Flushing, Queens

Flushing is the illegitimate child of commercial Chinatown and the ghetto. Despite the fringes of outside society occasionally peeking in - an Old Navy, a Payless, the ubiquitous Golden Arches - it is mostly cramped and dirty and cheap. Sometimes the shopkeepers will speak English, sometimes they won't. The stores are stocked with foreign brands and unusual delicacies, the butchers sell strange parts of animal, and old women in ratty overcoats thrust pamphlets covered in characters as you walk by and try to ignore them. There are hipster asian boys in screenprinted jackets with orange mullets and cigarettes. We always eat at a si cai yi tang - four entrees and soup - where you are given rice and point to four dishes on a buffet-style table. They are invariably greasy and unreasonably tasty.

There's a man who always cuts my hair for eight dollars. The salon is merely two rooms - a main one, lined in mirror, and a back room where I once had highlights done back in eighth grade. Somehow, by cobbling together my broken Chinese and some pictures, he has consistently delivered the perfect haircut, every single time. After he finished chopping off six inches of hair today, he commented something to the effect of, every time you come in, you want something very different, a big change from long to short. You're young, I guess. He's right. I don't want to look better, I want to look different.

Race and a Dash of Religion

I was walking down the street in Flushing Chinatown with my parents, and there were people trying to pass out papers, and a man was having a noisy argument with them in Chinese. I caught a small piece, which was, "They killed my family!" I tried to ask my father what they were saying; I could guess, but I wanted to confirm it. At first he shook his head and tried to ignore it, but I pressed him, and he told me with resignation that they were against the Communist party, and that the man that was arguing with them was saying they would make the people lose faith. How beautiful; this situation unfolding was like a perfectly formed catalyst for my thoughts, a physical expression of a confused psyche.

I remember being in China, and the subject of Chairman Mao came up, and all that was defensive and nationalistic welled up to the surface in a kind of fervor that made me wonder, wonder about what I knew, about what they knew, about what I should believe. My mother's best friend in college was saying how the West only knew the bad parts of Chairman Mao, the 20 percent, and ignored all the good he had done for China. Of course I, the girl who had grown up in a capitalist country in a blue state, with her anti-red propaganda tattooed on her brain, met all of this skepticism. (but I meet everything with skepticism.)

And then I am back in the US, and everyone speaking so highly of democracy and the evils of communism, and I wonder, how much are we ignoring? How different are we, how blinded are we? And back to the man arguing with those expats on the street, do we willingly try to suppress all that is negative in the interest of preserving "faith"? It seems so silly to me what that man was saying, but maybe he was just voicing a truth, a truth that did not want pain, that wanted to blindly believe, like I was asked blindly to believe in God, because it needed no proof, it was just faith that was the reward.

I have so much difficulty believing.

*

Part of the reason my history teacher bugs me so much that is he seems to equate atheism with communism, and thus, pure evil. I hate the way he tries to put words into people's mouths, and when people struggle with giving him the answers he wants, and how they seem so perfectly formed and obvious to me. I remember getting so angry when he seperated the extremist Muslims from the normal, run of the mill ones, but lumped China into one, collective, evil, god-hatin', terrorist supportin' entity. (He said that they would be very likely to go bomb the White House.) And worst of all, I couldn't argue coherently at all because I was choking on my own anger, and I knew I would sound stupid and hysterical.

In the same vein, I hate when people refuse to acknowledge the shades of gray; there is a lot of space between 'good' and 'evil', between 'right' and 'wrong', and at best, those words are merely generalizations created for convenience. I remember also having this argument with my teacher last year, and he told me I had a distorted sense of reality. My position was that society defined the right and wrong, and that was no necessarily concrete right or wrong, and maybe he was frightened that I would give people ideas so they could reason away their murders and rapes and wars. But I was not saying that all, I was saying, isn't this interesting?

Isn't this complex, how little we understand, how self-loving and protective we are of our 21st century American ideals?

Can't we admit to differences in thought without worrying it will somehow undermine our own values?

*

I'm going to become a US citizen soon, mostly for college purpose. You know, scholarships and all, and yet, I'm the slightest bit hesitant to relinquish that bit of legality, and I blame China for not allowing a dual citizenship. Though it really is more practical to become a US citizen, considering I probably won't visit China very often anyways, it's more of a symbolic gesture. I hated when my mother would always jokingly, mockingly, would say how I was the American in the family; she is right, of course, being that I hardly understand where she is coming from sometimes, and I have a much easier time eating cheese, but it's cruel to reduce someone down to their barest components like that.

My dad was quite touched when I brought it up, and he ruffled my hair affectionately. They really want me to be Chinese, or as they say, take the best of both worlds. I remember when I was younger that I hated that identity part of me, and my mother would only exacerbate it by reminding me that I would never be the same as others no matter how "American" I became, because I would always have my eyes, my face, that would separate me. And how ironic, that when I finally accept it, am proud of it even, that it somehow seems to be falling away.

*

Everyone must have their own private superiority; the Americans hold their government and economic clout dear, the Chinese have faith in their intellectual and manufacturing ability. I remember sitting in the kitchen, and my mother asked me out of the blue, "Do you think Chinese people are top in the world?"

How do I respond to that? So I kept quiet, and she sighed, and went back to cutting the vegetables. I thought how racist that was, but the more I think about, (a lot of) Americans are guilty of same kind of cultural superiority, the ugliness of ignorance, the justification of pervasive culture. Is it so hard to accept that things are different in other parts of the world, that attitudes are different, without attacking them? Sometimes the ugliest things are flying under the guise of patriotism. I'm probably guilty of this myself.
Posted on Mar. 22nd, 2005 at 04:02 pm