Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 905
January 2, 2016
Nixon’s “environmental bandwagon”: Richard Nixon signed the landmark Clean Air Act of 1970 — but not because he had any great concern about the environment
The New Yorker almost always senses a slight discomfort in breathing, especially in midtown; he knows that his cleaning bills are higher than they would be in the country; he periodically runs his handkerchief across his face and notes the fine black soot that has fallen on him; and he often feels the air pressing against him with almost as much weight as the bodies in the crowds he weaves through daily.New York’s problems with air quality were hardly unique. In an October 1969 letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, a resident of St. Louis expressed similar sentiments about the sheer pervasiveness of pollution in her community:
What really made me take the time to write this letter was the realization that I had begun to take the haze and various odors for granted. Close the doors and windows and they’ll be less noticeable[. I]t is very disturbing to think I’ve become used to the burning-rubber smell in the evening and the slightly sour smell in the morning. What does air smell like?And air pollution’s costs went far beyond sour smells and dirty handkerchiefs, as a series of deadly “inversions” both here and abroad had made dramatically clear beginning in the late 1940s. Typically, the air at higher altitudes is cooler than that below. This is because the surface of the earth absorbs sunlight and radiates heat, warming the air closest to the ground. That warm surface air then cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere. But in certain weather conditions, this temperature pattern can be flipped. When a warm front moves in above a cooler mass of air, it acts as a sort of lid, preventing the surface air (and any pollutants it contains) from rising into the atmosphere and dispersing. The longer an inversion lasts, the worse surface air quality gets, as more and more pollution becomes trapped beneath the lid. In 1948, Donora, an industrial town in southwest Pennsylvania, made national news after suffering a five-day inversion that killed 20 people and sickened 6,000 others, more than 40 percent of the town’s residents. Four years later came London’s “Great Smog of 1952,” another lengthy inversion that was estimated to have caused the premature deaths of at least 4,000 Londoners. And in 1966, an inversion in New York City killed an estimated 168 people over the course of a week. Furthermore, though acute incidents drew the biggest headlines, scientists of the time were also beginning to understand that even “normal” levels of pollution had serious, long-term health consequences. In December 1970, the acting Surgeon General, in testimony before the House of Representatives, cited “abundant scientific evidence that exposure to polluted air is associated with the occurrence and worsening of chronic respiratory diseases, such as emphysema, bronchitis, asthma, and even lung cancer.” And yet, while 1970 was not an ideal time for the actual environment, it was something of a golden age for environmentalists. On Jan. 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law. Six months later, he proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which opened for business in early December. And on Dec. 31, he capped off the year by signing the Clean Air Act, which was then—and still is—our nation’s most important environmental law. At the signing ceremony, Nixon speculated—correctly—that 1970 would later “be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America.” Why did all of these green stars align in 1970? For one thing, public interest in environmental issues was growing rapidly. According to nationwide Opinion Research Corporation polls, only 28 percent of the U.S. population considered air pollution a somewhat or very serious problem in 1965; by 1970, that figure had risen to 69 percent. J. Clarence Davies, a Princeton political scientist who would go on to serve as a senior staffer for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, speculated at the time that heightened concern about environmental degradation was an inevitable product of America’s post-World War II economic boom:
The massive growth in production and in the availability of resources which has characterized the U.S. economy in the past two decades affects the problem of pollution in several ways. The increase in production has contributed to an intensification of the degree of actual pollution; the increase in the standard of living has permitted people the comparative luxury of being able to be concerned about this; and the availability of ample public and private resources has given the society sufficient funds and skilled manpower to provide the potential for dealing with the problem.In other words, getting rich had come at great cost to the nation’s air and waterways, but, as a result of the nation’s new affluence, Americans were both more inclined to care about improving the quality of their environment and better equipped to succeed in that effort. The most memorable demonstration of environmental protection’s newfound political salience came in April 1970 when Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Rep. Pete McCloskey, a California Republican, co-chaired the first Earth Day, a “national teach-in on the environment.” The event drew more than 20 million participants all over the country. The same month, "CBS Evening News" anchor Walter Cronkite, who would soon become known as the “most trusted man in America,” began to include an environment-focused story in each night’s broadcast under the provocative heading “Can the World Be Saved?” But even with strong public support for legislative action, the Clean Air Act likely wouldn’t have passed when it did and in the form it did if not for the somewhat unexpected advocacy of President Nixon. According to William Ruckelshaus, whom Nixon appointed as the first EPA administrator, the president did not share the public’s concern for the environment. He thought the environmental movement, along with the antiwar activism of the period, “reflected weaknesses of the American character.” Nixon was, however, very concerned with staying president, and his expected opponent for the 1972 race was Sen. Edmund Muskie, a Maine Democrat whose chairmanship of the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution had earned him the nickname “Mr. Clean.” Nixon had no interest in conceding the green mantle to Muskie, so he set out to look even more protective of the environment than his liberal rival. Or, as the Nader report more colorfully explained, “The environmental bandwagon is the cheapest ride in town. . . . President Nixon paid his fare and jumped aboard.” In his State of the Union address that January, President Nixon vowed to present Congress with the “most comprehensive and costly program of pollution control in America’s history.” (Apparently, in 1970, the costliness of a regulatory program was considered a selling point.) The following month, Nixon made good on his pledge with a special address to Congress that outlined a “37-point program, embracing 23 major legislative proposals and 14 new measures being taken by administrative action or Executive Order” aimed at addressing a variety of environmental concerns, including water pollution, air pollution, solid waste management and parklands. Among those 23 legislative proposals was a set of amendments to the nation’s existing air pollution laws that would eventually become the Clean Air Act of 1970. Nixon’s air pollution bill was unquestionably stronger than one that Muskie himself had put forward the previous December, which included only modest improvements to the largely ineffectual Air Quality Act of 1967. But rather than admit defeat, Muskie doubled down. During the summer of 1970, his Senate subcommittee developed a bill that followed the same general structure as the president’s proposal but was much more ambitious: The deadlines were tighter, and the standards were both more stringent and more enforceable. Most controversially, the new bill included a requirement that auto manufacturers cut pollution from new motor vehicles by 90 percent in only six years. In September, the Senate passed Muskie’s bill, 73–0. The House had already passed a bill the previous June that more closely tracked Nixon’s, so a conference committee was charged with reconciling the two versions of the new law. Despite heavy lobbying by the auto industry and pressure from the White House to take a less aggressive approach, particularly with regard to the auto standards, the committee hewed much closer to the Senate version, and the new Clean Air Act was passed by both chambers of Congress in a voice vote on Dec. 18, 1970. When President Nixon signed the bill into law on Dec. 31, he invited a number of the Act’s congressional architects to the signing ceremony. Sen. Muskie was not among them. * * * More than four decades after its passage, the Clean Air Act remains a reliable source of controversy. Every major rulemaking under the Act has prompted intense lobbying and litigation, and the policies of the Obama administration have been no exception. Most recently, 45 of the 50 states have taken sides in an ongoing lawsuit over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which, for the first time in the Clean Air Act’s history, requires older power plants to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Ultimately, the suit will determine whether the EPA can meaningfully address the greatest environmental threat of our time: global climate change. But whatever the future may hold, on the occasion of the Act’s 45th birthday, it’s important to acknowledge how much good it has already managed to do, despite relentless attempts by recalcitrant polluters to undermine its implementation. Between 1970 and 2013, total emissions of six of the most common air pollutants—including those that form soot and smog—fell 68 percent, even as GDP more than tripled, energy consumption rose by 44 percent, and the U.S. population grew by 54 percent. These reductions have yielded enormous dividends for the American public. A 1990 EPA study estimated that the Clean Air Act prevented 205,000 premature deaths between 1970 and 1990. Significant amendments made to the Act in 1990—under another Republican president, George H.W. Bush—have generated even larger benefits. A 2011 EPA study concluded that the 1990 amendments had prevented 160,000 premature deaths in 2010 alone and estimated that the number of lives saved annually would climb to 230,000 by 2020. In short, it’s been a good 45 years. Here’s to the next 45. Richard L. Revesz is the Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law, where Jack Lienke is a Senior Attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity. They are the co-authors of "Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the 'War on Coal'” (Oxford University Press 2016), from which this excerpt is adapted.For polluters, America in 1970 was still something of a Wild West. A number of federal, state and municipal laws aimed at improving air quality were already on the books, but few were enforced, and pollution from the nation’s ever-growing stock of motor vehicles, power plants and factories remained uncontrolled in much of the country. A passage from the Ralph Nader Study Group’s "Vanishing Air," published in May 1970, vividly illustrates the extent to which dirty air was a fact of life for city dwellers of the period:
