Free A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu

family roots and the fact that Washington, home of Boeing and Microsoft, has strong trading ties to China.
    Then in 2011 he was named US ambassador to China. At first the reception was similarly adulatory. Early reports marveled at how humble and down-to-earth Locke was. A photo of him at an airport Starbucks, waiting in line to get his own coffee and carrying his own bags, became a viral sensation in China. It turned out, though, that the sensation was less about love of Locke per se than it was an indirect criticism of the Audi-chauffeured princelings and party powerbrokers who rule China today. Once Locke settled into his job—which, after all, was not to please Chinese people but to represent the interests of the United States—he on occasion became the object of orchestrated scorn. Special scorn, for he was not just American but Chinese American. Locke’s predecessor, the Mormon, Mandarin-speaking Jon Huntsman, had also been criticized by Chinese citizens. But now nationalist mobs of those citizens pelted Locke’s car during anti-Japanese (and implicitly anti-American) riots. They pointed out that Locke is unable to speak Chinese. They excoriated him in online forums for being a fake, a lapdog, and, odd as it may seem, a traitor to his race.
    But what he was, was simply this: an American, overseas.
    When Locke was ten, his parents had brought him from Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood to Hong Kong. The plan was to leave him with his grandmother and to immerse him for a year in Chinese schools and Chinese culture. Locke hated it. He was mocked by school kids for not being able to speak Chinese. He missed his home, his Boy Scout troop, his parents. After only a few months, they relented and brought him back. Brought him home. It turns out—and Gary Locke, onetime hero of the diaspora, is proof of this—that there is no such thing, really, as an ABC. To be American-born is inherently, inescapably to become something other than pure Chinese. It is, indeed, to highlight that there may never have been such a thing as pure Chinese. Purity of Chineseness is a fiction imagined and nurtured by those who migrated and by those they left behind to mask a sense of loss, to mark the distance traveled, to reckon with the reality that any hope for purity ended, on some level, the moment they who set sail set sail.
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    What is a seed, Dearly Beloved? Is a fish not a seed? May we not open the fish to find the sea? Do the birds know what they carry?
    â€”Li-Young Lee, The Winged Seed
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    There are many dialects of spoken Chinese, from Shanghainese to Toishanese to Mandarin. Sometimes the aural distance between them is like the distance between Mississippi English and Boston English. In other cases it is the distance between English and Greek. But there is only one written Chinese language, used by the speakers of every tongue generically called “Chinese.” It is the constant, the glue that binds all these speakers of all these different dialects from all these separate provinces that might otherwise begin to think of themselves as separate nations.
    Many Americans know that written Chinese characters are ideographs, derived from primitive symbols. Most do not know, however, that written Chinese comes in two formats, fantizi and jiantizi , complex and simplified. So-called complex Chinese characters are what was traditionally written, read, and taught in China for thousands of years. Simplified characters were implemented by the Communists in the 1950s and 1960s in response to the mass illiteracy of the nation’s peasantry. It was a great feat of linguistic engineering. Simplified characters dramatically reduce the number of strokes in each character and make reading and writing far easier. Many lamented this “dumbing-down” of written Chinese: the subversion of the nuance, beauty, and tactile intricacy of the original characters.