I don’t think cultures can survive outside of their native ecosystems, and the so-called “heritages,” as they are celebrated and practiced by a diaspora, are only arbitrary snapshots of the said culture. Heritage is the remembrance of a lost connection to a culture and not a celebration of the culture. This distinction between heritage and a living culture, when left unacknowledged, can cause some dissonance between second-gen immigrants and natives, e.g. when a Chinese American meets a Chinese Chinese, while first-gen immigrants have to deal with both sides. That’s me.
This essay, as is the case for most opinion essays, will contain a fair amount of hyperboles. So, take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Heritage is a second language. It is taught through instructions instead of organic immersion. It is an aesthetic addition to the core culture (e.g. for a Chinese American, the core culture would be the American culture). Heritage is the embalmed leftover of culture, after having gouged out the parts that are incompatible with the core culture.
There is some irony that it is primarily liberals who are the most enthusiastic about the celebration of minority heritages. I struggle to articulate why this rubs me the wrong way, somewhere between a white person wearing a feather hat to a Redskins game and a white colleague congratulating me for getting my citizenship. I think it has something to do with the fact that many immigrants, although appearing to be operating under free will, are forced to abandon their homeland and migrate to the US because of US foreign policy.
You may congratulate an Iraqi boy whose home was destroyed by US troops for “making it.” “He’s one of the good ones,” you may think. “What’s this bread called? Samoon? Interesting.” The boy may genuinely hate his home country and love the US, maybe his home was destroyed by the Iraqi army instead of the US army, but would that make your statement any less patronizing? I reckon not.
I think that’s the word for it. Patronizing. I find the celebration of heritage patronizing. It is the equivalent of turning an Indian reservation into a theme park. As a first-gen immigrant, heritage is to culture as my father’s ashes are to my father. It bears no resemblance to what it tries to represent, and all it does is remind me of what I have lost.
Cultural appropriation of aesthetics
There is this cheap debate tactic that I have seen a lot, where one side would demand the other side to provide a definition for a single word, e.g. “racist,” or “man” and “woman” for that matter. It is generally an attempt to stimy the opponent from providing enough context for the discussion, by forcing the discussion down a reductive path. “Do you think murder is right or wrong? Just answer the question. Yes, or no?”
Is it always racist when someone calls someone a racial slur? Perhaps. But it is disingenuous to use the same word (racist) to describe a slavemaster who calls his slave a slur and a slave who calls his slavemaster a slur.
This analogy can be extended to provide some context for discussing cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation done by a person of color, e.g. me speaking English, is so commonplace and usually done out of necessity. It is very different from those done by a white person, which is generally done out of curiosity. Because of this difference in motivation, the outcome is different. When the appropriat’er is given the freedom to choose which aspect of which culture to consume, their personal bias will drive the selection process. When this is done en masse by society (e.g. Hollywood, media, second-gen immigrants, etc.), the appropriated version of the culture (i.e. heritage) would have been defanged and fetishized to cater to the bias of the host society.
Market-driven self-devouring of lesser cultures
The same form of cultural defanging also happens abroad, in colonized societies. Because of the power imbalance between the western imperial core and its peripheries, i.e. “the global north” vs. “the global south,” poorer countries are coerced to “westernize” their culture. In the process, belief and ideological systems are often abandoned for being incompatible with the West. As Americans decry the woes of globalization, e.g. the loss of manufacturing jobs, the rest of the world sees their mother culture eroding. Instead of mom-and-pop burger joints being replaced by McDonald’s, their culture is replaced by McDonald’s.
For most of my childhood, there was a shame, a sense of inferiority, associated with everything Chinese. It is only recently when China has become relatively economically successful, that the people become engaged and take pride in traditional Chinese culture. Although one can also argue that even this revival is an imported idea, one that is driven by capitalism to monetize every facet of life.
I do take some solace in this resurrection of Chinese traditions, or heritage, but they are what they are, a kind of resurrection. I, a Hong Konger, am not as far removed from these traditions as an Egyptian is removed from the hieroglyphs, but the same sentiment is there. The resurrected traditions are historic artifacts, their functional parts have since been replaced by something else, and what remains are just rituals, motions without beliefs and ideologies. From medicine to science to politics, countless traditions have been abandoned centuries ago under colonial rule or influence. They have become stagnant. Can you build a modern government based on Confucian principles? Can you build a modern government based on the 1789 US Constitution?
Colonized societies have had their systems robbed of the time they needed to evolve and grow, and the result is the reduction of these systems to museum items. There is a sadness to never know how the world would have evolved without colonialism. The global diversity that could have been. What would have become of all the things that we consider universal to all human beings and even of all living things? Of beauty and morality and freedom and liberty and human rights? Which of these are truly fundamental and universal and which of these are just western ideals that rode on the back of centuries of brutal imperialism and cultural hegemony? Is it even possible to tell them apart?
