When to Swallow Bitterness and When to Spit It Out
The trouble with the Chinese cultural value chīkǔ (or "swallowing bitterness")
Kathleen Hou on the Chinese cultural value of chīkǔ (or “swallowing bitterness”) as a means of dealing with chronic harassment
For New York Magazine:
Like so many Asian American immigrants, my parents left behind everyone and everything they knew in Taiwan to build a better life for my brother and me. One of their biggest dreams was home ownership. They bought their first house in New Jersey, and they decided to paint the siding red and white. Compared to the other black-and-white and brown-and-white colonials in the drive, it was an unusual color choice, but my mom has always loved red. It’s also very auspicious in Chinese culture.
After living there for a few years, we moved to a bigger, beige-colored house in a different neighborhood. One day, before my mom could close the garage door, an angry man got out of his car, stalked up the driveway, and got in her face. “I just have a question for you. Why would you paint the house such a terrible color? It’s an eyesore for the neighborhood. Don’t you guys have any taste?” My mom was confused. Who was this person? What color? Then she recognized him as our old neighbor. He was a doctor, she recalled. I remember him yelling at my dad for not mowing the lawn often enough or properly bagging fall leaves. Much like the Karen from Montclair, it was racism packaged as excessive neighborly concern.
...There is a common Chinese saying of 吃苦 (chīkǔ). It translates literally to “eat bitterness,” to swallow our pain and suffering and endure it. We persevere and we don’t complain, and it is seen as a virtue: Work hard for things that people can’t take away from you. In a study of ethnically diverse cancer patients, they found that Asian Americans reported the lowest pain scores. My mom would not have seen the terrifying incident with our old neighbor as something to tell us about. Sharing it would have meant she was complaining. He used words. He didn’t cause her physical harm. He didn’t even use a racial slur. So, maybe it really wasn’t that bad.
Ms. Hou’s memory here struck a chord with me. The harassment that she describes between her mother and her neighbor — ostensibly about appearances/lawn upkeep but really about race, power, and vulnerability — happened to my family, where I grew up in white suburbia as well. In an all-white neighborhood, we lived next to a family who complained constantly about our lawn, which we (read: I, the son my father never had) mowed once every ten days or so. I was supposed to do it every week, but sometimes it was every two weeks. My neighbors mowed literally every few days. Their lawn was like a golf course. They mowed and mowed their perfect lawn and whined and whined about how unkempt our lawn was. First of all, it wasn’t that bad. It was normal. Second, I was doing very important things like watching Daria and memorizing Jagged Little Pill, okay? I mean, who has the time. To our family, our imperfect lawn reflected our preference for other more interesting things to do.
Our neighbor’s high-school-age son, along with another neighbor’s sons took things further though:
They bashed and smashed in our mailbox multiple times with a baseball bat, and we had to replace the box and re-affix the post every time. At one point we just left it bashed in, so long as the mailbox door could open and close. Wonder what the mailman thought as he pried open and jammed closed the mailbox door every day.
During the fall, the neighborhood kids rode their bikes into our stacked bags of raked leaves that had been set out for trash pickup. The bags were broken, clearly torn by bike tire tracks. We had to rake and bag it all up again. We had an acre with lots of trees. There were a lot of leaves.
They sometimes knocked over our full trash bins, set out at night for pickup the next day, spilling trash all into the street.
Our other neighbor’s son told us all this. I think he felt guilty observing/participating himself. I’m sure there was other stuff I’m not remembering, too.
My father confronted the neighbors time and again, and they humiliated him by mocking his accent, blamed him for stirring things up in a peaceful neighborhood as if he were somehow the troublemaker, and refused to acknowledge the possibility of any wrongdoing. My parents — unlike most Asians probably — spoke up, but they weren’t heard. And worse, they were further abused when they did speak up. Looking back, I’m appalled at how my neighbors could so calmly find a way to redirect blame from clearly kid-crimes to mature, conscious, racial gaslighting by mocking his accent and telling us that we were the problem. So what could we do, but 吃苦 (chīkǔ), replace the mailbox again, and move on.
Today, I can recognize this as racism, but back then I didn’t. I foolishly thought we were just surrounded by a neighborhood full of assholes. Logically, this makes no sense. But looking back I think, growing up in an all white town, I probably wanted to not see color so that I could just assimilate and feel accepted by my peers. And my parents, not wanting to worry or burden us, didn’t discuss these incidents in racial terms. They discussed only with each other, and all I remember overhearing was their frustration that they had been targeted again. We just chīkǔ over and over again, until the instigating neighbor kids grew up and moved out.
Iris Chen explains the drawbacks of chīkǔ
She identifies three ways that swallowing bitterness actually harms the Chinese community:
No pain, no gain.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
If it doesn’t hurt, you’re doing it wrong.
The Chinese have a special phrase for this bearing of hardship: 吃苦 (chīkǔ). It’s a phrase that literally means “to eat bitterness.” And it’s something that the Chinese have turned into an art and a virtue. The ability to endure and overcome all kinds of trials is regarded as a fundamental part of the Chinese character. Whereas the American value of comfort often means the avoidance of pain, Chinese culture accepts suffering as a natural part of life.
