Dean O’Brien We Aren’t That Different
“Ni e le ma?” I ask my grandma. “Are you hungry?” She doesn’t respond. She can’t hear that well anymore. I ask again. She looks up from her knitting and shakes her head no. She isn’t hungry. My mom stepped out to get some groceries and has left me to keep an eye on my grandma. Her health hasn’t been the best of late, but she’s in all-right shape for her age.
She goes back to her knitting, and after a few minutes she asks me, without looking up, “Ni juede Beijing hao haishi Shanghai hao?” I’ve just gotten back from studying in China, and she wants to know what I thought about the home country.
“Wo juede suoyou de chengshi hen hao. Danshi dui wo lai shuo Shanghai bi Beijing xiandai.” (I think all the cities are nice, but in my opinion Shanghai is more modern than Beijing.) I’m struck by the fact that this is the most complicated idea I’ve expressed to my grandma in my entire life.
She nods and says, “Wo xiao shihou, wo fuqin dai wo qu Shanghai.” (When I was little, my father took me to Shanghai.)
We were speaking in Mandarin, a Chinese dialect that neither of us speaks natively. In this conversation I learned more about my grandmother than I had in the first twenty-one years of my life. Speaking slowly, I asked my grandmother about her childhood and her life in China. I learned that my grandma grew up in Fujian Province, a coastal region in southern China. There she spoke the local dialect at home but learned Mandarin in school. She and her family left for Vietnam during the Japanese occupation in World War II, and it was there that she married my grandfather, raised my mother and her other children, and learned Cantonese, the Chinese dialect that my mom’s family speaks.
When I was little, I was also able to speak Cantonese, but once I entered school, I pretty much lost it all. My dad can’t speak Cantonese, so we didn’t speak it at home, and as my English got better and better, my Cantonese fell by the wayside. I can still understand the language, but when it comes to constructing sentences, I’m unable to express even simple ideas.
Before studying Mandarin, the time I spent with my grandma was always awkward. Neither of us could speak the other’s language very well, so conversations revolved around yes-or-no questions asked by my grandma, which I did my best to respond to. Once, when I was seventeen, I had to take my grandma on a ninety-minute drive with only the two of us in the car. She tried to make conversation, but whenever she asked me something complicated, I had to respond in Cantonese, “Ngor m sick gong.” (I don’t know how to say it.) After this happened a few times, she laughed and said to me jokingly, “Gam do zung man saai saai.” (So much Chinese wasted.) We were silent again for a little while before she told me that her biggest regret was never learning English.
I sometimes wonder what my grandma thinks of her life in the United States. She’s been in this country for over twenty years, but her interactions in that time have been limited to family members and a few Chinese speakers on the occasional trip to Chinatown. I wonder what she thinks of her half-Asian grandchildren who, like me, can’t talk with her because we didn’t grow up speaking Cantonese with both of our parents.
In our first real conversation after I returned from Beijing, my grandma asked if I had a girlfriend. I said that I did and she asked if she was Chinese. I told her she wasn’t. My grandma then jokingly asked, “Weishenme? Ni bu xihuan zhongguoren ma?” (Why? You don’t like Chinese people?) I didn’t have a good answer, but she eased the awkwardness by saying that I should bring my girlfriend to visit sometime.
I probably didn’t have an answer for her because I don’t often think about race. I know that my mixed racial heritage has colored my experiences in many ways, but not in a way that is exclusive to race. Because I have grown up with two different cultures, the idea that there are multiple valid perspectives on life has always been salient. Therefore, my story isn’t really about race but rather about seeing things from different perspectives and, I like to think, being a better person because of it.
Early Days
I grew up in Pleasant Valley, New Jersey, a town that has the same juxtaposition of cultures and values as my family. It is a peculiar mix of new and old and is filled with minor memorials to the past. My elementary school is named after a tavern where General Washington and his soldiers stayed during the American Revolution. The fenced area outside the church on Main Street was used by the Revolutionary army to train and exercise horses. An old schoolhouse, no longer in use, stands on the corner of a now busy road, a testament to the passage of time. Pleasant Valley was once a farming community, and we still have relics from that time as well. Every autumn the town celebrates the Harvest Fair, and Thomas Orchards has its Apple Day. The farming families have mostly gotten out of the business and sold their land, but a few remain. The farming done now is more emblematic than sustaining, but there is a variety of local produce available. The Smith family still runs its corn stand every summer, and a cooperative organic farm allows residents to buy a share of the weekly crops. But this is a different kind of farming, representative of a different kind of people. The blue-collar farmers who once populated our town have been pushed to the periphery by a younger generation interested in products that are organic, fair trade, and carbon neutral.
