Back in China, Watching My Words

By HELEN GAO

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York TimesChinese tourists taking in the sights in New York. Chinese perceptions of the United States, it often seems, are colored by their feelings toward China.

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Helen Gao writes an occasional column on overseas education forcn.nytimes.com, the Chinese-language website of The New York Times. This piece is adapted from a column published shortly after the Lunar New Year in 2013.

A fter studying in the United States for seven years, I was once again sitting at my grandmother’s table in Beijing. In front of me lay the dishes she had prepared for my visit: a steamed carp, laced with strands of cilantro; julienne potatoes stir-fried with green pepper; sautéed celery slices; braised pork cubes and eggs.

“When are you going back to America this time?” Grandma asked, placing a piece of fish on my plate.

“I’m staying this time.”

She raised her eyebrows.

I told her I hoped to do freelance writing in China and be close to home after all the years abroad. She nodded, but then shook her head.

“I wouldn’t have returned if I were you.”

Grandma peppered me with questions as I nibbled on the fish. What was I working on? What was the reporting process like? Did I take China’s side? She was once a journalist herself, having worked for state-owned newspapers from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s.

I told her I was writing about the strike at Southern Weekend, a liberal Chinese newspaper, after state censors meddled with an editorial last winter. “The censorship at the paper has always been very severe,” I said. “Frankly, I’m surprised the reporters put up with it for so long. If I were one of them…”

Grandma cut me off. “Of course you are surprised. You’ve been abroad too long,” she snapped, putting down her chopsticks with a clatter. “This is just the way Chinese journalism works. Do you understand? China is not America!”

I opened my mouth to explain, but Grandma went on. The words “superior,” “ignorant,” and “half-American” flew by my ears. I kept my eyes on my plate and ate the fish, trying hard to swallow.

I left China for the first time in 2005, at the age of 17, to attend high school in the United States. I quickly realized that my homeland, when viewed from the outside, looked very different from what I was familiar with.

In the United States media, Taiwan was its own country. The Tiananmen massacre was better known among my American peers than my Chinese friends. As a native of China, I faced constant questioning: Do you think the one-child policy is necessary? Why are the Chinese so incensed about the Diaoyu Islands? What was the Chinese government doing to ease ethnic tensions in Xinjiang and Tibet?

I tried to reply, searching for answers in my mind, but felt as if I were scraping the inside of an empty Nutella jar with a butter knife. So I hit the library, poring over documents and books written by both Chinese and Westerners. Slowly, my understanding of China evolved into something resembling a chaotic Impressionist painting: News and views from West and East juxtaposed each other like clashing colors and shapes, refusing to form a neat image.

But it was an image I was eager to share with friends and family at home when I returned to China two years ago.

One night at dinner, my mother, an editor in chief at a state publishing house, mentioned a new book she was planning to publish. “It is about the Jews,” she explained, “and reveals the secret behind their entrepreneurial success.”

Her words made me uneasy. I had often heard Chinese talking about Jews in similarly generalized terms. Carefully, I pointed out that the book’s idea sounded like a form of racial stereotyping.

“Chinese people talk like this all the time, and you know it,” my mother replied, throwing me an impatient look. “It’s not considered offensive in China.”

“But should China have its own standard for racial sensitivity?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem right to hold assumptions toward races anywhere in the world. In America, my friends don’t —”

“Just because they do it in America, it doesn’t mean we have to do the same in China,” she interrupted, raising her voice. “The years you spent in America have got those ideas into your head, and now everything in China seems wrong to you!”

I forget how I responded, but I remember the suffocating silence in the room afterward.

Often, I find conversations about China with Chinese relatives and friends trickier to navigate than those with American acquaintances. In America, my firsthand perspective of China gave me credibility and strengthened my stories and arguments. But here in China, my time spent in America seems only to have alienated me from others. If I say something critical, it is often taken not as social commentary but as a sign of shifted loyalty, of contempt for my homeland, of uncritical worship of all things American.

