 Michael Lind, a co-founder of the New America Foundation and policy director of the Economic Growth Program. And I'm here to welcome Eric Liu to talk about his book, A Chinaman's Chance, One Family's Journey in the Chinese American Dream. It's a particular pleasure to welcome Eric back. He was president some of the early discussions that led to the formation of the New America Foundation. And he's been a fellow or a friend off and on for the 15 years or so. It's existed. His very distinguished career as a public intellectual and commentator and civic entrepreneur. His first book, The Accidental Asian, Notes of a Native Speaker, was a New York Times notable book featured in a PBS documentary, Matters of Race. He is also the author of Guiding Lights, an official book of National Mentoring Month, and co-author of the Bestselling Gardens of Democracy. He's a columnist for Time, a regular contributor to The Atlantic. And he told me before this event that he's founding a new program on citizenship and American identity at the Aspen Institute. So we wish him well about that. Among other things in his very distinguished career, he has been a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton. And I want to start our conversation by quoting from his book, by far the most consequential speeches I wrote for President Clinton were for the 1994 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day and the Allied invasion of Normandy. Here was a Gen X son of Chinese immigrants crafting words for the first baby boomer president and a son of the South as he thanked the GI generation and the father he never knew. So that's a remarkable story. Well, Mike, first of all, let me just say thank you for having me, thanks to the New America Foundation for hosting us and for all of you for coming here today. It's really been great over these 15 plus years to feel like part of the New America extended family and always to get to come back and visit with you. Mike, as some of you may know, is really one of this country's great thinkers on the meaning of American identity. One of his many, many books back in I think 95 or 96 called The Next American Nation is one that really stands the test of time and one that I would commend to you all because it really explores in a very sweeping historical way cross ethnicities, cross different time periods, some of the questions that I try to look at for Chinese Americans in particular in this book. You know, Mike, that story about President Clinton and working on the 50th anniversary of D-Day is really fresh in my mind right now. My fiancee, Jeanet, who's here today, she and I six weeks ago were in Normandy for the 70th anniversary. We went with a good friend of mine who had been a fellow speechwriter back then and his wife and I'll tell you, going back there now is the first time either of us had been back since 1994 was just such a powerful and moving experience to not only of course be in the presence of the surviving veterans of D-Day, but to be reminded of some of the larger themes that I was trying to weave into that passage in the book, the ways in which every one of us here doesn't matter whether you are of an immigrant generation, whether you are like me, second generation, whether your family's been here for decades or for centuries, what your ethnicity is, the sense that all of us right now, just by virtue of being here today, are beneficiaries, trustees, recipients of this legacy of sacrifice and this legacy of contribution that people long before us have paid into and paid often with blood in their lives. And D-Day is probably the most signal representation of that because this was literally a moment where history pivoted and had D-Day gone the other way. We probably would not be sitting here. We'd be sitting here with different flags and different languages as the way we speak here in the United States, but that sense of obligation and debt to generations past, to fathers who we either never knew or knew too little in our lives, that was very much a theme in D-Day and in the commemoration of that event, but it was also a theme and is a theme throughout the pages of this book, which really, I try to explore both on the level of family story and also on the level of national story, what it means to be Chinese American in this moment of China and America, this moment of China versus America increasingly and how both at a personal level and just as a citizen, I and we reckon with that balance. Well, tell us a little about your family story, which you treat very eloquently and poignantly in the book. Yeah, and I will acknowledge in the first place, my mother, Julia Liu is here, my uncle, Cien Liu and aunt and cousin are all here as well, Amy Liu, so we've got a great Liu family turnout here and one of the storylines that is woven throughout this book is just tracing the arc of the Liu family journey and I start in many ways with my paternal grandfather, whose name in Chinese was Liu Guo Yun and those of you who are Mandarin speakers know that that is a name that Liu is a family name and Guo Yun basically translates to deliverance or destiny of the nation, right? So a big name to carry, a lot to live up to and a name which he did indeed in his lifetime live up to. He was a young man at the time when the kind of dynastic rule ended in China and the Republic of China was birthed and entered the military, became a pilot, entered the Air Force of the First Republic of China, fought in the war against the Japanese and then fought later against the communists and though I never knew him, his name, his legend in a way, his visage, I mean just literally his face looking down at me from a very stern portrait in our study at home very much shaped my sense of self, of family, of place and the sense again of obligation, right? And what it planted the seed of a question essentially which is for me, for all of us now, what does it mean to deliver a nation? And in my instance in particular, having been born in the United States and raised in the United States, what does it mean to deliver this nation? So it starts a lot with the echoes of that grandfather and I tell the stories as well of my mother's arrival here in the United States and how arrival stories themselves can be told and held in different ways depending on the larger point that either one is trying to make or the larger story that America wants to hear in that moment. One way you can tell my mother's story is this kind of classic immigrant story of a scrappy young woman who arrived on our shores with very little money in her pockets and through her own wits made her way and got educated and so on and so forth. And there are some people who would like to tell that story that way. But another way to tell it is that by the time she came to the United States she'd already been educated. She was a graduate of Taiwan's biggest university. When she came here she was not a stranger in a strange land. She was greeted and housed by people who were students, former students of her father who'd been a professor in China and Taiwan. And so she arrived on these shores if not with a lot of money, with a lot of social capital already, with education, with relationships, and yes, with her own wits and wherewithal. One of the emblematic stories that I tell in the book for my mother is that one of her early jobs was as a file clerk at a company in Manhattan which still exists to this day I think called Chock Full of Nuts, a coffee company. And she was a file clerk and with a decent command of English and just kind of learning her way through and doing her job and as she worked there at Chock Full of Nuts this kindly older executive, an African American man sort of just looked out for her, asked his secretary to look out for her and make sure that my mom knew how to navigate the corporate structure and made sure that everything was working out okay for her. And it wasn't until years later after she'd left the company that she learned that this older executive, Mr. Robinson, was actually Jackie Robinson who in his retirement from baseball had gone to Chock Full of Nuts just to be a senior executive. And so you can tell that kind of story and think wow, immigrant woman coming here with nothing touched by this mythic American and this kind of, again, destined path to claim this country. Yes and no, right? I mean yes, all of that is true but the reality is that for my mother and for many other people, I think in Chinese America, many Asian Americans in general today, I think the national narrative about Chinese Americans in particular and Asian Americans in general, neglects the fact that so many people like my mother, like then me in the second generation who've been able to arrive and achieve and do things in this country, yes we had our own motivation and our skill and our wits about us but we also arrived here with tremendous advantages to begin with and when people talk about this model minority stereotype that prevails about Chinese and Asian Americans, they often forget the ways in which having that starting endowment of social capital, having an education already, having already an expectation that you would enter into a profession gives you a huge leg up in arriving even to a new country and that there are even today in the Chinese American community, nearly half a million people who are living in poverty, Chinese Americans living in poverty, not just brand new migrants but people in multi-generational poverty whose stories are not part of the picture who do not fit the model minority stereotype. