A Complicated History of Han Chinese Anti-Blackness

My parents groomed me to be a model minority. It kept me from being an ally.

When my high school classmate Regina Lee* was 17, she gave a presentation in U.S. history class on the topic of why affirmative action enables “reverse racism” that punishes Asians for being academically overachieving.

I found this out recently after reconnecting with Regina since I became “extremely online” while under self-imposed lockdown due to the pandemic.

She was deeply embarrassed by her adolescent politics, but I quickly assured her that I was just as bad, if not worse. My teenage self was vehemently opposed to Tibet’s liberation, and refused to acknowledge Taiwan as a country. By the way, Regina is Taiwanese American, and my previously held belief that she and her brethren are enemies to China’s unification and ascension to power was why we were acquaintances, but never became better friends.

Better late than never. In these turbulent times finding a kindred spirit is a balm for the soul. As we caught up on each other’s lives, I was surprised to learn that Regina dropped out of college, and if she was surprised to hear about my decade of directionless career pivots, she didn’t show it. When we graduated from high school, we were cookie-cutter model students, ready to ace more classes in college and move closer to a cushy white-collar existence that would make our families proud. Instead of becoming a surgeon, I became a writer. And instead of becoming an aerospace engineer, she is still finding her way.

After we got past the small talk, the topic turned to the recent George Floyd protests, more specifically how our Han Chinese** diaspora community in the United States has responded to it. This was in early June. A week prior, Yale University junior Eileen Huang (no relation to me) wrote a searing open letter to our community, condemning widespread anti-Blackness amongst the first-generation immigrants and advocating for solidarity with Black Lives Matter. It was wryly amusing to Regina and me that the backlash against Eileen’s letter from the community has been much more passionate than the response to George Floyd’s brutal murder, but none of it was surprising.

The truth is, for a large portion of the Han Chinese community in America, police brutality against Black Americans is but an unsavory aspect of normalcy that has nothing to do with us. They may shake their head at the grim scenes in the news, and move on with their lives. But to be called out on being ungrateful for Black people’s civil rights contributions, by a child no less, now that is an act of rank disrespect of the highest order.

At the time of our conversation, neither Regina nor I had attempted to have a conversation with our respective families about how little our community has done to support the George Floyd protest, because pointing out the moral failures of the people who definitely did not toil for years to raise ungrateful back-talkers would turn out exactly as you’d expect.

The belief in essential Han Chinese excellence and a sense of entitlement to greatness is not just an American invention, but also has roots in Han chauvinism.

We mused about how we’ve had these conversations with our families in the past, conversations that always devolved into arguments. To my memory, appeals to my parents’ empathy for the plights of the Black community under systemic oppression somehow always become a lecture about how hard Chinese immigrants work when they arrive to the United States, and how they manage to build respectable lives through sheer willpower and talent. Regina’s mother even says offhandedly that Black folks’ suffering is due to bad karma, and is therefore deserved. I wonder what Mrs. Lee would say if she knew Rice University’s Kinder Institute found that Black Americans are most likely to value a post-secondary education in becoming successful, at 90%, followed by Asians and Latinos.

The truth is, the prevalence of anti-Blackness in the Han Chinese diaspora community in America goes deeper than ignorance of the contributions Black people have made to civil rights for people of color, as Eileen Huang writes in her letter, and goes beyond the temptation of White adjacency in the form of our embrace of the “model minority” myth. To consider these explanations for why many Han Chinese immigrants feel no affinity for Black Lives Matter would be overly simplistic, and dismissive of crucial contributing cultural factors.

I must say that if not for becoming model minority rejects whose lives failed to follow the charmed trajectory our families laid out for us, perhaps Regina and I would be just as apathetic toward Black Lives Matter as our families, and just as offended by the notion that it is a moral failure when we do not speak out and act up against systemic racism against Black people. Straying from that narrow, manicured path has shown us the laughably false premise that we are uniquely qualified to achieve greatness. Our new understanding has exposed us to the fact that the system is rigged to elevate White people while keeping BIPOC people from getting in the way of elevating White people. Our parents, however, never ventured as deep into American society as we did due to various cultural and linguistic barriers, and so they never saw it for what it is.

Here’s a quick history lesson. The two opposing camps in the community that formed over Eileen Huang’s letter largely split along “generation lines,” that is, the first-generation immigrants who came to the United States as students and adults, and the second- and later-generation Americans who were born and raised in the U.S. Many of the first-generation immigrants are older, part of the large influx of educated and skilled people who were able to immigrate after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. Though ranging in experiences and backgrounds, this group typically arrived with almost nothing, and spent decades keeping their heads down, living in extreme hardship, and working hard to give their American-born children an edge to attain upward mobility.

