Can Chinese Americans FIT IN in Chinese Society?

so gary you are done with your little trip right yep so what have you managed to accomplish here well i came here uh primarily for a couple reasons three reasons one is to learn the language better and then oh that's a nice dog yeah friendly neighbor that's that's part of being in china well i guess we could talk about that but it's learning language a lot better because i've studied it for five years and uh it has gotten a lot better and everybody's speaking they've gotten slowed down they slowed down they're speaking for me but actually i've gotten used to their pace the other is to see if i could do some golfing here and actually teach some golf and the third thing was to take a pilgrimage out to where my mom's village is that's about three or four hours away from here and see where she grew up what kind of lifestyle it was and where our native language came from which is a village dialect right yeah excellent so how successful were you in your endeavors here well i i am able to get around town um fairly comfortably you know i can't handle long conversations or have political well we can't have political science no you're kind of a political conversation in china anyway right yeah that's right so but i had good conversations with people i can get around i can order food you know but uh still not feeling like hey i'm still i'm chinese i'm right you definitely feel like you're a fish out of the water but i'm a little bit more comfortable with that golfing i have my chinese is enough to at least teach some simple golf but not it's not something that i really want to do now i've figured that out because the lifestyle is just too different than what used to and then yesterday i i spent three hours with a private car driver he took me out to um was a kaiping diallo which is now a unesco world heritage site and saw how how rurally my mom lived how poor it was it's still that way and time hasn't changed i got fairly emotional as i walked through the villages and seen that hey they don't have tv some of them still don't have running water those villages these days are still as decrepit in some places they look people still live in those is rather spartan um and so but there were only um grandpas and grandmas and little kids but there's no teenagers young adults uh it's just very very different i'm sure than when she was there sure yeah things have changed all the younger people have moved to the cities now you know urbanization yeah yeah but yeah it was very uh uh emotional for me to see where she grew up it's been over 50 years yeah it's been so i mean i guess things haven't really changed much since then because those those kind of places i go around china a lot and i see them and they all look like they haven't changed in the last 50 even 100 years right a lot of them they just kind of carry on with life even the way they do their farming and stuff it's very sort of old school they don't use modern equipment or anything you know they've got like an ox pulling the plow yeah you know yeah i saw people with you know walking with a hoe over their shoulder and i go wow that hasn't changed yeah exactly right so i i would really like to ask you what your impressions of china have been after this trip i mean you know you're an american chinese you know you came here you had some ideas about what you might find how were your ideas compared to what you found and what did china turn out to be for you anyway well i to at first when i got here i thought well okay i'm going to speak uh broken chinese and i'll get by and everywhere i went where we couldn't communicate i was thought i was thinking well nikoi just so that we can you know do you speak a little bit english so that at least i could communicate and what i found was most people what i found here is students here they they can read they learn to read they may learn to listen but they never learn to speak and so they can never communicate with me right so they can understand what i'm saying but they really can't talk to me so um from that aspect i was expecting more i've never got used to i didn't know i didn't have an appreciation for the traffic and the honking all the time and discriminated honking for no reason [Music] just and then yelling and uh that part is difficult um so you just say like noise overall noise overall yeah and then the toughest part i didn't have really appreciation for but being in america you hear about the pollution in china until you come here because uh one of the toughest part about my trip is my hell took a hit because i kept coughing all the time yeah and i think it's the pollution we i spent two days ago i was in dongguan which is about two hours north of here yeah and you can actually cut the air with a knife you really really could and it's because of the factories that are up there and they're telling me it's like well we can try to clean up the air but it'll cost it'll cost the profit line and so that's pretty important so they've chosen the profit line over the air quality and and that part uh to me was disappointing i hope i hope to see the china and i really love china to see them do some things to improve the air quality and the water quality too yeah i mean that that for me is a big issue that whole pollution thing absolutely yeah it's pretty awful yeah okay so you got to see the the the pollution was an issue the noise was an issue is there anything else and i mean i don't want to come across as being negative a lot of people accuse me of being very negative in my videos because you know it's difficult to be positive all the time when there are issues around you but just as a very honest uh question to you what are the things that you just weren't expecting that really are like a negative so people that are planning to come here if they want to come work here if they want to come live here what are the things that they should be prepared to deal with that they're just not used to dealing with back home uh the constant bumping and uh there's just a lot of people all the time right and uh you know my recommendation if a person is gonna stay here and i wish i did this is have a a full-time