Mark Zuckerberg has tied the knot with Priscilla Chan, a 27-year-old multilingual Harvard graduate and pediatric expert. Chan’s Vietnamese-Chinese father immigrated to the United States after a short transit through a camp for boat people from Vietnam—most probably in Hong Kong—before embarking on his journey toward the American dream.
We as Chinese have been quick to dig into the jackpot winner’s ancestral file and identify her indisputable Chinese blood. The Facebook Empire, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is now half-owned by the Chinese, another monumental achievement.
Like the case of Jeremy Lin, the Taiwanese-American basketball king, we expect Chan to say something nice about our Motherland. We are delighted that she took her then-fiancé to visit China twice, and he is now struggling to learn Mandarin. It would be helpful if she could, as a Chinese wife, learn some basic kung fu skills so that she could leap up and punch the face of an intruder at a congressional hearing. Or she could line up some Chinese investors to inject funds so that, under her influence, a banner of Chairman Mao’s quotations could flash in English on Facebook’s main page for more than a billion users worldwide to see.
But before she gets ahead of herself, she should remember that gratefulness is a Chinese virtue. Don’t forget who you are, who gave you all this and where you ultimately belong. Tens of millions of Chinese people on the mainland must be avidly awaiting Priscilla’s acknowledgment of gratitude for her cultural roots. Her thank-you speech should perhaps read something like this:
“Apart from Mark, my beloved, I wish to thank my family for their support. I wish to thank the people of the United States who offered me this land of freedom and opportunity to pursue my American dream.
“And I wish to thank the Hong Kong people of the 1980s who persisted in their call to send us boat people away. My father would have preferred to gain the right of abode in Hong Kong, but the public opinion there insisted that we should all leave. Had I not, I would’ve ended up as one of the miserable single ladies in Hong Kong whose only chance of hooking up with a macho man is paying $4,000 for a ‘Dining-With-Foreigners’ dinner, as I recently learned from my Facebook friends.