our facebook page or send us an e-mail, booktv@c-span.org. >> next, eric liu, former speech writer and adviser for president clinton, talks about the history of chinese-americans and the experiences of his own family members in the united states. mr. liu spoke at the world affairs council in san francisco. ..

unlocking the power of possibility. the latest book is entitled a china man's chance, one family's journey in the chinese american dream. please join me in welcoming eric lewis. >> the question begs to be answered, why the title? >> have in this conversation, gathering dust together today. i am really excited to talk, and this title in particular, the phrase "a chinaman's chance" by

think many people know the phrase that has fallen into most to pub of this review and out of use. it is slower, and in essence, and a phrase that has its origin really from the earliest days when chinese immigrants first began to arrive here in the united states and laborers from china were given some of the most thankless, dangerous to life threatening jobs and labor wrote mining mounds and so forth such that they often had slim to none chance of surviving which cut short handed in a length of time as a teefor. that phrase long survived its original uses. by the time were under plus years later when my father emigrated to the united states in the late 1950's my dad as a real sponge for language and idioms as well as somebody with this kind of erotic playful sense of humor somewhere along the way heard the phrase. you probably heard it used

either against him were used current of unthinkingly in his company and presence. and it was my father's nature to take something like that where the intention was to own and to grab that dart in mid-air and basically redirected. and so would he began to do was just in this kind of ironic the playful way we appropriate and claim that phrase such that when i was growing up as a kid he would apply in this silly way to everyday situations. who were attracted to the kershaw store before closing time we were so for two minutes away he would say, we have much animus chance of getting their own time for of the yankees were down by five runs in the bottom of the ninth inning he would say, oh, they have a tournament since of coming back here. he said it in this way, as he did many things to men tended to kind of poke and probe me and almost kid might go basically.

so archaic and passes the offensive to see if he keep it arises out of me when actually in the teaching ways in which we can reclaim and reprieve language. and a part of claiming american this is to take these words and phrases and slurs and the idea is meant to be used against us and say, we can talk by grabbing them ourselves and using them in ways that we dictate the terms of and that makes sense with the context that we have today. that is part of the bigger context. and so it is partly to honor my dance. that i named the book "a chinaman's chance." the other piece of it is just about the idea of chance of which entity. we were talking before we came out here about how cool you know, this moment, we live in this age of china and america.

the age often cast as china verses america and then age were here in the united states because of income inequality and wealth concentration, all of this turning social and demographic change our sense of opportunity is beginning to diminish and our sense of relative opportunity is certainly beginning to diminish in comparison to china. part of what i am writing this book about is to remind us as americans about the meaning of opportunity in the united states and what it means to have a chance to express your full potential, to have a chance to have your voice heard, to have a chance to redefine what it means to be american. and that is really a lot of the storytelling and arguments of the books are about. >> a lot of it is about identity and how you can structure our identity. all of us have multiple identities camino, we have a debt is related to our work of our passions to our genders, relationships, religion, at this city, citizenship. when you were growing up there

on the spectrum was your -- in the sense of how you constructed your identity, being american and being chinese, how important was that to you in terms of how you thought of yourself and how did other see you? did you feel that there was a gap? >> i would add 1/3 point to triangulate the senses of identity, asian. and so i want to speak to all those. i think you are absolutely right that everyone of us had many identities. and what you think but that you realize the ways in which we as americans often conflict the two words heritage and identity. we use them to mean the same thing, but they are not. i am a chinese heritage. and the recipient, the trustee, the inheritor of this legacy of chinese culture and civilization and i have done a job of trying

to hold on to that legacy and pass it on to a third generation, but that is distinct from identity, how one identifies oneself and what one takes and construction putting together that sense of self. and so today when asked what are you, that most basic sense. >> what are you and who are you. >> by people, what are you perhaps more often. you know, what are you, my answer is chinese-american. i hasten to add, i do not-a chinese-american. chinese american. american is the amount. chinese is the adjective. chinese is actually one of many adjectives that -- you know, i love baseball of american, a politically active american, is different as to, but the chinese part of my americanists lean -- laden's other large. so growing up, you know, i would say that as a kid actually have this very wonderful sense that

chinese and american this could be aligned of overlapping. and part of that is not just, oh, isn't that nice, part of it was the active growth of of second-generation kid trying to create unity and integrity out of these different streams of integrity that were surrounding him. and so i grew up with stories of my paternal grandfather who was a pilot and later a general in the nationalist chinese air force, fought in the war. though i never knew him, i heard legends and stories and knew him by his severe portrait and uniform looking down at me. and his name in mandarin, as you know, family name. but it basically means deliverance of the nation. so, you know, no pressure. my grandfather had this huge

