Not Zero-Sum: Perspective of an Ordinary Chinese American
In the era of Trump/Putin/Xi, an ordinary Chinese American's hope for solidarity (Chapter Five)
← Chapter Four: "The World is Flat"
Chapter 5: Globalization, I’m its Product
In 1971, the 31st World Table Tennis Championships was held in Nagoya, Japan. One day, Glenn Cowan, a 19-year-old American ping pong player, had been running late from training, and he accidentally boarded the shuttle bus carrying the Chinese national team. While most Chinese players treated Cowan with suspicion, Zhuang Zedong, China’s best player, came forward to shake his hand and spoke to him through an interpreter. When they parted, Zhuang presented Cowan with a silk-screen portrait of China’s Yellow Mountains. While Cowan didn’t have anything worthy of gifting at the moment, he returned the gesture the following day by giving Zhuang a t-shirt emblazoned with a red, white, and blue peace symbol and the Beatles’ lyric “Let It Be.”
Given the backdrop where the US and China had fought each other during the Korean War in the early 1950s and haven’t had any diplomatic relations since World War II, the goodwill between Zhuang and Cowan became the talk of the tournament. The timing was auspicious—leaders on both sides of the Pacific, increasingly wary of the Soviet Union, already harbored secret thoughts of a closer relationship. Ping Pong Diplomacy became the spark that jump-started thoughts into actions, and the rest became history: Mao extended an invitation to the American ping pong team to visit China, the US returned the favor to the Chinese ping pong team, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger began backchannel communications with his Chinese counterpart, and President Nixon shocked the world by visiting China in 1972.
In 2002, Zhuang recounted the chance meeting: "The trip on the bus took 15 minutes, and I hesitated for 10 minutes. I grew up with the slogan 'Down with the American imperialism!' And during the Cultural Revolution, the string of class struggle was tightened unprecedentedly, and I was asking myself, 'Is it okay to have anything to do with your No. 1 enemy?’”
I can imagine Zhuang sitting on the bus seemingly nonchalant, while an inner tug-of-war intensified, pitting curiosity against the admonitions of the Communist Party. Ultimately, man’s innate desire to connect with others prevailed. Ping Pong Diplomacy became a folktale in both China and the US, even making a guest appearance in Forrest Gump. The diplomatic rapport that followed eventually presented my parents with the opportunity to immigrate to the US.
When I asked my mom what motivated their move to a strange land thousands of miles away with a foreign language requirement, she shared several reasons. Through word-of-mouth, my parents had heard about the opportunities in the US—better living conditions and significantly higher salaries that seemed too good to be true at 7x exchange rate. These anecdotes didn’t match the Communist Party’s propaganda that the rest of the world was suffering, and so my parents wanted to seek the truth for themselves. The June 4th Tiananmen incident in 1989 also played a role in influencing my parents’ thinking. To them, it revealed the limits of reforms and brought back shades of the bloodshed during the Cultural Revolution. So too, my parents were looking for an adventure—an undetermined life. At the time, many jobs (especially those for college graduates) were allocated by the Chinese government. At their respective institutions, my parents saw how their lives would play out for the next 30 years if they stayed, although they couldn’t have predicted the staggering transformation that China would undergo. And so, they studied English, applied to American university graduate programs and scholarships, and boldly boarded a Boeing 747 plane with three large luggage and 7,000 RMB ($1,000) each. My mom moved first in 1992, and a year later, my dad followed her.
In a sense, by relocating to the US, my parents became active participants in globalization. Like resources finding their highest value through market allocation, immigrants gravitate toward places where they can reach their full potential. The immigration journey, however, was fraught with hardship. Within a few weeks of landing in America, my parents began juggling classes and schoolwork in a foreign language, as well as part-time jobs as both waiters and TAs. The only respite was a game of cards (sheng-ji) on Friday nights with other Chinese graduate students. During this initial phase of acclimation, if my parents were sustained by future plans and dreams, those ideals were rarely part of everyday reality. Instead, the first few years were all about basic survival: finding a job / maintaining legal status, paying bills / making ends meet, and earning the right to stay in the US.
