Perpetual Foreigners: Chinese Americans and the U.S. Opening to China

Abstract

In the fall of 1980, sinologist Wei Peh T’i revisited her hometowns in China, Nanjing and Chongqing, for the first time since she left for New York in 1947, at age sixteen. Wei was part of a luxury cruise for “foreigners,” but with unfading knowledge of local dialects, she managed to visit the people on the name list that her parents had prepared for her homecoming. A curious gaze of the “natives” trailed Wei along the way, however, and an old Chinese poem came to her mind: These words encapsulated the nostalgia and alienation that Wei and thousands of other Chinese Americans experienced when they returned “home” after the dramatic improvement of U.S.-Chinese relations in the early 1970s.2 After two decades of Cold War hostility, Washington and Beijing achieved a historic “rapprochement,” epitomized by U.S. President Richard Nixon’s handshake with Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Mao Zedong in February 1972. The diplomatic sea change reverberated among Chinese Americans, many of whom had been itching to reunite with their families, relatives, and friends in the mainland.