Chapel Talk

Between Two Worlds

Yubing Yang ’21

Delivered October 19, 2020, in Clark Memorial Chapel

The receiving of the red scarf is part of a ceremony for second graders being enrolled into the Chinese Young Pioneers — a national organization for children that feeds the Communist Party. However, as a first grader, I knew little about what was happening at the time. Alongside my classmates, I could not wait to be handed our red scarves and wear them patriotically every day, like those second- and third-graders we played with and looked up to.

Yet, I completely missed out on the enrollment ceremony that I had been looking forward to all year when my mom decided to bring me along for a one-year research stay in the US. Needless to say, I had major FOMO (fear of missing out). As much as I was excited to step foot in “the land of the free” and experience American pop culture, I was also anxious about leaving my friends back in Beijing and not being able to receive my first red scarf with them.

On my first day of elementary school in Michigan, everything was new to me, from getting off the yellow school bus for the first time to looking around and recognizing people who looked different from me. However, despite the foreign environment and new faces, I found a strange sense of familiarity when the teacher asked us to stand up, put our hands over our hearts, face the American flag, and read from a poster in the classroom.

Though I did not realize it then, throughout my short stay in Michigan I had been drawing parallels in my head between the nationalistic indoctrination that underpins the polarized relationship between these two political rivals, both of which I now reside in and call home.

Returning to Beijing to finish elementary school, I then immigrated to Massachusetts with my family. The junior boarding school I attended had a decent number of international students, but it was still dominated by white Americans from the surrounding towns. Whenever my birth country was brought up, I knew there would always be an awkward pause followed by questions unasked and thoughts unsaid. Even if they were not expressed, I knew what they entailed.

In conversation, if I (or any of my fellow Chinese nationals) hinted at anything even slightly positive about China, we were assumed to have been brainwashed by communist propaganda and our opinions were automatically invalidated.

China’s authoritarian way of governing has raised many red flags in the United States over the years, and at the time, US-China relations were strained, the result of military tension in the South China Sea. Chinese citizens are portrayed by western media as suffering under suppression, and people treated us with sympathy as they expressed their relief that I had finally left the inhumane surveillance state.

Since the first Chinese immigrants arrived in the States, the mysterious oriental nation has been vilified, an existential danger and menace to the Western world. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to McCarthy’s Red Scare, Yellow Peril continues to linger and perpetuate the social and political landscape in America, as China grows to be dominant on the global scale.

Are we, in America, threatened because of the supposedly different political ideologies? Or is it the discomfort and uncertainty that a non-western, non-white country is rising and cannot be controlled? Perhaps it’s both.

Living in the awkward overlap of two distinctly different worlds, I’ve discovered there to be more similarities than differences within the polarization. The red scarves and the Pledge of Allegiance are not a coincidence. As soon as children begin to gain a perspective, both countries immediately impose their own system of governance upon them. Even though China is slightly more overt in building a roadmap of enrollment into the Communist Party, the US has its own unique kind of American exceptionalism, advertising that everything is superior here, while implicitly centering the world around itself. This is what I have been taught throughout my education here.

It wasn’t until recently, in my Humanities classes at Pomfret, that my teachers began discussing the other side of the American Dream. America, for example, is ranked 52nd on Global Freedom in the Freedom House report. Many more statistics have proven the imbalance of this economy, which lacks the secure safety net that many outside of America take for granted, but which is deemed “socialist” here. Besides, China practices a state capitalist economy more than anything else, far from socialist or communist. Just like how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is nowhere near democratic, the Chinese Communist Party is not necessarily communist.

Despite being raised in two ideologies, I am constantly being told and reminded by both societies that my only and inherent source of value is based on what I produce. The expectation of productivity continues to stumble me in my attempt to deprogram from the toxic grind culture.

As I leverage my bi-cultural identity, the state-censored Chinese internet seems to stand in stark contrast to America’s freedom of speech and press; however, there is still a distinctly western lens and bias within American media that trickles down into classrooms that many fail to acknowledge. The strong media bias present in both countries has challenged the way I consume information. Constantly traveling between the US and China, I struggle to learn and unlearn my worldview and an understanding of reality that is warped by both societies.

How do you make a citizen? Is it defined by where you were born and where you live? Or is it determined by an interview and six correctly answered questions on a history test? I ask these questions of myself constantly, and I put them forward to you all today.

With a red passport in one hand and green card in another, I stand at the border of cultures and nationalities. Growing up surrounded by either American citizens or international students, I am always half-in and half-out. Community is just not a reality when no one else is on your block.

My citizenship in this world is shaped by my conflicting legality. As I grapple with dissociating myself completely from the Chinese sociopolitical narrative and distinguishing capitalistic indoctrination in my everyday American life, I am building my own individual identity as I navigate the gray area between two worlds.