Chinese VS Chinese American War?!

There's a Chinese vs. Chinese war going on in America right now, and I got to talk about it I recently saw this video from this account called spill the B And she made some really good points as she talked about the different waves of the Chinese Diaspora and how it actually differs especially in today's world and how it's viewed and I want to talk about it because I talked about This topic too, so shout out to her, but I think she might have missed some stuff Obviously, you can't say everything in Instagram video But let's break it down because there's a lot to say especially about the Cantonese Diaspora The Chinese Diaspora has a class war and nobody will say it out loud. Whoa Okay, you have my attention That's a good hook on one side You have families who arrived with nothing who worked restaurant kitchens and laundromats and corner stores for decades Who taught their kids one rule above everything else keep your head down and don't draw attention Let the work speak for itself who built every Chinatown from San Francisco to London to Sydney brick-by-brick over generation Yeah, so before we go any further I want to be specific that she is referring to the toys on American Diaspora now Most of the early Chinese were Cantonese but I would just say broadly southern but mostly from toys on and toys on people definitely banded together and were the founding backbone of today's Chinatowns which turned into some of the earliest Asian enclaves and communities, right and What I want to be specific is that toys on is a specific like urban district in a larger area called Jiangmen Which is right next to Guangzhou. So that obtains like Multiple kind of towns as you would say it so we think of toys on Taishan as a city but also there's like hoax on aka hush on where the lion dance comes from and Those are actually urban districts within the city of Jiangmen and Jiangmen is nearby Guangzhou But anyways guys that's getting a little bit my new but what I want to be clear is that even toys on people Early on if you talk to some of them who speak their specific toys on dialect, they don't already identify as Cantonese so from what I understand the term Cantonese is United by the Cantonese dialect, which is still a little bit different But very similar to a lot of the other southern dialects like toys on or hoax on right? mostly intelligible mostly the same But with some slight differences and I want to make that point because not all people who fall under Cantonese today actually spoke Cantonese as the dialect people have the Zongshan dialect people have the Chiu Chow dialect Which sounds very different which is actually like I think from a completely different language family, you know And then also there's a lot of other southerners that came to Chinatown early on but maybe not as early as the toys on which Are like, you know Shanghainese people So what I'm saying is if you really want to get granular it can get real granular So already using the term Cantonese is kind of an umbrella term in itself By the way, guys, what do you think about my new backdrop? 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It's probably a little bit off and Pretty much all the tonage of my Chinese is gonna be a little bit off from both dialects But anyways the foo art die the rich second generation these are what you think of as your fobs and Ferraris or your malls or altis or your rich international students were that were Zooming around the OSU campus in like a fancy sports car and buying it in cash you know a lot of these stories were very very common in the mid 2000s and I think that was the kind of the first major wave of Rich second-generation Chinese who were coming in here and kind of acting crazy. I think they act a lot differently now I know a lot in New York and they're definitely not as crazy as gaudy They're wearing a lot of expensive gear and living in luxury buildings. Don't get me wrong, but Maybe they're not They're doing a little maybe a little bit more tasteful now Let's give them some more credit You know the the later generation definitely learned and the reason why people like talking about this group Which are essentially in a way the crazy rich Asians here. They're the real crazy rich Asians They like talking about it because it is like a wave of Chinese that are very visible, right? They're being out there a lot of these people, you know There's a lot of like stories of these kids feeling and I don't want to like generalize But you know, you can kind of generalize if they're a single child. They grew up in a rich family from China They come here a little cocky or whatever, you know, there's stories like that I've actually met some really cool ones too, by the way but we all know that there's some of that going on and Usually the negative side of people does kind of define the narrative Unfortunately, people are defined by their negative stereotypes ultimately and don't get me wrong Not all fob students or international students are very rich I know that we tend to think so but some of them actually just come from middle-class families or just you know Like maybe slightly upper middle-class families by Chinese standards But the only thing is they have four grandparents and two parents that are feeding resources into them So sometimes they kind of have an outsized amount of resources, you know because of the single-child policy So when you have one child and you have four grandparents and then two parents working Of course, it looks like that kid has a lot of resources. We all know that comparing the old toy son fourth generation Chinese immigrant class to this new second rich second generation Mainland class where their parents got rich from like steel mills and windows and harvesting and farming and they just hit the booms of the 90s in the 2000s It's quite different. Those