Regina and I belong to the second generation, raised in America, with parents who are completely devoted to our academic success and subsequent upward mobility. As a child my parents told me that Chinese people are the hardest-working people in the world, and even though American society is racist against all non-White people, I was uniquely qualified to beat those odds because good grades are in my blood. “Black people are poor,” I was told, “because unlike us, they don’t have the innate self-discipline that we have, there’s laziness in their bones, they are impulsive, promiscuous, and lazy, and that’s why their lives are terrible.” (Little did they know, this strongly echoes the now-debunked 1965 Moynihan Report, which blamed African American culture and family structure for their socioeconomic problems.)

You may recognize this anti-lazy emphasis as the core tenet of the model minority myth, but while the term was coined by William Petersen in 1966, the belief in essential Han Chinese excellence and a sense of entitlement to greatness is not just an American invention, but also has roots in Han chauvinism, which refers to the Han majority’s ethnocentrism and oppression of ethnic minorities in the Greater China region, not unlike policies driven by White supremacy in the U.S.

I used to attribute the desire for White adjacency as what causes Han Chinese people to side with White Americans in denouncing escalated Black Lives Matter protests. But in context with Han chauvinism, which continues to influence the Chinese government’s policies more and more, it must be easy for them to see reason in defending the status quo in order to uphold peace and order, even at the expense of a marginalized group’s dignity and rights. As of this year in China, 1 million Uyghurs (a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority) are in concentration camps, Hong Kong has just been stripped of its political independence, and Taiwan is regularly intimidated with the threat of military offensive, all justified in the name of the greater good… for the Han majority. (Both Taiwan and Hong Kong have Han-majority populations, but their political deviation from the CCP is what causes them to be labeled as threats to a harmonic Han-led reign by the Chinese government.) The thing that so disturbs me is the way so many Han Chinese people in China and in the United States support these actions, or regard them as necessary sacrifices for the good of a Han majority-dominated nation.

Such acquiescence for the Chinese government’s cruel actions does not exist in a vacuum; it is a powerful sentiment that makes it feel reasonable to support the American government’s cruelty against Black people, particularly when it seemingly has no negative impact on the success of the Han Chinese community, or may even help it. This isn’t White adjacency so much as a confluence of kindred beliefs.

So, to tell the Han Chinese community that they are racist and ungrateful offends them twofold: It challenges their established worldview about the distribution of success in proportion to hard work and what they describe as superior innate qualities, and at the same time, invalidates their sense of self-worth built on how they have overcome enormous odds to build a good life for themselves in America. Both of these strongly held beliefs contribute to the view that it doesn’t matter if American society is not equal; as long as it’s effective and valuable for the success of the right people, its values deserve protection, while people who are worth less should struggle and suffer.

Many people from my parents’ generation lived through extraordinarily hard times, and cannot bring themselves to invest in other people’s survival.

It is deeply saddening for me to see clearly how honest my parents always were with me about their view on power and success, that some people deserve it more than others, that there’s no point in questioning the morality of how society functions as long as it benefits you. That it’s futile and wrong to try to live in a more just world if it means putting your own well-being at risk.

When I understood this, what my parents said about Taiwan and Tibet all those years ago suddenly connected with their refusal to support Black Lives Matter. I realized there exists a cognitive block in their minds, because if they can justify the oppression of ethnic minorities in China, supporting Black Lives Matter would directly challenge their understanding of justice and order. Regina, too, felt resigned. Her mother’s stance is that White people are the “ruling class,” and therefore get to make the rules, even if they arrived at their dominant position through brutal, abusive means.

I know what our parents’ generation sees when they look at second-generation Americans like us: We’re soft from our American upbringings. Despite our parents’ best efforts to instill in us the same backbreaking work ethic that got them where they are in life, they raised us to believe we live in a fair system, while they themselves have been operating within a cruel, unfair system that nevertheless still yields in their favor. I know they desperately want us to understand that we are lucky not to be on the bottom of the food chain, and that if we are smart we’d carry on as they have rather than risk losing what advantage our parents have given us.

I know that many people from my parents’ generation lived through extraordinarily hard times, and cannot bring themselves to invest in other people’s survival when they have their own to watch out for. I learned that Regina’s mother lives in fear of mainland China invading Taiwan, and it must seem silly for Mrs. Lee to worry about the suffering of people who — in her view — deserve to suffer.

The challenge at hand for us, as model minority rejects, is to convince our elders that we don’t have to live in a world where wealth and power is amassed by some at the expense of the dignity and freedom of others, that denouncing the abuses of the powerful does not relegate us to their abuses, that it’s okay to smash the status quo. Because if we band together with other downtrodden people, we can put it together again and make it better.

“I want to reduce suffering,” Regina told me. “I’ve seen the power of how another person can affect my life merely by existing, and I want to do the right thing.”

*Name changed to protect identity **Han Chinese diaspora is used by the author to refer to a group of people with cultural and linguistic ties, rather than people of the same nationality