My wife Carrie has recently been diagnosed with a serious but treatable illness. The course of treatment will likely last many months, if not years, and entail a number of surgical procedures and other treatments. I went with her the second time she met with the Doctor supervising her care to go over some test results. Her Doctor was an Asian woman, probably in her early to mid-30’s. She had a noticeable although not heavy accent leading me to believe she did not grow up in the United States. She was very friendly and seemed very caring and knowledgeable. She volunteered something at this first meeting that struck me as kind of strange at the time. She said, in effect, “I am not Chinese myself but have friends that are Chinese.” The next time I met her, before a relatively minor surgical procedure, I noticed she was wearing a small silver crucifix.
I’ve wondered about the Doctor’s comment that she’s not Chinese ever since. I didn’t think it was really appropriate to ask her but I have my own thoughts on why she may have felt compelled to make such a statement. Of course it’s impossible to crawl into someone else’s brain and understand exactly why someone else says the things they do. We often say things ourselves and afterwards wonder why we felt the need to utter such words. I know I have often said things, most often to those closest to me, that have left me wondering why. But still, I’ve always believed it can be beneficial to spend some time trying to understand others, especially those from backgrounds so different from my own. This is my attempt to understand this young Doctor’s words.
In recent years the level of animosity between those outside China and the Chinese Communist Party has risen markedly. Tensions have grown between not only the United States and other “Western” countries, but with many of China’s Asian neighbors like Japan and India, and other countries such as Australia. In the United States, it has been reported that the rising tensions with China has led to a rise in Anti-Asian bias and even physical attacks in extreme cases.
Americans are not as a whole really that well versed on the peoples of the world, their cultures and their histories. For too many, Chinese and Japanese and Korean and Filipino and the other ethnic groups that populate Asia are conflated into Asian, and are looked at collectively despite their disparate cultures and histories. In China itself, although the Han Chinese make up a very large majority of the population, there are other minority ethnic groups such as the Uighurs and Tibetans. Even within the Han Chinese population, which comprises approximately 1 billion of China’s 1.4 billion total population, there are sharp distinctions between those who have power and those who don’t.
The Chinese Communist Party, which counts among the party’s members less than 100 million people, has sole power in China. Within that small fraction of the population is an infinitesimally small group that have real power, the Paramount Leader, Xi Jinping, and to a lesser extent former leader Jiang Zemin being most notable. When we talk about the United States being at odds with China, we are not talking about a conflict between the people of the United States and the people of China, but really with the dictatorship of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin. The Chinese people, including the vast majority of the Han Chinese people, have suffered under the dictatorship of the CCP to a much greater extent than any outsiders have.
This is not to say that if Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin left the world stage all would be good. The Soviet Union fell but the history of totalitarian rule was not easily replaced, as we can see in the figure of Vladimir Putin today. As an American of partially German descent, I take no pride in the fact that the German people under the Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Party had many followers of a virulent nationalist bent which supported and implemented Hitler’s policies. But Hitler was not a true representative of the German people, nor working for the betterment of the German people. Such is the case today in Xi’s China. Xi is not representative of the Chinese people, nor is Xi and the CCP working for the betterment of the Chinese people. Xi, like Hitler, is concerned with his own accumulation of power and self-aggrandizement.
One symptom of one of the greatest flaws in the United States military action in Vietnam in the 1960’s and early 1970’s can be summarized in one word, “gooks.” One of the stated purposes of the Vietnam War was to protect the freedoms of the Vietnamese people from the scourge of the spread of Communism. Many fighting in that war, such as my father, sincerely worked and fought to help those peoples maintain the freedoms they did have. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the term “gook,” which was a derogatory term for Asians in general and Vietnamese in particular, gained wide usage amongst soldiers and the American public to describe the Vietnamese people. A war fought in Vietnam against the Vietnamese, instead of for the Vietnamese, was bound to fail.
In the building confrontation with the Chinese Communist Party, we need to make sure we are careful in making a distinction between who we are fighting for and who we are fighting against, whether that fight is rhetorical or military. We are not fighting against the Chinese people, we are fighting for their freedoms as much as for our own. And if we don’t fight for their freedoms, we will have a very hard time in the future maintaining our own.
Perhaps my wife’s Asian Doctor felt we may feel uneasy about having a doctor of Chinese descent treat my wife. Perhaps, unfortunately, she has had that experience were a patient or their family has expressed concern, or worse. If I could speak freely to this Doctor, I would tell her that we in the United States have no cause for her, whether she’s Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, or another ethnicity, to be ashamed of her ethnicity. We are a nation of immigrants. If I could have a conversation with her I would tell her that at our best we Americans should always remember the following:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
We need to keep our attention, and our words, focused on our true objectives.