Hyphen: a small dash connecting two words to form a compound. It comes from the Greek huphen, meaning “together”—hupo (“under”) + hen (“one”).

Unlike the commanding colon, the loud exclamation point, or the definitive period, the hyphen is quiet, unassuming, easily overlooked. Even when it appears, you often gloss over its existence: short-term, part-time, do-over.

Yet, for me, the hyphen has become a symbol of suspension: a high-wire balancing act, devoid of a safety net, teetering, unstable, forcing me to tread slowly and deliberately—with my words, thoughts and footsteps—lest a single misstep leads to danger, pain, or even death.

Why? Because I am Chinese hyphen American.

Prior to immigrating to America as a child, I had never encountered the hyphen before. It is a punctuation mark that does not exist in the Chinese language. The first time I recall seeing it was on an immigration form my father was filling out. Amidst the ocean of English words, I noticed it nestled between only certain terms, like a secret.

“It’s how they differentiate between immigrant groups,” my father explained.

This made sense: America was made up of immigrants from all corners of the world. Non-native people started arriving in the 1400s: first the English colonizers, then the German settlers, the Irish farmers, the annexed Mexicans and so on. Nearly every American has undergone the hyphenation process. But as I grew up in America—attending K-12 schools, going to university, starting a career, becoming a writer—I also grew increasingly wary of the hyphen.

Because what it joins together seamlessly on paper can be frayed in reality.

I have often wondered if a different punctuation mark would have been more accurate—say, the slash. Chinese/American: two words, two identities; two worlds best kept separated, partitioned, even far apart.

Not unlike how American and Chinese citizens actually lived, until a TikTok ban changed all that.

***

Ironically, the first place I saw mentions of RedNote was on X, formerly Twitter. A user had posted that she was a #TikTokRefugee: a term for the 170 million American users of TikTok on the verge of losing their digital home after the U.S. government announced a ban, which was set to begin Sunday, 19 January 2025.

The panicked search for a new platform catapulted RedNote to the top of the app charts overnight: seven million new users in less than twenty-four hours.

At first, I didn’t even recognize the app’s English moniker, as I had only ever known it as 小红书—pronounced Xiao Hong Shu. I was puzzled. This was a decidedly Chinese app, something I had encountered only on trips back to China—to carb-load on biang biang noodles, tease my cousins about their growth spurts, and to help Grandma feed her favorite hen. With 300 million active users, RedNote is a blend of Instagram, Yelp and Pinterest, with a side of e-commerce. Curious, I downloaded it to take a look: photos, mood boards, videos, livestreams—the content centered mostly around lifestyle, food, travel, and fashion, offering viewers a portal into the lives of Chinese citizens.

I had fun browsing RedNote while on vacation, but soon after returning home, with its content no longer relevant, the app slowly but surely faded from my life.

Like my identities, my Chinese/American lives went their separate ways as soon as the airplane left the tarmac.

***

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the tightrope walk began, but a searing incident from the seventh grade may have drawn the psychological starting line. During a Social Studies class, after a lesson on China’s Cultural Revolution, the teacher quipped: “Chinese people aren’t very nice.”

The words rolled off his tongue easily, thoughtlessly and cruelly, with little regard for my being the only Chinese-American student in his class. Once uttered, they had an immediate chilling effect: the room went cold, everyone fell silent, and I sat frozen in my seat as the many pairs of blue and brown eyes shifted—some towards me, some away—their gazes curious, embarrassed, confused, as if my hyphenated identity somehow made me complicit in those historical events.

And in the already bullying-heavy environment of middle school, the comment put an even bigger target on my back: it chased me through the school halls in a never-ending game of pernicious tag. Finally, to escape the relentless harassment, I took to eating lunch away from the cafeteria with a different teacher, Ms. A. A new teacher in the school, Ms. A taught me English and ran the student newspaper club of which I was a member. Instead of mingling with other adults, she stayed in her classroom to provide me refuge and company, often sharing the cookies she brought for her own lunch.

But painful as it was, the incident taught me an important lesson early on: in America, much of the vernacular surrounding China and its immigrants is steeped in negativity, a legacy that traces back to the 1800s when the first Chinese ‘coolies’ arrived as replacements to the enslaved on plantations after the Civil War.  The new arrivals would also build America’s transcontinental railway, before their presence was blamed for depressed labor wages that culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first piece of U.S. legislation to explicitly discriminate on the basis of race.

As Chinese-Americans, we bear that legacy on our yellow skins.

Years later, in university, I took an American Studies class: United States from 1945 to Present. For the first time, I truly understood how deep-seated these fears were branded onto the American psyche, due to the Cold War and rabid McCarthyism: anything from “the East” was bad, tainted by communism or espionage, and were a threat to “American values”. I noticed how quickly and easily people—bureaucrats, politicians, journalists, employers, housewives, neighbors—believed these wild exaggerations of communist subversion. It is a Red Scare mentality that continues to shape much of US-China rhetoric and relations today.

