Viewing page 7 of 11

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:26:38]
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"}
For exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:40]
{Woman speaker}
When you were talking about the Chinese women in Hong Kong, and the American women in Hong Kong, I wonder if you were including children of Chinese immigrants who were born and raised in the United States.
[00:26:56]
Now if they went back to Hong Kong, would they be considered American women or Chinese women, and what, and how are they perceived? Is it kind of a third group, American, Chinese, and then Chinese-American?
[00:27:08]
 
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"}
There is a third group. And a lot of times its about self naming. And it's interesting to look at crisis periods. So for instance in World War II, you have women who were born in the US, or born in China, basically they have US passports.
[00:27:24]
And they may have been literally days in one place before moving to another, but you have a lot of ethnically Chinese women, both Chinese-American, or Hong Kong born Chinese, or mainland Chinese women who have US passports, basically flushing passports, and passing as being ethnically Chinese.
[00:27:43]
A woman in the book named Eleanor Tong is an interesting example. She is somebody, she's born in the US, and is educated truly bi-culturally in both in Hong Kong and the US. And she, she identifies as Chinese.
[00:27:59]
In the Eurasian community, sort of clumps in different places. Eurasians in Macao, which is next door to Hong Kong, will tend to associate with Chinese identities much more than Western identities. It becomes more a mixed bag on the island and if you have, you know, British connections as opposed to American connections sometimes the identification is different, but I think we can say at this point is that local Chinese people see ABC's differently.
[00:28:31]
I didn't even know what the term ABC was until I came to Hong Kong. And that is American Born Chinese, right? I knew Chinese-American, I knew Asian-American, but the way my local students look at Chinese-American women is, it's quite striking, it really is, and I went to Hong Kong thinking "Oh, I will be able to connect with my Hong Kong students around questions of migration and diaspora and hybrid identities", and my Hong Kong Chinese students said "No". [[laughs]]
[00:29:01]
And when Eng talks about Jook-Sing, you know bamboo, or banana, there is still, that's starting to break down a little bit, because we have more and more students from all over the world in our classrooms, but there is still a very clear view of American born Chinese women as being different than Hong Kong born or mainland born who go for periods of time.
[00:29:25]
And again, some of that is women get to identify, they get to speak their narrative to determine who they are, but only to a point, there's still a lot of labeling going on. Does that answer?
{Woman speaker}
Yeah
[00:29:34]