As early adopters of globalization, my parents also experienced much of its friction. Upon receiving their Master’s degrees, the clock began ticking on the one-year Practical Training countdown to first secure a job and then work. To continue working legally beyond Practical Training’s expiration after the first year, the employer must be willing to sponsor a conversion from student visa to H-1B visa. After several promising interviews derailed by the mere mentioning of H-1B visa—most employers had no idea what the term entailed—my mom learned to wait until the job started to drop the surprise. Once approved, the H-1B visa bought another three years on the clock, six years if an extension is granted. The extra time allowed the employer, if they choose, to navigate the convoluted course of sponsoring permanent residency on behalf of the employee, a trying process that took years—eight years in my parents’ case.
For my parents, freedom didn’t come with the Bill of Rights. Freedom came only after they were granted permanent residency—the green, plastic card that affirmed their right to stay in America. Without it, they couldn’t visit friends and relatives in China, or they risked denial of re-entry to the US. As a result of this constraint, my grandparents hid poor health statuses over long-distance calls, acknowledging only when the episodes had passed. They had learned from experience that telling the truth only worried their son and daughter and did no good when there was nothing that could be done. For my dad, who had applied for permanent residency for the family, he also could not switch jobs or change roles, or the application would start over. Luckily, he worked for a company that valued all of its employees and treated them with dignity—a stroke of good fortune (a necessary ingredient in any immigration success story) and a source of my family’s gratitude.
Looking back through the lens of my own work experience, those years must have been stressful ones for my parents, when a job loss could have ended their immigration experiment, forfeiting progress built upon years of perseverance. Only after securing the green card—12 years after their initial arrival—could they breathe a sigh of relief and celebrate. They had made it in America.
If obtaining the green card was an achievement, a milestone for immigrants, it was also a glass ceiling—a barrier to dreams. The uncertainty that delayed any planning was similar to that of pending college applications—you didn’t know what was next or where you were headed—except the wait for a green card lasted years rather than months. My parents spent much of their lives laying the foundation that would allow me to participate more equally in American society. But for their own journeys, the difficult immigration process and communication in a new language proved the two biggest factors of circumstance that molded their ambitions. Although globalization has rapidly advanced, not much progress has been made to simplify the path of legal immigration in the US.
While my parents were struggling, China was quickly growing more wealthy. A sizable portion of my parents’ former co-workers became millionaires, mostly through investments in real estate, and in some cases, simply through the increased valuation of their own home. Yet a couple years ago, when I asked my mom whether she had any regrets moving to the US, her answer was a decisive “no.”
Besides quality of life—China’s growth often came at the expense of clean air—my mom loved life’s simplicity in America. Guan-xi, or connections, and not your abilities, was often the key to getting anything done in China (bureaucracy was not a good fit for my mom). She also spoke of the abundant resources in the US; roughly the same size as China, but just 1/4 the population such that a brick house with a flourishing garden was an attainable dream, whereas it would have been prohibitively expensive in China.
And lastly, despite the hardships, my mom embraced her immigration experience, even the obstacles that had become her adventure and life stories—asking strangers for help with a flat tire, bartering for parts at a junkyard, earning tips as a part-time waitress, and building her career in computer programming from scratch—stories recounted with chuckles of pure delight. Of course, there were also plenty of blissful moments that compensated for the adversities: catching crabs from the Gulf of Mexico, observing a talented squirrel steal food, tending to her beautiful garden, and watching her son grow up in America… The ups and downs on the journey formed some of my mom’s fondest memories, they were evidence that she had lived life to the fullest.
If my parents participated in globalization by moving, I became a product of globalization as a result of their move. As a kid growing up in China, I had overheard adults banter and formed the vague impression that the US wasn’t friendly to China. Yet from their tones, I also detected an antagonistic admiration that coincidentally mirrored my own experience. As an avid young reader of all things WWII, I knew the US and China had fought in the Korean War and more vaguely that capitalism exploited the common people, but what was more relevant to me had been the transformer cartoons that transformed into my inventory of toys and the stolen sips of Sprite, the cool sweet taste that awaited me inside the green bottle behind the white magnetic door after school, while my parents were still at work—I was a recipient of American soft power (and drinks).