The farmland has slowly disappeared as neighborhoods have expanded. I grew up in a one-story ranch-style house on the busy main road that runs though Pleasant Valley. For the better part of a decade, I waited outside the house every morning for the bus to take me to school. The bus would pull up and I’d climb on, say hello to Ed, the bus driver, and take my pick of seats; mine was the first stop, so I could sit anywhere on the empty bus. I usually took the seat right behind Ed. He had hair down to his butt, always wore tie-dye, and loved the Grateful Dead. I didn’t know anything about the Grateful Dead and didn’t understand the mix of skeletons and colorful bears that decorated the bus, but Ed was always interesting to talk to. He was a strange guy, and I think that’s why I liked talking to him so much—I felt we both were kind of misfits. Unlike most adults, he was approachable and warm and seemed genuinely interested in whatever opinions my first-grade self cared to share.
Every morning the bus took the slight left onto Jacob’s Creek Road and followed the meandering path to Pleasant Ridge, the neighborhood where most of the kids on our route lived. The homes there could only loosely be called houses; “manor” or perhaps “estate” would be more accurate. Each house had a professionally manicured lawn, stately entrance, luxury cars in the driveway, and an immaculate pool in the back. Looking out that bus window, I saw a world that was not my own, and for many years I was envious of the pristine storybook setting that many of my classmates seemed to take for granted.
One of my earliest school friends lived in that neighborhood. Carl had just moved to Pleasant Ridge in the summer before first grade, and we were in the same class. Spending so much time together on the bus and in school, we became fast friends. It was about this time that I began to notice that my family operated very differently from those of my friends. When I visited Carl’s home, the first thing I noticed was how clean everything was; his family had a professional housekeeper who came every week to help tidy things up. I didn’t know that such things existed. At home, my mom took care of cleaning, and we didn’t have the same emphasis on neatness. It’s not as if there were dirty dishes everywhere, but things didn’t need to be put away if they were going to be used again soon. As long as things were functional, it was fine.
Tony, my closest friend at the time, also lived in a stately home. Both his parents worked in the city, so he was often left in the care of an au pair. This concept was very strange to me. I couldn’t understand why parents would want a stranger to live with their family and take care of their children.
Those early experiences with my classmates shaped the way I viewed the world. When I think back on that part of my life, I see that all the social anxieties I felt were a result of the underlying class divide. I felt different from my friends, but it had nothing to do with my race. From a very young age I saw the world as having lots of little self-contained parts. The rich lived a different lifestyle from the rest of us, and when the two worlds interacted, I always felt some discomfort. As I’ve gotten older, that strict separation of people has seemed to fade. This might be the result of attending a prestigious university and being somewhat more accepted as a member of the elite, but I’d like to think that it stems more from a realization that material differences are superficial. I think I realized this as a child without being able to articulate it.
Still, for the young me, life was made up of little arenas, each of which had its own set of rules, customs, behaviors, and participants. There was a distinct separation between the two large arenas of my childhood: school and hockey. One of my fondest early memories is of sitting in the warm-up room at the old rink at Princeton Day School. Every Saturday in winter my mom would get me up before sunrise, and my dad would take me down to the rink. That rink was the epitome of old-time hockey. It had a roof but was open to the winter elements on three sides. The warm-up room had a little black woodstove with a big pile of logs stacked next to it. As our parents laced up our skates, the only sound we’d hear was the dull roar of the Zamboni resurfacing the ice. When the Zamboni was finished, we’d step out into the foggy rink and skate for the rest of the morning.
Hockey was one place where the ordinary structure of my life was removed. Sure, we had a schedule and the game had rules, but there was never any pressure, and I think that’s why I loved it. It didn’t matter whether I played well or lost the game for the team. The freedom I had playing hockey was also very different from the structure in my education. The difference in these two parts of my life seemed to represent the differences between my parents.
