Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in "Trying to Find Chinatown"

Many of the readings for my English class this quarter have dealt with "identity".  They often make me consider such questions as "who am I?", "what do others think of me?","what factors are important to me in defining myself?" and "what factors are important to others?".

It seems like there are a number of factors that are integral to identity.  Here are some of them:  language, race, culture, social group, social class/status, and accomplishments.

In “Trying to Find Chinatown”, Hwang considers the role of race and ethnicity in how we identify ourselves and how others identify us.  Are “race” and “ethnicity” the same thing?  It seems that people often use the terms interchangeably, but really they are different although overlapping concepts.  The American Heritage Dictionary defines “race” as “A group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group.”  That is a relatively simple concept compared to “ethnicity”:  “Of, relating to, or characteristic of a group of people sharing a common cultural or national heritage and often sharing a common language or religion.”  While race is manifested in physical characteristics regardless of your choice, ethnicity is the recognition of belonging to a cultural group, usually, but not always racially connected.

Hwang uses a particularly clever construct for exploring the separateness and intersection of race and ethnicity in how we identify ourselves and in how others identify us.  He uses two characters, Benjamin and Ronnie, to illustrate his ideas.  Benjamin is blond and blue-eyed; he is not racially Asian.  Ronnie on the other hand looks Asian.  The strange part is that Benjamin insists that he is Chinese because he was brought up by Chinese parents (he was adopted), while Ronnie wants to distance himself from his racial origins.  He doesn’t want to be limited by the stereotype of a young Asian American man and so vigorously demonstrates his differences in his behavior, his clothes and his choice of music.  In other words, Benjamin is ethnically Chinese without being racially Chinese, and he is content with that.  Ronnie, however, is not content.  He recognizes that he is racially chinese but does not identify with the culture.  Perhaps he would go so far as to say that he is not ethnically Chinese.  It would seem that they should be in agreement that one’s race and his ethnic identity can be independent of one another.  So why does their conflict continue to the end?

You have an appointment with the Patrician…

Poor Ronnie . . . he is rather confused, isn’t he.  He wants to have it both ways:  he wants to be free of his racial “Asianness” with respect to how others identify him.  But, by denying that Benjamin could “be Asian”, he unwittingly argues that being racially Asian is of the most basic importance in “being Asian”.