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, he's a great social scientist in his own right, he made that point repeatedly that this myth that everyone arrived at Ellis Island completely amnesiac and not knowing anybody and then they all worked their way up that if you looked in his case he and Nathan Glazer studied European ethnic groups in the United States and there were divisions within the ethnic groups between what were called the lace curtain Irish and the shanty Irish and you see this in Chinese Americans and other groups and that gets left out of both of these somewhat contradictory stories. One is the model minority where everyone's got this or that set of skills and the other is the traditional Ellis Island narrative where people arrive amnesiac and destitute, right and then just completely reinvent themselves. No, I think in both cases you're absolutely right. What is neglected is class. What is neglected is the endowments of class and having this conversation right now in this moment where America is stretched apart, hold apart centrifically by some of the most radical and severe income and wealth inequality that we've seen period in our history certainly over the last 100 years means that this conversation about Chinese Americans this conversation about race and American identity can't just be about race. We have to begin to see the interplay of class and race and see the ways in which advantages acknowledged and unacknowledged form and open up paths for people like my family and many other stories. Let's talk about something you deal with in the book and the geopolitics of it, the changing view of China from our ally in World War II to a peer competitor as the Pentagon called it today. One of the interesting things you find if you look at the history of immigration in the U.S. is at any given time much of the immigration to the U.S. tends to come from the country which is the geopolitical rival of that particular era. So in the early American Republic it was Britain, right? There was the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and English immigrants were among the largest groups. Then you had German Americans being the dominant to the extent that the single largest ethnicity among white Americans to this day is German Americans and you had the two world wars which created anti-German backlash in World War I which had pretty much abated by World War II so that you had the Pacific Fleet commanded by Chester Nimitz, a German American and Dwight Eisenhower, another German American commanded D-Day. And what has often happened is and I wonder what your thoughts about this are. As the rising power, be it Britain industrializing the 1800s, Germany late 1900s, maybe China now. As it develops, it was often an authoritarian regime or in the case of Britain one where the aristocracy restricted upward mobility. So you had a lot of the talented upper middle class the educated elites either were forced out as exiles as in the case of Germany where they fled for opportunity like the British. Then as the country develops but also democratizes then the immigration tends to dry up. Do you think there are parallels there with what's happening in China? Now obviously your family came after World War II and during the Cold War. But there are reports in the press that a lot of successful Chinese are trying to transfer wealth abroad trying to get green cards. Well that is I think in the broad historical scope and by the way I mean one of the reasons why I commend to you Mike Lynn's books including The Next American Nation is this is the closest thing you will find on earth to a walking Wikipedia. Well we're interviewing you here. Yeah I know but Mike is I mean pretty much any topic on anything. Mike has a reference and a source and I love learning from Mike and talking about things and you know that that broad historical scope that is an interesting thing. I hadn't thought about it that way. I suppose it is quite true that the pattern is holding today even as China is rising there is a layer of Chinese elite who certainly are sending their children to the United States to get educated or trying to move assets to the West to the United States in particular. And if for no other reason than as a hedge. A hedge against instability and chaos that might still unfold in China. But I think there's a larger underlying theme to each of those historical examples you're describing which really brings us to this moment right now. And that is that from the beginning of the republic even when our immigrants were mainly English coming to quote assimilate among other essentially third generation Englishmen that from those early days all the way through today what has been this country's competitive advantage in the world has been our openness. Has been not just the literal legal openness of our borders, the millions upon millions of Irish and German and Italian other European immigrants who came here, you wouldn't call it illegally then because there was no particular immigration law but you would certainly call it uninvited by our government, right? Uninvited by law, uninvited by official United States that throughout the history of this country the cultural openness to these new arrivals and then the openness of our cultural operating system to welcome these folks and to take the strands of their styles, their voices, their approach to problem solving, their cultures and mesh them and weave them into a new form of American-ness. That story is still playing out today. And I think that this is again our competitive advantage in the United States if we don't blow it. This is a really big if. This is the thing that I really wanna underscore, Mike, which is that as great as China is becoming and as powerful as it is and some people estimate that by the end of this year or next year China's GDP will surpass that of the United States. A sea change is happening and nothing in particular that we do is going to change that. I don't care. No matter how great and surpassingly large China's GDP gets, we have this advantage that I boil down very simply this way. America makes Chinese Americans. China does not make American Chinese. China does not want to, does not know how to, is not interested in, it's not the point of China to take immigrants from America or Europe or Africa or Ireland or wherever it may be and fuse them into a culture and a welcoming spirit and allow them, empower them to change the very meaning and definition of Chinese-ness. That's not what goes on there, but that is what goes on here. It is the very point of here and it has always been the point going back to all the historical examples that you're citing. I think that's very important and it's something that I think all of the societies of East Asia, including the Japanese and the Koreans and the Taiwanese, they still just cannot imagine people from different groups unless it's very similar countries. There's a little story I tell in this book. It's not even about China, it's about Japan which I learned from a colleague who's a journalist who is I suppose fourth generation Japanese-American. He's a Japanese-American great-grandmother, but his name is Leslie Helm. He's German last name. He looks like his German grandparents and great-grandparents and he wrote a great book called Yokohama Yankee about his German family going to Japan 150 years ago and becoming traders and getting established there and how that legacy flowed into his life. He told me the story, Leslie did, about how I think in the late 80s, early 90s, when Japan was facing a labor shortage because of their