My dad never pushed me in anything, but when I did show interest in something, he would help me pursue it. At Back to School Night in my junior year of high school, my composition teacher gave the parents a questionnaire to help get to know them and us better. One of the questions was “What are your hopes and dreams for your child?” My teacher showed me what my father wrote: “I have no hopes and dreams for Dean. I only hope that he follows his own.” This perfectly captures my father’s attitude toward parenting. On weekends, my dad and I often went to coffee shops to sit and read, and to get out of the house. The best part of these outings was the drive over, when we’d talk about everything and anything. I’d often ask my dad for his opinion on the trivial problems I’d been having at school, and he’d give me the same reassuring answer, that I was just stressing over things that didn’t matter. We’d talk about the experiments he was running at work and about the new inventions we’d read or heard about. Being with my dad always gave me a release valve; he was a person with whom I could vent my frustrations and who would always listen without condescension. He rarely pressured me, yet I was always aware of what he thought was best.
I had a very different relationship with my mother. She rarely gives praise. Whenever I came home with a grade that was less than perfect, she focused on what I did incorrectly and needed to fix. I hated this and dreaded having to show my mom my tests. When I did get a perfect score, she’d glance at the paper and say, “Okay.” Never “Good job.” My mother set very high goals for me, and throughout elementary school she would assign me extra work after I finished my homework each day. We fought about it often. I’d tell her that none of my friends had to do extra work. “I don’t care what your friends do,” she would say, and I’d resign myself to her demands.
My parents argued regularly about how to raise their children. My dad saw my mom’s constant pushing of my brother and me as abusive, while my mom saw my dad’s laissez-faire attitude as neglectful. Neither could accept the way the other felt because neither could articulate what he or she was trying to do in a way the other could understand. They couldn’t see that they both wanted the same thing: to give their kids the skills we needed to survive on our own. I can see now that neither my dad’s loose attitude nor my mom’s rigid structure alone would have been very good for me. Without my mom pushing, I wouldn’t have a strong educational foundation, but without my dad, I would have lost the desire to learn a long time ago.
My mother and father can see the world only from their own perspectives, but now that I’m out of the house and my brother will be soon, my parents don’t fight like they used to. They don’t argue, but I wouldn’t say things are better between them. They don’t sleep in the same room anymore, the house I grew up in is falling apart, and they both seem unhappy, yet neither can manage to leave. Maybe deep down they really don’t want to, or maybe they’re too broken/dependent/loving/fearful to break it off and start over. I think my parents were never really able to see beyond their cultural differences.
For many years my parents argued about my mother’s mismanagement of her medication. She has bipolar disorder, and when I was a kid, she was in and out of psychiatric facilities because of her inability to stay on her medication. My father couldn’t understand why it was so difficult for her to take a pill every morning, but more critically, he could not understand how strong the stigma of mental illness is in Chinese society. When I was younger, I couldn’t really understand it either. I couldn’t understand why my mom would continually take herself off the medication she so clearly needed.
I was in second grade when my mom was first hospitalized. For several days her behavior became less and less like that of the mom I had known. The living room floor was covered with pages of ink sketches, each one slightly different but done with the same hurried hand. Chinese and French songs echoed eerily through the hallways. The mom I knew didn’t draw. She also never sang. My mom’s family didn’t make things any easier. They couldn’t accept that my mother’s illness was the result of a chemical imbalance and thus they blamed my father, saying he was the one who made her crazy.
I didn’t understand why my mom found it difficult to stay on her medication until I was faced with a similar experience in my own life. During my sophomore year of high school I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. For six months, doctors tried to get my immune system under control, and they eventually found a medication that worked. The medication had to be injected, and they said I would have to take it every week for the rest of my life. This idea didn’t sit well with me. I couldn’t accept that I would have to take medication forever in order to have a normal life. So I took myself off it. At that moment I truly understood why it would be difficult for my mom to accept that she had to take a pill every morning for the rest of her life, even though it clearly helped her stay “sane.”
I guess it comes down to being able to empathize with others. Often the only way to do that is to have walked in another’s shoes and experienced life the way that person does. In a cultural and racial sense, I grew up living two lives and experiencing two cultures. I’m most grateful for this aspect of my upbringing.
Later Days
At my maternal grandmother’s house, conversations were always infused with collectivist values. My grandma and aunts would tell me to keep an eye out for my younger brother. In their eyes, if he did anything wrong, it was partly my fault. This held true for all of us. If I did something wrong, it was partially my cousins’ fault because they should have been keeping track of me. There was never any distinction between siblings and cousins; all the kids were lumped together. We spent more time with extended family than most kids I knew. When I was little, I asked my mom why we did this, but she didn’t seem to understand the question. To her, family is the most important thing, so spending so much time at Grandma’s was what we should do. I don’t want to imply that I disliked our family time; I actually enjoyed it and think I’m closer to my aunts, uncles, and cousins than most other people are to theirs.
