emphasized the importance of also approaching maps and history this same way. Cartographers also have an agenda; they are out to prove their point.

Political maps? Chock-full of biases.
Maps detailing which languages are spoken where, or which religions are practiced most? That research changes according to who is retrieving it.

The same is the case with history. As I said in my previous discourse, history is distorted over time, across borders, in various contexts, for different races, religions, and economies

I take it all with a grain of salt. I learn as much as I can with the best use of the resources available, and also keep in mind that I’m storing this information in a western-bred mind. Being outside one’s own culture does emphasize what is not consciously considered when within it—how deeply people are defined by their society.

This resonates with the studying of history; ask a Ukrainian child and American child about the Cold War and you will get two different accounts. Ask a Japanese student and a Chinese student about the presence of Japanese military in Nanjing, China, and you will hear two different tales, with different enemies and reasoning behind the event.

So can I really blame the Chinese for wanting to present a rich, deeply archeological past? There’s no doubt they have this history. Seeing the relics and sites so far, I have established my own perception of all this history, and it has altered the way I see history. It is an important revelation; for the rest of my life, I will see history in other countries and other contexts and take it all in with a grain of salt, stepping away from the biases presented at face value, and appreciating it all for what it stands for.

Within each city, museum, temple, mausoleum, and other culturally significant thing I have visited, I am reminded constantly of China’s truly ancient civilizations. This is something that is remarkable in the mind of an American, as my nation’s history stretches only so far as the discovery of the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Compared to China, North America and the United States specifically are infants in terms of social evolution, innovation, war, and cultural identity.

China was also the homeland of one the four academically accepted “cradles of civilization,” the areas of earliest known human habitation. While I might consider my own nation’s history—early New England settlers, western expansion, the famed founding fathers, entrepreneurialism, the advent of television, rock & roll, and fast food, for instance—to be lengthy, progressive, dynamic, and influential, it is relatively uneventful compared to the thousands of years that China has been cultivating its own stories.

While touring half a dozen museums full of relics from the past does lose its novelty, there is something remarkable about statements like, “This was from the Shang dynasty, dating back around three thousand years.” It makes centuries of history seem frighteningly minuscule in relation to the life span of individuals, and puts in perspective the relative significance of different nations and civilizations and different times in history.

As an American in the 21^st Century, I tend to think of the U.S. as an everlasting leader, more owing to my American psyche than by my understanding and education. While I have always been fully aware of the fleeting leadership of any nation, mine included, being in China and learning about its long and dynamic history have put that idea into more literal and realistic terms

One thing my history teacher in Zhengzhou mentioned was that Chinese people tend to each claim a favorite dynasty from their nation’s past, and that which one they choose is largely suggestive of that person’s character. This is an interesting observation, and I have found China’s past to indeed be largely influential within the nation and upon its citizens.

What comprises history and fact changes depending on who one asks, the context in which said information is analyzed, and its relation to other, correlating and opposing histories. I find that the more I interpret and understand Chinese history, my grasp on world history and U.S. history is also challenged, reaffirmed, and adjusted.