low birth rates, they were trying to figure out, okay, how do we bring in guest workers? And this is a country even more than China, that is, as you say, so focused on cultural and racial purity and so resistant to outsiders coming in that they thought, well, instead of getting, you know, Pakistani or other South Asian guest workers as happens in a lot of the rest of the world, we have an idea, let's go find, it turns out there's a large population of ethnic Japanese in Brazil because of earlier generations of immigration from Japan to Brazil. So there's this large community of Japanese Brazilians. Let's invite them back to Japan, right, to be guest workers. And so they did this grand experiment and they invited thousands of Japanese Brazilian guest workers and guess what happened? What happened was that even though they were ethnically Japanese, even though most cases they could speak fluent Japanese, they completely were rejected by the host body. This transplant did not work because they were culturally Brazilian. They barbecued meat in their apartments. They created, set on, you know, kitchens on fire. They danced and partied in ways that were just not kind of known or accepted in the little cramped communities in Tokyo. And there was just this whole culture clash and they were like, but wait a minute, you're Japanese. And no, I'm Brazilian, right? And I think there again, this is an instance of the ways in which America for all our many manifest faults to this day and all our continuing failures, you need to look no farther than the southern border to live up to our promise of openness. For all our failures, that doesn't happen, right? We, the body does not so actively and regularly reject transplants. And we don't have this kind of immune system here that kicks out anything that is not of the body. But you talk about the Han Chinese, the ethnic majority in China, but it actually did grow through gradual assimilation as well as natural demographic growth, right? Over, and you had the imperial system and you had Confucianism, which you write about at great length. Very fascinating subjects. So what are the continuities in Chinese culture between pre-modern China and 21st century China? Well, I do not, in the pages of this book, pretend to be an authority on Chinese civilization. But what I do claim is that as a second generation Chinese American, as a son of immigrants who has grown up at least saturated in or suffused by certain values and norms and styles and mores that you could call Chinese, I do, in a sense, throughout the pages of the book, try to peel that apart and ask what part of me is Chinese and what is the essence of that chineseness? And a good measure of it does have to do with what turns out to be Confucianism. I didn't, you know, we did not have a household where we talked about Confucius or, you know, I didn't read the Anilex of Confucius till I was in college in a Chinese history course and I read it in English translation. And quite frankly, as I say in the book, I found the English translation very weird and dull and stultifying and kind of ill-fitting. And I thought the whole thing was a little bit just anachronistic. But several things have happened over my life to make me dive back deeper in. And I suppose the most basic one is becoming a father in my own right. But the second one probably is the passing of my father 23 years ago. And both of those things made me think a lot about the nature of inheritance, the nature of what we pass on in terms of our values and our norms and our beliefs. And it just turns out that so much of the way that I am both kind of constitutionally wired, I suppose, but also the values that I hold dear and what I try to pass on to my daughter who's a teenager now. What I try to practice in my work on American citizenship, which is a lot of the work that I do and I'm not writing, values of mutual obligation, of reciprocity, of understanding that we are woven into a web of relationship and expectation all the time. Values that set us into a larger historical context. Values that deny us the opportunity just to say, I am a sole individual cut off from history, reinventing myself without regard to anybody else around me. That all these values are in different ways in one kind of cultural strand or another, confusion. And that my belief, for instance, in the context of talking about American citizenship, that rights are not just rights. Every right we have under the constitution, every right we enjoy as Americans, can and should and must, if we're to remain a healthy grown up country, be coupled with a set of responsibilities. That rights are duties. Rights are not just set off by duties. Rights are duties. That if you have a right to bear arms, you have a duty to bear arms responsibly. If you have a right to free speech, you have a right to exercise that speech responsibly. That these things are woven together, that is a confusion ethic. And so one of the great joys of even writing this book was just to see the ways in which I was magnetically drawn to certain Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, Francis Hutchison or David Hume or others. But the reasons why I was drawn to them was because of these little seeds of confusion ethics that had been planted in me, again, often without express articulation, just the way that we were. We were pushing back against this extreme lock-in individualism. That's right. And lock is a great thinker in many ways. But he really is weak on social duty. And at one point, he explains that the reason soldiers fight in wartime is fear of punishment by their commanding officers. This is very transactional, materialistic, individualistic sort of thing. People often forget. So Adam Smith, who we often cite as the guy who wrote The Wealth of Nations and gave us the metaphor of the invisible hand for our marketplace, and is often cited by modern-day free-market fundamentalist individualists as their hero and kind of load star. People forget his second, in some ways, more consequential book, which was called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And The Theory of Moral Sentiments is exactly what Mike is talking about here. The ways in which bonds of affection and trust and mutual obligation and reciprocity, they are the glue that make anything work. They are the glue that make a market work. They are the glue that make a community work. They are the glue that make a family work. They are the glue that make a nation work. And so the part of me that is drawn to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, rather than Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, is a strongly Chinese part of me. And I would say in this moment right now to the earlier part of your question, the opportunity that America has today, when I said that America makes Chinese Americans and China doesn't make American Chinese, that's not just a statement of demographic curiosity or fact. Again, what it is is a charge and a challenge to American society. And the question is, can American society embrace Americans of Chinese descent, whether first, second, third, fifth generation, in ways that don't force them to assimilate to some other pre-existing white wasp way of behaving. To the extent that the United States embraces Chinese Americans but forces them to kind of become white, then we are completely undercapitalizing on this opportunity. If by contrast, the United States in our practices and laws and norms and culture embrace the ways of being, the ways of leading, the styles of conversation, the styles of leadership that Chinese Americans can bring to the table, which may not seem classically, Dale Carnegie, sell yourself, get out there, may not seem classically extroverted or self-aggrandizing in a way that a lot of American business and society likes to reward, then American culture will be enriched. And I think this is our challenge and our opportunity right now. Well, one of the basic aspects of Confucianism that's always fascinated me is this reverence for learning, for education, which you actually don't find in the West because in recent centuries, the West has been more economically developed and more scientific than Asia and other parts of the world. But historically, if you look at the two main influences on Western culture, you get Christianity, which says like the wisdom of the Greeks is the foolishness of God. And there's sort of an anti-intellectual strand there, but not in all denominations. And then there was this kind of European-British upper-class mentality where it's all about