Looking to Beijing, With Pride

Chinese Americans Find Cultural Connection in Games

In her quest to keep her 10-year-old son Joseph connected to his Chinese roots, Diana Wobus has hung paintings with Mandarin characters in his room, shuttled him to Chinese language classes most Saturdays, and steadfastly resisted the temptation to speak to him in English rather than Chinese.

But it wasn't until Wobus and her American husband, Peter, decided to take Joseph to the Beijing Olympics, that the boy began truly identifying with the land of his birth.

"It's really exciting because I never knew the Olympics could be in China," said Joseph -- who moved to Rockville before he reached the age of 2 -- as he pulled a well-worn Olympics T-shirt out of his half-packed suitcase to show a visitor on a recent afternoon. "It's like the first time China gets to do it in more than a hundred years and it makes me really proud."

When the first bars of the Olympics theme are broadcast from Beijing's National Stadium to television screens across the United States this August, perhaps no one will cheer more ecstatically than the nation's estimated 1.4 million mainland Chinese immigrants. Like their countrymen back in China, many immigrants consider the Olympics a sort of national coming-out party -- the ultimate recognition of China's long transformation from "sick man of Asia" to economic powerhouse and world player.

Many Chinese Americans say they are just as thrilled by the opportunity the Olympics will offer to introduce their U.S.-raised children to Chinese culture in a modern, appealing light.

"One of the frustrations for Chinese parents in this country as they try to pass on their heritage to their children is that the children say, 'Oh, China is the old way. That's your heritage, not mine,' " said Yan Tai, deputy national editor of World Journal, one of the most widely read Chinese-language dailies in the United States.

"But through the Olympics, parents can say to the kids, 'See, where I'm from is not that old fashioned or out of date. We can do great things like hosting the Olympics. The Olympics is your thing, but we're hosting them.' . . . It's a way to bring the first and second generation together."

Months before the games, teachers in some of the dozens of Chinese-language weekend classes for children of the Washington area's more than 46,000 Chinese immigrants were already using Olympic-themed readings or reward stickers to capture students' attention. And lately Xiaoning Wang, owner of ChinaSprout, a New York-based company that markets Chinese textbooks to Chinese American parents, has also been doing a brisk business selling Olympic-themed pencils, clothing, and plush toys.

Once the games begin, almost all Chinese immigrant parents are likely to make watching them a family event, predicted Yaohui Wang, a scientist at the National Institutes of Health and head of the American Chinese School in Rockville.

"The Olympics are such a good way to communicate to the kids," said Wang, whose 16-year-old son has a poster of Chinese NBA star Yao Ming in his bedroom. "Sports are universal."

Then there are those willing to spring for an even more expensive version of the lesson: Several travel agencies that specialize in Chinese American clients estimate that purchases of tickets to China are up as much as 20 percent this summer, largely due to parents who, like the Wobuses, are taking their children to see the Games in person.

Wobus and her husband, both health policy researchers, have encouraged Joseph to find maps of China on the Internet and plot their trip itinerary in advance. Diana Wobus said her ultimate goal is to ensure that he doesn't grow up to be "a banana -- yellow on the outside, white on the inside."

"There are already so many second-generation adults who are like that," said Wobus, who was born in China. "They take a trip back to China [as grown-ups] and they realize that they have no connection to this rich, ancient culture and it's too late. . . . I don't want Joseph to have those regrets."

The difficulty of keeping their children grounded in Chinese culture is all the more vexing to many Chinese immigrant parents because of the effort they put into it. Chinese Americans, of course, are hardly the only immigrant group struggling to pass their language and traditions on to the next generation. But they are certainly among the most systematic, founding hundreds of weekend and summer academies like Wang's to teach not only Chinese reading and writing but decorative arts, sports, music and dance.

The mixed results of that approach were evident during interviews on a recent afternoon with some of the roughly 150 kids, mostly Chinese Americans, attending Dr. Li's Summer Camp in Rockville -- which offers six hours of math, English, middle- and high-school entrance exam and SAT prep classes, five days a week.

Despite attending language classes, few children said they could read or write well in Chinese. And asked to define what part of them was Chinese, most gave examples related to their parents rather than themselves:

Being Chinese American, giggled 10-year-old Jessica Zhang, means having a mother who insists that you eat Chinese food every single day. "I'm so sick of it -- it's so oily!" she said.

Or having parents who make you spend the summer toiling in Dr. Li's camp, even though you're already in your middle school's advanced math class, added her friend, Rolanda Wang, 12. "They want me to do even better -- Chinese parents have the highest expectations," she said, half-sighing, half-laughing.

And though most said their families have access to television and music broadcasts from China through Internet subscriptions, they could not cite a single Chinese performer whose work they followed.

"I guess," said Jacob Chen, 15, summarizing the sentiments of many peers, "I think of the Chinese part of me as the stuff that comes at home rather than the rest of my life."

Yet nearly all the children interviewed said they considered themselves Chinese American, or even simply Chinese, rather than purely American. Most shared not just their parents' pride in the Olympics, but the dismay that even immigrants not particularly supportive of China's government expressed when human rights advocates protested the international torch relay through Europe and San Francisco.

And as much as a group of high school boys on break from their SAT prep class bemoaned the Saturdays of their youth lost to Chinese language class, not one hesitated when asked if they planned to subject their own children to the same regimen.

"Oh, definitely," said Ed Gao, 16, of Potomac. "And I'm not going to let them quit like I did!"