Chinese-American customs and forms of address

As a casual observer of Chinese families in California, second generation US citizens are for all intents and purposes Americanized, particularly among educated families. Having a white son in law would not be an issue. Whether or not there might be some internal resentment among the older Chinese I can't answer, but for perspective, it does not seem to be much of an issue in China and Southeast Asia today. Personally, I think you could assume that if the mother lived in the US most of her life, old Chinese customs regarding communication with elders can be abandoned.

Look for the POC subforum and do a search. It should turn up a lot of the info you're after.

There could be so many variables, as well.
Some immigrants keep up 'the old ways', some want to 'fit in' ASAP. Admittedly, my experience is chiefly from Eastern Europeans coming to Canada.

But, young white guy at work fell in love with the daughter of Korean immigrants. They were teenage sweethearts. Her family disapproved of the match, not because he was white, but because he was kind of a loveable slacker, and they were suspicious of his ability to support a family.
The day he was promoted to supervisor, he proposed. He said it was remarkable - the first time her father had actually spoken to him, rather than grunting acknowledgement through the newspaper he always seemed to be reading.

People are variable, and have their own little quirks.

Jill_Blake said:

Her mother was born in China but lived in US most of her life, and the physician is US born.

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As said, it may vary, but one of the reasons I have no idea how to your question is the above line. I assume the mother is maybe in her seventies. Does "most of her life" mean she came her when she was in her twenties? Or did she come here as a child? Because that would likely have an impact...

(My mother's family is Chinese-Canadian.)

As folks have pointed out here, there are a lot of variables. Are you envisioning this... Okay, let's start at the beginning, because I'm guessing you don't know anything about Chinese (or Asian in general) family dynamics from these questions. I'm half Chinese (from me Mum) and in no way can I speak for all Chinese, Asian Americans, or any other group.

Firstly, what on earth do you mean by address? Are we speaking in English or not? (Because you can't technically speak Chinese, you're speaking Cantonese, or Mandarin, or Shanghainese, or Taishanese etc etc) It's not uncommon for ABC's (a term for Australian or American Born Chinese) to speak, or not speak, their parents mother tongue. You also get fun dynamics like parents speaking in Cantonese and children responding in English. One of my full Chinese cousins would do that (and now super regrets it because he needs to use Catonese in his life.) Quite a few of these dynamics have to do with white people racism, which is a whole other can of worms, and this post is already going to be long.

Now for me, all of my mum's close Chinese friends are auntie or uncle, in chinese. This term of course varies dialect to dialect, and also culturally. For example, in Cantonese I'd call my aunties "ze ze," when speaking directly to them, and "[name] ze ze," when talking about them. (Note one, romanization is stupid, this is not pronounced how it looks, unless you're a witch.) Ze ze is technically older sister, but it's polite to call your aunties that. Again, I can't speak for other dialects and Chinese folk, but Cantonese (at least HK Canto) is just like that. It's also totally acceptable to try to get your waiter's attention by saying, "Pretty lady," or "Pretty man." (Oh, also Chinese is a tonal language. Dialects vary on how tonal, but Cantonese is very tonal. The word for pretty and thug are the same word with a different tone, and guess who's made that mistake?)

Now for anything in English? Just auntie or uncle. I will note that I find us Chinese folks elevate folks to auntie or uncle faster than Americans seem to. All my parents friends were auntie/uncle [first name]. If they're not close enough to be an Auntie or Uncle, why hang out at all??? My yougner cousins, when speaking in english, will call me, "Nat cousin." It's cute. It's also polite. (Leaving off titles is impolite, as well. Calling an auntie Ms. Name is really rude. Always auntie.)

So, basically, I can't answer a lot of the "what would you call people," without knowing if we're speaking English or Cantonese. BUT Chinese does have very clear words for a lot of family relations (like uncle on your mother's side is a different word than uncle on your father's side). I'll give it a try though!

When mother and daughter are talking privately, how would mother refer to her friend? (e.g. by first name, or first and last name, or nickname, or title...?
The mother would say, "You know your auntie [name.]" I've literally never heard my mother say, "My friend," and it's always your auntie or just auntie. Huh. Hadn't really thought that was super standard english till it's pointed out.

