We are the Other - Heilongjiang Provincial Museum, Harbin, China (2012)

Does Speaking Chinese Make You Chinese?

The trip of a lifetime for any child of immigrants is the one back to the Motherland. Mine did not come until two years ago. It was made possible by the joint efforts of Arts Midwest (a Minneapolis based-organization that facilitates international artist exchange programs) and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, working to promote visual artists as cultural ambassadors. They organized an 80-piece retrospective, culled from eleven of my photographic projects, that is traveling throughout China for two years.

I arrived in Beijing for the exhibition opener in December 2010, my first time in China. I am the first one in the Huie lineage not born in the Middle Kingdom. I went from Minnesota, a place where inside I felt like everyone else but at times stuck out in appearance, to a place where I looked like everyone but really felt like a foreigner. Especially when I opened my mouth. The meager Chinese language skills I once possessed have long since eroded, but people there of course assumed differently. And so it was with a bit of shame and cultural guilt that I had to repeatedly shake my head and say, “Wǒ bùzhīdào” (I don’t understand).

There were a variety of reactions from audiences at the several lectures I gave, perhaps crystallized by one university student who stood up and remarked in confident English, “But you are showing us images of what America really looks like, not the rich paradise that we know it is!” Indeed. Perhaps America’s most influential exports are the idealized images churned out by Hollywood, marketing and the media, driving the gap between perception and reality. But are we any less susceptible here to all that glossy illusion?

My traveling retrospective was in six cities last year (Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Xian, Wuhan, and Dalian). Last week I was back in China, in Harbin, where the exhibit opened this year at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum and will travel to several more cities. Over a million people will have viewed it by the end.

This northeast capital and the tenth largest city in China, known for its bitter winters and ice festivals, has a sister city relationship with Minneapolis. Because of this fortuitous coincidence I was not only an artist serving as cultural ambassador, but also an official emissary, delivering a letter from the mayor of Minneapolis to the Vice Division Chief of American and Oceanian Affairs Harbin Foreign & Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, and other officials.

My opening lecture (I gave eight lectures in five days, mostly to universities) was preceded by media interviews (millions would be seeing this on state television), speeches, and a ceremony in which museum officials and I placed our hands on an electrostatic globe (a standard ritual for such important events in China I was told) that danced with tiny lightning bolts to the touch, and was partially eclipsed by the barrage of flashes from the camera-wielding audience. 

At one point my interpreter leaned and whispered, “Are you overwhelmed?” I was.

It would be difficult for me to capsulize (and understand) the myriad reactions to my photographs. Sometimes the audience didn’t seemed engaged or didn’t ask any questions, and other times there were so many questions that we had to cut people off because of time.

I wondered how many factors played a part: cultural issues that didn’t translate well, size and age of the audience, English-speaking capabilities, interpretation issues, Westernized knowledge, my fluctuating energy level, shyness, reluctance to question an authority figure, and so on. Throughout my lectures though, one aspect remained constant: everyone wanted to have their picture taken with me afterwards.

There were quite a few responses that stood out, and here are two. One middle-aged man was hoping that I could shed some light on an ongoing debate among Chinese photographers between the pristine landscape aesthetic of Ansel Adams and the social documentary of W. Eugene Smith. “Who is more relevant?” he wanted to know. I gave a not well thought-out, diplomatic answer.

Another was from a young university student who was born and raised in Canada and then went to high school in the deep, rural American south. She had only been in China several years and talked about her shifting cultural identity and the difficulties of being perceived as different.

Her plan was to stay after graduating with the hopes of a career as a Chinese journalist. Even though she is fairly fluent in Chinese, however, she still feels she sticks out. That sometimes she is still treated as a foreigner. I asked her, “Does speaking Chinese make you Chinese?” She thought for a moment and then shook her head no.