name to live up to. in many ways he did. he had the good fortune to my supposed to come of age at a time when dynastic rule was a big and the republic of china was emerging and he could participate in those very crowded, consequential years of chinese history. and so growing up by have all these stories of world war ii, stories in which americans and chinese are on the same side, in which and indeed my grandfather worked with the flying tigers, a group of semiofficial american mercenary pilots. and so i had these kind of legend in my mind, to be american and chinese or in some sense overlapping. now, there are, of course, limits to that. and the limits of the limits once i left my imagination and once i left the safety of my home and my family. we go out into the wider world. i grew up in a part of upstate new york. fantastic in idyllic place to

grow up but not particularly diverse. incredibly white community. and so i was very aware of my difference. in difference was cast not so much in chinese terms but in nation turns. and so the sense that you or not white like everybody else to me or something else. something else is this indiscriminate logging. of of of your chinese are japanese or korean and so a lot of my youth was really trying to figure out how to triangulate these different points of identity, to hold onto an idea, had to reckon with this other point evasion. and as i write in my first book about the accidental agent to my spent much of my early years in kind of overcompensating arm's-length for holding away asian entity because i just wanted to be american. that did not want to get put in

a category like that even though i was perfectly proud of being chinese. was only kind of later college-age and certainly not today deepened to km age and deep as well on 14 years now away from the east coast, 14 years of the west coast of 14 years of seattle, 14 years being steeped in a cultural and civic and social million where there is banned at the, pan-asian, pan everything politics, culture, front organization, and that has shaped me to embrace the sense of asians as this third point in the triangle. growing up was much more about chinese and american and not so sure what decision thing is about. >> do you think change came because you move to the west coast or there was an evolution and a maturation within the united states in terms of how

america's look at mecca identity . >> simply in recognizing of a lot of young people who are subject to stereotype, and it could be ethnic, gender, sexual orientation. and they often feel the need to live in perfect opposition to the stereotypes. people think i am ex i will be exactly not. and what i came to realize by the time that i had gone through college and was resting on how i had been formed in my earlier years i was realizing that when you are reacting and living in such direct automatic opposition to a stereotype you are as much a prisoner of that stereotype as you would have been any other way. that is a point of identity in america to make a path and identity in choose a path. what happens is i live up to

certain asian stereotypes' to my to play the violin. [laughter] i love playing the violin, and i'm not going to go out. embrace that. that is you. you don't have to not play the violin because people like you are expected to. i think this is -- the other piece of it that is chases, not just america's maturation, but the world. everything they know from your time in asia and watching the rise is not just the material economic crimes. it's a cultural civilization all eyes were now there are just ways of being cut off that you can identify as chinese or confucian or asian. people in america now see that as a plus, a value-added. that was not the case to the five years ago unnecessarily, but it is increasingly the case now. part of the message is for us to take that seriously, not just at the level but

ask ourselves, what actual cultural assets to chinese-americans bring to the table? help contribute to an american advantage in the larger global fame. >> about your violin, the lovely theme in your book. you and your friend in high school are jamming in a rehearsal room. he learned the technique, playing the violin. then you did atonal music, jazz, classical. that was of importance perry is free of. >> it was about exercising imagination, so i did violin education starting with suzuki and then had a great non suzuki violin teacher. i did all the competition's.

and i gained a certain command of the form. and then when i had a yearning to do, my buddy who was not chinese-american, rob de taos ski, a pianist and a jazz aficionado. we both love this kind of freestyle in proposition and have been soaked in that. we just started jamming on our own. and that process even though we did not produce keith jarrett level recordings or anything, but the process of breaking out of the former soviet already gained command of, that he had earned the right to break out of, that was an incredibly formative experience, and not just a moment. a particularly do improvisational jazz violin in war today. it was for live in a sense of this is a pattern. this is a template. this is the thing that american lives up to.