As we watched old grainy footage of committee investigations that incriminated individuals based on the flimsiest of evidence, I also realized that my dual identities would forever entrap me in the purgatorial No Man’s Land: the liminal and precarious space between two geopolitically opposed nations. Any movement may draw crossfire.

The only way to survive was to stay still, unnoticed, invisible.

***

I was certain the X post about RedNote was just an aberration—a fluke. Especially when the consensus was that everyone would shift to either Instagram or YouTube, given that the ban was due to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, being Chinese.

So why would Americans suddenly flock to another Chinese app?

But when I clicked on the hashtag, I saw a flood of posts confirming the migration. Curious again, I re-downloaded the app. The interface was still in Chinese, a language that I’m grateful my parents insisted I retained despite our move to America. But for many Chinese-American families I knew, I witnessed the kids orphaning themselves from their mother tongue, encouraged by their parents to speak English exclusively and to distance themselves from their heritage in the hope of greater assimilation. Only for them to realize later on that, for some of us hyphenated Americans, no matter how fluent and accent-less our English became, or how many generations our ancestors had resided in America, our non-white skin still prevented us from shedding that troublesome little dash.

After setting up a new account, I began scrolling through the feed. But unlike before when all of the content was in Chinese, I was instantly greeted by a white American introducing herself: “Hi RedNote, my name is Mandy and I’m a TikTok refugee from Wisconsin.”

I swiped to the next video: “Ni hao everyone, wo de ming zi jiao Michael—Hi everyone, my name is Michael. I am a carpenter from Texas, and I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for letting us crash in your digital living room.”

And then this one: “Man, my entire life we were taught to be scared of the Chinese people: “Watch out, the Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming,” began The Joey Show, a content creator from Alabama.

I nodded, thinking I knew where this would go—back to the usual place of fear and discrimination.

“But none of that is true!” he continued enthusiastically. “The camaraderie, the friendliness of the Chinese people, they have welcomed us with open arms. Yo, to my American people: Don’t. Mess. This. Up. These people are cool, man—they’re already sending me foodie videos.”

After living nearly my entire life ingesting the standard rhetoric, I found myself reacting to Joey with pleasant shock and disbelief, even though I knew he didn’t speak for all Americans.

***

The invisibility worked for a while.

By strictly following the tenets of the model minority—work hard, be grateful, don’t rock the boat—we were able to lead quiet, narrow lives within No Man’s Land, at a price. When I read Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, I nodded in fervent agreement with her analysis of the cost: “We are the carpenter ants of the service industry, the apparatchiks of the corporate world. We are math-crunching middle managers who keep the corporate wheels greased but who never get promoted since we don’t have the right ‘face’ for leadership.” Because I had witnessed firsthand so many Asian-American peers in my field, who, despite their achievements academically and diligence professionally, were unable to attain leadership positions at work. Too often, we bemoaned our being pigeon-holed as “the analyst”, forever stuck doing the most complicated data analysis and modeling, just to watch someone with a different face take our findings, regurgitate it in an executive meeting, and get rewarded with promotions.

But despite these bamboo ceilings and walls, we managed to build lives within the confines, reaching a certain degree of financial and physical security that many other hyphenated Americans who, due to a legacy of structural racism, educational inequalities, and criminal justice disparities, could not yet reach.

Until 2020.

When the Coronavirus struck, our fall from the model minority pedestal was swift and deadly. Overnight, the title was stripped away, as we reawakened to a dormant strain of virulent racism that no N95 mask could protect against. Headlines of anti-Asian hate crimes became as quotidian as the daily forecast: Woman charged with hate crime after stabbing student of Chinese descent multiple times in head on bus; Family of Thai immigrant, 84, says fatal attack ‘was driven by hate’; 8 dead in Atlanta-area spa shootings, suspect arrested.

Reading in the New York Times, I discovered that six of the Atlanta victims were Asian-American women. Authorities said these killings “may have been racially motivated”. May have been? How many deaths does it take to qualify? I wondered. Then, in a press conference, the investigating county sheriff claimed the shooter just “had a bad day.” A bad day? I felt sick to my stomach. (Later, it was revealed the same sheriff had shared multiple posts featuring t-shirts with anti-Asian racist slogans on Facebook.)

Fearing for my parents’ safety, I forbade my mother from venturing outside alone, and insisted my father wear a baseball cap to conceal his features and age—even for a walk around our neighborhood. They didn’t need much convincing. Stay alert. Be aware of your surroundings. Avoid eye contact. Social distancing became less about avoiding the virus and more about preventing bodily harm.

Many Asian-Americans became first-time gun owners during the pandemic.

Yet, despite these precautions, I still found myself accosted at a gas station: “Where are you from? You’re not American. You’re Chinese!” the woman screeched.

“I’m Chinese-American,” I replied curtly, knowing the little hyphen made no/all the difference.

***

Over the next few days, I scrolled with an anthropologist’s fascination through RedNote’s feed. Chinese netizens, equally surprised by this unexpected influx of American visitors, began making videos in response—with hilarious results.

