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Reaching for their roots

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-12 07:34

Danielle Huyn (second from left) attends an event held by Overseas Chinese Network (OCN). The French-Chinese is an organizer for the Shanghai-based network. [China Daily]

Chinese-American Barry Chien, who moved to Shanghai eight months ago to work as a private equity investor, says he is following the "exact same dream" that lured his parents across the Pacific - just in reverse.

"I feel the Chinese are chasing what was previously coined the 'American Dream'," the 27-year-old says.

"My coworkers enjoy chatting about what car or house they plan to buy next, and that's no different from how it was in the United States."

While Chien is following his parents' footsteps, backward, he has gone the same direction as American Larry Wang, who came to Hong Kong in 1990, when "it seemed like a fairly new thing for a young Chinese-American to pursue".

Wang would later dedicate much of his career to encouraging overseas-born Chinese, often called "OBCs", to expatriate to their ancestral homeland.

It took him by surprise when native Chinese congratulated him and shook his hand during his first visit to the mainland in 1985.

"After a while, I realized it was because I was an overseas Chinese from America who had unlimited choices and opportunities available to him," Wang says.

Five years later, the self-described "all-American kid" left the "Land of Opportunity" to develop a career in Hong Kong, starting with an internship at Johnson & Johnson.

Upon graduating from business school, he returned to work for Wang Computers, which transferred him to Taipei. In 1995, four years before he moved to the mainland to eventually settle in Shanghai, Wang founded the headhunting firm Wang & Li Asia Resources, which mostly tapped overseas Chinese.

"I wanted to plant a flag and let other Chinese-Americans know there's a growing community of us who are doing pretty well out here, and doing many things that we wouldn't have the chance to do in the States, or things that nobody is doing out here yet," he says.

In 1998, he wrote The New Gold Mountain: The Success of American Chinese in Greater China ... and What You Need to Know to Get There.

Chinese once called the US "The Gold Mountain" because of the economic opportunities it promised. Now the tide is turning, with waves of overseas Chinese returning to cash in on China's rapid economic development.

This influx prompted the 2006 founding of the Shanghai-based Overseas Chinese Network (OCN), which Chien joined last year.

The network's membership is now more than 900 - about 60 percent of whom are OBCs.

"After several years in Shanghai, a friend and I realized there was an increasing overseas Chinese diaspora uprooting and coming to China to seek new fortunes," says cofounder Alwin Lee, a Chinese-Australian who expatriated to China six years ago.

"We met more and more of them and we felt they needed a more integrated group identity and better support structure in a foreign country."

The group's activities revolve around a regular social mixer, but also include smaller events, such as dinners, go-kart riding and outings.

French-Chinese Danielle Huyn, who became an OCN organizer last year, says many OBCs in China are "like third-culture kids not really belonging anywhere, generally multicultural with a Chinese ethnicity."

The group was exactly what she had been seeking.

"The first time I attended an OCN mixer, my first reaction was, 'Wow, I've just found people from the same planet as me'."

While economic and career opportunities often provide the strongest pull for China-bound OBCs, a quest to dig for their roots provides most with greater incentives than foreign career-builders without Chinese heritage.

When American Sunnia Ko came to Hong Kong in 2002, it was her intention to advance her career goal of becoming a teacher - as the region's English-teaching market was burgeoning - and reconnect with her Cantonese heritage.

However, she found engaging the culture more difficult than expected.

"There was this naivete of, 'I'm going to live with my people', because of that feeling of being the other in the States," the 35-year-old, who now teaches in Beijing, says.

"But after about a year I realized that in terms of my beliefs and values, I don't blend in here at all.

"Here, I realize how American I am Sometimes I feel like I'm caught in the middle, like I'm not completely at home in California, nor am I completely at home in Beijing."

However, she says her "dual identity" has its upsides.

"I get to traverse cultural boundaries and explore more of both Chinese people, and American and Western people, and their experiences. I guess that's really what has led me to stay in China after all these years."

Many OBCs in China say few local Chinese or other expats understand their heritage and appearance can be both a burden and a boon to navigating life in the country.

"While we are technically Chinese, there are still many cultural etiquettes, languages that we don't know or understand," says Canadian-Chinese Jacqueline Wan, who moved with her mother to work in Tianjin's entertainment industry three years ago.

The OCN member says she wishes more Chinese people would "cut us slack and don't take everything we say offensively and aggressively. We're still learning."

Every interaction is about "passing" for American Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge, whose mother is from Taiwan and American father is ancestrally English and Czech.

"The tenacity with which I haggle for bargains is the tenacity of the desire I have to pass as Chinese," says the university instructor who moved to Beijing in 2007.

"The price they're willing to go to is the extent to which they're willing to accept you as Chinese, how Chinese they believe you are."

Ko says that having developed her teaching career in China for several years she has been considering returning to the US since Barack Obama became president-elect.

But her mother, who came to the US from Hong Kong in search of a better life in 1977, suggested she reconsider.

"Since the economic situation is so bleak back home, she thought opportunities and job prospects were more promising in China now than in the States," Ko says.

"I'll give it some time to see if she's right."