To be biracial in a world of binary thinking is not easy. To be binational is even more challenging.
Olympic gold medalist Eileen Gu, affectionately known in China as the “snow princess,” has ignited an international firestorm of hot takes on nationality and what it means to belong to a country.
“I’m American when I’m in the U.S. and I’m Chinese when I’m in China,” Gu told reporters at the Games on Feb. 8.
San Francisco-born and raised, Gu is the child of a Chinese mother and an American father of undisclosed identity. She is biracial, and appears to have dual nationality, which U.S. law recognizes but Chinese law does not.
Then again, China is not a country where the rule of law consistently trumps other considerations. For instance, Huawei heiress Meng Wanzhou was found to be in possession of as many as seven passports in 2018. In keeping with China’s practice of extending perks and privileges to a select few, it is likely an exception was made for Gu because she has been deemed to serve China’s national interest.
It should also be noted that American citizens can’t just give up citizenship at will, but must go through a costly and arduous bureaucratic procedure to rid themselves of U.S. citizenship.
The media fascination with Gu’s nationality brings to mind another famous biracial American by the name of Barack Obama. Obama also had to navigate the identity tightrope of a dual identity, and he, too, hardly knew his father.
But unlike Gu, who is as tight-lipped about her cipher of a dad as she is about her preferred citizenship, the former U.S. president speaks openly and fondly about the father he never knew, poignantly reconstructed in his memoir, “Dreams of My Father.”
As a politician and president, Obama was dogged by “birther” conspiracy theories from the outset. The intensity and persistence of ill-sourced claims sheds more light on the racially tinged unease of his critics, including his successor as president, Donald Trump, than on the particulars of his case.
Gu has inadvertently touched a raw nerve. Given the pandemic blues, political strife, social unrest and signs of American imperial decline in the face of increasingly bold and brash challenges from Beijing, the idea of a smart, well-spoken young woman from California representing China is hard for many Americans to process.
That she freely chose Team China over Team USA riles her critics. She’s photogenic and accomplished, equally proud of China as America, and unapologetic, too, all of which stimulates the trolls and makes the haters hit on her even more. Inasmuch as Gu appears to be having her cake and eating it too, she causes indigestion in others without uttering a word.
She is eloquent and outspoken, optimistic and egotistical, but she also can toe the line when need be. She studiously refused, six times by one count, to answer questions from foreign journalists in Beijing about whether or not she had renounced her American citizenship as Chinese law ostensibly requires.
But a more positive take on her ambivalence is that she is the harbinger of a world where the old rules — you’re either this or you’re that — don’t hold as tightly as before. If so, is she on to something? Is it possible she represents a paradigm shift in the way young people look at the world?
Old school Americans, both native born and naturalized, understood you had to chose sides and stick with it. German Americans and Italian Americans fought bravely and unequivocally for the United States on the front lines of two world wars, and Japanese Americans, though denied the chance to fight Japan due to the insecurities of Euro-Americans about their loyalty, fought with great courage and patriotism in the European theater.
Because we live in a world in where zero-sum wars are a tragic legacy and the possibility of future conflict can’t be discounted entirely, it doesn’t sit well with conventional thinking to say that a person is equal parts one thing as they are another.
Is it possible, to borrow a concept pioneered in no small part on the streets of San Francisco, that the old binary categories no longer apply?
The age-old male/female dichotomy is being resisted by a new generation informed by contemporary notions of gender fluidity and sexual identity. It’s about being what one wants to be by taking pride and control of one’s identity.
During her Feb. 8 press conference, Gu clearly expressed a desire to “live her best life.” She says she does not seek to make other people happy by being what they want her to be.
As China’s guest athlete of the hour, already celebrated in a drone display and lavish sponsorship deals, she doesn’t conform with conventional notions of race, nationalism and citizenship.
In time, reactionary pressures may force her to make a more binary choice, but for the moment she’s having it all, doing it her way and representing a new kind of international citizen that is proud of both sides, defiant in her embrace of duality.
Philip J. Cunningham is a freelance writer on East Asian politics, and author of “Tiananmen Moon” and “Tokyo Crush.”