other countries may be better than the united states at getting in people to master the form. this is all about debate. our young people don't know the forms of mathematics or cervix or sentence construction as well as they do in other countries. one thing we do retain -- and not even sure how we captured, the capacity to encourage our students and dinner citizens in this country to have a certain point, exercise imagination and combine things in ways that have not been combined before, to make hybrid mixtures of styles and the voices and images and means that had not been contemplated in the world before. that is a pattern. i feel like it influenced our do my work in the world in my mind set about what america's competitive advantages in the world. we are just an incredible,

open trade, this open operating system for this kind of celebrity and aggressively contradictory mixing in meshing in melding of influences. mobs subdominant right now for. at the narrow, the shut board, the closed part of the mind. and that is dangerous not just on a policy level off is dangers of a cultural competitive advantage of. >> with .. should be done differently in this moment? >> the values and a language that will use, business leaders, people who are here in this room today. kershaw owing of puggaree of the world affairs council you're already a pretty high class show her upper.

everybody in this room masterpiece about he takes it upon themselves to preach the gospel of openness, have pretty, and that asset of the american advantage because he -- we can make that behavior. it cannot just be the ceo of this or president of that. it has to be us. and that is a matter of norms and values so that when a crisis does arise let the crisis of the border with mexico, the reflex of our country and of our felicitous since it is the reflex of duval patrick in massachusetts, the people who are saying, you know what can it is not the american way to treat these people who may be eradicated .

must be hot and the valuable pieces this of the policy level comprehensive immigration reform clearing out. how we bring it to a city of 11 or 12 million undocumented friends, co-workers even family members is a non trivial thing. we can't figure out how to do this we are essentially exceeding to the idea that america shot of a permanent underclass, second class not even citizens, people in limbo. we are many years past chinese exclusion, many years past some of the time and this country's history where we decided that we would treat a group of people as outside the bounds of participation in american life. we have to have comprehensive immigration reform to address that.

think that is another case of it. >> those were already in the country. the approach to education. what do you see and where does it concern you? >> and so glad you asked that question. throughout my boat but even more to the heart of the work that i do in running the small profit for the university. we run a variety of different programs. some are political or policy, but many of them are in essence cultural. to use another phrase, civic religious. about the idea that we have in this country a civic religion, creed. indeed, it is a creed that is essentially the only thing that holds us together the united nations is not a tribe but a nation where a set of ideas and a finite number of documents, a declaration, the preamble of the constitution, gettysburg , the i have a dream speech, senator paul's

declaration. a few kind of core, scriptural documents that we have to attend to and wreath -2. one of the programs of we got from the university has a program called sworn in america. will we are doing here is to bridge this gap between the immigrant experience in the experience of native-born americans. by show of hands how many of you ever either been to or participated in a naturalization ceremony? okay. a few. for the rest of you i urge you, demand that sometime in the next week you find your way to a naturalization ceremony. unserious. bureaucratic balkan the cheesy video that is mandated by the structures of how they do these things, it is one of the most powerful and moving things experience to see when they do the roll-call and people are rising to many

immigrants from china and in marcan georgia and vietnam all rising. then there till the next time you sit down you will be american, that's accused of kind of moment. i've been to enough of these naturalization ceremonies, my partner and i thought what if we created something like this for everybody. not only for brand new citizens in naturalized immigrants but all of us, native-born as well, with your family has been here when they're 100 years and more. a sense of renew many of files. so we created this ritual, this simple civic ritual that has meaning, ceremony, that has an of, is simple non-partisan, non-political of the boxes and shipped as contribution, service, showing a preacher and push each other to do better. and we have been doing these all around the country.

it brings immigrants together with native-born, together with sons and daughters of the american revolution, with people from all different parts of the country to see the ways in which we have a common story, a common creed, but it is not self renewing. takes us to actually pay attention to it and remind us. >> what impact have you seen it have in terms of people taking the ideas and going out and doing something with them? >> i am a bitter optimist. and so i see a lot of popular science. reran this moment right now, and you can think of it as a moment of things falling apart for breaking. you can also think of it as a moment of new things emerging. so much of our national policy, our ability to deal with the wider world stock or, you know, not nimble.

