A favorite story about adapting to life in America:

“Becoming American – the Chinese experience” This is an interesting title. What is American? What is Chinese? What America is experiencing now is what China has been experiencing over her 10,000 years of history (yes, the 5,000 years convention has been extended to 8,000 to 10,000 years due to recent discovery). Chinese culture is not only inclusive of the 56 ethnic groups, it also integrates many facets of western culture including Jewish, Christian, and Islam by religion, and European and Asian by geography. China has gone through all that painfully in integrating the different ethnic groups. Although many are still recognizable by their face, dialect, and custom, a Chinese is a Chinese. One day, an American is just an American.

As a scientist, I still keep up a lot of interest in Chinese culture – calligraphy, erhu, medicine, cooking, history and archaeology, just to name a few. Chinese culture is a part of American culture now, no different from Italian culture, Irish culture, German culture, Spanish culture or African culture. How many Americans have not tasted Chinese food? I wonder. If pi-zza is American culture, why not Yangzhou fried rice?

Not all items of Chinese culture are indigenous. The very ‘Chinese’ musical instrument I play, “erhu’ (two-stringed violin that features in “Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon”), in fact came from the Middle East. But no one denies it as a most typical Chinese instrument now.

I am still practicing my Chinese calligraphy and erhu. A publisher in Shanghai just published my first book of Chinese calligraphy.

Instead of adapting to 'American culture', I would like to take a more positive attitude of contributing my experience of Chinese culture to American culture. I established a website just to do that.

One of the questions I often have to deal with is: “How to pronounce your name?” My response is I have a simple last name Lee for you. So if you can deal with Brzynsky and Lichenstein, there should be no problem with my given name. I have gone this much to put my family name as my last name, reversing the traditional Chinese way. So, there shouldn’t be any mistake. A name is for others to recognize you. Just call John on the street and see how many heads are turned. I bet I am the only one when my name is called. Besides, my name, which means “good omen”, is a beautiful and meaningful one my parents gave me. I will not change it.

“Do you speak English?” the bus driver asked me. I almost wanted to tell her that although not born in the US I not only speak fluent English, I also translate English poems into classical Chinese poems that rhyme and conform to the classical format, and vice versa. I also can tell from your English accent if you are from the Appalachian, or Boston, or South Carolina. I didn’t do that. I just responded politely with the most sophisticated English usage and sentence structure I could think of at that moment and watched her mouth drop.

One thing that does bother me a lot is Chinese are often viewed as non-managerial technicians. By statistics of the American Management Association, Chinese is 20-30% lower in managerial/technical ratio compared to the norm. The ratio of hired managers is even more skew if we exclude those self-made entrepreneurs. Do Chinese lack the skill for performing managerial jobs? The Chinese bureaucratic system (in the good sense) was invented in Qin-Han era and well developed in Tang dynasty. To this date, the Japanese and English bureaucratic systems are partially modeled after the Chinese system. Another observation is that many academic departments on Chinese studies are headed by non-Chinese. I am not questioning the credential of these professionals, but it seems that either Chinese are not trusted to these positions, or they are less qualified because they can read their mother language better. Some statistics indicates that Chinese, at less than 1% of the American population, constitutes 25% of the science and technology workforce. I am proud to be one among them.

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