One of the new things I did earlier this year was to travel to my Grandpa’s home alone.
My Grandpa lives in Jieyang in China, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a prefecture-level city, (…), ranking below a province and above a county in China’s administrative structure“. I always had a hard time describing what Jieyang is since it’s not exactly a city nor the countryside. I’m glad I now have a definition I can give to others.
To me, China was always my Mum’s country, and Grandpa’s home was always Mum’s home, not mine, so I had never thought of going to Grandpa’s home without her. Which today sounds very odd.
Being born in Paris and raised partly by a Mauritian family (yes, that’s a long story I’ll save for later), I’ve never really felt connected to my Chinese roots.
I was always the only Asian in class or at school, so there was nobody I could discuss or relate my Asian background with, which made me kind of, if not really, ignorant about China or Chinese culture for the first fifteen years of my life.
There was this one time in secondary school when one of the school’s supervisors came to me and asked me: “Are you Chinese? Because you’re different from the other Chinese people I know.”
I remember being puzzled by her question. It was obvious to me that I was French. I didn’t feel offended, hurt, or any negative emotions. I didn’t feel the need to reject the word “Chinese”, or the opposite, to defend it, because this statement “You’re different from the other Chinese people (IN A GOOD WAY)” was clearly a negative judgment about Chinese people.
Even though at this point I had been to China several times to see my grandparents and I could speak a Chinese dialect, I was genuinely ignorant of what “being Chinese” meant.
Being Chinese felt like a vague concept for a long time. My childhood was way too far from being the typical childhood of a Chinese immigrants’ child. I was French-Chinese child born to a single mom (which was quite rare at that time, and might still is!) raised by a religious Mauritian family (I used to go to church every Saturday Morning, pray before each meal, and we never ate pork).
There were so many layers to my identity, all intricately intertwined.
The few things I thought I knew about “being Chinese” weren’t flattering. Chinese people were often too loud, too dirty, and too impolite. “I am NOT like them.” I used to think.
And yet, I always had a fascination for China: the food (omg, the food!), the energy, the beauty of the landscapes, the gigantic sizes of the cities, the behavior of the children (who seemed so mature compared to us, to me), the cultural norms, the traditions. Everything, everyone was so different from what and whom I knew. Traveling in China was always a cultural shock. A slap in my face that would scream “You know nothing about the world“.
And it was true, I knew nothing about this part of me.
Asking my Mum about my grandparents’ story, trying to connect more to my cousins and my aunts who live there, and making the effort to speak my dialect without mixing it with 50% of French words in my sentences helped me to fill some gaps.
Now, returning to China as an adult makes me see this part more clearly and embrace it even more.
I see Chinese people with curiosity rather than judgment. What used to appear like “too loud, too dirty, too impolite” is now “They are loud, but they are as loud as Americans, or Italians, and we (French) can be loud too!” or “They are not as polite as Japanese people, but they are so much more friendly!”.
For a long time, I just thought I was French. Then, as I grew up, I slowly learned about the Chinese part of me. Today, I’m still learning what it means to be Chinese, and the more I learn, the more I love being Chinese.
I’ve never been torn between my multiple cultural identities. And those with multiple cultures shouldn’t be. Because our cultural background doesn’t have to define us.
But what I don’t want is to let others’ biased perception define what it’s like to be Chinese, or even French, especially from people who haven’t been in any of these countries or haven’t done extensive research on the culture. To really know and understand something or someone requires us to be open, curious, and to actively ask questions and seek answers by ourselves.
I’ve been to China more than fifteen times, and what I can say is, I still don’t know what it means to be Chinese.
But traveling there alone this time felt different. For the first time, it didn’t feel like I was visiting someone else’s home. It started to feel, in some unfamiliar way, like it was also mine.
So maybe I’m now in a very Chinese time of my life. And maybe, being Chinese, at least to me, is to feel at home in a country I used to feel a stranger in.