and, yes, there is this yearning all across our country that i am finding in our work of people to innocence reclaim their power and responsibility as citizens problem solvers and arenas where they have control. but there is just this renaissance of local citizenship, people reclaiming what it means to live in a city car redefine the life of community at the level of the neighborhood or precinct for county. and not just doing that and it pulled to parochial, doing what i call network level partly aided by technology and partly aided by the fact that we adjust and in major networks to mindset once. and so people in seattle are borrowing money from people in san francisco and borrowing from people in tampa and cleveland and so on and so forth. this interesting web of people trying to make change l local level but ring up

with others and with a mix that chase national in scale and this, to me, is an instance of what makes this country resilience. if you compare again are starting team of looking at the united states in the shadow of or in relation to china there's a lot that china had going for it. it is more we going to be soon that china's gdp surpasses that of the united states. that will be a great moment of psychological crisis for many americans. but i don't care. i do not care when that happens, and i do not care that that will happen that china's gdp will surpass hours in their economy will become number one. think there we retained deep and lasting competitive with vantage. two aspects. when is this aspect has --

its battered ask forgiveness than permission. and that's credo permeates american civic life in ways that i think you don't know this in just paying attention to the doorway and what is going on in d.c. adapted and he and resilience. what we were describing earlier which is our open intermingled intermixed cultural operating system. i borrow it down this way. our advantage over china, america makes chinese-americans. tiny does not make american chinese. china does not want to, is not interested

that is the very essence of the american idea. i think that bless this network resilience bottom of citizenship gives me a great deal of hope. >> some experience, but it ask forgiveness than permission. could you see us as a university existing in china? >> a great question. yes, i could. but not today. not so easily today. >> so would have to happen? >> i think this is -- there are pockets. unfortunately the government taken is more adept than wait five to figuring out where these pockets are. pockets of citizens of that

country you want to solve problems on their own, who want to bypass steps and procedures and call of corruption and have voice and agencies in ways that are beyond what has been permitted. think that there is a yearning there. it is bubbling up a different quarter pockets across the broad, complex wednesday put china. of course, as you well know from your recent reporting there, among the organizations being persecuted in china right now, there is one called the citizens league. has the word citizens and. the idea of a culture of this kind of citizenship taking hold in china is going to require a couple of things. is going to require example, cochran people like you.

it's going did take us spreading contagion. i don't mean this in a simplistic way. modeling by example what it means to take ownership and responsibility of problems and solve them yourselves and to organize others to do that and aggregated ways does not necessarily try to overthrow them. these habits of citizenship and citizen problem-solving, you are not born knowing how to do them. they are different from the act necessary. that is part of that. once you've done a, a preexisting feed bed, the practice of this kind of soft governance and self-governing citizens shipped, something else will

come fill that vacuum as it happens throughout parts of the arab world. part of what i would like to see if there were to be a citizen university in mainland china would be to help foster this not in the spirit of challenging the authority of the communist party of a threat and the government there would actually in the spirit of this is a well made china a stable and resilience and adaptable without new revolution of long-term. what but robert and i would describe as tablets of the heart that can begin to be processed and taken to heart in different parts of china. you think about authorizing the socio-economic boehner more than a quarter century ago. tear, you know, we are going to create zones where you get to play capitalism

we will plan and. rita wanted to go too far too fast but we will do that and then methodically with that spread as it works. i, you know, i think china government would benefit if they began in some ways to imagine a civic version of socialist economics. >> i think it is actually probably gone considerably farther than the already with the adventist ways like twitter, suddenly you have hundreds of millions of people on line sharing ideas criticizing the government at times. there are ngos to lawyers who are trying to practice according to the chinese competition. they get funding and the government has been

suspicious that there is some ulterior motive of trying to destabilize the government. at this point in china the government has been discussion in universities and western democracy, rule of law, constitutionalism, following your own constitution. a long preamble. do you think that the kind of society you are passionate about, advocating within the united states and elsewhere is possible under a strong, authoritarian government? >> it think it is possible under a strong authoritarian government to nurture the development of that kind of society. you need look no farther than other parts of the station than the art of not just economic but civic development, democratic development and south korea or taiwan or for that matter japan has taken over these

tickets. and the republic of china from 1949 through the mid-80s have plenty of authoritarianism. and they figured out a way to make possible the practice and the cultivation of these habits of constitutionalism, self-government's, the key phrase that was used. by the way, if you ever go take the u.s. citizenship exam there are all kinds of questions on mayor, who was the first president. company stars on the flag. there are couple of rigor questions. you're like a while, not sure most heliborne americans could answer this for everyone of the questions is what is the rule of law? weakest in the next couple hours year tried to get to

an answer on what is the rule of law. that mainly suggests that we as americans have taken for granted so much about the rule of law. so much about how we operate in an inferno with the rule of law and our, again, that is not automatically self renewing. but in china or in other places where you have the tradition of political authoritarian as a i do think it is possible to cultivate the rule of law in this democratic constitution was white. and i think one of the things they have to push against, and i would push against and that i duplicitous in my book is this mythology of asian values and asian values are inherently inhospitable to self-government, democracy, and freedom. that is erik tor cocoa was strange to fund a variety of more authoritarian rulers are promoted throughout east asia. i just don't buy it.