It Prevents Us From Seeking Relief. A research article about Chinese beliefs and behaviors regarding pain cites several studies that illustrate this cultural value of stoicism. In one study of an ethnically-diverse sample of 480 cancer patients, the Asian Americans were the ones who reported the lowest pain scores. Another study of Taiwanese cancer patients indicates a cultural acceptance of and high tolerance for pain. But this very ability to withstand intense hardship also prevents many Chinese people from seeking help. We fool ourselves and those around us into thinking we are fine when we are in fact suffering. Whether physical or psychological, we can’t get timely support if we are not honest about our pain....Many crises might well be avoided if we acknowledge our need for support and ask for help earlier.
It Keeps Us Submissive. Since pain and sorrow are an expected part of life, when Chinese people suffer unjustly, they often simply keep their heads down and carry on. Many Chinese immigrants accept racism and condescension as part and parcel of the immigrant experience...But in doing so, we often end up tolerating injustice and becoming complicit in maintaining oppressive systems. Eating bitterness may therefore help us overcome personal difficulties, but it doesn’t inspire us to be agents of change for the greater good. It keeps us in a self-seeking, submissive survival mode that prevents us from addressing wrongs and speaking truth to power.
It Erodes Our Compassion. Eating bitterness can be a bit like surviving a hazing. We had to endure humiliation and abuse to make it into the inner circle. Now we expect other pledges to endure the same. Those who flinch, faint, or falter provoke our derision instead of our compassion. When we believe all of us just need to suck it up, it’s easy to look down on the “weak.” Our ability to eat bitterness thus becomes a badge of honor instead of a way to connect and empathize with others who are suffering.
I take pride in the tenacity and resilience of my Chinese heritage. Eating bitterness has provided sustenance for our survival. It has fueled our ability to persevere. It has sustained our successes and achievements. But we have to know when to swallow the bitterness down, and when to spit it out.
Ms. Hou’s piece also articulates the unique qualifier of an Asian American hate crime
You might look at what’s happening to the Asian American community now and think it’s about crimes of opportunity or a failure of our mental-health system, not race-fueled crime. You might look at my mother’s story and think it was over a house color, but it wasn’t. It’s easy for racism to exist in our country when it is so insidious and has had years to hide under the excuses of power and outsiderism, or even misogyny and taste. My old neighbor did not like “something” about my family — in this case, a house color — and he felt entitled to target a young Asian American woman when she was at her most vulnerable to express his emotions. He knew he had the power. He never wanted an apology. He wanted an easy outlet for his rage. It was about exhibiting dominance in a society that rewards whiteness.
There’s a pattern with these attacks on Asian American elders: People target those whom they perceive as weak, as outlets for their rage and entitlement. Usually and sadly, this often means women. It can only end when people change the power dynamic by speaking out and not backing down. With the rise of Asian American hate crimes, I’m no longer confused about who I am. I am Asian, as well as American, and swallowing the bitterness of racism shouldn’t be something that I have to bear.
Asian hate crimes are a form of rage bullying powered by entitlement, in other words. Rage bullying, inadvertently aided and abetted by Asia’s literal opposite values of non-entitlement -- chīkǔ, shame, not wanting to cause trouble/call attention, and pragmatism (recognizing that reporting/the police can’t do much and wanting to simply move on). Moreover, this is all underlined by Iris Chen’s observation that, “whereas the American value of comfort often means the avoidance of pain, Chinese culture accepts suffering as a natural part of life.” On the one hand, you have the entitled bully, and on the other, you have effectively, the perfect victim, who accepts pain and doesn’t complain/report. These clashing cultural values make Asian hate a totally different brand of abuse, in my view. It’s racism plus a perverse risk/return calculation, aiming for maximum harm with minimum liability. It is sickening to me, and it is sad.
Both Hou/Chen note that the long term solution is speaking up and speaking out. But that can’t happen without a conscious effort to acknowledge how dismantling some of the premise of chīkǔ, as Iris Chen has. Going against a cultural value so ingrained in our subconscious will take generations to change, if it ever will. I’m doubtful that it will, to be frank, because there is also a sense of pride and accomplishment in swallowing pain and moving on. It allows us to bury problems for the time being, and that relief and the ability to focus on something else feels good. As Chen notes though, that relief is often short-lived -- whatever pain we swallowed can resurface, sometimes more malignant than ever.
Finally, a note on how Andrew Yang just doesn’t get it on race
In light of all this about how problematic chīkǔ can be, I also want to note how wildly wrong Andrew Yang’s WaPo op-ed re: Asian American hate crimes, was. He basically tells Asian Americans to prove their worth by just volunteering more:
We Asian Americans need to embrace and show our American-ness in ways we never have before. We need to step up, help our neighbors, donate gear, vote, wear red white and blue, volunteer, fund aid organizations, and do everything in our power to accelerate the end of this crisis. We should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.
This is a bizarre case of treating the symptom, not the cause. No addressing of the culprit and changes that the perpetrators of hate crimes may need to make. Puts the onus solely on those who suffer. It’s also a weird embrace of the Model Minority Myth. Yang seemingly implies that if Asian Americans work hard enough, racism goes away. Worse, he suggests that we’re not American till we prove ourselves.
There’s plenty of great counter op-eds to his piece, so I won’t pile on any more. And he appears to be trying to learn, but honestly, he still doesn’t seem to be getting it on race. That all said, I listened to his podcast for a bit last year, and he grew on me. I had a very poor initial impression of him, largely because of the whole MATH thing -- Make America Think Harder sounded elitist and annoying. I felt it played too cheekily into Asian American stereotypes. I can’t say if he’d make a good mayor of New York, but he seems to be chiku-ing a public life of political mistakes/learnings because he genuinely seems to want to improve the lives of others.