“I think, if political tensions continue to rise, we will find ourselves in situations, whether we’re in the States or in China, where people will push us to identify with one over the other,” said Easten Law, 38, of Princeton, N.J.
“For us everyday Chinese Americans, we’re going to have to deal with the same issues of, you know, claiming versus disassociating, and parsing through what to identify with and what not to,” he said. “I think it’s inevitable.”
For others, the criticism against Ms. Gu felt personal. Several described experiencing the weight of people’s narrow expectations of how Asian Americans should act, think and identify.
Jessica Wu, a Queens resident, never felt this projection more clearly than in 2017, when she flew from Portugal to Philadelphia. While passing through immigration with others from her flight, Ms. Wu said, a Transportation Security Administration agent laughed when he saw her United States passport and asked if she was actually an American citizen.
“Even though I never felt like I have to choose or even think about my identity, I think other people make that assumption for me, or they put their own racist assumptions on me,” said Ms. Wu.
Though Ms. Gu, who was born to a Chinese mother and an American father, has described herself as a typical Asian American teen, she had an unusually privileged childhood. She was raised in an affluent neighborhood of San Francisco, attended an elite private school and spent most summers in Beijing.
Her experience since then has been similarly uncommon. She has been allowed to compete with an ambiguous citizenship status: China does not allow dual citizenship, but there is no record of Ms. Gu having renounced her American citizenship.
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