Chinese American Family Cut Offs
If you know, then you know that the 4 words that comprise the title do not feel… right together. Each word alone speaks a real and sordid truth, the combination of the words together create a black-hole, a deeply amnesiatic space in conditioned psyches of Chinese Americans.
It is not uncommon to have an emotionally disappointing Chinese American family. It is not uncommon to have an extremely abusive Chinese American family. And none of those facts can move the ultimatum conditioning and roles of holding an Chinese American identity: that you can never leave your family.
I have a conflictual, wounded, and work-in-progress relationship with Ascended Master Confucius. From what I know of him, I do not completely understand him. But what I know of him, has been heavily distorted with a heavy patriarchal and oppressive lens, that I can not trust what my culture has taught me of one of the most influential philosophers and thought leaders of Chinese culture.
The root of the distortion “Family comes before all: before your dignity, before your suffering, before your own life” lies in some of the officially transmitted principles taught by Confucius. Because of China’s imperial and disgustingly oppressive reach to conquer other peoples in other nations in body and spirit, the officially transmitted Confucian principles have gone to impact the moral and family functioning of tons of other cultures (ie: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, etc). With that, our Chinese moral and social disfigurement has become tons of other people’s problems as well.
Let’s break this distortion down into smaller pieces, because I know that the cultural conditioning is so pervasive, simply looking at the distortion is unlikely to awaken the truth in you.
The distortion of the family unit being more important than your life has origins in the principles that Confucius on-record listed of Ritual 禮 pronounced “Li” and Filial Piety 孝順 pronounced “Xiao Shun”. On surface-level read, it seems to be a nice theoretical concept. It is a nice idea to give respect to our elders and express our respect through established rituals that let us know that we are honoring a specific world order.
However, when we incorporate the understanding that this world order placed men above women and chronologically older people above those who have incarnated later, we run into oppressive constructs of patriarchy and scarcity mindset/territorialism (aka “I was here first and I won’t let you take space or benefits away from me”).
In one of my past/parallel lives, I remember a lifetime of being a Chinese woman in Southwest China in the early 1900s. From my experience there, I do believe that Ascended Master Confucius may have laid these principles out to curb patriarchy and gender violence, and instead highlight an ideal family hierarchy where men see their role as to protect women rather than to rape and violate them. Before Confucius’ time, the violation of women was already a normalized aspect of Chinese society. Likewise, I believe Ascended Master Confucius sought to remind elders (those who have experienced lessons and hardships) that it would be beneficial to nurture and guide newly incarnated humans so that our society could flourish from the lived human experiences of those already incarnated and coexist in a safe and supportive container.
What happened in between Ascended Master Confucius’ loving dream for the world and the 21st century Asian reality I live in… is a lot different but also not really all that different. Those ideals of gender respect and supporting those with your expertise will only be effective if the people have the heart to follow them. What has evidently occurred is that elder men hollowed out those words and used them to create a hierarchy where they would feel justified to demand lifetime service and obedience from women and younger folk while being entitled to feel superior to them.
An enduring evidence to this cruel distortion is the Chinese cultural devaluation of women. When I was growing up, it was very common to see Chinese girls being adopted and raised here in America. We need to face the cruel reality underpinning this fact. Chinese families are systematically conditioned to devalue their baby girls to the extent that it is acceptable to abandon their baby, let them die or be subject to some other unknown fate. This does not happen to Chinese boys. As a college student, I used to work summers as a Mandarin Chinese translator for adoption agency projects where a bunch of Chinese orphans would come to the United States to meet and greet potential American parents who might adopt them. From these experiences, I learned that the only time Chinese boys would ever become orphans is if they had a birth defect, physical or cognitive. In contrast, Chinese parents have been abandoning healthy baby girls by the river side for centuries.
Not every Chinese woman has the experience of being abandoned by the riverside and left to wander their whole life. But every Chinese woman has had the experience of needing to hold their tongue when a man is committing inequalities to them: be it literal gender or sexual violence or the invisible transformation of becoming a man’s domestic servant through cooking, cleaning, and life management for the man. These are the consequences of the actions of our ancestors.
The elder/younger oppression dynamic is what makes me the most concerned because peoples’ memories of their suffering as young folk has proven to be amnesiatic as they transition into oppressing others once they grow up to be elderly. With Chinese women, I do believe we have made progress in this aspect of social justice and readjustments to equality and we will continue to make more progress. Those advances are because women (for the most part) always stay women, even when they age. We have a remembrance and encyclopedia of the wrongs and injustices.
