After the “Black Lives Matter” movement began in the United States this year, demonstrations intensified in various parts of the country, turning into riots and looting in some places. In addition to being a battleground between conservatives and liberals in the U.S. election, there is also a generational divide between Chinese immigrants, the older, first-generation immigrants, and the second-generation immigrants who were born and raised in the United States and have embraced left-leaning ideas.
In June of this year, Irene wrote an open letter to her parents and the Chinese community, asking them to reflect on their generation’s hostile stance toward African Americans.
Eileen Huang, an English student at Yale University who was born in the U.S., sent an open letter to her parents and the Chinese community online in June, asking them to reflect on their hostile stance toward African-Americans. In an interview with The Apple on the eve of the election, Eileen Huang, who voted for Biden, believes that the anti-African-American sentiment of immigrants in the past generation is “a myth of model minorities, a tactic of white supremacists to divide Asians and African-Americans, and a way for Asians to believe that if they work hard, they can escape the consequences of racism.
Irene Wong, whose parents are from Shandong Province, China and who was born and raised in the United States, believes that Chinese elders tend to be right-wing and conservative in their thinking because they do not understand the history of the United States and are used by white people to divide them.
She says she was able to get into Yale because of the resources she had, but that many BIPOC (African Americans, Native Americans and people of color) were not as fortunate as she was, “and the fact is, not all Chinese become doctors, lawyers and engineers”. She added that many first-generation Chinese immigrants lack knowledge of American history, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was “the result of white people making people of color the scapegoat”, and that although the Chinese Exclusion Act has been repealed, the idea of targeting people of color still exists.
As a first-time voter, Irene Wong admitted that Biden and his partymate, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, had “taken a knee” in support of African-American affirmative action as a mere gesture, that “they’ve been in power but haven’t made a real difference for racial equality” and that she cast her first general election vote for Biden only to “kick out the racist Trump”.
After reading the “Open Letter to Parents”, Mr. Ni, who lives in Brooklyn, New York and has immigrated to the United States from China for more than 20 years, immediately wrote another open letter to Irene Wong. He described it as “a typical article about being brainwashed by the leftists in schools to turn black and white into black and white, and one of the biggest fears of many Chinese parents is that their children are being taught by the leftists who are confused about right and wrong.
Mr. Ni, a Chinese immigrant to the United States for more than 20 years, said that second-generation immigrants generally embrace left-leaning ideas because American school teachers are “too leftist” and parents are too busy working to teach their children.
As a Republican supporter, Mr. Nee told The Apple that not only is there no systematic discrimination against African-American communities in the United States, but that African-Americans are given preferential treatment, and that their arrests and killings are “an inevitable consequence of high crime rates. When the culture of an ethnic group goes into a welfare trap instead of going up, it makes the community go down, and it makes it easier to commit crimes and go to the edge of police enforcement,” he said.
He also opposed the proposal of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, to abolish the Uniform High School Admissions Test (UHSET), saying that the allocation of places in the name of racial diversity is “equal results but unequal opportunities, and Chinese children are being deprived of opportunities”.
According to Mr. Nee, second-generation immigrants born in the United States generally embrace the left-leaning value that “rules are no different from the model of the Cultural Revolution” because many first-generation immigrants are confused about their own identity and are too busy working to educate their children. In this election, he will continue to vote for Trump, “As a vegetarian, he can only break up the interest groups when he is outside of them”.
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