A Double Difference

To my parents,

You endured much in order to secure comfort in the life we were able to have.  You each made a long journey at an early age in order to ensure a better life for yourselves here in the United States.  I am happy that you two were able to find each other once you were here and were able to build a bond through your similar experiences and new ways of life.  I am grateful, of course, for all that we have been able to enjoy here as a family.  However, sometimes I wish that our connection to our home country had remained stronger.  You gave me a Chines name when I was born which means distant fragrance.  But I feel as if I never truly knew what this fragrance smelled like; I only knew that it was distant.  And to us, this fragrance of a past and heritage rooted in another land was in fact distant.  You both worked very hard in order to establish yourselves as something set apart from the typical, poor Chinese immigrant and you were successful in doing this by earning a comfortable living that was not dependent on menial, servile work.  Yet, when other Americans, without Chinese decent or recent immigrant history, look upon us, we are still foreign; they can still detect that fragrance of otherness.  We are “marked by a double difference-different from white people around [us], different from other Chinese”.  While whites assumed we are very different from them, we believe to be more similar.  I do not feel a strong cultural connection with this difference that I am assumed to be associated with.

The times when this connection to our Chineseness surfaced were in order to make an economic gain.  Members of our family were able to be compensated for using the Chineseness as a resource to help others further distanced from American society.  We used this double difference to our advantage.  In order to do this though, we lost the respect of some other Chinese people.  We distanced ourselves at times from the Chinese community, and the white American community was never really willing to accept us, at least not without some struggle or apprehension.  We are not viewed by the main society as we view ourselves and I wish that this did not have to be the case.  



Your daughter,
Mamie   

(I don't really know anything about birds but let's say this is a more exotic/foreign bird standing next to a mirror reflecting back the image of a typically American bird.)