A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream by Eric Liu (review)

In 1998 Eric Liu published Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (Random House). For someone who is part of America’s minorities, he seemed proud of his life’s achievements at age twenty-nine. Liu grew up in the suburb of Wappinger, New York, graduated from Yale University in history, married a white American, and became a speechwriter for President Clinton while attending Harvard Law School. In Accidental Asian he claims that being Asian is simply “contrived” and “unnecessary” and that such a socially constructed category is invented and can be easily dismantled. His book answers what he perceives to be the seemingly monolithic nature of the Chinese American community as a unified movement with uniform interests.

Now in 2014, sixteen years later, he has experienced the perception of most white Americans toward the Chinese who are seen as “all alike.” This is regardless of how Chinese define themselves as “Chinese in America” (those who sojourn here) or “Chinese American” (those who were born here). From this viewpoint Liu wonders about his own Chinese American identity. Like so many Americans, he had imagined himself as self-made. But today he stands more than two decades from the death of his father (at age fifty-four), and fifteen years himself into fatherhood. “And now I see myself clearly: not as the author solely, or even primarily, but more as the page, less the calligrapher than the parchment, absorbing the ink and scripts of others” (p. 2). In recent months Liu studied the Analects of Confucius with his mother, Julia Liu, who was born in Nanjing in 1937. Her father was a reformist professor of European history. Also Liu has intermittent tutorials with his eleven-year-old daughter, Olivia. “So on January 4, 2009, I dug out my college textbooks, and we began a Tuesday afternoon ritual that continues to this day” (p. 191). Together the three generations ponder the saying of Master Confucius who said, “At fifteen, I set my heart at learning.”

Eric Liu is a rising star, a Chinese American quite comfortable being who he is: an articulate person who even lectures without notes. Despite the fact that Chinese Americans are among the top income earners and have achieved the highest levels of education, according to social media, his intuition tells him there is much more than such a simplistic picture. “There are Chinese American stories of striving and struggle that don’t fit the box of a government form or narrative of the model minority, from families who’ve been here many generations to lone migrants who arrived yesterday. And the gleaming promise and looming menace of modern China colors the perception of people who look like me—and indeed colors our self-perception” (p. vii).

Also, almost intuitively he asks, “Does Chinese culture somehow confer a competitive advantage? Is it possible for America, the planet’s most efficient hybridizer of cultures, to capitalize fully on the talents and passions and character of those of us of Chinese ancestry?” (p. viii). So in A Chinaman’s Chance, he writes about the role of chance in his own family’s journey and argues that America still has to be something greater than the sum of its many parts. Though Liu can speak Chinese without difficulty, he has virtually forgotten the reading and writing of Chinese that he once knew. It is his conviction, however, that “America makes Chinese Americans, but China does not make Americans Chinese.” A Chinaman’s Chance can be regarded as a call to all Asian Americans that “this is our moment, together. Few things together are more American than a Chinese American dream” (p. 209).

Throughout the book Liu cites many Chinese Americans on the positive side such as Wong Chin Foo, the first to use the term “Chinese American,” referring to himself. Wong in 1884 challenged...