Wounded by such misunderstandings, I babble in self-defense. I point out that my complaints echo those of many Chinese about air pollution, food safety, news censorship, corruption and so on. In fact, these gripes dominate discussions on Chinese social media. But such reasoning is usually of little help. The evening after my exchange with Grandma about censorship, my mother sat me down in the living room. “Don’t talk about Chinese journalism like that in front of Grandma in the future,” she said.

“But Grandma complains about it all the time,” I muttered.

“Grandma can complain about it,” she said, looking in my eyes. “But it’s not the same when you do.”

When I left China in 2005, my teachers, classmates and relatives bid me farewell with a nudge. “You will come back after finishing school, right?” they asked. “To develop your motherland,” they joked, before adding more seriously: “Plus, you will surely have a brighter future here.”

But when I saw them again after returning, many seem puzzled. “Why did you come back?” they ask. “Couldn’t you find a way to stay?”

Chinese are leaving their country in droves. Students, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, celebrities, pregnant mothers — it seems everyone is trying to get away. They land on the campuses of New England universities, in Silicon Valley offices and Manhattan condos, in hospital beds in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those who stay grumble about the exodus while speaking of the United States in rapt fascination.

“I hear Americans can go to hospitals for free. The health care system covers it all!”

“Everybody in America can get a job, even without a college degree. Isn’t that the case?”

A friend burdened with debt to buy an apartment outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road described the better fortune of her cousin in Virginia and sighed. “She bought a house just four years after graduating from college, and she’s only a middle-school teacher!”

If I spoke of the United States this way, friends would glare in offense. I now tread carefully, avoiding out-of-context comments about China or the United States that might upset people. But sometimes, when confronted with rosy depictions of life in the United States, I can’t help but trying to present a more nuanced picture.

If my American friends inundated me with questions about China, though, my Chinese friends are usually less curious about the subtleties of life in the United States. When I try to explain the problems with American health insurance or school testing, their eyes begin to wander. After telling my friend with the cousin in Virginia about property taxes, she replied, “What do I need to know that for. In China, you can’t even afford the down payment!”

I gradually realized what was happening. Like someone gazing out a window but staring only at his own reflection, many Chinese look at America in ways that are colored by their feelings toward China. The United States they see — a nation with a pristine environment, perfect schools, generous welfare and complete political transparency — is a figment of their imagination, custom-made in stark contrast to the reality we live in. This is what makes my comments about China or the United States so grating for them: The same hopes and anxieties for China that lay behind their idealized notions of America also heightened their sensitivity to criticism of China from outsiders. And that is how they saw me. The years I spent in the United States, it seems, had served only to deepen the sting of my words.

I once joined old friends at a high school reunion in mocking President Xi Jinping’s flashy campaign to curtail government waste. My opinions echoed theirs, but one classmate quickly turned on me. “In America, of course you don’t need this. But this is China. This is how things have to start,” he said, though a few minutes earlier he had derided the campaign as “a big show” staged by the authorities.

I stayed silent the rest of the meal. Before it ended, the classmate approached with a question. “I heard about something,” he said. “I heard you can buy a large house in a nice suburb on the East Coast for just $200,000. Is that true?”

Not long ago, Grandma showed me an essay she wrote in 1984. The piece reminisced about her days at The Hunan Daily, the newspaper where she started her journalistic career in the 1950s. Then a bright-eyed, plucky girl in her early 20s, she was assigned to report on the “new scenes of rural prosperity since the Great Liberalization.” For three years, she roamed the province, visiting ethnic minority villages tucked in the mountains and interviewing veterans who had fought against the invading Japanese forces. The headline was in bold: “I Was the Rough Country Girl.”

I suggested to Grandma that she put more of her remembrances in writing. But she demurred, complaining that Mao-era bureaucratese clogged her pen the moment it touched paper. She said her dark memories of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution would not find an audience in today’s China.

I assured her that I was eager to read about them. I told her my friends in America would be too. Perhaps I could translate her writing into English…

Her face sank at the suggestion. “Why should I be writing for foreigners? What could they possibly understand? I can’t believe you even proposed that!”

“That’s not what I meant,” I blurted out. A wave of words rolled in my chest and tumbled to the tip of my tongue. I looked at Grandma. The corner of her mouth twitched. Deep furrows lined her forehead. I held my tongue.