“Welcome TikTok refugees, welcome to Xiao Hong Shu. We hope you have a great time here,” announced a Chinese user named Jerry, looking rather formal in his wooly turtleneck against a pristine backdrop. His video quickly went viral because the incoming Americans accidentally mistook him for RedNote’s CEO. (Jerry, it turned out, was just a guy starting a new channel with his girlfriend. He didn’t even live in China. XSWL: the Chinese equivalent of LMAO.)

“Hello American friends, welcome to XHS. This video will teach you everything you need to know about this app,” said another Chinese creator in a tutorial video on how to change one’s username, upload an avatar, and make different posts. The comments section soon flooded with American users requesting assistance with cool Chinese usernames. Meanwhile, the RedNote community also instituted a playful tradition: every fresh-off-the-boat American had to pay a “cat tax” at customs, a photo of one’s pet as an entry fee. Acceptable forms of payment included cats, dogs, hamsters, rabbits—basically anything furry and adorable.

Suddenly, Americans and Chinese people were communicating in a way I had never experienced before: posts, videos, gifs, comments, memes—you name it. One American user boldly asked Chinese netizens to roast America. The top reply, liked by both sides, came from 千芸: “Why do you guys eat like your healthcare is free?”

Meanwhile, Chinese citizens, after years of mandatory English classes and writing letters under the standardized name “Li Hua” to fictitious American pen pals for practice, finally found real-life “voice-pals” in Americans who replied to them directly on live streams.

Americans, in turn, began learning basic Chinese: ni hao (hello), wo shi mei guo ren (I am an American), and tried phonetic self-introductions cobbled together with help from Google Translate. In one week, Duolingo saw a 216 per cent increase in people studying Chinese. While imperfect, their efforts felt sincere. For the first time, Americans were trying to speak Chinese in earnest, instead of the previously mocking “Ching Chong” noises a white UCLA student made the last time the language went viral on the Internet.

RedNote also seemed to dispel decades of misconceptions about China for these American refugees overnight: skyscrapered megacities instead of dilapidated villages; property tax-free modern apartments instead of sweatshop living conditions; no rickshaws but a high-speed rail system that could take you from Beijing to Shanghai—819 miles, an equidistance of New York to Chicago—in under 4.5 hours; and a grocery haul that gave Americans, struggling with the high cost of living, sticker shock because of its lower prices.

“Corn on the cob? Ninety-four cents. In America? $7. Is that what they don’t want us to know?” asked @KyleOstromecky, an American user who went shopping virtually with his new Chinese bestie.

Social media, it seemed, had sparked a different kind of cultural revolution.

***

Five years on from Covid, while the waves of anti-Asian hate may have receded, until the next event, anti-immigrant sentiment in the global West is rising at an alarming rate. Immigrants everywhere are being scapegoated for society’s every ill: disease, overcrowding, unemployment, poverty, crime, inflation. Calls for mass deportations and revocations of citizenships grow louder every day: Italy Curtails Ancestry-Based Citizenship Rights; Violent clashes erupt between riot police and migrants during Paris eviction; Germany’s toughening on immigration sparks tense debate in Europe.

Discrimination, I’ve come to realize, operates like a rotational program: targeting certain groups while offering others a fleeting sense of security, until eventually, it comes back around for all. And it did: U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students. For a moment, after reading this latest headline, I sat in my chair, motionless, as if turned to stone: is this the start of a new Chinese Exclusion Act?

With every sharp intake of the news, I could feel the tightrope beneath me shrinking, the ground falling further away, my high-wire act growing more challenging, more dangerous, more impossible.

Recently, a clip from Don’t Be a Sucker, a black-and-white US War Department educational film from the 1940s, began circulating online. In the scene, a self-proclaimed real American—a white man—stands atop a soapbox to deliver an angry rant under a flapping American flag. Despite his words being nearly eighty years gone, they sound eerily contemporary: “I’m speaking to you as an American-American, and I tell you, friends, we’ll never be able to call this country our own until it’s a country without. Without Negroes. Without alien foreigners. Without Catholics. Without Freemasons.”

One of the listeners, initially nodding in vehement agreement, suddenly stiffens: “Masons? What’s wrong with the masons? I’m a Mason!”

Turning, the other man beside him replies knowingly: “And that makes a difference, doesn’t it? Before he said Masons, you were ready to agree with him.”

Listening to the clip, I was instantly transported back to that same seventh grade Social Studies classroom: the same chill setting in, like frost, the same xenophobic words infiltrating the air like noxious gas, and the same unsettling hyphen now fusing together the identity, American-American. But remembering all I had witnessed on RedNote—the family photos exchanged, the joy Americans expressed in trying their first Chinese recipe, the friendships forged across borders—I also felt a spark of hope.

Because when we the people rewrite the script of fear, even citizens from opposite ends—geographical, political, and cultural—can overcome the legislations and algorithms of division to come together as one.

And the hyphen’s dream? Not to erase itself but to expand and grow.

Chinese—American: a hand reaching for a handshake.

Chinese—American: a tightrope that stretches to become a bridge.