Ancestral villages and the AA identity

[J Honcanese]

Most AA's I've met have a clear understanding of exactly where their parents, grandparents, and so on came from. I think it's intriguing that there are parallels with the rest of the American population - I've found that most people, regardless of race/ethnicity/culture, know a surprising amount about their family background even when it isn't that recent. Maybe it's because America is an immigrant nation at its very core so the idea of being rooted in some other place is deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche.

So the question now is this: how important is the idea of an ancestral village in the Asian-American identity? Is it a pan-AA concept or is a particular feature of certain groups? What do you all think?

[Adaon]

From my experience with my friends in SF, there was a whole range of responses about ancestral homes, ranging from indifference and chosen ignorance of such information to pride of who and where their family came from. I, personally, swung from indifference to more pride and interest as I got older, and learned more about my folks.

I'm planning on going back to HK and visiting China from there around my birthday, with or without my dad is in question at the moment, as he'd be able to tour guide me around with actual stories and memories to go along with the changes that occurred since he was last there. He's not getting any younger, and I better get those memories/stories while they're there to be shared with him.

[AngryABCGirl]

There's actually been a lot of extensive scholarship on ancestral villages and Chinese-Americans in the 1960s-1980s or so, with Chinese-American activists going back and discovering socialist revolutions there, etc. Do a few academic searches and articles should come up- but it is very particular to Chinese-Americans mostly in SF who can trace their ancestries back to villages in Guangdong.

It's not really relevant to someone like me, but AAs are all different.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

Most AA's I've met have a clear understanding of exactly where their parents, grandparents, and so on came from. I think it's intriguing that there are parallels with the rest of the American population - I've found that most people, regardless of race/ethnicity/culture, know a surprising amount about their family background even when it isn't that recent. Maybe it's because America is an immigrant nation at its very core so the idea of being rooted in some other place is deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche.
Yet another parallel between Soviet society and American society: the pressure not to be a "rootless cosmopolitan" ... less strong in the U.S., but it's still there.

I guess there's a lot of reasons why some AAs might be so attached to ancestral villages

The feeling that, due to being an ethnic minority, you've been denied full participation in the local identity of the city where you actually grew up, and try to find a substitute in identifying with some rural village
2nd-generation kids get a distorted view of Asia and of the importance of rural villages from their parents, whose view of their home country is frozen in time back in the 1960s/1970s when they emigrated (back when Asian economies, except Japan, were still mostly based on agriculture)
Idealisation of one's ancestral village is part and parcel of the Confucian mindset which upholds the farmer and the agrarian village he came from as a model for society, near the top of the social ladder just below officials, and devalues the merchant and the urban setting he subsists in. (Probably not so applicable to Southeast Asians).
You see Asian societies modernising and urbanising, and mistake that for Westernisation (e.g. the countless times on this board alone I've heard AAs describe Japan as "the most Westernised Asian country", "white-worshipping", etc.). So you think that the modern urban cultures of Asia, and the kids who grew up in those cultures, are just shallow copies of the West and have nothing to teach you about what "being Asian" really means.


Me being a Hakka, whose urheimat is allegedly somewhere in the North (but none of us exactly know where), I've always thought of the excessive attachment to ancestral villages as a specifically Cantonese thing (e.g. this thread (http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?p=504078#post504078)), something they used to "Other" the Guest People among them.

I have a pretty good idea where in Southern China we think my grandpa's Chinese ancestors lived before getting the hell outta there to go to Malaysia; I'm just not particularly attached to it. I don't see the "down to earth heartland values" of the people there as having some special significance to my life ... they're really just the same universal values you see in every farming village the world over from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and from Alabama to Wyoming: xenophobic suspicion of outsiders, extremely rigid gender roles, inability to identify with anyone who doesn't talk/dress/act/worship exactly the same as you, doing things a certain way without understanding them just because "that's the way it's always been done", and performance of unnatural acts with livestock.

Fortunately, this kind of village mentality and its values are fast disappearing even in our ancestral countries thanks to urbanisation.

[AngryABCGirl]

You see Asian societies modernising and urbanising, and mistake that for Westernisation (e.g. the countless times on this board alone I've heard AAs describe Japan as "the most Westernised Asian country", "white-worshipping", etc.). So you think that the modern urban cultures of Asia, and the kids who grew up in those cultures, are just shallow copies of the West and have nothing to teach you about what "being Asian" really means.


I think that's why the village idea is really irrelevant to me. My family is all urban dwellers and I actually have active securities accounts in China and Taiwan, doesn't feel that ancestral to me. I've only heard it more relevant to AAs who truly have agrian roots, but that's less and less of us.

Reminds me how annoyed I was at this dumb guy I was talking to before saying how he didn't wanted to visit Taiwan because it was too "Americanized" and wanted to go to Southeast Asia instead. I was like "so places should just remain poor for your amusement and authentic experience?"

[J Honcanese]

I've never thought that the obsession with ancestral villages was a particularly Cantonese trait, but then again it's a big deal in HK even among the younger generation. We even had this week in our school where everyone pinned their hometown/county on a massive map of China.

In a sense I guess HK is a bit like America in that most residents are descendants of refugees or migrants from different parts of the southern provinces. I think the thing with agrarian roots is less relevant in this context because in many cases a lot of migrants to HK worked in the industrial and business sectors even before moving to the city. An example being the substantial number of middle to upper-class Shanghai émigrés.

With my own background I'm genuinely fascinated and intrigued but not to the point of obsession. On one hand, the ancestral village has played a less important role beginning with my grandparents' generation as both sides were already urban dwellers by then. However they did retain that sense of where they were originally from, a case in point being my paternal grandfather who was Toisanese but born and bred in Shanghai.

Like most Chinese HKers I'm generally an admixture of southern Chinese genes... 1/2 Toisanese on both sides, 1/4 Shanghainese (1/8 northerner included), and 1/4 Cantonese from Zhongshan/Macau. I think my fascination with my family history has more to do with the movements of my forebears than the whole idea of the ancestral village. Growing up I'd hear stories about how my great-grandfather emigrated to Brooklyn from Toisan, went to college in Philly and then settled in Shanghai. As a kid that made a big impression on me.