However, due to our biological aging process, a formerly abused younger person will one day become an elder who then feels entitled to project all their past experiences of being mistreated onto a new unsuspecting young person. We cannot stop this cycle of abuse if we are unable identify that it is happening. This seamless cycle of abuse becomes packaged into Confucius’ word of Ritual/Li 禮 . By encasing age-related oppression within the natural biological family unit, those who have distorted the ascended master’s words have likened this phenomenon to being a part of our natural and spiritual world. “This is just how things are as Chinese family because it has been this way for millennia. Mom and Dad are free to physically or emotionally abuse their kids. Kids have to structure their life choices to please the narcissistic whims of their parents, while abandoning the idea of having an individuated life. The cycle repeats when the kids become adults and have their own children. They then project on to their children all of the unresolved trauma they incurred when they themselves were children.
Let’s examine how much more detrimental this filial piety distortion becomes for Chinese Americans.
The Chinese identity is and has been propaganda since its Sinicization expansion efforts of the Zhou and Han dynasties. Sinicization is a neat little word that explains in essence, what Spain did to Latin America. Through forced occupation into non-Han Chinese lands, the Chinese empire sought to make Other people become Chinese people. Naturally, this idea of forced identity sounds very silly. I am who I am, you cannot tell me who I am. The Chinese empire achieved their Sinicization by suppressing and destroying aspects of other cultures, promoting their Chinese cultural aspects for non-Chinese to assimilate into, and sealed the deal by racially mixing with those non-Chinese populations to create hybridized children who shared Han Chinese and other cultures’ genetics. This was likely done through a mixture of consensual intermarriage and also colonial-style rape. This propaganda of everyone being “One Chinese” has started millennia ago, and China hasn’t really ever stopped pushing it.
Everyone take pause for a moment: If you know your heritage to be Chinese and your known ancestors do not come from the northern provinces of Hebei, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, or Shandong, you are the product of millennia-long forced cultural and ethnic assimilations. You carry at least some lineage and genetic markers of oppressed peoples that include Austroasiatic groups, Kra-Dai, Hmong-Mien, Baiyue, Qiangic, Tibeto-Burman groups.
There has been almost nonstop pressure to expand and protect the Chinese identity. Racism is used to engender positive affection for the Han Chinese group and discourage racial mixing unless it is an absorption into the Han Chinese umbrella. Forcible family and cultural pressure for young people to make babies is part of the imperial agenda to expand the Han Chinese bloodline and legacy as much as possible.
Chinese Americans are a group of people who carry the lineage of all this twisted history, but now live in a new land with new cultural norms and philosophies. They are a group whose sub-culture will undoubtedly have differences from either the Chinese or American cultures, and yet will pay respect to these primogenitors of our subculture. But Chinese Americans have a violently turbulent psyche, because both of their primogenitors are some of the biggest imperial powers the world has ever seen. Every time that Chinese American seek to harmonize and participate with American culture and attune to themselves to the cultural rhythm they live in, Chinese immigrant parents yank the leash they’ve placed onto their children.
“Remember who you are, you are Chinese. You cannot be all of those other things you want to be. You can only be the Chinese identity established through millennia of oppressive casting and molding. And if you don’t care to be Chinese, you would care to still be part of this family. If you go against my wishes as an elder, you’ve chosen to step out of the family structure that has been fossilized into the Chinese psyche since the Zhou dynasty. Do you wish to, in one fell swoop, lose your identity, your roots, your heritage, your family, and your actual survival system in a land where you don’t actually look like you belong?”
If a Chinese person in China chooses to cut off from their abusive Chinese family in order to take care of their mental health, it is hard but they will still feel they are Chinese through the myriad other interactions and relationships they have in their daily life. But a Chinese American doesn’t have all of that. In a lot of cases, their only tie to their culture is the family that gave birth to them. If their family chooses to be abusive, many Chinese Americans suffer in silence for the rest of their life because they’d rather be abused than lose their identity.
I want to put these four words together Chinese American Family Cut Off. I want our Chinese American family to remember that we always have exits. Our heritage should give us strength and warmth, not choke us from the life we were given. Our relationships with people should be embracing of our full selves, not performative and instrumental. We should not be used as instruments for other people or for millennia-old propaganda.
Not every Chinese American will feel the need to cut off ties with their family to protect their mental health, but I’ve seen in my personal and professional life that there are way too many Chinese Americans afraid to stand up for themselves against their families because they’re worried that their identity will dissolve. I want to remind our Chinese American family that our heritage and DNA is our own. It lives in our blood and marrow. This can never be taken away from us even if we refuse to be our parents’ or our family’s slave.
There’s not enough of us out there yet who endeavor to find out who we are as an Chinese American peoples without the chains of the past. I don’t have solid answers to what will come out of it, but I am very certain we will experience the sweetness of expansive freedoms if enough of us feel daring enough to step outside of our particular prison.