pedigree and birth and the upper classes are good at war and hunting animals and the lower classes write books as the king supposedly said to Edward Gibbon when presented with a presentation copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another damn fat, thick book, A, Mr. Gibbon, Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, so, and I was thinking about that when I was in Vietnam a few years ago and there was a Buddhist temple, it was supernatural, and then there was a Confucian temple, so that was very interesting, Confucian temple, what being the Confucian temple? So they had row after row of these still eye, these big tombstone-like carbon stones from the Middle Ages. So I asked my guide, you know, what was that? And he said they were diplomas. That is, when someone passed the Confucian examination in Vietnam, which at that time was modern, you know, looked to China as a cultural model, they had graved, the family had such pride that they engraved the name in stone, and so here you have, you know, 900 or 1,000 years later, essentially the diplomas, right? At a time when my European ancestors were, at least in Scandinavia, sacrificing human beings and along with goats and so on and, you know, a bunch of warlords, so that's a cliche which has some foundation and truth, doesn't it? You know, respect for learning? It is, and anytime you begin to explore and try to peel the onion of what is Chinese-ness, what is American-ness, what is the Chinese aspect of American-ness, you can go down the road of lapsing into cliche. It's certainly true that late in this book, I cite a work by an education psychologist, Chinese immigrant named Jin Li, and the book is called The Cultural Foundations of Learning East and West, and there's a part of her book where she has these two columns. One is European-American modes of learning engaging and one is Chinese modes of learning engaging, right? And both columns are filled with exactly what you would expect to be cliches. On the European-American side, it's about individual achievement, it's about drawing attention to oneself, it's about racking up knowledge in order to deploy it in the world. On the Chinese side, it's about acquiring knowledge in order to perfect oneself morally, it's about kind of reverence for learning, for the sake of learning, it's about, again, this sense of relationship and obligation. And you look at these two columns and you can say, oh, these are very kind of broad generalizations. And yet, as she herself writes in this 500-page book, there is a core of truth to both of these sets of cliches, right? And part of the thing that we get to and have to do as Americans is we get to mix and match our cliches. We get to mix and match the different strands of cultural identity and influence. And we get to borrow things that we think are most adaptive from one culture or another. And maybe shed the parts that are least adaptive, right? The Confucian reverence for learning, like so many aspects of Confucianism, got stultified, it became ritualistic, it became very oppressive, it became literally and kind of figuratively legalistic, just following rules for the sake of following rules. And that's why for, you know, my mother's father, for instance, who was a professor of European history in that time of, in China, part of what is called the May 4th movement of reform in the early years of the Republic there, had a strong distaste for the Confucian legacy in the sense that Confucianism was what used to hold back China, right? So it is possible to see in that legacy as much as in the American legacy of individualism and individual imagination, excesses that become maladaptive, excesses that stifle the society, right? And what we again get to and have to figure out as Americans is how do we take the best of these traditions? How do we kind of select the most adaptive aspects of being Chinese, being Scandinavian? You know, I live in Seattle, which is about as pure a distillation of an Asian Scandinavian society and fusion as you can find on Earth, right? And you get this melding of ways that makes Seattle a very communitarian place, a very, a place where people are not flashy, are not trying to draw attention to themselves, a place where there is a spirit of mutuality and family and obligation. And that's very different from, say, where you grew up in the South or where I grew up in upstate New York. And how we kind of borrow these strands and weave them into the most adaptive hybrids is the American question. Well, you'll be pleased to know that the actor who played Charlie Chan, Warner Oland, was Swedish. So. A great American story, I suppose. Well, why don't we open it up to questions, comments from the audience? Again, welcoming Mrs. Liu, the Liu family in the audience. Any questions, comments stimulated by this discussion? Yes. I'll take a microphone. I'd like to have you discuss how you decided on the title. Given that some of your preface remarks seem to say that you did come from a relative degree of privilege, education, social standing, ties, and yet the phrase or the term, he doesn't have a Chinaman's chance, means totally the opposite, that he had no way of succeeding. And yet your story seems to be the opposite of that. That's a great question. So the backstory of the title itself, of the book, I actually tell on the opening pages of the book. My father, when he came to the United States, was a real, he loved language. He was a real sponge for slang and idiom and just the way that people talk. And somewhere early along the way, he came here in the late 1950s, he heard someone use this phrase, a Chinaman's chance. And somewhere along the way, he understood that that was a phrase to be used against people like him. It is a phrase for those of you don't know that has its origins 100 years earlier in the 1850s when Chinese immigrants first started coming to the United States in large numbers and whether it was in laying the tracks of our transcontinental railroad or mining our mountains, these Chinese laborers were given the most thankless, dangerous, life-threatening tasks so that a figure of speech arose that you've got a Chinaman's chance of surviving. And that figure of speech survived, ironically, long after the era that gave it birth. And so that by the time of the 1950s, when my dad got here, it was still in popular enough usage that he'd heard it. By the time I was a kid and was growing up, my father did what I think is a great American act. And I don't mean great in the sense that history books record it, but I mean great in the sense of this is the essence of what it means to be American. He took a word or a set of ideas that were meant to be used against him and he re-appropriated them and he flipped them around and he turned them upside down. So he started to take this phrase and to use it at home in a joking, ironic sense, just on applying it to everyday prosaic situations. Oh, it's the ninth inning of this baseball game. The Yankees have a Chinaman's chance of winning this game. They're behind by five runs or if we were trying to get to the grocery store before closing, but it was, but we were 15 minutes away. Oh, you've got a Chinaman's chance of getting there on time. And so my father would just do this in a joking way and by doing so, essentially teach me some bigger lessons about how wit can neutralize malice about how new Americans can claim language and change the meaning of that language, right? And so that's number one about why I use that phrase. But the second reason, even apart from that particular family story, is that again, part of the thesis, the argument here of the book is that, the key words that I said in my remarks earlier were if we don't blow it, right? That America has this advantage, has this open cultural operating system that fuses the best of all different cultures around the world if we don't blow it, right? And that means if we don't lapse into fearful restrictionism, if we don't lapse into isolationism, if we don't lapse into racial antagonism in our society, if we preserve the spirit of open hybridity that has always made this country what it is. And so to me, a good bellwether in this moment where China is rising and its rise scares many Americans, a good bellwether for whether America is doing its job and succeeding at its design is whether people in this country of Chinese descent find that their chances for success, for opportunity, for voice, for fulfillment, for power are most best expressed here in the United States than say in China, right? If people like me, people like