The New Yorker almost always senses a slight discomfort in breathing, especially in midtown; he knows that his cleaning bills are higher than they would be in the country; he periodically runs his handkerchief across his face and notes the fine black soot that has fallen on him; and he often feels the air pressing against him with almost as much weight as the bodies in the crowds he weaves through daily.New York’s problems with air quality were hardly unique. In an October 1969 letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, a resident of St. Louis expressed similar sentiments about the sheer pervasiveness of pollution in her community:
What really made me take the time to write this letter was the realization that I had begun to take the haze and various odors for granted. Close the doors and windows and they’ll be less noticeable[. I]t is very disturbing to think I’ve become used to the burning-rubber smell in the evening and the slightly sour smell in the morning. What does air smell like?And air pollution’s costs went far beyond sour smells and dirty handkerchiefs, as a series of deadly “inversions” both here and abroad had made dramatically clear beginning in the late 1940s. Typically, the air at higher altitudes is cooler than that below. This is because the surface of the earth absorbs sunlight and radiates heat, warming the air closest to the ground. That warm surface air then cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere. But in certain weather conditions, this temperature pattern can be flipped. When a warm front moves in above a cooler mass of air, it acts as a sort of lid, preventing the surface air (and any pollutants it contains) from rising into the atmosphere and dispersing. The longer an inversion lasts, the worse surface air quality gets, as more and more pollution becomes trapped beneath the lid. In 1948, Donora, an industrial town in southwest Pennsylvania, made national news after suffering a five-day inversion that killed 20 people and sickened 6,000 others, more than 40 percent of the town’s residents. Four years later came London’s “Great Smog of 1952,” another lengthy inversion that was estimated to have caused the premature deaths of at least 4,000 Londoners. And in 1966, an inversion in New York City killed an estimated 168 people over the course of a week. Furthermore, though acute incidents drew the biggest headlines, scientists of the time were also beginning to understand that even “normal” levels of pollution had serious, long-term health consequences. In December 1970, the acting Surgeon General, in testimony before the House of Representatives, cited “abundant scientific evidence that exposure to polluted air is associated with the occurrence and worsening of chronic respiratory diseases, such as emphysema, bronchitis, asthma, and even lung cancer.” And yet, while 1970 was not an ideal time for the actual environment, it was something of a golden age for environmentalists. On Jan. 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law. Six months later, he proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which opened for business in early December. And on Dec. 31, he capped off the year by signing the Clean Air Act, which was then—and still is—our nation’s most important environmental law. At the signing ceremony, Nixon speculated—correctly—that 1970 would later “be known as the year of the beginning, in which we really began to move on the problems of clean air and clean water and open spaces for the future generations of America.” Why did all of these green stars align in 1970? For one thing, public interest in environmental issues was growing rapidly. According to nationwide Opinion Research Corporation polls, only 28 percent of the U.S. population considered air pollution a somewhat or very serious problem in 1965; by 1970, that figure had risen to 69 percent. J. Clarence Davies, a Princeton political scientist who would go on to serve as a senior staffer for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, speculated at the time that heightened concern about environmental degradation was an inevitable product of America’s post-World War II economic boom:
The massive growth in production and in the availability of resources which has characterized the U.S. economy in the past two decades affects the problem of pollution in several ways. The increase in production has contributed to an intensification of the degree of actual pollution; the increase in the standard of living has permitted people the comparative luxury of being able to be concerned about this; and the availability of ample public and private resources has given the society sufficient funds and skilled manpower to provide the potential for dealing with the problem.In other words, getting rich had come at great cost to the nation’s air and waterways, but, as a result of the nation’s new affluence, Americans were both more inclined to care about improving the quality of their environment and better equipped to succeed in that effort. The most memorable demonstration of environmental protection’s newfound political salience came in April 1970 when Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, and Rep. Pete McCloskey, a California Republican, co-chaired the first Earth Day, a “national teach-in on the environment.” The event drew more than 20 million participants all over the country. The same month, "CBS Evening News" anchor Walter Cronkite, who would soon become known as the “most trusted man in America,” began to include an environment-focused story in each night’s broadcast under the provocative heading “Can the World Be Saved?” But even with strong public support for legislative action, the Clean Air Act likely wouldn’t have passed when it did and in the form it did if not for the somewhat unexpected advocacy of President Nixon. According to William Ruckelshaus, whom Nixon appointed as the first EPA administrator, the president did not share the public’s concern for the environment. He thought the environmental movement, along with the antiwar activism of the period, “reflected weaknesses of the American character.” Nixon was, however, very concerned with staying president, and his expected opponent for the 1972 race was Sen. Edmund Muskie, a Maine Democrat whose chairmanship of the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution had earned him the nickname “Mr. Clean.” Nixon had no interest in conceding the green mantle to Muskie, so he set out to look even more protective of the environment than his liberal rival. Or, as the Nader report more colorfully explained, “The environmental bandwagon is the cheapest ride in town. . . . President Nixon paid his fare and jumped aboard.” In his State of the Union address that January, President Nixon vowed to present Congress with the “most comprehensive and costly program of pollution control in America’s history.” (Apparently, in 1970, the costliness of a regulatory program was considered a selling point.) The following month, Nixon made good on his pledge with a special address to Congress that outlined a “37-point program, embracing 23 major legislative proposals and 14 new measures being taken by administrative action or Executive Order” aimed at addressing a variety of environmental concerns, including water pollution, air pollution, solid waste management and parklands. Among those 23 legislative proposals was a set of amendments to the nation’s existing air pollution laws that would eventually become the Clean Air Act of 1970. Nixon’s air pollution bill was unquestionably stronger than one that Muskie himself had put forward the previous December, which included only modest improvements to the largely ineffectual Air Quality Act of 1967. But rather than admit defeat, Muskie doubled down. During the summer of 1970, his Senate subcommittee developed a bill that followed the same general structure as the president’s proposal but was much more ambitious: The deadlines were tighter, and the standards were both more stringent and more enforceable. Most controversially, the new bill included a requirement that auto manufacturers cut pollution from new motor vehicles by 90 percent in only six years. In September, the Senate passed Muskie’s bill, 73–0. The House had already passed a bill the previous June that more closely tracked Nixon’s, so a conference committee was charged with reconciling the two versions of the new law. Despite heavy lobbying by the auto industry and pressure from the White House to take a less aggressive approach, particularly with regard to the auto standards, the committee hewed much closer to the Senate version, and the new Clean Air Act was passed by both chambers of Congress in a voice vote on Dec. 18, 1970. When President Nixon signed the bill into law on Dec. 31, he invited a number of the Act’s congressional architects to the signing ceremony. Sen. Muskie was not among them. * * * More than four decades after its passage, the Clean Air Act remains a reliable source of controversy. Every major rulemaking under the Act has prompted intense lobbying and litigation, and the policies of the Obama administration have been no exception. Most recently, 45 of the 50 states have taken sides in an ongoing lawsuit over the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which, for the first time in the Clean Air Act’s history, requires older power plants to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Ultimately, the suit will determine whether the EPA can meaningfully address the greatest environmental threat of our time: global climate change. But whatever the future may hold, on the occasion of the Act’s 45th birthday, it’s important to acknowledge how much good it has already managed to do, despite relentless attempts by recalcitrant polluters to undermine its implementation. Between 1970 and 2013, total emissions of six of the most common air pollutants—including those that form soot and smog—fell 68 percent, even as GDP more than tripled, energy consumption rose by 44 percent, and the U.S. population grew by 54 percent. These reductions have yielded enormous dividends for the American public. A 1990 EPA study estimated that the Clean Air Act prevented 205,000 premature deaths between 1970 and 1990. Significant amendments made to the Act in 1990—under another Republican president, George H.W. Bush—have generated even larger benefits. A 2011 EPA study concluded that the 1990 amendments had prevented 160,000 premature deaths in 2010 alone and estimated that the number of lives saved annually would climb to 230,000 by 2020. In short, it’s been a good 45 years. Here’s to the next 45. Richard L. Revesz is the Lawrence King Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at New York University School of Law, where Jack Lienke is a Senior Attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity. They are the co-authors of "Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the 'War on Coal'” (Oxford University Press 2016), from which this excerpt is adapted.
