What it’s like to live a double life.
Lots of us live double lives.
In the daytime I’m a respected professional whose subordinates respond to my requests with alacrity.
Outside the office, I’m an ATM to my kids and can’t get them to consistently hang up their bath towels & clothes strewn on the floor.
Don’t be silly, @GMTplus7. Outside work you are a CC ninja. 
Loving the festive color change @GMTplus7.
Beautifully written article.
GMTplus7
picking up towels is a lost cause. give up on it! trust me!!
“In China, everyone puts too much stock in the fact that I go to Harvard.”
I think the same can be said of any American student who attends Harvard.
Five years ago I was in Wuhan China (population 10 million), working for a week at a university, a good university, but not the best in town. So that my daughters wouldn’t be bored, I exchanged their attending the school on the campus for my teaching some English classes for the school. I probably spoke to 5 or 10 classes, mostly middle school because that is where my older daughter was. Mostly I answered questions about American popular culture, but one question was memorable. A 13 year old boy asked me how to get into Harvard. So in central China, away from the over-developed coasts, in a decent middle school, but not the best in town, at least one kid (and probalby far, far more) was planning his way to Harvard, looking for advice anywhere he could get it.
Now I have a kid at Harvard. As I read this thread, I wonder if I could arrange profitable speaking tours.
Sounds like whining to me, especially this part:
"At Harvard, where I operate mostly in English, I sometimes find it hard to make classmates and friends understand what it means to be one of relatively few Chinese undergraduates on Harvard’s famed campus. "
She should watch the Facts of Life with the student from the Bronx trying to fit in with mostly rich students. Or any of the other many “fish out of water” shows.
Many 1st generation Americans aren’t as familiar with idioms as they should be. My father’s first language was not English, and it took him years to learn English idioms, frankly being in the armed services and then college helped him a lot in that.
Or how about my mom was a babysitter when my dad was out of work? Or my spouse’s mom was paid under the table so she had no Social Security until her ex-husband passed away? How do you think I and he felt when we were at an Ivy League school with kids of movie stars and princes, and of oil magnates and Fortune 50 CEOs? Any better than poor Ms. Zhang feels?
There are a lot of things that separate us, but we set up the walls ourselves, and we decide when not to extend ourselves beyond our comfort zone.
I also was shocked by this comment:
“Growing up in a fully Asian society, I had always been surrounded by people who shared my skin color and cultural heritage”
From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China
This is also very interesting about diversity in China.
www.whatsonxiamen.com/ask-topic-9193.html
(FWIW, I am yellow-skinned, it has to do with a certain type of coloring which is not the same as the now-out-of-fashion olive-skinned color often associated with southern Mediteranean people.)
The author is an insular person, it’s nothing to do with being Chinese. It’s like my friend from Connecticut who said that her roommate freshman year was the first black person she saw other than on TV. Insular = insular, nothing to do with being from China.
Also the article smacks of “HOW DARE YOU call me ASIAN when I am Chinese!!!”. She should take her unchangeable heart back to China, or maybe pay attention in some of her classes about empathy for those with other backgrounds.
For full disclosure, I work with many international students including Chinese, Indian, Thai, Bangladeshi, Korean, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese, and other Asian students. They understand that the rule is, if you don’t get an idiom, you ask about it. And we understand the rule is, that if we use an idiom and aren’t sure if we are being understood, we rephrase it.
I have friends who grew up like my dad with English as a second language, and perhaps Ms. Zhang would be shocked at some of the idioms they don’t know. Here’s an idiom for you - get down off your high horse.
If my friend doesn’t know an idiom, they ask. I certainly don’t completely alter how I speak based on one person’s needs. She needs to be culturally sensitive as a guest in our country, as we need to be towards a guest in our country.
That’s funny, as an Asian American, I’m always one of the few Asians in (plug in a place). Get used to it.
7, it doesn't sound at all like whining.
'“In China, everyone puts too much stock in the fact that I go to Harvard.”
I think the same can be said of any American student who attends Harvard. ’
It can definitely be said of the US too. D1 says that in any new work or social situation the first thing everyone seems to know about her is that she went to Harvard. She never tells anyone she went there unless directly asked or is required to put it on an employment app. or some other form, but as she meets people who don’t know her but know of her they very commonly say “Oh, you’re the woman who went to Harvard.”
I think Harvard students say “I went to college in Boston.”
" I think the same can be said of any American student who attends Harvard. '"
Snap to that. I attended a non-HYP Ivy and it still is special that someone went to Harvard.
Mamalion, I bet you could make money in China and probably here in the US too giving “How my child got into Harvard” talks.
Nicely written story. I, too, have a mixed-breed dog but I’m not going to knock the creators of ‘Benji’ because it’s just a dog story. While there was nothing earth-shattering, I wouldn’t call any of it ‘whiny’ either.
I don’t see it as whining either, just a description of cultural difference and the difficulty even a smart and educated person has navigating between cultures.
China is pretty monolithic and thus insular, despite its ethnic minorities. Only two of their ethnic groups are another race (white, in the far west), ethnic minorities are at the very edges of the old empire, and basically everyone speaks Mandarin. Once you’re off university campuses, you can travel for days and not see another race. It is possible to find non-Mandarin speakers, but you have to travel far, and mostly they are elderly. The internet is controlled. Well into this century even colleges of foreign language controlled and monitored the use of foreign language on campus; the languages were taught in ways that erased political and cultural difference (“Wang ate breakfast”).
I am surprised at your opinion, rhandco. I work with international students, too. Some come from cosmopolitan cultures, and others don’t. I find it helpful to understand the difference.
I didn’t think it was whiny. I thought it was very, very well written – I would never have guessed that the author had spent only about three years going to school in English – and that it said practically nothing beyond what I would have assumed. Lots of us know what it’s like to be a stranger in a strange land.
About the only thing I learned from it was that Chinese humor apparently does not involve irony. Which doesn’t sound exactly right to me, based on the limited exposure I have had to Chinese humor.
@rhandco : I noticed the comment implying cultural uniformity in China, too. I think it’s probably emblematic of the experience and attitude of many Han Chinese, which is really not to see diversity in China, and to regard its supposed uniformity as a strength. I wish the author had gone deeper on the effect of going from a setting that was ethnically and culturally monolithic to a setting that is neither, and that defines the author as a minority.
@NoVADad99 An acquaintance recently mentioned a new employee at her branch of the State Department saying exactly that, word for word. When asked “What school in Boston?” (Since the city has only about 250,000 college students at 1,0001 different colleges and/or graduate schools), she answered “Harvard.”
YMMV, but this person’s reaction (later, not when speaking to the employee herself) was “Skip the $@#% pussyfooting and just say you went to Harvard. We’ve seen Harvard grads, HS dropouts, and everything in between.”
I personally don’t much care about impressing people who are wowed by nothing more than the name of someone’s alma mater, but I know others’ priorities will vary.
Asians living in the US are not 100% Asian anymore. But they are not 100% American either.
I don’t see anything special about the article.
Chinese students in all American colleges face the same cultural difference. Maybe the author think she is special because she is a Harvard student?