are not even the same people not even from the same dare I say exact culture and when the backlash comes when the headlines run about Chinese buyers and Chinese money and Chinese students the grandmother who worked 60-hour work weeks for 40 years gets lumped into the same story a story She didn't write that first wave overwhelmingly Cantonese and they are tired for over a century If you said Chinese immigrant you are statistically describing a Cantonese speaker the gold rush the Transcontinental Railroad Every Chinatown from San Francisco to Sydney and the culture the outside world came to associate with Chinese people the food the New Year Traditions the red envelopes that was Cantonese culture not because it was more authentically Chinese But because Cantonese people got there first and built the infrastructure and they built it in a very specific way Cantonese immigrant culture ran on one unspoken rule. Do not draw attention to yourself work hard Stay quiet take up as little space as possible. That wasn't weakness. That was survival Chinese exclusion acts anti-asian violence Neighborhoods where you were tolerated only as long as you were invisible and useful Generations internalize that code because they had to that's a context you need for what happened next Okay I do want to talk about this because when you think of Chinese New Year in America For example, you are thinking of a lot of Cantonese or southern customs. It's true the lion dance That is one of the urban districts of Jiangmen nearby toys on as well And then there's also like, you know, just the way they do it is is very Cantonese I guess coded you could say it's very based in Cantonese culture so that's why a lot of the new mainland Chinese international kids or Just the mainland kids who grew up here aka kids whose parents are from the north But are not rich international students that just grew up in America Which there is a large group of that who came over as well in the 90s and 2000s So we can't like overlook that group. But anyways, I'll get into that in a second when you think of Chinese American culture It is typically Cantonese American base or you could say Shanghainese American base because I do want to give a shout out in Chinatowns Maybe not as early as a toy song but pretty much like for the last like 60 years 70 years there's quite a few Shanghainese people who also came over So Shanghai was also a very diverse well-developed very global Coastal city of China and not to mention in New York You have a lot of Fujian ease and that's why during the New Year's over on East Broadway You can buy the big moon cakes these gigantic thick sweet Moon cakes. They're just like the year beings are just like bigger than my face They're like wheels and when she said that they had a code of staying low and out of sight out of survival Yes, I do agree But that's also out of survival people do that when they see that the landscape is not going to accept them She made that point. I would say on to add to that that I think part of being Cantonese is to be very humble Okay, Cantonese like to survive in many different environments. I kind of consider them all-terrain vehicles You can drop Cantonese people anywhere on earth sprinkle them across the globe Jamaica the Middle East Southeast Asia Drop southern Chinese anywhere. I know I'm using southern Chinese and Cantonese is the same thing I don't really mean it but yeah, you know what? I mean, anyways, you can drop southern Chinese anywhere on earth and they're gonna start a business They're gonna figure it out All-terrain vehicles, but I also think that other types of Chinese have a different identity in a different mindset Which causes them to be more visible and out there and I know they're not from mainland China But we're talking about Taiwanese people Taiwanese people have a very different mindset and that's why per capita You know a lot more famous people of Taiwanese heritage than you even do of Cantonese people Even though there's way more Cantonese people in America, but Cantonese people own a lot of things in America She only also briefly mentioned the post 1965 heartseller group of Chinese students who came over which pretty much accounts for all your engineering parents Yes, even my parents. Those are my parents. My dad came from Hong Kong for college My mom came here for that's my parents and that's a lot of other people's pants And I would say that group of Chinese people was actually quite diverse. It wasn't just Southerners It was Chinese people from all over Hunan Sichuan Xi'an Dongbei northeastern China Shen Yun Beijing everywhere Mandarin dominant immigration came later and through different doors post 1965 immigration reform favored education and professional Credentials then China's economic boom produced a wave of wealthy international students and investor class immigrants arriving with resources earlier waves couldn't have imagined cash purchases cars that cost more than most families annual income a Relationship to blending in that looked nothing like what the Cantonese diaspora had spent generations practicing It wasn't just about the money It was about exposure everything they had carefully managed the perception the footprints the way they moved through a country that never fully welcomed them Suddenly felt like it was being renegotiated by people who hadn't lived through what it cost to build that quiet The Cantonese diaspora carries a specific grief here the grief of building something painstakingly over generations Only to watch the perception of your entire community get rewritten by people with completely different Circumstances and a completely different relationship to visibility Now here's the part of the video that I mostly disagree with when spill the B says It's being rewritten and they didn't ask for it. Essentially. That's kind of what she's suggesting and