Building U.S. - China Bridges

China Center

The Unbearable Weight of Being Chinese

What does it mean to be “Chinese”? This one word in English encompasses a plethora of meanings in the Chinese language: tongues and cultures, bloodlines and citizenship. The Chinese state regards itself as the single authority on Chinese history and identity, and pursues this goal through censorship, violent suppression of ethnic minorities, and overseas influence operations. In the meantime, here in the U.S., to be racialized is to endure perpetual foreignness: tethered to an ancestral homeland and implicated in its every ill. Can one be proudly Chinese in the face of Beijing’s actions? Where should a Chinese-identifying person place their sense of belonging and find safety?

Through personal stories, from past to present, of individuals whose lives straddled a divided world and were squeezed by geopolitics, this talk explores the porous and shifting bounds of Chinese-ness, the human cost of a hardened border, and the power and limitations of individual agency against the forces of the state.

About the Speaker

Yangyang Cheng

Yangyang Cheng is a fellow and research scholar at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and U.S.‒China relations. Her essays on these and related topics have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, WIRED, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a columnist at SupChina and a contributing columnist at Physics World. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.