my friend Scott Tong, who I grew up with, second generation or other generations are finding that gosh, it's way more attractive to pull up stakes and just go to China and seek my fortune there and raise my family there because that's where it's at right now, then America will have failed. America will have failed at its fundamental purpose, right? And indeed this is part of the story that I tell throughout the context of my family. Several of my uncles who came to the United States and came here and got great educations and came here and got good jobs but found during the 80s when Taiwan began to rise that wow, it was actually more attractive to go back to Taiwan and to make a go at it there, right? I look at that and I'm very proud of the success that they achieved in business and in education and in politics in Taiwan and from a Liu family perspective, that's a great thing. But from the vantage point of my country as an American, I think that's a darn shame, right? It's a darn shame that this country was not magnetic enough to hold them here and did not create enough opportunity so that their fullest sense of potential and voice and power would have been channeled into American life. And so I want that chance which once was denied to people called Chinaman to flower to its fullest extent here so that people of Chinese or any other ethnicity find that the place where they can be their fullest selves is still here. Well, there'll be a permanent Chinese diaspora culture. The reason I ask that is if you look at the very populous Western countries and also Mexico, if it had not been destroyed deliberately during World War I, there would still be a huge German language infrastructure here. You know, there's a Spanish language and it just seems to me that given the scale and the size of the Chinese diaspora that that would be a permanent feature. So even as some Chinese Americans assimilate, you would have immigrants and you would have this infrastructure, this kind of bilingual bicultural in the way that you have now particularly with Spanish, the Spanish speaking subculture. So two quibbles I would make with the premise of the question of word choice. One is assimilate and the other is diaspora. So let me say a word about each of those. So I don't believe that the watchword of our time here in 2014 is assimilate or assimilation. I don't believe that the point of America is to assimilate immigrants in the sense that, you know, mold them to a preexisting form. Okay, let's just, but linguistically. Yeah. Right, so third generation Latinos often speak no Spanish whatsoever. I'm just speaking about that. Oh, that's totally true. Yeah, so that I agree with. But I would say a cultureate more than a assimilate, right? Because even as those third generation Latinos or in the case of my daughter, third generation Chinese Americans begin to lose fluency and command in that heritage language, they're at the same time changing the baseline of America. Hispanic immigrants are changing the baseline of our politics, of our culture, of our media. Chinese Americans are as well. So that's number one. But the diaspora point, I think, is an even more important one to really for us to chew on together here. I resist in some ways the idea of Chinese diaspora. I also resist in particular the phrase and the idea of overseas Chinese. This is a phrase that is said and heard a lot in the news, in global affairs, in, you know, not just in the context of American life. The idea that you're either Chinese in China, or you are an overseas Chinese, right? And if you're an overseas Chinese, you are simply a member of the mothership society who happens to be somewhere else, right? And that member of the, you know, that notion has some cultural truth to it. Certainly if you look throughout Southeast Asia, you see Chinese minority communities that essentially have stayed isolated and stayed linguistically and culturally coherent and have neither wanted to nor actually been allowed to acculturate and integrate into the wider society of Malaysia or Indonesia or the Philippines or Singapore or what have you, right? There's some truth to that. But even if there's some truth to that in other places in the world, again, the point of this place in the world, the United States, is not to treat people as essentially guest visitors from a mothership diaspora, whether Chinese or Jews or Germans or whatever. But to treat them as Americans. Americans of another variety, right? And so two points of terminology that I often make a point to express. One is I label myself Chinese American without a hyphen. I don't hyphenate because to me the hyphen, I say Chinese American. American is the noun and Chinese is the adjective or an adjective. It is one of many adjectives that I could use to describe my identity, right? I'm Asian American. I am a progressive American. I'm a short American. I'm a baseball loving American, right? I mean, there's many adjectives there, but American is the noun and by my presence, I am changing the noun, right? But the hyphenation to me, a Chinese hyphen American signifies something very different. To me, the hyphen is appropriate in usage when you're talking about an interplay between two parties, between two nations. Chinese hyphen American trade. Chinese hyphen American diplomacy. Chinese hyphen American military conflict, right? Between China and America. I'm not a hyphen. I don't reside in the hyphen. I'm an American who's redefining American by my and by my family's presence here. The other kind of grammatical quibble that I have is there's a phrase that many Chinese Americans use that I heard growing up, ABC. American born Chinese, right? And so people like my parents would say to people like me, you ABCs, you know, you don't do this, you don't do that. The ABCs standing for American born Chinese, right? Again, American born Chinese has by implication this notion that I am essentially indelibly wherever I may reside, wherever I may happen to have been born Chinese, right? I'm an American born Chinese American, right? That's a different thing. American born Chinese is sort of a, is a dream. I mean, it is a wish. It is a wish perhaps in the first immigrant generation that their children born here would remain essentially fundamentally unchangeably Chinese though they were born here. And it is a dream that I think any immigrant parent realizes is only a dream because from minute one in your arrival here, in your entry to schools, in your play with neighbors, in your walk in public spaces, you become something other than what was Chinese and China. And that's both sad and beautiful. That's the point. Yes. On Asian, don't you think that for non-Asian Americans, you and I will always be Chinese hyphen Americans or American born Chinese? How often do you have total strangers asking you in the elevator or in the grocery line? Where are you from? Where are you really from? Yep. Where are you really from is one of the most pointed and frequently asked questions directed at, not just Chinese, at Asian Americans in general, right? And you are right that even to this day, in American society, people with this face are often presumed foreign until proven otherwise, right? That is true on one level. It is also true that that is changing, right? And it changes, this is something that, again, in my work on citizenship and civic engagement, I make a big point of talking about. It changes to the extent that we show up. It changes to the extent that we get out into the public square and claim voice. It changes to the extent that we get involved in culture and culture making. That we are not just on TV, but that we are writing TV shows. It changes to the extent that we are writing books. It changes to the extent that we are entering professions. It changes to the extent that we are, like one of my friends and mentors, Gary Locke, entering into politics and literally representing the United States abroad, right? So that not only does he make history by being the first Chinese-American US ambassador to China, but he changes how people throughout the world have to begin to visualize what's an American, right? I don't disagree that whether abroad or even among our countrymen here in the United States that too many people, if you do the quick word association game and you say American, the picture that pops in their head is of a white man, not you or me, right? But that is changing. I think about my daughter's generation and it's already changing more there. Their notion of the where are you really from thing is less pointed and less salient