When I moved to the US in the summer of 1996, I gained exposure to the American side of the story. For example, other kids would remind me that China was communism while I would remind them that China was bigger in size. The trip across the Pacific also made my scope irreversibly global. While my former classmates were dealing with heavy loads of homework, pressure from Chinese junior high entrance exam, and elation or disappointment pending its result, I was navigating foreign diplomacy in the form of American diversity at Campbell Junior High: the white kids majority party, the Mexican kids minority party, the black kids minority party, and me, the lone Asian representative. To improve relations, I was learning to communicate with the other parties at a rate of 50 vocabularies per day, and I was also trying new exotic food: (Cici’s) pizza, the hot sticky stretchy cheese on the pizza, the funny shaped pasta, the uncooked vegetables known as salad…
Looking back, moving to the US was the singular event that defined me. It put my life on a different trajectory, exposing me to thoughts and feelings that I would not have otherwise experienced. The inability to communicate converted me from an extrovert to more of an introvert by default. I learned what it felt like to struggle, I learned what it felt like to be marginalized, and I also gained intuition of what things mattered—what can be counted on when circumstances changed. Though like any teenager, I still sought popularity and over-indexed on appearance, there was an undercurrent of self-reflection, an inner reminder that I needed to remember where I came from, not necessarily the country—though it is one form of application—but the struggles that I had gone through.
I had known the struggles were not my fault, it was no one’s fault really. But when the plane landed in Houston, my circumstances had changed; they had transitioned from majority to what felt like handicapped minority. I remember the time a kid accidentally picked me third for a basketball game when he said Jerry when he really meant Jared. I quickly moved over to his side, giving him no time to correct his mistake. Our team promptly got crushed, as I unintentionally ran with the ball and Jared made 3-pointers for the other team. I didn’t care, I was just happy I got picked third. I remember reading out loud in class and pronouncing assuage “a sausage” that had the whole class roaring with laughter. And I remember strangers driving by shouting slurs or imitating Asian accents poorly that ruined whatever activity we were engaged in.
These struggles not only drove me to prove myself, prove to others that immigrant / minority does not equal inferiority, but their imprints would also consistently steer me toward the middle, between people, groups, and cultures as I tried to reconcile the different parts of my own existence, recognizing that the kid who got on the plane in China is the same kid who got off the plane in America, and that the kid who ran with the basketball was the same kid that now had a decent crossover. While I became better at sports, I tried to be both competitive and inclusive, believing that everyone has something to offer; while I tried hard to be cool, I never fully conformed to popular culture, maintaining a vestige of my own judgments deeper down; and while I embraced American values—democracy and freedom—I never abandoned Chinese heritage, never fully Americanized.
It was like we were avatars in a video game, and the rules of the game, the KPI of esteem had changed when I landed in America. My new valuation was lower compared to others’, my former experiences discounted or deprecated for newer features, so that extra efforts were required to catch up. Except, when I eventually caught up and had the opportunity to transform into a different avatar, I never fully transformed. Instead, I wanted to build my own character, one that kept the player history intact—Steven had shown me the possibility, like Kobayashi Maru à la Captain Kirk.
I must have needed what Steven did, because it came back to me time and time again, a beacon of hope amidst feelings of lost, injustice, and disappointment, reminding me that I can always choose my own path despite adolescence’s trials and tribulations. It was one of the life jackets that kept me afloat in my turbulent teenager years, as I grappled with the pursuit of popularity, others’ acceptance, and perhaps something more meaningful.
Chapter Six: 2008 - Two Proud Moments →
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Chapter Five End Notes:
For Ping Pong Diplomacy, I relied on the following three sources: 1. https://www.history.com/news/ping-pong-diplomacy 2. Huang, Rune-Wen; Gants, Connor (March 7, 2008). "Diplomacy in the Sports Arena" 3. Zhuang’s recount of the chanced meeting during a TV interview in 2022 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-pong_diplomacy)