buddy uh that could actually or you know if you have someone that could speak chinese fluently with you and english that can sort of attack you could tag along and and so you can bring your chinese and and understanding of the culture and the language uh until you're up to speed because i think that'll accelerate uh your ability to simulate here in china because there's a lot of i could tell there's a lot of subtleties that i'm not getting that people are saying and doing that i'm not following um i would say if you're going to live here spend some time here but but before you spend some time here underst if you can understand the language and learn the language as much as possible before you get here um and then if you're just going to spend a short amount of time it's better to just take a tour right right like a speaking tour yeah uh if you're short of that if you really want to stay here you know you got to really immerse yourself and then have a thick skin right yeah okay so um some of the negatives were noise pollution kind of personal space people bumping into you all the time and of course the language barrier yeah what about some positives what what kind of things do you do you say that you maybe weren't expecting but found to be quite nice here uh the variety of food the availability of food at all hours of the day yeah from morning to late at night if you get the late night munchies you can still see somebody on the street producing some food that's pretty pretty tasty and then there you can because it's a big city here and because it's a immigrant city if you will from other parts of china you're going to be able to find all kinds of different chinese food and that that i really like that and i like its proximity to hong kong right uh and so that was a little bit if you will more westernized over there yeah um and the availability is shopping and just if you're a people person and if you're a young person it's great if you like being um i i love the positive part also is that i like seeing all the young people and old people stand healthy by dancing in the park i haven't been to a park yet where it was still and quiet which i like too but there's every bit of space in the parks and even in open shopping centers people are dancing at night you know there's a boom box out there yeah and all you know whatever kind of dancing you want to do they're that's out there for you so it seems like that's the social that's where a lot of the social activities for chinese comes from is yeah dancing yeah so that that's a positive part um and i may noted this to a friend uh is that um i guess socially if you love being close to your family it's really easy to stay close to a family because everything's like the transportation oh that's the other transportation is outstanding yeah yeah public transportation right outstanding between the trains the subways and the taxis and um buses the subways you can get across town for i think is less than a buck it felt like to me oh yeah easy yeah six rmb five rb2 rmb for most rides yeah yeah right we want to get a suit that's it i like that too the suits was like you can get a really nice suit done had a suit done and and a sport coat a shirt for 200 us custom yeah yeah he's like wow this is great sure so there's there's a lot to like about china for sure absolutely do you want to tell them your dancing story oh yeah so yeah so it's one of the challenges i had so i we're walking around town with winston and sea milk and we saw this this corner park with a big giant billboard of deng xiaoping but below it is dancing from hip hop dancing to line dancing to ballroom dancing and we walk by there and oh this will be fun so i'll just here film this and start dancing with each of the groups and you know maybe hip-hop is about 25 years younger than me right right right yeah so i started dancing with them i actually uh pulled a calf muscle yeah and had to go go to the hospital the next day and find a good one at that and so i was out of commission for a week and a half yeah it was pretty tragic and we had to wheel you to the taxi on the back of one of those mo bikes right right right thank god yeah we you guys were there but well to be fair if we weren't there you probably wouldn't have ended up going there and dancing maybe now it was yeah it was a lot of fun i enjoyed that laugh about it absolutely yeah yeah so well gary i think uh this your observations are are very valuable to people out there you know because there are maybe quite a few people who may be thinking about coming here for whatever reason and it's always good to know what you're getting yourself into yeah yeah and if they have someone they can relate to it's even better so any abcs out there who are considering to come and work in china or come here for a long trip you know uh pretty sure your advice is invaluable so yeah yeah thank you for that yeah excellent well safe journey thank you for coming so good to see you it was good to see you yeah it was great to meet you in america and amazing to see you here as well so yeah and thanks for supporting my what was really my bucket list item to come see where my my mom grew up and and she had quite a few tears just knowing that this is where where you're from where she's from and where i'm from you know richard from that was that was uh made the whole trip worth it yeah fantastic oh well done thanks man i'll be seeing you in america again and hopefully quite soon yeah yeah all right so until next time guys thank you for watching uh thanks to gary and as always stay awesome [Music] you

Channel: serpentza

Views: 97,025

Keywords: food, ABC, American Born Chinese, Finding your roots, trouble with China, Negatives of China, Positives of China, Impressions of China, China Impressions, Living in China, Moving to China, Working in China, American in China, Chinese American in China, Overseas Chinese in China, Overseas Chinese visit America, education, china vlog, chinese, asian american, china, asian, chinese american, american, chinese living in america, abc chinese, mandarin, chinese society, fit in, foreigner

Id: Rjkk5qfuMpc

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 19 2017