As a fifth generation Chinese American I will be watching the Olympics with many questions, several reservations, but most of all with tremendous pride.
The China that my family left behind decades ago was one that did not promise our family, originally one of little means, much life opportunity.
So my great great grandfather ventured from southern China to America many years ago as a railroad worker, raising a son and grandson who later became laundrymen on the East Coast. In the 1950's my father was able to attend college through the GI Bill, and in the late 1980's my parents put me through law school. My family never looked back, but always watched, as did
the world, as China went through its high and low moments - crackdowns and liberalizations - and wondered about its long-term future.
And so watching the China Olympics is a threshold moment filled with all kinds of questions, not only for me and my family, but for millions within the Chinese diaspora around the world. As China fetes the world's greatest athletes, will China show itself to be a more humane country than the one our ancestors left? Will these Olympics prove to be a clarion call for China's leaders to deal seriously with issues of air quality, human rights, and displacement of their most marginalized?
Will we be shown in these Olympics, as we often are, that the realm of competitive sports is now fully reserved for professional athletes and sponsorships by the powerful? Or can China deliver to the watching world the stories of "everyday sports heroes" - the teachers, builders, accountants, and students by day - who compete in the Olympics not necessarily to win gold, but to celebrate true sportsmanship and mutual respect for one another?
The China that I and my family yearn to see is one that can step outside the box of what it means to be a rising global power - a country that is willing and able to answer these wide-ranging questions with more openness than in its past, with honesty, accountability, and by honoring the rights and dignity of its people.
And so in the face of unresolved and difficult political questions, I will still be watching the Olympics with baited breath every night, with a sense of pride that something fundamentally huge may have changed. I will be listening for evidence of a fairer, freer China than the country my family left long ago.
SOURCE Phoebe Eng
Published by Mike Hitchen, Mike Hitchen Consulting
