Chinese Americans ≠ Chinese
This thing is bugging me really hard after reading some Shang-Chi reviews and...ugh. I need to get this off my chest so I can go to sleep.
Chinese American culture is NOT EQUIVALENT to Chinese culture. I'm so fucking sick and tired of Chinese Americans bitching about how they're not accepted as Chinese because:
You do realize that modern China has 56 ethnicities, right? 55 are ethnic minorities and are also Chinese, but you, Chinese American, are most likely a descendant of Han Chinese, which is the majority ethnicity. (Minority Chinese descendants outside of China tend not to identify as Chinese American, but rather identify as their ethnicity-American, aka Mongolian-American, or Mung-American.)
Han Chinese are not defined by genetics. In other words, just because you inherited DNA from a Han Chinese does not qualify you as Han Chinese.
The qualification for Han Chinese are the following:
Speak in Han Chinese (汉语)
Practice Han rituals (礼仪)
Ancestor Worship (祭祖)
Genetics don't matter, Han is a culture-based ethnicity; there is no blood purity test, there is only cultural purity test (sure, it has it's own problems, but that's a different can of worms)
The Chinese word for Chinese Americans (美籍华人) is not "Chinese Americans", but rather "American citizens who are of Hua descent". (中国人= Chinese, 美国人= Americans, so a literal translation would be "中美国人" which is nonsense Chinese and does not exist.) This is because the ethnicity of the Chinese diaspora is not given the Han designation, but is rather given the Huaren (华人) designation, precisely to differentiate between culturally Han Chinese and people who are not culturally Han but look similar and share some but not all cultural markers.
"Chinese" (中国人) refers to citizenship, not ethnicity. Only in English are these concepts conflated. Chinese Americans do not have Chinese citizenship, ergo, not Chinese. No one is denying your fucking genes, OK? 汉人≠中国人≠华人
Given that the majority of Chinese Americans barely speak Han Chinese, don't practice Han rituals, and don't participate in much if any ancestor worship, I have to ask: Why do you want to be recognized as Chinese so badly? If you don't want to share any of the values that the Han Chinese hold and you're not living in China...why do you want to be part of this in-group? Singaporeans speak Mandarin and consume Chinese media, but they're not clamoring to be accepted as Chinese. They are proudly Singaporeans because they have a different culture (plus different nationality). You, Chinese Americans, obviously want to be Americans, so why the constant insistence that you have a claim to Chinese culture?
If you don't worship the same ancestors as us, then you don't get to claim our Han culture as yours. Fuck off.
Oh, also, Han language (汉语) and Official Chinese aka Mandarin (普通话) aren't the same. Han language includes any dialect spoken by Han Chinese, yes, including Cantonese (best known of the Yue dialect)\Shanghainese (a funky subset of the Wu dialect)\Hakka\Mandarin\etc. (Aside: BTW, Taiwanese is a subset of Hakka which is also spoken in Fujian province in PRC.) Official Chinese is the dialect spoken by...officials in government, which, btw, is the Manchu (满族, an ethnic minority) pronunciation of Han words (hence mandarin), just to make things even more confusing. Also, the written Chinese (中文) uses Han characters (汉字), because the spoken and written language is differentiated in Chinese (语 vs 文). All dialects look exactly the same when written out. And "Chinese" is taught under the subject "语文" (spoken and written language), not Chinese national language (中文、中国话). Political language terminology with 56 ethnicities and over 10 dialect groups spoken by the majority ethnicity is difficult, OK?
So, with all of that said, no shit a movie designed to appeal to Chinese Americans is still going be an appropriation of Chinese culture. Just because it has a Chinese Canadian actor as the lead doesn't make the movie somehow not cultural appropriation.