What does it mean to be an American? That was the question that was going through my mind as I was reading the essays. To be honest, I don’t know what the real answer is, but I have thought about this question multiple times. Last year in the Arts in New York City class, I went to the Museum of Chinese in America for my final presentation. This museum has an exhibition that focuses on the Chinese American experience from early trade to today. It showed the particularly rocky experience of Chinese Americans and how they dealt with the discrimination and exclusion. One of the questions that was raised by the exhibition was, what does it mean to be an American?
“You are American by birth.” It’s a notion saying that, if a person is born on American soil, that person is automatically an American. This is a really neat concept, but this didn’t really apply to the Chinese Americans during the exclusion period. Even if they were native born, Chinese citizens had to carry their identification papers everywhere they went, or they would risk deportation. A Chinese American that was given citizenship at that time was not treated as one. It seemed really odd to me when I read that the Americans at that time were complaining about immigrant groups not assimilating when they were actively denying Chinese Americans a place in society. This discrimination and exclusion towards Chinese Americans pushed Chinese Americans to form their own communities which maintains stronger ties to their homeland than many other immigrant groups.
To the Chinese Americans, there were no melting pot. Chinese Americans were just an ingredient deemed unworthy to even enter the pot. That was until the exclusion period ended. Chinatown opened up to the rest of society and it was the first view of Chinese Americans. Chinatown was a popular destination for tourism, grocery, and “exotic” Chinese food. Chinese cuisine was changed. Dishes such as chop suey or kung pao chicken aren’t genuine Chinese food, but were created for the purpose of attracting customers. That is what I believe it means to be American. It means a group coming into a society and responding to the society to create a unique culture that incorporates both the cultures of the homeland and the new society.