I am the Fox News atheist: “Some call me a militant atheist. Others call me a dick. I am neither”
Close U.S. ally Saudi Arabia kicks off 2016 by beheading 47 people in one day, including prominent Shia cleric
January 1, 2016
The high school musical that might have saved me: Watching a high school production of “A Chorus Line” in middle age showed me how much I missed
I didn’t see "A Chorus Line" until I was 45.
In 1975, the year Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse’s brilliant spectacle of dance and confession first appeared on Broadway, I was 9 years old and just becoming aware that I was different from other boys. That year, after I’d expressed an interest in acting, my mother enrolled me in a drama school in Sacramento, incidentally the same school that a young Molly Ringwald attended. But after going to just one class, a well-meaning friend of mine who had heard of my interest from his mother but whose vocabulary was still developing asked me if I intended to become an actress. I quit that very day, instinctively frightened that I had already revealed too much about what I liked and who I was. Acting, I thought I had learned, was for girls and sissies, and I would no longer have anything to do with it.
In the years that followed, the social geography of my conservative, semi-rural California high school confirmed my suspicions. The theatre building was on the far north side of campus, perhaps purposefully isolated from the rest of the school. Every year, when hand-painted posters appeared advertising serious dramas or raucous musicals, a hum of activity surrounded the building. But I scrupulously kept my distance. To be found anywhere near it, I thought, was to be immediately and irredeemably implicated it all its queerness.
In between shows, however, as I went from one class to another, I occasionally observed thin boys with poofy hair and plump, colorfully dressed girls passing in and out of the building’s large metal doors, sometimes singing softly, more often all too wary of the ugly name-calling and contemptuous stares that were their daily crosses to bear. These especially unpopular people seemed to me neither heroic nor pathetic but simply stupid because they willingly, even willfully, brought such hateful attention upon themselves. At my school, they were either ridiculed as “drama fags” or, worse, ignored as irrelevant. The boys, especially, were subject to the loneliest kind of irrelevance. Except as the butt of a football player’s violent joke, it seemed to me, they didn’t exist. Thank God I wasn’t one of them, I told myself.
Things have changed a lot since the 1980s. America has grown more tolerant of gay people, high school musicals have become serious business, and after years of therapy and a lot of soul-searching, I’ve managed to become a reasonably happy adult who both loves the theatre and, miraculously, himself.
To be sure, my knowledge of Broadway is still woefully inadequate for a gay man, owing largely to my misspent youth; some things just can’t be repaired. A decade ago, however, I wrote a play that was produced at the New York Fringe Festival, and a few years ago I even acted in a community theater production of The Tempest, playing an especially effeminate and cowardly Trinculo to rave reviews. On both glorious occasions, a long-dead ember within me flamed anew.
So when a good friend and his partner, both musicians, invited my partner and me to a high school production of "A Chorus Line," I jumped at the chance. As we crowded into the enormous, expensively appointed theater, I felt a little self-conscious that the four of us – middle-aged men without wives or children – didn’t belong. But as we jostled past proud and eager parents and nearly tripped over their rambunctious younger children, some of whom were clearly aspiring performers themselves, I was also aware that I had, 30 years later, entered the high school theater building—and survived.
When the lights went up, and the dancers began dancing, I found myself utterly astonished by what I saw and heard. These teenagers were not only supremely talented performers but also confident, unembarrassed ones. They perfectly inhabited the gifted, devoted, anxious dancers they were portraying, not merely because they were these things themselves, but because they were that good.
Who were these extraordinary kids? And how did they get this way? Before the show, I’d been told by the conductor that many of them have had years of training and serious professional ambitions; but their self-assurance was something that could only be taught by supportive families, teachers and friends, by a world that welcomed and cherished them. I gazed admiringly into their eyes to discover what they might be feeling as they kicked and turned across the stage. Not all of them were physically beautiful. Some of the boys were short or skinny and some of the girls were chunky or a little plain. But they danced and sang like they were the most attractive and popular kids in school. And the roar of the audience made it clear that they were.
The racy lyrics of "A Chorus Line" never would have passed muster with the teachers and parents at my high school. Bullying, bigotry and callous disregard for the suffering of misfits were widely tolerated, but smoking, foul language, and overt sexuality were not. Indeed, the musical’s mature themes and frank talk of “tits and ass” even made me wonder for a moment just how age-appropriate it was, if these students really understood what they were saying. But the way they said it—with their voices and their bodies—told me that they did understand, that they knew not only what the adult material meant but also what it meant to them.
When the character of Cassie admits that her failed solo career has brought her back to the Broadway chorus line; when Greg sadly recalls the day he realized he was gay; when Val exults in her surgically enhanced breasts; when Sheila reflects on dancing as an escape from a broken family—as I listened to each of these very grown-up revelations delivered with such emotional clarity, I felt certain that, at least on some level, these kids already knew what it had taken me over four decades to learn: that life and love are treacherous and splendid things at the same time.
This was made tearfully, joyously clear to me when the character of Paul, alone onstage, confesses to the director, Zach, the story of his growing up gay in New York City, becoming a drag performer, and one day being discovered by his incredulous Puerto Rican parents. It was one thing to play gay in high school—one very heroic thing to do—but quite another to perform such fragile vulnerability and painfully honest strength, and to do it so flawlessly.