What would the daughter call her mother's friend in this private conversation with her mother? (e.g. some version of 'auntie' or...?)
Also just auntie.

How would the mother address her friend directly (e.g. first name, some form of diminutive nickname...?)
Oh they'd have nick names. These are realllllly specific. My mum's little fish. Her youngest brother has a nickname, but is usually called dumb shit instead by his siblings. My mother calls my sister and I both unsavory nicknames, but none of the rest of our family can use them. I used to have a friend who called me fat girl and I'd call him fat boy. So, yeah, varies a lot.

How would the daughter address her mother's friend directly?
AUNTIE.

How would the mother refer to her friend's nephew when talking about him to her daughter?
So the mum might bring it up, "Do you remember Auntie [name]'s nephew, [nephew's name.]" Which brings us to...

How would the mother address said nephew?
A fun dynamic I haven't mentioned yet! Generational hierarchy. You're always polite to old people. You just are. If someone is older than you, you be politer. So the mum can call friend's nephew just by his name, but he needs to call her auntie.

What would the mother call her daughter when speaking with the daughter directly (first name or some other term?)Again, nicknames. Sometimes your name. It's like in English too (although this could be something my mum picked up from living in the west), where when you're being yelled/it's serious at it's your name not your nickname.

How would the daughter address her mother when speaking with her directly?
Mum. In either language.

Are there any particular turns of speech or phrases that might distinguish the mother's speech, make it sound more authentic?
Oph, so yes, and no. There's certainly common mistakes in English the Mum would make, but unless you're Asian I wouldn't recommend this. Unless you do a lot of research and actually talk to some more Chinese folks at best you'll come off racist. At worst you'll come off really racist.

There are idioms/phrases that are Chinese specific that my mother would say in English translated poorly. One was, "Your head." It's like... "That's ridiculous/you're crazy." So a conversation might go like this.

"Can I go to Sam's house?"
"Your head you're going to Sam's house." Which of course means, "You're crazy if you think you're going to Sam's house." The "your head" can also go at the end of the sentence. It's flexible!

She'd also say, "Frog in a well," in English which is an idiom about how a frog in a well only knows the well, so it doesn't know or understand the world outside. It can be used to call someone narrow minded, but she'd also use it in place of, "Can't see the forest for the trees." I imagine every family has their own ones of these.

Later, the daughter gets together with a colleague who is not Chinese-American (Caucasian). Would the mother object to having a white son-in-law? Is that even an issue these days in Chinese-American families?
Yeppers and it varies a lot. Again, huge can of worms if you want me to go into racism issues, but my mother is a bit cheesed that my sister and I are both dating white people. She did tell us not to marry first born Chinese sons as well (this is a somewhat my mother specific gripe, to do with how first born sons are raised differently in some families, very spoilt and ill mannered, and not a good match for women who value independence.) But my mother has bluntly told me she has more issues with me dating a white person than my partner being a woman.

I have friends who were disowned for dating outside their race, and I have friends whose parents couldn't give a shit. I even have friends whose parents encouraged them to date white people, since white people run the country.

Hopefully some of that is helpful! Again, I really want to stress that this stuff can vary, a lot. China, like anywhere, is not a monolith. There's lots of different cultures, and different and valid ways to be Chinese. Please do try to talk to other Chinese Americans (and there's other research you can do like reading forum posts or reading books by Chinese Americans.) But really, the biggest take away is how we're all different and research is good!

Glad it helps!

You can see why the Chinese came to love nicknames so much. In past centuries given names weren't very descriptive. I was reading a collection of Chinese legal cases from the 12th century and pretty much every given name translated into just a number (and occasionally an adjective--"Big Six", "Little Twelve", etc.). I wonder if it was expected that a child would eventually adopt their own name, so the given name was just a placeholder. I'm guessing that naming conventions have changed over time.

I think for the purposes of your story, you should probably "get the family's story straight" and nail down some of the things you want to define for their characters. For example, how "embedded" is the migrant, first generation Chinese mom in Western society, versus Chinese? If the family moved into a Chinatown area, or a suburb/neighborhood of some city where many Chinese or other Asians have congregated, then she might still be primarily speaking Mandarin/Cantonese/Hokkien, whatever dialects she's familiar with, still reading a daily Chinese newspaper, if the city is big enough to support that kind of publication, and still largely working, speaking and living within a Chinese community, with only occasional exposure to American influences. And this would mean that daughter also grew up with one foot in Chinese America, and the other foot in America, America, possibly effectively bilingual.

