Chinese American Albert Chen, 25, said he came to China to discover his family roots and to build a start-up company using his engineering background. Photo: Courtesy of Albert Chen
Bicultural people
For Carol Liu, a documentary producer and director who has lived in Beijing for almost six years, it is both a blessing and a curse to be a Chinese American.
Carol Liu was born into a Chinese family in Los Angeles. She has a bachelor's degree in English creative writing from Stanford University and a master's degree in film direction and writing from New York University. She was working at a production company as a freelance creative before coming to China. During her China stay, she produced and directed the documentary film Restoring the Light, featuring the work of a local humanitarian doctor in rural China.
In her opinion, ABC people can be faced with challenges when both people in China and the U.S. are skeptical about their understanding of Chinese or American culture and professionalism.
Carol Liu said in China she was generally regarded as a Chinese person since she was raised with strict Chinese cultural practices. "Problems arise when Chinese people assume I am not American enough, for example, when someone defers to my blonde American friend for American business advice when I would have been more qualified to answer the question," she said.
On the other hand, she also met American people, from an American company, who deemed she was not Chinese enough because she speaks "such good American English," despite the fact that the person had never been to China before.
"It is ironic because it is precisely bicultural people like me who can better help build intercultural bridges because we are more aware of cultural differences," she said.
Due to health problems triggered by Beijing's environmental pollution, Carol Liu has returned to her home in the U.S. But she continues to work on projects related to China and said she plans to work in China again.
The sense of returning
Chinese American Mary Peng came to China after she graduated from Columbia University; she was among the earliest overseas business people who came to China in the early 1990s. She founded Beijing's International Center for Veterinary Services in 2006 and has stayed in China for almost two decades.
She remembered when telling her father, who emigrated to the U.S. from China's Henan Province, that she was going to China to work, her father was upset because their family had to endure so many hardships to settle down in the U.S.
"I told him that there are more opportunities in China," she said.
Like many ABC, Peng said China is where she discovered how American she is, and that she just happens to have Chinese heritage.
"Chinese people use 'huijiale' (returning home) to describe all ethnic Chinese when they are in China," said Peng. "But with that also comes a tremendous amount of assumptions that the person can understand the culture and the language. It is extremely hard for us to meet these expectations."
Peng believes the number of Chinese Americans coming to China is rising. She suggests that ABC that are planning to come to China should keep an open mind during their stay.
"Don't assume that you will automatically understand Chinese culture," said Peng. In her opinion, Chinese Americans maybe the group that go through the greatest cultural shock, and have a greater sense of disappointment.
To become fairly fluent or functionally fluent in Chinese language is very important, said Peng. "Foreigners with Chinese heritage are expected to know a lot more mandarin than someone not ethnically Chinese. It might not be fair, but that is the reality that you face in China."
Lee left China at the end of July. Before returning to the U.S., he declined an offer from an international school based in Shanghai that pays quite well, and spent a while working as a freelance video editor in Thailand.
Lee concluded that his China stay was "challenging and humbling." He said his career goal is to become a digital nomad and it is possible he will come to China again, depending on factors such as pollution, the employer's internationalization standards and the scale of the foreign community of the Chinese city.