The young man playing Paul may or may not have been gay himself, but he looked every bit like one of the boys I knew in high school who lingered around the theater building, preferred the company of girls, and withstood endless abuse from his peers. I remembered with shame and regret the day I watched from a distance as a tough, swaggering jock put him in a chokehold and dragged him effortlessly across the quad to the delight of the lunch crowd. Onstage, Paul had a similarly soft, round, good-looking, melancholy face, and a husky physique. But his dancing was light and strong, his voice was clear and bright, and his demeanor credibly revealed a history of struggle.
As he told his story, the audience was silent, and the four of us wept quietly. I don’t know exactly why my partner and two friends wept, though I can imagine the reasons. I wept for Paul because his story was sad, because the actor was brave, and because this high school was—incredibly!—celebrating his bravery. I never thought I’d see this in a million years.
But I also wept because what the actor playing Paul brought to life onstage was something I had missed at his age, something I’d been unable or afraid to claim for myself— something that had not been possible, or at least, had not seemed possible at the time, which amounts to the same. What if I’d gone to such a school and had such support when I was a boy? Or what if I’d had the courage to go into the theater building, to withstand the abuse, to get up onstage and risk being called an actress or a sissy or a drama fag? Or what if I’d been wrong about my high school, wrong about the building into which I never dared enter, or wrong about the people who did? What had I missed? What had I forgone?
Sitting in the audience that night, full of awe, humility, and not a little envy, I understood that my life as I’d lived it wasn’t at all inevitable, though it often seemed so, that the man I’d become was never preordained but rather the aggregated result of particular circumstances and choices. Seeing so palpably that things might have been otherwise—other paths I might have taken, other identities I might have assumed—filled me with both profound regret and unmistakable satisfaction. Since that evening, I have frequently mourned the bold performer and unflinching devourer of experience I never became; but I’ve also come to believe that of all the possible lives I might have lived, this one was pretty damn good and, if I’m lucky and perhaps a little daring, might get even better.
One of my favorite songs in "A Chorus Line," now that I have seen it, occurs just after Paul injures himself and is carried off stage. As the other dancers consider how precarious their careers are—and how under-paid and under-appreciated—they finally declare that the risks have been worth it. I’d vaguely heard of “What I Did for Love” but always assumed it was about some sacrifice made in the name of romance, about the “sweetness and the sorrow” involved in devoting oneself to another person. But as I listened to these wonderful kids sing, it suddenly occurred to me that it was about the love of performance, the love of art:
“The gift was ours to borrow
It's as if we always knew
And I won't forget what I did for love
What I did for love.”
And as I wiped away another current of tears, I realized that the love of which they sung was also the love they had for themselves, which may just be courage by another name.
I didn’t see "A Chorus Line" until I was 45.
In 1975, the year Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse’s brilliant spectacle of dance and confession first appeared on Broadway, I was 9 years old and just becoming aware that I was different from other boys. That year, after I’d expressed an interest in acting, my mother enrolled me in a drama school in Sacramento, incidentally the same school that a young Molly Ringwald attended. But after going to just one class, a well-meaning friend of mine who had heard of my interest from his mother but whose vocabulary was still developing asked me if I intended to become an actress. I quit that very day, instinctively frightened that I had already revealed too much about what I liked and who I was. Acting, I thought I had learned, was for girls and sissies, and I would no longer have anything to do with it.
In the years that followed, the social geography of my conservative, semi-rural California high school confirmed my suspicions. The theatre building was on the far north side of campus, perhaps purposefully isolated from the rest of the school. Every year, when hand-painted posters appeared advertising serious dramas or raucous musicals, a hum of activity surrounded the building. But I scrupulously kept my distance. To be found anywhere near it, I thought, was to be immediately and irredeemably implicated it all its queerness.
In between shows, however, as I went from one class to another, I occasionally observed thin boys with poofy hair and plump, colorfully dressed girls passing in and out of the building’s large metal doors, sometimes singing softly, more often all too wary of the ugly name-calling and contemptuous stares that were their daily crosses to bear. These especially unpopular people seemed to me neither heroic nor pathetic but simply stupid because they willingly, even willfully, brought such hateful attention upon themselves. At my school, they were either ridiculed as “drama fags” or, worse, ignored as irrelevant. The boys, especially, were subject to the loneliest kind of irrelevance. Except as the butt of a football player’s violent joke, it seemed to me, they didn’t exist. Thank God I wasn’t one of them, I told myself.
Things have changed a lot since the 1980s. America has grown more tolerant of gay people, high school musicals have become serious business, and after years of therapy and a lot of soul-searching, I’ve managed to become a reasonably happy adult who both loves the theatre and, miraculously, himself.
To be sure, my knowledge of Broadway is still woefully inadequate for a gay man, owing largely to my misspent youth; some things just can’t be repaired. A decade ago, however, I wrote a play that was produced at the New York Fringe Festival, and a few years ago I even acted in a community theater production of The Tempest, playing an especially effeminate and cowardly Trinculo to rave reviews. On both glorious occasions, a long-dead ember within me flamed anew.
So when a good friend and his partner, both musicians, invited my partner and me to a high school production of "A Chorus Line," I jumped at the chance. As we crowded into the enormous, expensively appointed theater, I felt a little self-conscious that the four of us – middle-aged men without wives or children – didn’t belong. But as we jostled past proud and eager parents and nearly tripped over their rambunctious younger children, some of whom were clearly aspiring performers themselves, I was also aware that I had, 30 years later, entered the high school theater building—and survived.
When the lights went up, and the dancers began dancing, I found myself utterly astonished by what I saw and heard. These teenagers were not only supremely talented performers but also confident, unembarrassed ones. They perfectly inhabited the gifted, devoted, anxious dancers they were portraying, not merely because they were these things themselves, but because they were that good.
Who were these extraordinary kids? And how did they get this way? Before the show, I’d been told by the conductor that many of them have had years of training and serious professional ambitions; but their self-assurance was something that could only be taught by supportive families, teachers and friends, by a world that welcomed and cherished them. I gazed admiringly into their eyes to discover what they might be feeling as they kicked and turned across the stage. Not all of them were physically beautiful. Some of the boys were short or skinny and some of the girls were chunky or a little plain. But they danced and sang like they were the most attractive and popular kids in school. And the roar of the audience made it clear that they were.
The racy lyrics of "A Chorus Line" never would have passed muster with the teachers and parents at my high school. Bullying, bigotry and callous disregard for the suffering of misfits were widely tolerated, but smoking, foul language, and overt sexuality were not. Indeed, the musical’s mature themes and frank talk of “tits and ass” even made me wonder for a moment just how age-appropriate it was, if these students really understood what they were saying. But the way they said it—with their voices and their bodies—told me that they did understand, that they knew not only what the adult material meant but also what it meant to them.
When the character of Cassie admits that her failed solo career has brought her back to the Broadway chorus line; when Greg sadly recalls the day he realized he was gay; when Val exults in her surgically enhanced breasts; when Sheila reflects on dancing as an escape from a broken family—as I listened to each of these very grown-up revelations delivered with such emotional clarity, I felt certain that, at least on some level, these kids already knew what it had taken me over four decades to learn: that life and love are treacherous and splendid things at the same time.
This was made tearfully, joyously clear to me when the character of Paul, alone onstage, confesses to the director, Zach, the story of his growing up gay in New York City, becoming a drag performer, and one day being discovered by his incredulous Puerto Rican parents. It was one thing to play gay in high school—one very heroic thing to do—but quite another to perform such fragile vulnerability and painfully honest strength, and to do it so flawlessly.