On the other hand, if the family migrated and made the decision to integrate, then the mother might not know many Chinese at all, and the daughter really doesn't have a sense of her own people, language and heritage, and may even have grown up wishing she were "really white," because all her friends were. She might even be embarrassed by her Chinese heritage and looks because she doesn't "feel" Chinese, which is a cultural symptom common to a lot of second generation, born-in-North-America Asian kids.

There's also a matter of outlook based on the type of Chinese background the family has. If the family is from mainland China, that's going to be very different from Chinese that come from Hong Kong, especially since, until 1997, the HK Chinese were WORLDS apart from mainland Chinese, due to their British colonial heritage, and thus had a very different outlook on white people, especially British white people. The same is true if these are Chinese that migrated from Singapore, which was another British colony, or even if they were ethnic Chinese from non-Chinese nations, such as Malaysia or the Philippines, which have pretty substantial Chinese populations, that are still integrated into those societies. There are plenty of Malaysian and Filipino nationals wandering around with last names like Tan and Wong.

So it's important to get down some of the family background basics first. Because geography, dialect, and even perception of colonialism are all going to play into just how the Chinese family in your story view their American living situation, as well as what they think of Americans.

And yeah, Asians can be racist too, so there is always this possibility to play with.

That sets up some interesting situations for you. Is the mom also from HK? If not, then which part of China, or what other nation with Chinese from Asia? Does this mean that she's considered the "first wave," and when the second wave of immigrants came, they naturally rallied around her as one of the "anchor points" for Chinese immigrants to go to to figure out how to integrate, where to go and what to do? Is she like the "elder" for the Chinese immigrant community because she got there first and knew all the stuff they needed to know, or did she isolate herself from the rest of the second wave?

If the daughter was born in the late 70s, and is a Gen X American Chinese, did the mom choose to raise her purely American? Or did she try to inculcate some Chinese culture and language in her? When the second wave arrived, was this daughter already speaking Chinese? Could she, in a similar fashion to her mom, been the "anchor" for Chinese immigrant kids, because she could speak English and they couldn't, so they also rallied around her as the "gateway" to American kids? Or did they shun her because she was bilingual, or even couldn't speak Chinese at all, thus alienating her from the other Chinese kids?

A lot of the personality traits developed here might hinge on the mom's decision to embrace or reject that second wave, and how the daughter reacted to it as well. So you actually have a ton of potential character/dramatic situations to play with here based on these reactions and choices.

If you're going for historical accuracy, then the time period you're talking about, the 1970s, for immigration, makes it a little less likely that the mom was a mainland Chinese immigrant. China was pretty closed up at the time, and it was only in about 1977 that more immigration from the mainland came about, as they finally opened the gates to the west and more openly accepted foreign investment, factories building western goods, etc. During the 60s and 70s, the majority of Chinese immigrants came either from Hong Kong, which was still a British territory, or else from Taiwan, from those Chinese that had fled the Cultural Revolution that caused China to go communist and close up in the first place.

So while it's still possible for this mom to have come from mainland China, at that period of time, she would have made it to America under much more extraordinary circumstances, more like refugee or defection status, rather than straight up immigration and naturalization. But for HK or Taiwan immigrants, it would have been what you'd typically expect. If you target 1977 onwards though, that's when China finally started allowing college students and other professionals to travel abroad and immigrate if they wanted to.

Even after China started opening up, as a Mainland Chinese you would still have had a special permit to cross the borders. And Hong Kong was the main gateway into China.

Also, what was the mother's background? Wealthy? What conditions did she emigrate under? Did she know any English (very likely only the basics)? Which part of China is she from -- this will inform whether or not she would have a integrated with the local community and how traditional she would be.Her family background and access to education levels would also impact her social skills, knowledge of China beyond where she grew up, and certainly knowledge of the rest of the world and other cultures.

In short, even if you have the mother moving after 1977, there are plenty of factors that would have influenced how she settled in her new home.