in the lives of her generation than it is in mine or yours. And it will be, I think, less so in her children's generation, right? But I don't just kind of leave it to time and trust that it'll all work out in the long run because as John Maynard Keynes once said, in the long run, we're all dead, right? What I'm interested is in the here and the now how we actually try to change our norms and the way we see each other and talk to each other and part of that is educating our non-Asian American friends, neighbors, fellow citizens about the ways in which we are American and part of that is just being present in the fullest way possible that forces them to change their mental picture. So, Buck. Hi, Eric. Thank you for being here today. My name is Jenny Lu. No relation, I don't think and I work as part of the communications team here at New America. Just thinking about, I came here to the US with my parents when I was two years old. So I guess that makes me a Chinese-born American, CBA. But one episode in which I observed kind of the duality of both cultures present in my own parents was when the Sichuan earthquake happened and my parents and the other Chinese at the Chinese American church that they go to all gathered together to donate money and send relief funds over and just help in whatever way they could. So I felt that in that instance, they all really identified as Chinese and feeling off empathy and compassion for their compatriots, but the place, a church, the means through which they gave through collective donations and the motivation to be a good Christian were all very kind of Western American notions. So I don't know if you had any comment or observation about kind of civic associations or religious associations within the US that have helped Chinese Americans to both kind of identify with their Chinese-ness but express them through Western ways. That's a great, both question and I think example of something, of this fusion of styles, but also of the ways in which, yeah, particularly in crisis, something like the earthquake, or in moments, for instance, of during the Beijing Olympics, I think many, particularly first-generation Chinese immigrants in the United States, there was a strong pull and tug of pride and connection and yet at the same time, you're absolutely right that the ways that in American life that that gets expressed are through channels, civic associations, self-organizing, faith groups that are Tocquevillian, right? That are what Alexis de Tocqueville described as classically American and the ways in which American citizenship is an America's civic culture is so unique in the world. I think there are a lot of other organizations out there. I mean, there are more professionalized advocacy organizations, of course, OCA, Organization of Chinese Americans, that does a great deal of work, both nationally and in chapters around the country and a lot of their work actually is essentially in kind of a watchdog way, kind of watching out for instances of mistaken identity, instances of discrimination, instances of abuse and so forth. There are other groups like the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, CACA, that have been working both to organize and activate Chinese Americans socially and civically, but particularly around using as the linchpin elements of history, right? And so they've been behind a big drive to get more American history and government courses here in the United States to teach more about the Chinese exclusion law and the experience of Chinese exclusion, from 1882 all the way through 1943. At that point, for about a quarter of the life of the Republic at that time, that a group in the first and only instance of its kind had been barred entry into the territory of the United States on the basis of its race, right? And that this age of Chinese exclusion is this remarkable thing in American history, a remarkable example of the ways in which we continually fall short of our stated creed and yet try continually to redeem that creed later by reforming and redressing these wrongs and injustices. CACA is trying to embed that into our education system. You know, here in the Greater D.C. area, my mom is part of something called CAPA, Chinese American Professionals Association, which is very active here in the Greater D.C. area, a huge network of people. Again, networking professionally, but also civically and socially. And I think, you know, when you look at, Mike and I were talking before we came downstairs kind of thinking about how strong or how brittle is China today, right? This big question of as much as we Americans fear that China is going to eclipse America and so forth, how strong are they actually? And one of the ways in which I would say China is less strong than some people think is the thinness of their civic life, the absence of habits of association, the absence of permission to associate, the absence of habits from the bottom up in small circles to solve problems yourselves as citizens without waiting for someone else or waiting for some entity to do that, right? Now, that is beginning to change as things in China change, but, you know, we in America see the bright, shiny, formidable exterior of a lot of China ink and China, the kind of global empire force, right? And what we don't see is how when it comes to civic life and these habits of people in a bottom up sideways way making things work for themselves and solving things, you know, how relatively thin that is there. Although again, the reason why I do what I do and run this organization called Citizen University is not to pat ourselves on the back here in the United States but to warn us that it's getting thin here too. And we are neglecting that to our social capital and our stocks of civic capital here in America and that's something that we've got to tend to as well. We have a question over here. I'm Julia Chen Block of the U.S.-China Education Trust. I'd like to go back to your points about the rising China and the growing competition between the United States and China. I think we all know that U.S.-China relations have deteriorated to really a very low spot, particularly over the East China and South China seas tensions. What do you think is the role of Chinese Americans in this growing competition? Do you think Chinese Americans should have a role? And where are those voices in terms of this, I think, intensifying debate? And looking at our own history, I think we all agree with you. We hope that the United States doesn't blow it. Looking at our history, what do you think is the future of Chinese in America or Chinese Americans? May I actually initially at least turn the question back to you if you have, as some of you may know, a wealth of experience as a diplomat, as a leader in American foreign policy. I know this. I know your name. And as truly literally a representative of the United States with a face like ours and a voice like ours. And so I'm very curious, just first, your thoughts on the role of Chinese Americans in this period of China-America competition? Well, speaking from my own personal experience, you really put me on the spot. I created the U.S. China Education Trust back in 1998 when I retired at Peking University because I saw a gap. There are quite a few American organizations and societies that are focused on helping Americans understand China and the Chinese. But I really couldn't find any that were helping the Chinese understand the United States or understand America. And I was in a unique spot and was given an opportunity to really do something about it because we all know Peking University. It is the Harvard of China. Just as Tsinghua is the MIT of the United States. So what I thought over all these years since 1998 is that Chinese Americans can be a bridge because in many ways, as you said, we are not so much assimilated as we are cultivated. So we are really of both cultures. So I think the Chinese, from my experience again, the Chinese are welcome, Chinese Americans in particular, to be the interlocutor, if you will, be the intermediary between our two societies because they think, although sometimes or often they're disappointed, that Chinese Americans may have more of an inclination, a greater understanding towards China and the Chinese. So it's very interesting. I would agree with almost all of that and one phrase in particular to draw out, though they may be disappointed. It does bring me back to my friend Gary Locke. So as you may remember, when Gary Locke was, I'm from Seattle, when Gary was governor of Washington, he made this triumphant