The young man playing Paul may or may not have been gay himself, but he looked every bit like one of the boys I knew in high school who lingered around the theater building, preferred the company of girls, and withstood endless abuse from his peers. I remembered with shame and regret the day I watched from a distance as a tough, swaggering jock put him in a chokehold and dragged him effortlessly across the quad to the delight of the lunch crowd. Onstage, Paul had a similarly soft, round, good-looking, melancholy face, and a husky physique. But his dancing was light and strong, his voice was clear and bright, and his demeanor credibly revealed a history of struggle.
As he told his story, the audience was silent, and the four of us wept quietly. I don’t know exactly why my partner and two friends wept, though I can imagine the reasons. I wept for Paul because his story was sad, because the actor was brave, and because this high school was—incredibly!—celebrating his bravery. I never thought I’d see this in a million years.
But I also wept because what the actor playing Paul brought to life onstage was something I had missed at his age, something I’d been unable or afraid to claim for myself— something that had not been possible, or at least, had not seemed possible at the time, which amounts to the same. What if I’d gone to such a school and had such support when I was a boy? Or what if I’d had the courage to go into the theater building, to withstand the abuse, to get up onstage and risk being called an actress or a sissy or a drama fag? Or what if I’d been wrong about my high school, wrong about the building into which I never dared enter, or wrong about the people who did? What had I missed? What had I forgone?
Sitting in the audience that night, full of awe, humility, and not a little envy, I understood that my life as I’d lived it wasn’t at all inevitable, though it often seemed so, that the man I’d become was never preordained but rather the aggregated result of particular circumstances and choices. Seeing so palpably that things might have been otherwise—other paths I might have taken, other identities I might have assumed—filled me with both profound regret and unmistakable satisfaction. Since that evening, I have frequently mourned the bold performer and unflinching devourer of experience I never became; but I’ve also come to believe that of all the possible lives I might have lived, this one was pretty damn good and, if I’m lucky and perhaps a little daring, might get even better.
One of my favorite songs in "A Chorus Line," now that I have seen it, occurs just after Paul injures himself and is carried off stage. As the other dancers consider how precarious their careers are—and how under-paid and under-appreciated—they finally declare that the risks have been worth it. I’d vaguely heard of “What I Did for Love” but always assumed it was about some sacrifice made in the name of romance, about the “sweetness and the sorrow” involved in devoting oneself to another person. But as I listened to these wonderful kids sing, it suddenly occurred to me that it was about the love of performance, the love of art:
“The gift was ours to borrow
It's as if we always knew
And I won't forget what I did for love
What I did for love.”
And as I wiped away another current of tears, I realized that the love of which they sung was also the love they had for themselves, which may just be courage by another name.
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The Chinese home I never knew
"It's a totally brand new city. I don’t recognize anything,” my mom says, gazing wide-eyed out of the decades-old tram and into the chaotic streets of Hong Kong. “I never used to take the ding ding. It’s so slow,” she complains as the tram operator rings the bell twice to alert pedestrians nearby — emitting a characteristic sound that gives the tram its Cantonese nickname. “But actually it’s kind of nice. You can take your time to see the scenery around you.”
More from Narratively: "Kids, We're Moving to Greenland"
It’s been 33 years since she moved from Hong Kong to Toronto and four months since I did the opposite. This is how I became my mother’s tour guide in her own hometown.
More from Narratively: "How an International Man of Mystery Scammed My Grandma"
The crowded streets that are familiar to me are now unrecognizable to her. I guide her through the modern subway system, which was constructed after her departure, and advise her on the best bus routes to take when she meets up with her old school friends. We walk together through Central, the city’s financial district, among 70-story skyscrapers and modern steel structures that my mother has never seen before. I introduce her to some of the great local restaurants I’ve discovered; she uses her Cantonese fluency to order dishes that aren’t on the English menu.
More from Narratively: "Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery"
Together, we are the ultimate Hongkonger.
My mom comments on how much my Cantonese has improved while we devour her expertly-ordered meal. This food that I’m enjoying and the language I’m eagerly practicing is in stark contrast to the attitudes of my youth.
I credit my childhood apathy towards my mother’s culture to the whitewashed Toronto suburb I grew up in, where I was one of three Chinese kids in an elementary school of 300. I wanted nothing more than to be just like my white Canadian peers with their Wonder Bread sandwiches and after-school ballet classes. Instead I was forced into weekly piano lessons, which I loathed, and fed traditional Chinese meals of steamed meat and stir-fried vegetables over heaping bowls of rice that I thought were bland.
My mother put me in Chinese school on the weekends to learn her native tongue, but replacing my Saturday morning cartoons with rote repetition of stroke order and Chinese characters instilled in me a repulsion of the language. Whenever she spoke to me in Cantonese, I’d understand perfectly but reply back in English.
There’s a Cantonese slang phrase to describe people like me: jook sing. The term originates from the knot in a reed of bamboo that prevents water from flowing from one end to the other. “You look at bamboo. It looks like it should be all hollow, but actually there are parts where it’s closed inside,” my mom explains. “That’s like you. You look like you’re Chinese but you’re not really Chinese because you do not understand the language and the culture.” It’s meant to be derogatory, and it works. My mother and relatives would tease me, my sister and my cousins for being jook sing when we spoke our accented Cantonese or used our chopsticks incorrectly.
Witnessing her children stuck between two cultures must have been frustrating for my mother too. While she moved to Canada to live and raise kids in a western environment, with western values and beliefs, she didn’t know what the norms were. She had only her own childhood experience to draw from. Growing up in poverty, she adopted an eat-or-be-eaten attitude as the second eldest of six siblings. She witnessed how her father’s strong work ethic brought him from low-level garment seamster to factory foreman and, later, top-level manager. My mother was taught by strict Catholic nuns at an all-girls high school, which undoubtedly influenced her own parenting style. The chaotic city life and incredible academic, societal and economic pressures of Hong Kong are what eventually pushed my mom out of the city.
Between the time my mom left in 1976 and the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, a slew of Hongkongers fled to the west. I went to high school in a city that was popular with recent Hong Kong immigrants and their children, who became my classmates. I befriended many but I could never really relate, instead seeking distance from them and my mother’s heritage. When I registered for university and renewed my passport I omitted my Chinese middle name on the application forms, thinking it might make me seem less Chinese and more Canadian.
It wasn’t until I was removed from this environment that I recognized the gap in my identity. In my third year of university, I spent a year abroad, studying in Copenhagen and traveling through Europe. I visited parts of the world where the concepts of immigration and visible minorities were virtually unheard of. I once met a group of young Croatian girls at a bar in Dubrovnik’s Old City, celebrating a friend’s eighteenth birthday. They fawned over my foreign appearance, a rarity in Eastern Europe. “China! You’re from China?” one of the girls asked in a tone that wasn’t racist but inquisitively earnest.
“No,” I said, feeling, for the first time ever, ashamed in my eventual reply. “Actually, I’ve never been.”
* * *
Growing up with my mother and among other Chinese immigrants I never once imagined that I might live in Hong Kong one day. But then I graduated from university on the brink of a recession with no job prospects at home. Hong Kong was a natural destination. I easily found work with an English teaching agency and was trained with 60 other expatriates, mostly white and from the UK.