My family experience was certainly different from what I experienced at school, where there was always an emphasis on self-sufficiency and an underlying belief that you alone own your successes and failures. My teachers told my parents that I was a quick learner, which was probably due more to the extra homework I did with my mom than to any individual quality I possessed. I think there are advantages and disadvantages to experiencing different worldviews. I’ve tried to experience life from as many angles as I can in the hope that I’ll never get stuck believing or doing something that doesn’t make me happy.
I’ve tried to stay friends with a wide variety of people, and my best friends are some of the strangest people I know. For four years I played on my high school ice hockey team, which was full of clowns. Of all the athletes in the school, the hockey team had the lowest GPA. We were the only team that had mandatory afterschool study halls because some players were in danger of becoming academically ineligible for sports. These guys couldn’t take anything seriously, but I couldn’t have asked for better teammates. Playing on that team helped me keep everything in perspective and reminded me that not everything in life should be serious.
I had a lot of friends in high school who were really into live music, psychedelic art, hiking, and the environment—a kid from suburban New Jersey’s version of the counterculture. There’s a nature preserve at the edge of our town that has miles of trails cut through it. My friends and I spent countless days hiking through this area. This was our sanctuary, a piece of the world that was entirely our own. A long time ago, glaciers carved the terrain of the preserve and left behind huge rock formations. We nicknamed one of them the Hippie Rock. We’d bring beer and maybe some pot, and spend endless summer days there lounging on the rocks, hidden by the surrounding forest. We’d talk about anything—music, philosophy, girls, sports. It was our oasis from the real world where we could simply be carefree. It was a welcome contrast to the pressures that came with high school, college admissions, and growing up.
My hometown is a mostly white, liberal area, and because of this, most of my friends were white and pretty liberal. In high school, when we discussed national issues, the conservative argument was often ridiculed, which is the background I brought with me to college. I have to say that I’m happy to have had the privilege of meeting so many people there whose beliefs are different from my own.
When I first arrived at college, the presidential primaries had just begun. Since our school is in New Hampshire, which has the first primary, it was a big deal. It was in this environment that I had my first real experience with conservatism. While drinking beers together, some of my floor mates and I discussed how we felt about the candidates and the direction of our country. I don’t really remember who said what, but I do remember being asked questions that I’d never expected from conservatives. These were rational people with rational concerns, and they were asking the same kinds of questions my liberal friends would ask. For the first time the conservative position made sense to me, and I liked that. These people were very different from the gay-bashing Bible thumpers who used to come to mind when I heard the word “conservative.” As with my parents and their beliefs on parenting, the differences I saw between conservatives and liberals were differences in application. The goal for both groups was the same: a better country.
At college I got another opportunity to branch out in a way that I couldn’t in my hometown. College was the first place I’d been that had a number of Asian Americans, and by extension a fair number of Asian and Asian American organizations. I’d never been in any predominantly Asian groups before, so I went to the meetings of a couple of these organizations. After a few meetings, though, I decided they weren’t for me. I didn’t fit in, I didn’t speak any Asian language well, and I just felt that I didn’t have much in common with the people in these groups. I didn’t have many Asian friends while growing up, and it struck me that most of these people hung out almost exclusively with other Asians. I guess when I went to the meetings, I felt like I was faking something. As a half-Asian kid, I felt as if people at these meetings expected me to be someone that I wasn’t; there was an implicit pressure to like everything about Asian culture simply because it was our heritage. I just wasn’t into any of it as much as everyone else seemed to be. I was just looking for a place to hang out with people who had a similar cultural background. I stopped going to the meetings.
Nevertheless, during my sophomore year I found I did want some connection with my Asian heritage. I hadn’t yet fulfilled the language requirement for graduation, so I decided to take Chinese. After completing first-year Chinese, I had to choose whether to continue with my Chinese studies. I decided that I didn’t want all the work I had done to go to waste, so I went on the foreign study program to Beijing.
I was excited about going to China for two main reasons. Before going to China, I’d never left the East Coast. I guess I’m pretty homegrown, and since all our family lives in the Northeast, I’d never gone anywhere else. So I was excited about going to China simply to visit someplace different. More important, though, I was excited about getting in touch with a part of my background in a way that I never had been able to do on my own. Whenever we went to Chinatown, I had relied on a family member to communicate. By going to Beijing, I’d be able to experience China and explore my Chinese-ness on my own. Before studying Chinese, I was afraid that as I got older, I’d be locked out of lots of the things I did as a kid because my language skills weren’t very good, such as going to the markets or restaurants in Chinatown. It was mostly this fear that pushed me to continue my Chinese studies.
