Growing up Chinese in White America (中文/英文字幕）|| was I ever bullied?

around three months ago my cousin who is considering raising his kid outside of china asked me growing up in the u.s were you ever bullied or were there any difficulties that you encountered and i thought well that's a pretty good topic so today i want to answer that question by sharing with you my story of growing up chinese in white america now i know that that's a strong title but in elementary school 70 percent of my classmates were in fact white i didn't have another chinese classmate until 7th grade actually and in college one of my friends famously said that i was the whitest agent he's ever met so let's begin the story where it all started when i was just over a year old my parents and i moved from our home in hrenan province in china all the way to the chicago suburbs here in the u.s even though my parents were both college educated neither of them spoke very good english though so i did not speak any english with them we only spoke chinese at home and because i didn't go to preschool or go to any clubs or anything like that i didn't have any american friends so i only spoke chinese although i did watch some american television and i do remember that some of my favorites were blue's clues dora the explorer tom and jerry i doubt i really knew what was going on in them but like tom and jerry it's fun to watch so i watched them when i was five years old i was finally ready to attend public school and up until that point my parents had not taught me any english because they said they didn't want me to learn their english with an accent but they had to teach me a few phrases before i went to school so they taught me how to say hello thank you good morning and where is the bathroom now i actually think it's pretty surprising just how adaptable kids are at that age i actually remember being very excited to go to school to meet my new american friends and the first few years of school were actually just filled with good memories and i don't even remember struggling um on anything in particular i also think that kids at that age are just so innocent and pure like they have no concept of any of the differences or problems that plague society like race or social economic class however throughout my elementary years i still had my share of struggles and so let's start with the original question was i ever bullied because of my race you know because i was chinese and the minority i honestly do not think that i was ever bullied directly because i was chinese but i will say that there was some name calling that were racially inspired you know kids would call me things like ching chong or jackie chan bruce lee which keep in mind that i was the only east asian kid at my school for many years other than my sister and figures like jackie chan and bruce lee were the asian figures that kids knew about so i guess it's natural to assume that they would make that connection later on in middle school and high school because my last name is wang or as the americans would pronounce wang i got a lot of nicknames based off of that like wenger ring or wangamatang but again most of the people who called me those names were not actually out to get me they did not have any bad intentions and in fact a lot of them were actually my closer friends i actually just had one of my best friends from high school tell me like a month ago that in his phone contact list i'm still wangamatang it did help that by middle school i had already kind of built up a reputation i became known as the smartest kid in school because i always got the highest test grades so most kids respected me by then but i have learned that overall if you learn to respect yourself and you're comfortable with yourself it really doesn't matter how everybody else treats you it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where the way you see yourself becomes the way other people see you and i think that's so important in this day and age whenever we talk about racial problems i don't want to make anyone mad but honestly from my own experience i can say that the way you see yourself really does become your reality if you think the world is out to get you then the world will be out to get you if you think that the world is on your side then the world will be in fact on your side but the biggest struggle with growing up as the minority is this longing to fit in i mean as kids we just want to be a part of the group we want to be accepted and when we're different from the group we change ourselves to become more like the group i mean that's probably why my friend says that i seem whitewashed because throughout my childhood i hung around white people i remember when people would talk about their favorite celebrities about their idols or the movie stars and i wouldn't know any of them because i didn't know anything about pop culture i did listen to pop music and we didn't go to the movies i remember students and teachers debating on whether the chicago socks or the cubs were the better baseball team and i didn't know anything about that because i didn't watch baseball when they asked me which team i liked better i just made it up i eventually decided that i would be a sox fan for no apparent reason and i remembered that everybody was either boy scouts or girl scouts and i didn't join any of those organizations either so i couldn't relate this became kind of like the theme of my childhood where i always felt like the world that i was living in was slightly different than the world that they were living in and i'll be honest i was never super proud to be chinese i didn't despise it either but all i wanted was just to be another american kid you know when my parents would force us to learn chinese i didn't want to practice my hanzo i didn't really want anything to do with chinese culture and i definitely didn't consume any chinese media unless you count jackie chan movies but everybody watched jackie chan movies and most of his movies were in english so that doesn't even really count the big turning point for me was when we went back to china for the first time since we came to the us and that was when i was 15 years old it was a long time because there were some complications but the first time i went back i just suddenly realized that there's a world much bigger outside of the u.s and there were way more people just like me and that was also the first time i met my extended family a few years later we went back to china for the second time and it was in that trip that i was just really impressed with some of the technology that they have over there especially bullet trains and cashless payments which if you don't know about china's bullet trains they go like 180 miles an hour it's the coolest thing ever it makes amtrak seem like a dinosaur and cash's payment how cool is that you walk around without a wallet to pay someone you just scan their qr code with your cell phone but those experiences completely destroyed the narrative that i've kind of been fed my whole life that the us is somehow the greatest country in the world and we're better than everybody else at pretty much everything it was also in that trip that i started to realize that my limited chinese language skills were kind of hindering me from truly immersing myself into the culture so that was also when i started getting more interested in learning chinese again now i know i'm not the only one who's experienced these things or feels this way there's a lot of chinese immigrants or children of immigrants who've grown up in the us in canada australia you know europe or the rest of the world who spent their childhoods conforming to the local culture and my original inspiration for starting this channel actually a b chinese was to help fellow abcs and to inspire them to learn their native language and to appreciate their culture instead of rejecting it and this is especially important for americans not just chinese americans but i've come to believe that everybody should learn a foreign language and a foreign culture because it allows you to see things and issues from two different perspectives at least and let's face it americans tend to be a bit more narrow-minded when it comes to global affairs especially you know if you consider the recent events in like the last year or two between the us and china it's given me personally an opportunity to really see issues from both the american side of things and also from the chinese side of things and when you start seeing things from both sides you start to realize that neither side is as bad as the other side makes them out to be and wouldn't the world be a better place if people could just see things from each other's perspective instead of attacking each other i really believe that if america and china can coexist harmoniously not just the governments but the people to mutually respect each other then we would live in probably the most prosperous time the world has ever seen so if i can influence that somehow to help make that a reality i would gladly do it so that might be something i consider for the future of this channel to help americans appreciate chinese culture and help chinese people appreciate american culture so looking back at my childhood it was honestly kind of lonely but i imagine it must have been even lonelier for my parents i mean there were a lot of people that were good to me but i always felt like i didn't completely fit in you know as bad as it sounds to want a friend or to choose your friends based on race alone there are just some things that you can't really understand or relate to unless you've lived through it like i have some really good you know white american friends but none of them are going to know what it feels like to be completely oblivious to pop culture and entertainment to have this pressure to just study and do well in school become a doctor or an engineer one day you know not being allowed to do sleepovers or playing an instrument instead of watching baseball to this day one of my regrets is not having even one good chinese-american friend growing up you know just somebody that i could relate to somebody who knew the struggles of being an immigrant or the nuances of an asian family but i guess life is too short for regrets and the only thing we can change is the future so [Music] [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: ABChinese

Views: 12,967

Keywords: 美国华裔, 移民到美国难不难, 移民故事, 美国留学经历, 在美国成长经历, immigrant story, Racism, 种族歧视, 美国人会不会歧视中国人, model minority, racism towards Asians

Id: Hfpn9_kghow

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020