Skills that I snubbed in my adolescence now gave me an edge above the typical new arrival to the city. Over heavily-accented Cantonese I negotiated with my landlord for cheaper rent. I enjoyed blending in with the crowd, slipping into clothing stores and shopping for groceries unnoticed, until my accented Cantonese outed me as a foreigner. While my new colleagues fumbled with their chopsticks at group lunches, skeptically eyeing the steaming bamboo baskets of curried cuttlefish, shrimp dumplings and pillow-y white buns with mystery fillings, I found comfort in these dishes that were more familiar to me than the strangers I was seated with.
These strangers did eventually become my friends. But over time, as my social networks expanded past the English teachers I first arrived with, I met more and more expatriates like myself — the children of Hong Kong immigrants who were born, raised and educated in the west but settled in Hong Kong for work. While these were the very people I was eager to distance myself from in my youth, in our parents’ homeland I discovered a camaraderie that was missing before. While no one tracks the number of western-born people of Chinese descent living in Hong Kong, data from a 2013 census analyzed by Pacific Prime Hong Kong shows that there are an estimated 301,000 expatriates living in Hong Kong, comprising 4.24 percent of the city’s population. This is a big jump from just 252,000 expatriates living there in 2009.
Hong Kong’s western-born Chinese definitely aren’t considered locals, but we aren’t quite expats either. We navigate the city as in-betweeners, with our varying knowledge of the local customs and norms, the language and food. Yet we retain our western values, among them a sense of individuality and freedom that would be considered a rebellious trait of a traditional family-centric Hongkonger.
Working as an English teacher, I found that my in-between status hindered rather than helped. The schools where I taught English requested an immersive experience for their students, which meant native English speakers. The supervisor of my second teaching job, Pamela Bovitz, instructed me to pretend that I didn’t understand a word of Cantonese.
“She knows what we’re saying!” the kids would say in their native tongue, aware that I was one of them. I feigned confusion and fought the urge to reply back in Cantonese. At the kindergarten where I worked, I was hired to teach these young students English. But through the playground games and classroom conversations I overheard, the students inadvertently helped me improve my second language too. Every morning I listened to them sing their school’s anthem in Cantonese and one day I sang it for my mother. In between fits of laughter, she helped me translate the song and understand the lyrics.
Out of seven English teachers, there were two other Chinese teachers like me at the kindergarten. Bovitz, who has been responsible for hiring native English teachers for the past decade, told me that she gets plenty of resumes from western-born Chinese applicants — more so in the past few years.
After completing my teaching contract at the kindergarten, I was eager for a change but not yet ready to leave Hong Kong. So I enrolled in the University of Hong Kong’s Master of Journalism program in 2010, where I met Stephanie Chan. She moved to Hong Kong from her native Toronto in 2007 to teach middle school at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong. She had trained as a teacher in Canada but looked abroad for work after graduation. “A lot of my friends in teachers’ college were scrambling to find jobs,” Chan recalls. “Many couldn't get permanent teaching jobs in the districts that they wanted. A lot of them just ended up being supply teachers for a couple of years.” Like me, Chan knew very little about Hong Kong, having visited only once before she moved. Her parents were still children when they immigrated to Canada, and they still live in Toronto as my mother does.
Chan is now teaching media studies and journalism at the same Hong Kong international school. Her husband Ricky is also from Canada and of Chinese descent. He was equally drawn to Hong Kong for employment, where he found work with an American firm.
Being not quite local but not quite foreign has been a positive experience for Chan. “I’ve been able to enjoy the Chinese culture while also maintaining the expat identity,” she says. “Hong Kong is such an easy place for a foreigner to live. And even easier as a foreigner who speaks Chinese.”
While Iris Lam was born in Hong Kong, she immigrated to Canada with her family in the late 1980s when she was just a kid. She had the opportunity to return when her employer, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, promoted her through a transfer to the company’s headquarters in Hong Kong in 2011. Lam worked there for two years and was then was transferred to Shanghai. She returned to Hong Kong in 2014 to work for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
Compared to Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, where Lam has also worked, she says that her status as a western-raised Chinese person isn’t as notable in Hong Kong. “I find local Hong Kong people are amongst the most accustomed and accepting of the concept of overseas Chinese,” she explains. “I haven’t found any stigma or special fascination with the way locals interact with me. In fact, I think I’m regarded as somewhat common within Hong Kong society.”
Second-generation reverse migration isn’t exclusive to Hong Kong. I met Sandy Oh through a mutual friend in Hong Kong as she was stopping over on her way to Seoul. Oh’s mother and aunt left South Korea for New York City in the mid 1970s, where they both found better-paying nursing jobs. Oh moved to Seoul in 2008, and like me, easily found work teaching English. Later she became a textbook writer and developed teaching curricula for a private academy. Oh was inspired by her experience working with upper-class teens to pursue a PhD studying Korean international high school students and global education. She has since returned to Seoul three times and is currently conducting long-term fieldwork in the city.
While in Seoul, Oh has had the opportunity to reconnect with middle and high school friends from her native New York. “There are lots of Korean-Americans who come back for stints like me,” she says. Her peers are working in law, finance, research or opening restaurants, but most are English teachers at the same academies where Oh started out. “It’s common knowledge that a lot of people like me — highly educated, grew up in America — come back to Korea these days because even we can’t find jobs.”
* * *
In 2009, my mom retired from a fruitful 35-year nursing career in Canada. With time on her hands and a desire to see how her hometown had changed (and to see me, of course), she celebrated with an extended seven-week holiday in Hong Kong. Her last visit to the city was in 1982.
Over the years, my mother has never been very sentimental about her upbringing. She’s told me bits and pieces but being in her hometown and seeing certain things for the first time in nearly three decades triggered a flood of memories from her past: a department store where her father used to take the family shopping on the weekends, a spicy Shanghainese noodle dish that she’d always eat after school with her classmates, or hearing the rickety old trams with their characteristic ding ding.
One afternoon during my mother’s stay, I took her to the Hong Kong Museum of History. Part of the museum’s permanent exhibition includes a reconstruction of a room in a post-war tenement building, meant to recreate the rough conditions that Hong Kong’s increasingly poor population lived in at the time.
My mom’s eyes lit up when we turned the corner and the exhibit came into view. “This looks just like our first apartment! I used to sleep on the top bunk with your dai kau fu and yi yi,” my mom said, pointing to a small bunk bed tucked into the corner. “We had to sleep this way,” she added, gesturing her arm width-wise across along the bed, slicing her hand down three times to represent the three children who slept there. I imagined my mother there, sleeping in a bed with her siblings like sardines, in a room so iconic in its squalor that it’s now preserved in a history museum.
“The bottom bunk was where your po po and kau fu would sleep,” she continued. “And your gong gong would sleep on a cot.” The bathroom and kitchen were shared with another family of six. My mother’s family lived there for five years before my gong gong, my mother’s father, earned enough to support the growing family’s move to better accommodations and their eventual emigration and establishment in Canada.
On her first trip back, my mom kept busy touring the city with me and catching up with old high school friends she hadn’t seen in decades. Her retired life now allows her the freedom to fly back to Hong Kong for a few months every year. She’s living comfortably, thanks to a sizeable pension plan that she wouldn’t have attained had she worked in Hong Kong, along with savings from her shrewd frugality — a stereotypical trait of Chinese immigrants, which I’m now grateful for having adopted.
My mom carries her western habits with her to Hong Kong when she visits. When the temperature dips in the tropical city, down jackets, hats and mitts come out. But my mother, hardened after countless Canadian winters, keeps her shorts and tees on. When interacting with a waiter or a shopkeeper, she finds herself initiating conversation in English before reverting back to Cantonese. Her friends comment on her sweet tooth, as she’s gotten used to ending every meal with a dessert — a western norm that’s less common in Chinese cuisine. “They call me fan gwai po because I’m acting like a white woman.”