I'm gonna be honest It's not being rewritten. It's just evolving Listen when you put everybody under the umbrella of Chinese now whether you think that all Cantonese people ask for that or not The truth is there is incentive and everything now my thing and how I see Cantonese culture as much as I understand I think Cantonese people are some of the most humble Chinese Okay for a number reason, you know, they're far from the central government. They've always been leaving, you know There was a lot of poverty in the south. So that's why they left for opportunities Cantonese people have been leaving for opportunities in other places outside of China for centuries Multiple centuries Southeast Asia they went there hundreds of years ago. So the thing is about Cantonese people they seek opportunities I think that's part of the identity and when you seek opportunities You also have incentive to blend into places and to set up shop and when I say that It's kind of on the Cantonese group to figure out how proud they want to be and how much they want to keep the culture I think it's their decision. They got there first They had the power but due to the economic and the geopolitical incentives, particularly nowadays Things are more leaning Mandarin things are leaning more towards mainland China. That is kind of what is happening I'm acknowledging that but I'm also saying that if Cantonese people were so proud so proud Then why would they always leave? the Cantonese area and then also Why would a lot of them be so spent on survival that they would blend in? Like I heard a lot of Cantonese people, you know, a lot of Cantonese ABCs. They don't speak Cantonese So who's not teaching them it's the parents and the grandparents well, why aren't they teaching them? Well, maybe it's the incentive structure They want them to blend in but then if they want them to blend in and not be so Cantonese Then are they being as proud of their ethnic pride? What I'm saying? Is that Chinatown's maintaining the Cantonese miss makes sense? And I think it should because that's the identity of Chinatown's it should be mostly based in Cantonese But just because Cantonese started Chinatown's first It doesn't mean that the identity of Chinese America isn't going to morph I think this girl spilled a bee probably would agree with me, but at least you know, she wanted to make a good video So maybe she didn't include some of that stuff but the class divide was only the half the story because while all this is happening Cantonese was quietly being erased from the inside and The people who built this diaspora didn't even see it coming and that's for part two and stay tuned for part two Part of Cantonese culture is to seek opportunity and seeking opportunity Incentivizes you sometimes to go blend in and become One with someone else. Let's be honest I mean listen when you think of what America is aren't you thinking of Middle America the good old Middle America not these coastal elites and guess what Cantonese they're actually coastal people. That's why they eat so much fish and seafood. That's why the seafood game is on point This week's Cantonese people would always leave that's why the Cantonese diaspora is amazing because they weren't landlocked Okay, they were next to the ocean and when their area got poor they were like, I'm out Oh what somebody wrote me a letter. I heard that there's like people moving to Thailand. Oh, let's move to Thailand, you know, a lot of children people move to Thailand, you know Did you people are a type of southern Chinese but not quite Cantonese a little bit different. So again, it's granular But trust me I do not want to overlook the political implications of all this because I understand and you can see definitely during kovat that every old Chinese person whether they came from a kind of like twice on Chinatown lineage or If they had just been brought over by their children From mainland China recently. They were being viewed the same and From an ignorant person's viewpoint Yes, they are all gonna be viewed as being from China and now what other that ignorant person thinks of China as just like the CPC CCP like government and that's all they see or They see see it as like Chinese culture, right? I mean ignorant people are gonna be ignorant so I think what I want to empathize is that a lot of Cantonese who are Chinese but really of the southern Chinese Diaspora they don't necessarily identify with a lot of the mainland Mandarin oriented Kind of I guess culture or way of doing things. But again, I don't think there's really in a way Something sacred about being Cantonese. I think Cantonese people Like to do trade and when you trade you interface with other types of people when you interface with other types of people you mix So then ultimately your identity does become diluted at some point and that's okay That's just kind of evolution and what happens So what I would ask bill to be and I could probably send her a message and have this discussion But I just ask it to you guys What do you think? Like do you think the Cantonese identity is being wiped out deliberately? Is it being rewritten or is this kind of just how things are going? It used to be that Chinatowns were the only place that Chinese people could go and yes It was from a certain group of Chinese But now that Chinese from all over are coming and they come at different waves and different levels that diaspora is still happening They are still immigrants. They still have that work ethic a lot of them A lot of them still have that grit, but they are coming from a slightly different mindset and culture Anyways, shout out to spill the B. I'm gonna watch part to follow her if you like those type of discussions But also let me know in the comments down below what you guys think. All right, everybody Thank you so much for watching and until next time I'm out. Peace