Furthermore, I need to stress that getting to university would be extremely unlikely for rural Mainlanders, unless they were inordinately rich (extremely unlikely at the time). And don't forget that if she did make it to uni, she would have been from a very well-off family. And it was likely Beijing or Shanghai university; probably the former. But if she got married first, it would make more sense that she did not get to university. Therefore, she would not have associated with uni students.

Her education level would likely have hit maybe junior school or perhaps the first three years of secondary if she was very lucky.

If she did get to Beijing university, and before she emigrated, would she have witnessed the Tiananmen massacre? I expect she'd've watched it on TV anyway, or heard it over the radio, or others would have brought her the news. How would that have affected her? Affected how she brought up her daughter or taught her daughter at the time?

BTW, does the mother have any (older) brothers? If she does, the brothers would have taken precedence in education and favourability within the family. And many (if not all) values would be Confucian.

I assume the mother was born in the 1940s/1950s. In this case, a very traditional family background, values, and outlook. And the family may well have still been recovering from WWII; even if they had been wealthy prior to the war, they were likely impoverished.

Oh, and language: Main language was Mandarin, but what was the mother's home dialect? That will influence everything too, especially phrasing and understanding.

In summary: there's a lot of research that seems to not have been done. Highly recommend you immerse yourself in the Chinese culture of the time before assuming anything else about the mother.

(And the daughter may not have been an anchor at all, especially if she's fully integrated / westernised. This will also be extremely unlikely unless she made a deliberate choice to throw away her heritage. If she did, then her relationship with her (traditional) mother will be strained at best, or outright explosive otherwise.

Look into third culture for a taste of how the daughter may have grown up and what she may have gone through.)

Additionally, I didn't see mention of superstitions, Feng Shui, and the Chinese Zodiac -- this would have impacted the mother, and she would have (subconsciously) passed it onto her daughter. Not to mention the cooking skills.

There's more, but there are plenty of books written on growing up as a third culture child, as well as books on what it was like on the Mainland in the 1970s/1980s. Please read them and study the history of this period of China.

Again, I strongly suggest going through the POC forum -- there's a lot of information in there. And take a look at the Chinese language thread in the International District sub-forum -- there's more information there, too, and plenty of examples of the written language.

If the mother was born in the 40's or 50's in China, might a white boyfriend be more acceptable than a Japanese one? Even an American-of-Japanese-ancestry one?

Japanese-anything would be rejected immediately.

The WWII atrocities were still very fresh in people's minds. Even to this day, the older generation remembers and the fury is as strong as ever.

A white boyfriend, American, could be a remote possibility.

More likely, a 100% Chinese boyfriend would be a must, or at least the first choice. All other nationalities would be found unsuitable (best case scenario); worst case, the mother would drive off the boyfriend and be even more controlling of her daughter's choice of suitor.

"Tiger mum" is a very real thing and it's a different world to "helicopter parent".

Snitchcat said:

Japanese-anything would be rejected immediately.

The WWII atrocities were still very fresh in people's minds. Even to this day, the older generation remembers and the fury is as strong as ever.

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I kind of got that impression from things I've read and people I've known. A quick way to infuriate your mother.

frimble3 said:

I kind of got that impression from things I've read and people I've known. A quick way to infuriate your mother.

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Hahaha! The fastest ever method!

However, this would depend on how much of the learned rascism and fury influences the daughter vs how deep the mother/daughter bond is.

Want to tie the daughter in knots as well as the mother? 50% Japanese, 50% Indian (India) boyfriend who also has Malay and Filippino heritage/roots. Want to know why? Research cultural clash and relations of SE Asia.

(Chinese vs Indians is another explosive ethnicity relation. Ask if you want to know.)

Snitchcat said:

Want to tie the daughter in knots as well as the mother? 50% Japanese, 50% Indian (India) boyfriend who also has Malay and Filippino heritage/roots. Want to know why? Research cultural clash and relations of SE Asia.

(Chinese vs Indians is another explosive ethnicity relation. Ask if you want to know.)

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Holy crap, am I ever flashbacking to some major family blow outs now. Had no idea this thread was going to be so triggering...

Shoeless said:

Holy crap, am I ever flashbacking to some major family blow outs now. Had no idea this thread was going to be so triggering...

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*Hugs*

I hear you.