My mom knows they’re teasing, just like how she used to call me jook sing when I fumbled with my Cantonese as a kid. But I know my mom has some jook sing in her too. Those knots developed in her as she found her way in Toronto, adopting Canadian habits and merging them with her Chinese upbringing.
I’m back in Toronto now after four years in Hong Kong. While I thought of what life would be like if I were to stay in Hong Kong permanently, my heart always was, and still is in Toronto. Life was easier abroad — socially and career-wise. Ironically, I’ve struggled to make friends and find my footing in my hometown, but I’m establishing a fruitful freelance writing career and a good group of friends, old and new. Spending time with my extended family in Toronto is a definite benefit of being back home. I feel proud to converse in my improved Cantonese with the aunts and uncles who used to mock me and cook Chinese dishes for my Canadian friends. While I’m grateful for the linguistic and culinary skills I’ve picked up, what I value most from my time away is the appreciation I discovered for my in-between identity. I used to be ashamed of the place that I occupied between two cultures, but now I’m grateful for these knots because I know they’re what tie me together.
"It's a totally brand new city. I don’t recognize anything,” my mom says, gazing wide-eyed out of the decades-old tram and into the chaotic streets of Hong Kong. “I never used to take the ding ding. It’s so slow,” she complains as the tram operator rings the bell twice to alert pedestrians nearby — emitting a characteristic sound that gives the tram its Cantonese nickname. “But actually it’s kind of nice. You can take your time to see the scenery around you.”
More from Narratively: "Kids, We're Moving to Greenland"
It’s been 33 years since she moved from Hong Kong to Toronto and four months since I did the opposite. This is how I became my mother’s tour guide in her own hometown.
More from Narratively: "How an International Man of Mystery Scammed My Grandma"
The crowded streets that are familiar to me are now unrecognizable to her. I guide her through the modern subway system, which was constructed after her departure, and advise her on the best bus routes to take when she meets up with her old school friends. We walk together through Central, the city’s financial district, among 70-story skyscrapers and modern steel structures that my mother has never seen before. I introduce her to some of the great local restaurants I’ve discovered; she uses her Cantonese fluency to order dishes that aren’t on the English menu.
More from Narratively: "Can German Atonement Teach America to Finally Face Slavery"
Together, we are the ultimate Hongkonger.
My mom comments on how much my Cantonese has improved while we devour her expertly-ordered meal. This food that I’m enjoying and the language I’m eagerly practicing is in stark contrast to the attitudes of my youth.
I credit my childhood apathy towards my mother’s culture to the whitewashed Toronto suburb I grew up in, where I was one of three Chinese kids in an elementary school of 300. I wanted nothing more than to be just like my white Canadian peers with their Wonder Bread sandwiches and after-school ballet classes. Instead I was forced into weekly piano lessons, which I loathed, and fed traditional Chinese meals of steamed meat and stir-fried vegetables over heaping bowls of rice that I thought were bland.
My mother put me in Chinese school on the weekends to learn her native tongue, but replacing my Saturday morning cartoons with rote repetition of stroke order and Chinese characters instilled in me a repulsion of the language. Whenever she spoke to me in Cantonese, I’d understand perfectly but reply back in English.
There’s a Cantonese slang phrase to describe people like me: jook sing. The term originates from the knot in a reed of bamboo that prevents water from flowing from one end to the other. “You look at bamboo. It looks like it should be all hollow, but actually there are parts where it’s closed inside,” my mom explains. “That’s like you. You look like you’re Chinese but you’re not really Chinese because you do not understand the language and the culture.” It’s meant to be derogatory, and it works. My mother and relatives would tease me, my sister and my cousins for being jook sing when we spoke our accented Cantonese or used our chopsticks incorrectly.
Witnessing her children stuck between two cultures must have been frustrating for my mother too. While she moved to Canada to live and raise kids in a western environment, with western values and beliefs, she didn’t know what the norms were. She had only her own childhood experience to draw from. Growing up in poverty, she adopted an eat-or-be-eaten attitude as the second eldest of six siblings. She witnessed how her father’s strong work ethic brought him from low-level garment seamster to factory foreman and, later, top-level manager. My mother was taught by strict Catholic nuns at an all-girls high school, which undoubtedly influenced her own parenting style. The chaotic city life and incredible academic, societal and economic pressures of Hong Kong are what eventually pushed my mom out of the city.
Between the time my mom left in 1976 and the handover of Hong Kong from the British to the Chinese, a slew of Hongkongers fled to the west. I went to high school in a city that was popular with recent Hong Kong immigrants and their children, who became my classmates. I befriended many but I could never really relate, instead seeking distance from them and my mother’s heritage. When I registered for university and renewed my passport I omitted my Chinese middle name on the application forms, thinking it might make me seem less Chinese and more Canadian.
It wasn’t until I was removed from this environment that I recognized the gap in my identity. In my third year of university, I spent a year abroad, studying in Copenhagen and traveling through Europe. I visited parts of the world where the concepts of immigration and visible minorities were virtually unheard of. I once met a group of young Croatian girls at a bar in Dubrovnik’s Old City, celebrating a friend’s eighteenth birthday. They fawned over my foreign appearance, a rarity in Eastern Europe. “China! You’re from China?” one of the girls asked in a tone that wasn’t racist but inquisitively earnest.
“No,” I said, feeling, for the first time ever, ashamed in my eventual reply. “Actually, I’ve never been.”
* * *
Growing up with my mother and among other Chinese immigrants I never once imagined that I might live in Hong Kong one day. But then I graduated from university on the brink of a recession with no job prospects at home. Hong Kong was a natural destination. I easily found work with an English teaching agency and was trained with 60 other expatriates, mostly white and from the UK.
Skills that I snubbed in my adolescence now gave me an edge above the typical new arrival to the city. Over heavily-accented Cantonese I negotiated with my landlord for cheaper rent. I enjoyed blending in with the crowd, slipping into clothing stores and shopping for groceries unnoticed, until my accented Cantonese outed me as a foreigner. While my new colleagues fumbled with their chopsticks at group lunches, skeptically eyeing the steaming bamboo baskets of curried cuttlefish, shrimp dumplings and pillow-y white buns with mystery fillings, I found comfort in these dishes that were more familiar to me than the strangers I was seated with.
These strangers did eventually become my friends. But over time, as my social networks expanded past the English teachers I first arrived with, I met more and more expatriates like myself — the children of Hong Kong immigrants who were born, raised and educated in the west but settled in Hong Kong for work. While these were the very people I was eager to distance myself from in my youth, in our parents’ homeland I discovered a camaraderie that was missing before. While no one tracks the number of western-born people of Chinese descent living in Hong Kong, data from a 2013 census analyzed by Pacific Prime Hong Kong shows that there are an estimated 301,000 expatriates living in Hong Kong, comprising 4.24 percent of the city’s population. This is a big jump from just 252,000 expatriates living there in 2009.
Hong Kong’s western-born Chinese definitely aren’t considered locals, but we aren’t quite expats either. We navigate the city as in-betweeners, with our varying knowledge of the local customs and norms, the language and food. Yet we retain our western values, among them a sense of individuality and freedom that would be considered a rebellious trait of a traditional family-centric Hongkonger.
