Observe the Chinese Community in the Original Chinatown of San Francisco

Chinese Community

The Paradox of the Chinese-American Community in San Francisco -- a New Province of an Ancient Land is Created Upon American Shores

What does it mean to be Chinese-American? Perhaps, to answer this question it is best to ask what it means to be Chinese. To be Chinese in China means to speak with a Mandarin, Cantonese, or another dialect particular to one's region and location in that vast land. It is to be either of rural or urban location in one's manners and customs and birth. It is, in other words, to have a distinctly territorial and ethnic identity within a highly complex and evolving country that is still coming to terms with the legacy of Maoism. China today is still building an economy on a worldwide scale that delicately balances its past traditions with the needs of the global marketplace.

To be a Chinese-American, however, is to be one of many immigrant groups in the equally complex young nation of America. America is a mosaic of different cultures and ethnicities, rather than a composition of past provincial identities. A tourist may simply gaze at a face of a woman or a man in San Francisco's popular Chinatown and see a Chinese-American. In fact, that individual may be a recent immigrant and have a strong cultural allegiance to his or her 'mother' country and a particular set of cultural expressions and dialect. Or, that individual might not speak Chinese at all. That individual might simply identify him or herself as an Asian-American, a cultural designation with no meaning outside the United States. After all, in the geographical region of Asia itself, individuals of all cultural backgrounds have strong nationalist allegiances, but individuals from the Asian region in the United States have formed a common cultural and political currency to advocate for their legal and cultural rights.

The complexities of Chinese history and Chinese-American identity are embodied at the exhibit at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco's Chinatown. The exhibit chronicles the history of Chinese immigrants in America. Entitled "The Chinese of America: Toward A More Perfect Union," the exhibit shows how different individuals of different backgrounds and beliefs from China were forced to unify once they arrived at the borders of the United States. Individuals whom would never have known one another in China became married and had children, or pursued occupations they never would have dreamed of pursuing in their national land of origin. By participating in this American experiment of pluralism, they created a new form of Chinese identity, and also became more unified with individuals from China whom they may have perceived as alien, had they met them in their original cultural context.

The paradoxes of the Chinese-American identity are perhaps even more manifest upon a stroll through San Francisco's Chinatown itself. At first glance to an outsider's eyes, the 'exotic' elements of local cuisine draw his or her attention. An individual simply wishing to catalogue such exotica might take pictures of fortune cookies being made by hand in a shop window, or a dead duck still bearing its head hanging in a butcher's shop. However, busy people with cell phones, rapidly switching from one language to another, show that modernity and the trappings of tradition are constantly juxtaposed on the streets of Chinatown. Yet even the Chinese slang words of such modern teens are not those of a Chinese youth of China, but of individuals particular to the Chinese population of San Francisco.

The various rituals currently observed, from the paper dragons to the music played, that accompany the celebration of this lunar year of the Monkey, are not a transplantation of Chinese traditions in their totality, but a blend of various Chinese provincial traditions of the past, and an entertainment spectacle put on for individuals whom have traveled to Chinatown to eat American-sized quantities of Chinese food to celebrate a calendar they do not observe, with fire crackers and joy.