tour of China, visited his ancestral homeland village where his grandfather had emigrated from, and this great American story, his grandfather had come from that village, come to the United States, been a house boy in a private home a mile from the governor's mansion and then two generations later, his grandson is governor of Washington state. So in the late 90s, Locke went back to China and was greeted as this hero. Fast forward a bit, he becomes commerce secretary and then United States ambassador to China. When he first took the post as ambassador to China, the first reaction was similarly kind of praising and adulation and what a hero. And some of you may remember, literally even before Gary left the territory of the United States, when he was at the airport in SeaTac, he was at a Starbucks and he was wearing a backpack, carrying his own bags, and some tourists or somebody snapped a picture of him saying, hey, that's Ambassador Gary Locke, he's carrying his own bags, and that picture went viral in China, right? And it went viral in part to kind of praise him, what a humble, you know, low-key guy, but really as an indirect way for people in China to criticize the cronyism and corruption of a lot of leadership class there who never carry their own bags. They turn around in outies and Mercedes who, you know, whose princelings are getting to kind of do whatever they want in society and so there was this kind of use of Locke as a way to kind of indirectly criticize, then fast-forward to when he takes the job, right? And guess what? His job turns out not to be purely the bridge of understanding between two cultures, his job, the job description of the United States ambassador is to represent the interests and values of the United States. And where that came into tension with the interests and values of the People's Republic of China, many people in China were shocked. They were surprised. And so, you know, when Chen Guangcheng, the blind dissident, you know, wanted to escape China and Locke got in the middle of arranging, you know, his exit from China, when other economic or military disputes arose as China has been flexing its muscles in the South China Sea, all of a sudden people in China started saying about Locke, wait a minute, you're not one of us. You're a race trader. You know, what kind of Chinese are you, you know? And when he left the job as ambassador, an organ of Chinese state media published an editorial mocking him and saying he's a banana, right? He's yellow on the outside but white on the inside, right? And he never had any real sympathy for China and good riddance, right? I looked at that editorial and I thought, wow, again, that says a lot about how little to what Ambassador Block is describing in her work, you know, how little China actually understands America, because Gary Locke was not a banana, right? Gary Locke's job in representing the interests of the United States didn't make him white inside, it made him American inside, right? And their inability to distinguish between white and American is precisely the kind of narrow vision that gives America an edge in the world, right? And so, you know, to more directly answer the question, I do think that Chinese Americans today, in many ways, can be bridges of understanding, are already bridges of understanding. I mean, you think about in business, in whether large-scale corporate deal-making or smaller-scale entrepreneurialism, the flow of Chinese American business and talent and understanding is thick and thickening. I think that's true also in policy, whether foreign policy or even, you know, education policy and bridge-building that way. That said, I think, you know, I bear in mind the caveat of they may be disappointed, right? And I think the best job that we Chinese Americans can do is to show people in China how we are American, to show them how we are American and how being American and how the full variety of ways of being American, you know, embodies the full diversity and range of ways that a person can be a person in America, right? And sometimes that will mean having Chinese Americans be interlocutors at programs, that you've set up at Beidat, and other times that will mean simply having us be voices in examples so that they understand in a more three-dimensional way the way that we in America deal with race and identity and belonging and culture and to give them a more complex picture than a lot of them it seems currently have in their heads. I think that's one of the best things we can do. I'd like to take two more questions, the gentleman with the tie and the gentleman with the short-sleeved blue shirt. Thank you, Eric Lugat. That's a wonderful book. And my name's James, I'm John, and I was born in China, but I have family and raise my kids here, and I often think about, reflect the old culture that I was brought up in a village 40 years ago. And also after I moved to America, and I've been Princeton for a while, I have a very good Princeton professor who is a family immigrant here from Germany. They still call their grandma Oma. But besides that, I can't tell anything different from this American to other German, American, American, German. But at the same time, and notice the Jewish Americans, or Jews, they always call them Jews, they stick to their own culture, Jewish culture, language very, very much. As we all know that many American Jews here support Israel so much, as you can tell by the hearing of the Secretary of Defense, and he was brutal by those who support Israel for a few remarks actually about the Jewish lobbying and actually the American lobbying in support of Israel. And at the same time that we are talking about the Chinese American, and there are certain different groups of, like you were talking about the second generation, like Gary, I completely agree with him what he was doing in China as Ambassador of the United States, defending of representing American value and defending American interest. But at the same time, there are other groups that tend to identify themselves more Chinese than American. I'm not one of them, and I can't see my children will be any way to be non-American, but this is a kind of culture identity. So I wonder how do you read the culture factor that make Jewish American more successful or American Chinese more successful? One more question, and then you can answer both of them. Last question? No, no, no, the guy in the short sleeves there. No, we'll take... Oh, sorry, I'm sorry. Who did you mean? We'll take both questions. Thank you very much. I was wondering about language and if you feel as a father, for example, that your access to your Chinese heritage is greater enhanced by your understanding of whatever dialect your parents spoke, do you think your daughter or generations that might be farther apart and not have that language access, do you think they have as much of a claim to their Asian heritage? Last question. Thank you. I think your point that hybridity in America gives the country an advantage is an interesting one, and I wanted to get your opinion on what makes America special that allowed this hybridity to develop and evolve and how it survived previous examples of what we might see as isolationism and restrictionism, I think, in terms you used. Well, actually, can we bring the mic? This woman in the second row was really eager to say so. Just add your question to the mix and I'll try to wrap it all up. Thank you. I was raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, which is a predominantly Asian-American state of all 50 states, as well as Barack Obama, and I wanted to know your opinion on the statement that Barack Obama is the first Asian-American president of the United States because he had white rice every day. He was his friends, his teachers, our Asian-Americans. Just like people used to say that my former boss, Bill Clinton, was the first African-American president. