I'm very conflicted over which nation my sport spectator support should lie. On one hand, I grew up in America, my family has been here since the railroads (The American West was built by yellow hands, btw. Not Roy Rogers and Davey Crockett). On the other hand, I grew up with a distinct understanding that I was, in fact, Chinese. Set apart from my White American friends. I had a culture.* I had a heritage. And I had yellow skin and almond eyes. And because of that, I would and could never be a real American.

As a Chinese American, growing up non-white, but not black, in a nation with a racial politic so polarized from it's history of the enslavement of millions of Africans, you get used to being excluded. Not only excluded from institutions held and controlled by white-folk, but also from conversations about race relations in this nation, which almost inevitably melt into a rabid, foaming pool of black vs. white.

This is only compounded by the notion that Asians have "made it" and can no longer be considered "disadvantaged" because by some miracle of the Asian community's resilience and self-determination, it has been able to position itself within highly skilled and status fields like science, medicine, math, and law.

This is despite the long history of racist anti-Asian, specifically anti-Chinese, U.S. Immigration policies that sought to effectively wipe out the Chinese American populations by prohibiting the entrance of Chinese women into the country, creating "bachelor communities" of Chinese men, who could not, by law, marry white women and could not bring their Chinese wives to the states. The US government sought to exploit cheap labor from the Chinese, yet withhold the crucial benefits of American citizenship. In fact, the Chinese were the first and only group of people deemed officially undesirable by American immigration policy, and systematically excluded by Congress. All of that suddenly changed with the advent of Pearl Harbor and a need for an Asian ally against Japan.

In many ways, I see parallels with this recent surge in interest in China and Chinese culture in this time of a plummeting dollar, a Chinese middle class larger than the entire US population, the creation of a new Chinese superpower, and - of course - the Olympic Games hosted in Beijing. All the sudden, everyone wants to know about China. What do we eat? How to speak our language? How many of us are there?

Why the sudden fascination folks? It's not like we've been in your country, living next to you, serving you General Tso's Chicken and other bastardized-American-versions of our food, for the past... oh hundred years or so. It's because for the first time, in a long time, the big bad American bully has found someone who'll push back.

So excuse me for questioning the sincerity of America's newfound interest in my "home country." Call me bitter, but I'm still sore over getting denied a "minority scholarship" to college because, evidently, Asians aren't considered a "minority" any more. I'm still not over the fact that my grandfather was denied his rightful diploma from an unnamed Ivy-league University over the color of this skin. And I'm still upset at the fact that the Gay community is hauntingly and disturbingly white-centric.

Maybe when the GWMs figure out that pesky "no femmes, no fats, no Asians" sexual racism stuff, and when school kids can start learning of the Opium War as the West running a drug cartel which devastated a nation, or when the Rape of Nanking finally gets recognized for the genocide that it was... maybe then I'll feel less bad about that little pang of pride when a Chinese athlete wins a gold and the American has to settle for silver.

Please note:

I am by no means trying to gloss over the faults of China in its own history. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, alone, are horrifying enough. That isn't even including the Great Firewall, censorship, suppression of civil rights, disappearances of political opponents, involvement in Darfur, etc. But... I think it's a little hypocritical of Americans to point all the fingers and try to paint China as the new axis of evil... when we've got a whole bunch of atoning to do before we should do any blaming.

* I do not mean to imply that white people don't have culture. They do and it is pervasive, but often made invisible by it's supposed "normalcy."