A few months before going to China, I was with my aunt at Jin Men, a grocery store near her house that sells Chinese food. I could read a few characters on the labels of the items for sale, and I heard phrases that were straight out of the dialogues we had meticulously memorized for class. “Wo zai nar fu qian?” (Where do I pay?). “Yigong shi duo shao qian?” (What’s the total?). For the first time these foreign sounds made sense to me outside the sterile academic environment of the classroom. This was real life, where real people were going about their daily lives.
On my first day in China, I was up at 5:00 a.m. because of jet lag, so I decided to go out and get breakfast on my own. I found stands all around selling dumplings called baozi; each serving plate has anywhere from eight to twelve, depending on where you buy them. I wanted only half an order, but I didn’t know what the measure word was. Should I say a plate? A serving? A tray? I went up to the fuwuyuan, the service person, and asked for yi ban (one-half). She looked at me confused and asked, “Yi pan?” (One tray?).
“Bu shi. Wo zhi yao yi ban.” (No, I just want a half).
She was still confused, so I told her that I wanted six baozi.
“Liu fen baozi?” (Six orders of dumplings?).
I still couldn’t get my meaning across, and ended up just motioning that I only wanted half the tray. She finally understood. It was frustrating, but I chalked that one up in the win column because I ended up with what I wanted.
On one of the first days we were in Beijing, my friend Peter and I were exercising at the university’s track. All around the city and the university campus we had seen proclamations on large banners that promoted the Chinese nation or the Communist Party. At the track we saw a similar banner and wondered what it meant. “Hmm, ‘Every day [two unintelligible Chinese characters] an hour,’ ” I said. “I wonder what that means.” “I don’t know either,” Peter replied, and we forgot about it. A few days before we left Beijing, we were back at the track and noticed the same banner. We turned to each other and laughed because sometime during the last three months we had learned the missing characters. It read “Exercise one hour every day.”
Before going abroad, I had been pretty convinced that learning a new language was simply beyond my ability. But once I was there, more and more of the world around me became accessible as I learned more and more of the language. It wasn’t easy, and at times it was pretty frustrating, but being in China was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
There were things I had expected to be very different in China that ended up being similar to how they are in the States. For example, in one of our classes we got to see a documentary about the indie rock scene in China. There were punk rockers with Mohawks and tattoos, and teenagers with shaggy hair and skinny jeans—things that I didn’t expect to see in China. I guess I expected China to have one culture, as if all the Chinese would believe and act the same way. I expected everyone to be really excited about Spring Festival or making dumplings or something like that. It wasn’t rational, but it was the image I had in the back of my mind. I also hadn’t expected the regional differences we encountered in both language and customs. In Beijing, for example, you call waitresses fuyuyuan, but in other parts of the country you call them xiaojie, a form of address which is considered offensive in Beijing.
After being in China I started to feel that for the most part everyone everywhere is fundamentally the same. China is a communist country; a council appoints the president. The government screens movies and television to look for political criticism. Even Facebook and YouTube are blocked. And yet people’s lives are more or less the same as they are in the United States. Shopkeepers run their shops, office workers go to work, professors teach, students learn, and life goes on. Sure, the faces are different, the food’s a little unfamiliar, and everything has Chinese characters on it, but these are just surface differences. I think I feel that way about being biracial. There are clear and undeniable differences between the Asian and Caucasian sides of my family, but on a more fundamental level they are exactly the same. Both my mom and my dad and all my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents care for me; they just show it in different ways. Every country, every ethnicity, and every family has its own different set of values, traditions, and customs. When it comes right down to it, you just have to find what’s right for you.
As for me, I’ve discovered that I’m not Chinese and I’m not Caucasian. There are customs that I like and values that are important to me from each, but I’m not simply a sum of these two parts. To describe my racial heritage is simply that—a description of one aspect of my life. There’s a lot more to the story, and I can’t talk about my life without talking about all the other parts—my friends, my hometown, or the meandering experiences that have shaped the way I view the world—because all of them are an equal part of who I am.
After graduating from college, Dean moved to New York City to work as a consultant. He plans to return to academia to pursue a Ph.D. in computational neuroscience.