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so let me actually in reverse order weave these together. That statement itself, that Barack Obama was our first Asian-American president, that Bill Clinton was our first black president, you know, they're jokes, but they have a kernel of truth, and the kernel of truth is exactly to this point of hybridity, of not just that we are tolerant of new people coming in, but that we let ourselves be changed by new people coming in, right? So that neither Barack Obama's father from Kenya, nor the, you know, people of various Asian ethnicities around him in Hawaii necessarily expected that they would inform and infuse one another, but it happened, right? And, you know, Bill Clinton growing up in rural Arkansas, you know, didn't expect to be understood as the first black president, but it happened, because that's who he grew up around and with, and from the time he was a child, understood to be this is my neighbor, this is my fellow citizen, right? You know, this question of what accounts for this history of hybridity, again, I keep on plugging it, but I would, number one, refer you to Mike's book, The Next American Nation, which does give you a great sense of kind of the exceptional and in some ways unique historical circumstances that allowed us to forge this culture of openness, but again, not to over, not to put too great a shine on it. For a lot of this country's history, that openness was very conditional, and it was conditional on being one of the least despised versions of white people available, right? And so people's openness was only open so far as, okay, you know, Germans, yeah, all right. Italians, ah, not so much, right? You know, Italians may be Irish, I don't know, Irish are different race, right? They're not even quite human, right? There's a lot of that kind of ethic for many of the, you know, first century of this, century and a half of this country's history. And so, you know, the idea that non-Europeans, you know, the melting pot, the idea of the melting pot is also a phrase that I essentially discard now because it describes a moment in time when different kinds of Europeans could come here and become white, right? When Germans and Irish and Italians and Greeks could set aside their previous historical ancient kind of hatreds and tribal differences and just mush into this kind of monochrome whiteness. And that is the underside of this American story, right? Because part of how they became white is they defined themselves as not black, right? When the Irish first came here in large numbers, poor Irish immigrants, and Mike knows this just as well, you know, they were despised by the Anglo-Yankee kind of native stock of America. They were held in the same kind of social isolation as freed slaves, as African Americans in our community. And they worked side by side. They lived side by side. They intermingled, they intermarried for a kind of short window of time until enough Irish arrived that they figured out our way up on the ladder is to step on the blacks, right? And to say we are not black. We distance ourselves from the black. We will show our chops by pushing against the blacks, and we will earn our stripes as white, right? That is as much a part of American history of inclusion and openness as simply my kind of whiteness song of hybridity, right? And I think we have to hold both of these truths in our head at the same time. And I think, you know, to this question about why certain ethnic groups in this country, in the immigrant panorama have held more to an ancestral culture, you know, in particular Jewish Americans. You know, it's a chicken and egg, I suppose, of the more fiercely you are discriminated against, the more you tend to hold on to the culture that you came here with, right? That has certainly been the Jewish experience globally, right? And there is this chicken and egg thing when Chinese immigrants first started to arrive in significant enough numbers to form Chinatowns. They formed Chinatowns because they weren't allowed to live anywhere else. They weren't allowed to just move into, you know, neighborhoods of whites. But then once there were Chinatowns, then it became the self-fulfilling thing where all those clannish Chinese, they keep to themselves, they don't want to be part of the rest of society and they've got weird customs, they don't integrate, they don't assimilate. What's wrong with them, right? Amnesiac, forgetting that, well, they were sort of put there. They were ghettoized there by the wider society, right? I think that was in early generations part of the Jewish story in America as well. Actually, I would say that, you know, today the greater concern among Jewish Americans is not the fact that they stand apart in holding on to their culture and religious heritage. It is that rapid intermarriage is eroding and evaporating that heritage today. I mean, that's the fear that you hear in Jewish communities all across the United States, which brings me to, you know, the first and last question here about language. Language and cultural inheritance in general, my command, such as it is of Mandarin, is not, you know, I'm barely proficient in conversational Chinese. My reading and writing are very poor and I'm probably the worst of my cousins at this. My cousins are more fluent in written and spoken Chinese than I am and so I already have a degraded command but I'm passing on to the third generation, to my daughter, will be further degraded still, right? I tried it from the time she was little to send her to Chinese school the way that my mom sent me to Chinese school and she resisted even more than I did but I struck a deal with her that said, look, if I'm not going to send you to this weekly Chinese school, which I admit is very kind of boring and not well done and everything, then you have to do a tutorial with me once a week and she agreed to that starting at age, you know, eight roughly or nine and we haven't been religious about it every week but we have been doing it for all those years since and I use every bit that I can, I use textbooks from when I was a kid, I use textbooks from when I was in college and took refresher courses in Mandarin and I dust these things off and we play games and invent games where I get to teacher things in more creative ways and yes, I mean, I think language is a key to accessing so much about a culture and a civilization, right? and one thing that I'm very grateful for even though my daughters, even though Olivia's Chinese, you know, she could barely carry on a conversation but she has enough so that number one, her pronunciation is excellent number two, she has, well, she's developed our instinct she has an instinct for when a character is drawn right or wrong she has an instinct, in Chinese, in the writing of Chinese characters there is an order to the strokes, right? if there's a shape that's like a box you can't just draw it any which way, four sides there's a way that starts on the left and then this way like that and then you close the bottom, right? she has an instinct for how you literally draw the characters she has an instinct for Chinese sentence structure, right? which differs from English sentence structure and where you put subjects and verbs and how Chinese as a language that lacks so many prepositions and kind of the interconnected tissue that we have in English she has an instinct for how you compose things, right? that to me, like she can, if she gets interested in five, ten years she can ramp up and study and build her vocabulary up right? but you can't reteach those instincts you know, twenty years from now and I'm very glad that she has those instincts because to me they also signify a larger set of instincts about the culture a language that lacks prepositions, for instance um, uh, forces you to understand meaning by context right? forces you to understand the relation of words to one another and the relation of that sentence to the larger conversation that is a Chinese way of thinking a contextual way of thinking it is not about spelling out in the precise detail kind of exactly what you mean as legalistic Americans and English speakers like to do it is about understanding the Gestalt to cite our German friends, right? and that is a way of being and thinking that some knowledge of the Chinese language allows her to appreciate about the Chinese culture and way of thinking, right? it's some of what I try to write about and explore in the book and, you know, yes, ultimately you are right but that degrades over time and that is, again, both the sadness and the beauty of American life because even as that degrades other new things are flowering, right? and she is borrowing styles from her African American friends and from her Jewish friends and from her Native American friends and other people where she's mixing languages and ways of being and talking um, that she would never have had access to had she grown up Chinese and China um, and that's that is the trade-off we make as Americans and our job is to just make that trade as open-minded and open-hearted as we can together and that, in the end, was why I tried to offer this book up Well, the book is a Chinaman's Chance Please join me in thanking Eric Liu Thank you, Mike