Working as an English teacher, I found that my in-between status hindered rather than helped. The schools where I taught English requested an immersive experience for their students, which meant native English speakers. The supervisor of my second teaching job, Pamela Bovitz, instructed me to pretend that I didn’t understand a word of Cantonese.
“She knows what we’re saying!” the kids would say in their native tongue, aware that I was one of them. I feigned confusion and fought the urge to reply back in Cantonese. At the kindergarten where I worked, I was hired to teach these young students English. But through the playground games and classroom conversations I overheard, the students inadvertently helped me improve my second language too. Every morning I listened to them sing their school’s anthem in Cantonese and one day I sang it for my mother. In between fits of laughter, she helped me translate the song and understand the lyrics.
Out of seven English teachers, there were two other Chinese teachers like me at the kindergarten. Bovitz, who has been responsible for hiring native English teachers for the past decade, told me that she gets plenty of resumes from western-born Chinese applicants — more so in the past few years.
After completing my teaching contract at the kindergarten, I was eager for a change but not yet ready to leave Hong Kong. So I enrolled in the University of Hong Kong’s Master of Journalism program in 2010, where I met Stephanie Chan. She moved to Hong Kong from her native Toronto in 2007 to teach middle school at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong. She had trained as a teacher in Canada but looked abroad for work after graduation. “A lot of my friends in teachers’ college were scrambling to find jobs,” Chan recalls. “Many couldn't get permanent teaching jobs in the districts that they wanted. A lot of them just ended up being supply teachers for a couple of years.” Like me, Chan knew very little about Hong Kong, having visited only once before she moved. Her parents were still children when they immigrated to Canada, and they still live in Toronto as my mother does.
Chan is now teaching media studies and journalism at the same Hong Kong international school. Her husband Ricky is also from Canada and of Chinese descent. He was equally drawn to Hong Kong for employment, where he found work with an American firm.
Being not quite local but not quite foreign has been a positive experience for Chan. “I’ve been able to enjoy the Chinese culture while also maintaining the expat identity,” she says. “Hong Kong is such an easy place for a foreigner to live. And even easier as a foreigner who speaks Chinese.”
While Iris Lam was born in Hong Kong, she immigrated to Canada with her family in the late 1980s when she was just a kid. She had the opportunity to return when her employer, Shangri-La Hotels & Resorts, promoted her through a transfer to the company’s headquarters in Hong Kong in 2011. Lam worked there for two years and was then was transferred to Shanghai. She returned to Hong Kong in 2014 to work for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.
Compared to Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur, where Lam has also worked, she says that her status as a western-raised Chinese person isn’t as notable in Hong Kong. “I find local Hong Kong people are amongst the most accustomed and accepting of the concept of overseas Chinese,” she explains. “I haven’t found any stigma or special fascination with the way locals interact with me. In fact, I think I’m regarded as somewhat common within Hong Kong society.”
Second-generation reverse migration isn’t exclusive to Hong Kong. I met Sandy Oh through a mutual friend in Hong Kong as she was stopping over on her way to Seoul. Oh’s mother and aunt left South Korea for New York City in the mid 1970s, where they both found better-paying nursing jobs. Oh moved to Seoul in 2008, and like me, easily found work teaching English. Later she became a textbook writer and developed teaching curricula for a private academy. Oh was inspired by her experience working with upper-class teens to pursue a PhD studying Korean international high school students and global education. She has since returned to Seoul three times and is currently conducting long-term fieldwork in the city.
While in Seoul, Oh has had the opportunity to reconnect with middle and high school friends from her native New York. “There are lots of Korean-Americans who come back for stints like me,” she says. Her peers are working in law, finance, research or opening restaurants, but most are English teachers at the same academies where Oh started out. “It’s common knowledge that a lot of people like me — highly educated, grew up in America — come back to Korea these days because even we can’t find jobs.”
* * *
In 2009, my mom retired from a fruitful 35-year nursing career in Canada. With time on her hands and a desire to see how her hometown had changed (and to see me, of course), she celebrated with an extended seven-week holiday in Hong Kong. Her last visit to the city was in 1982.
Over the years, my mother has never been very sentimental about her upbringing. She’s told me bits and pieces but being in her hometown and seeing certain things for the first time in nearly three decades triggered a flood of memories from her past: a department store where her father used to take the family shopping on the weekends, a spicy Shanghainese noodle dish that she’d always eat after school with her classmates, or hearing the rickety old trams with their characteristic ding ding.
One afternoon during my mother’s stay, I took her to the Hong Kong Museum of History. Part of the museum’s permanent exhibition includes a reconstruction of a room in a post-war tenement building, meant to recreate the rough conditions that Hong Kong’s increasingly poor population lived in at the time.
My mom’s eyes lit up when we turned the corner and the exhibit came into view. “This looks just like our first apartment! I used to sleep on the top bunk with your dai kau fu and yi yi,” my mom said, pointing to a small bunk bed tucked into the corner. “We had to sleep this way,” she added, gesturing her arm width-wise across along the bed, slicing her hand down three times to represent the three children who slept there. I imagined my mother there, sleeping in a bed with her siblings like sardines, in a room so iconic in its squalor that it’s now preserved in a history museum.
“The bottom bunk was where your po po and kau fu would sleep,” she continued. “And your gong gong would sleep on a cot.” The bathroom and kitchen were shared with another family of six. My mother’s family lived there for five years before my gong gong, my mother’s father, earned enough to support the growing family’s move to better accommodations and their eventual emigration and establishment in Canada.
On her first trip back, my mom kept busy touring the city with me and catching up with old high school friends she hadn’t seen in decades. Her retired life now allows her the freedom to fly back to Hong Kong for a few months every year. She’s living comfortably, thanks to a sizeable pension plan that she wouldn’t have attained had she worked in Hong Kong, along with savings from her shrewd frugality — a stereotypical trait of Chinese immigrants, which I’m now grateful for having adopted.
My mom carries her western habits with her to Hong Kong when she visits. When the temperature dips in the tropical city, down jackets, hats and mitts come out. But my mother, hardened after countless Canadian winters, keeps her shorts and tees on. When interacting with a waiter or a shopkeeper, she finds herself initiating conversation in English before reverting back to Cantonese. Her friends comment on her sweet tooth, as she’s gotten used to ending every meal with a dessert — a western norm that’s less common in Chinese cuisine. “They call me fan gwai po because I’m acting like a white woman.”
My mom knows they’re teasing, just like how she used to call me jook sing when I fumbled with my Cantonese as a kid. But I know my mom has some jook sing in her too. Those knots developed in her as she found her way in Toronto, adopting Canadian habits and merging them with her Chinese upbringing.
I’m back in Toronto now after four years in Hong Kong. While I thought of what life would be like if I were to stay in Hong Kong permanently, my heart always was, and still is in Toronto. Life was easier abroad — socially and career-wise. Ironically, I’ve struggled to make friends and find my footing in my hometown, but I’m establishing a fruitful freelance writing career and a good group of friends, old and new. Spending time with my extended family in Toronto is a definite benefit of being back home. I feel proud to converse in my improved Cantonese with the aunts and uncles who used to mock me and cook Chinese dishes for my Canadian friends. While I’m grateful for the linguistic and culinary skills I’ve picked up, what I value most from my time away is the appreciation I discovered for my in-between identity. I used to be ashamed of the place that I occupied between two cultures, but now I’m grateful for these knots because I know they’re what tie me together.
After spending 2 years in solitude, I know something about loneliness. So why is New Year’s still so rough?
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