The REAL Story

I was just surfing the blogsphere and I came across an article bashing nouveaux-riches Chinese Mainlander kids. The article made me laugh, although it was slightly biased and stereotypical.

I don't deny I live in a nouveaux-riches neighbourhood here in Vancouver where it's 80% Mainlander Chinese and I go school with these people. Although being "daddy's girl" and spending money like paper seems like the norm here, I adamantly refuse to be a part of those people. Sure, I enjoy the occasional splurge on designer duds or expensive beauty items; and I go back to Beijing every single summer. However, what I encountered earlier was the description of the epitome of nouveaux-riches Mainlanders and it does not do justice for the rest of us who are not like that.

I grew up in Beijing with my grandparents because my dad was working in Hong Kong and my mom was studying/living abroad in Los Angeles. I grew up with grandparents who taught me to be grateful and cultured. I lived comfortably yet modestly and although my parents never denied me materialistic proposals, I never asked for much. I always exercised good manners and had respect for my peers and elders alike.

When I moved to Canada in the summer between third and fourth grade, my mom taught me proper etiquette. I worked hard and strived to master the English language -- and I did so within a year. In sixth grade I was writing at a high school level and by ninth grade, I passed the LPI, a standarized Canadian English exam for university entrance, similar to the TOEFL test.

I started out helping my dad around the office in the summer of eighth grade, when I started going back to China alone during the summers and started working in Vancouver at a local publishing house in tenth grade. In the summer of tenth grade I got an intership at Asatsu Dai-ichi Kikaku, the top advertising firm in Japan. I translated product analysis and helped with campaign designs in their Beijing head office last summer. Currently I work for the Foreign Language Press of China as a freelance translator, translating the works of prolific Chinese authors. I am also within the top 5% of my graduating class in terms of academics and a co-editor for my school's internationally award-winning yearbook. I strive to achieve financial independence from my parents -- which by the way I'm more than halfway there (I stopped taking "allowance" from my parents years ago).

Just like Miss Couturable, I am tired of defending myself and my other peers who are Mainlanders who grew up in wealthy families but also pursue their dreams through their hard work and not their daddys' industrial strength bank account.

Most of my friends graduate within the top 10% of our reputable high school (ranked 2nd in the province) and go on to pretigious universities in the States, Canada, or even China. I have two friends who grew up in dead-wealthy Chinese nouveaux-riches families and they've never left China at all. They both had above 2300 on their SAT Reasoning and 800s on their SAT Subjects. One of them was accepted early into Columbia (being the Chinese National Go (Wei Qi) Youth Champion helped, I assume) and the other just got his acceptance letter from Princeton, Stanford, and Penn. They both grew up in extreme luxury inconceivable to most people, yet they've worked so hard for what they achieved and so have I. I also have friends who are nationally award-winning musicians and speakers of more than five languages, and that friend is also a talented dancer with a 118 (120 being perfect) on TOEFL and a GPA of 3.6 (4 being the highest in our school system). She too grew up in a wealthy family (her dad owns a bank in China).

Growing up in an elite environment and with money does not mean we're less hardworking than others. Having parents with marital problems does not signify that we are incomplete "fucked up" human beings. We have feelings too and we too get angered by "bashing" from people who are unfamiliar with our real lives. Not all of us kids are heartless money-spending machines. Although some (more like most) of the kids in my school are like that, I've always considered them a disgrace to Chinese people.

I'm proud of my accompolishments, and I''m proud of my friends. I'm proud of the fact that I'm from Beijing and am pure Chinese but by no means am I proud of the fact there are so many ill-informed nouveaux-riches people running about in the world flaunting their wealth and denting the Chinese moral values of modesty and integrity.