i just do not buy it. and i think to buy it in to say that, oh, gosh, well, they are asians and the asian way is not so much to have a voice and stick up for yourself. the asian way is to be herded like cattle were led by strong when it is repugnant to me as a nation, as an american, as human. and though, does that mean american-style democracy can and should be exported in an untouched, undiluted way and can be transported to any other country? i think the last ten years tell us the answer to that. no. we cannot and should not pretend that that is the case. and our foreign is not necessarily perfectionists of. but i think that the idea of rule of law matter is something that can, i think, be seated even in a context

like that which prevails in china today. >> i think if you were to half a world citizen university how would it be different in your occurrences in university? >> another great question. i am presented with this question. and mainly from my friends on the left who have more orientation toward transnational and global. being so parochial. unamerican. talking about just the nation. it's time for global citizenship. and then i grant this reality. there are so many problems of our world right now to our climate change the record era transnational global approach and that simply having countries trying to do their own thank .

and the same time when i talk about citizenship crimean in the political community that has haitians. and so if you are having health trouble realizing the you are in trouble model because your sector you don't have any kind of health insurance or access to health care you will not petition doctors without borders purview of the petition the world health organization. you will call for better or worse, petition the united states congress. you may not like the answer that they cannot put your petition, but that is a unit of agency, an entity that will be able to redress wants and needs and be responsive to these things. and so on one level i do think that even in the company now we're in comminations matter and that this nation in particular matters especially. particularly if you care

about global thinking a global mindset. you should be super dedicated to making sure that the experiment called the united states works. the experiment called the united states actually delivers on its promise. we have a promise of everything errors in a year earlier. that is only in theory. in practice we have continuously, severely fail to live up to. if we ever actually get in right and make american citizenship fully lived up to its full birth of potential but would be the closest thing of this planet to global services. that would be the closest thing this planet will have yet seem to transcending nation, a tribe, creed and religion. and if we can't prove it here but delivering on that promise we can actually give the world a fighting chance

at a meaningful national global citizenship. >> i want to ask your couple of questions before i go to the audience questions. language is important to you as a writer, former speechwriter. he did not speak much chinese when you were a kid. when did you decide it was important to learn that language and why? were in sites did you learn about chinese culture to line in the language? >> i grew up in a household where my parents would speak to be 80% chinese 20 percent english. i would answer in their verse ratio. and so my listening comprehension is outstanding . you can put me in many situations and i will really understand more than just chitchat level of chinese conversation. of my ability to respond in kind is much more limited. and check the one thing and

i realize as i grew older was during a lot of my childhood and upbringing of basically saw these things as one big line which. that is still, mom and i talk. our sentences are mixed with chinese now is in english verbs are putting in ing after a chinese word and just kind of creating this to english is the name by would convince all of you, of a great comedy about misunderstanding as of language across china and america. but for me drizzle line in my book, those who ignored chinese are doomed to repeat it. i tried to keep underpaid. i hated going. was distracted, counting the minutes down and talk to go and play baseball.

in our eyes the father of and now a teenager who aren't trying to reassure learns some core of chinese to the you know, the generational cycle of revenge has come. obama's cracking a by efforts to make my daughter in the chinese. one of the things i came to realize is that of course father heard, km creates a greater sense of urgency and responsibility about sustaining this. when i was the age i was even when i wrote the accidental asian and was a 20 something can't imagine myself the inventor of myself imagining myself with a blank slate, blank canvas. that was a different thing than being in my mid-40s raising a teenager and realizing the ways in which my sense of the and person's ability were already pieces of parchment where a can already been billed, strokes

have already been a western invention already been formed. and teaching my daughter chinese, i gave of on a weekly chinese school, which she hated, but a major deal. he would i would have to go one-on-one tutorial. and it has been about six years no. you know, we miss plenty of weeks, we are generally in a rhythm of tuesday after news and we do chinese. and to do that i have to go dig up looks alike used as a kid in chinese school and then later books the values in college when i began to feel the spark of, hey, i should really give more access to this. i took mandarin beginning college. sunday in of these books and teaching chinese to her, but the when redoing his lessons is it's all very american. im the very opposite of a

tiger parent the tech's marco opposite and the animal kingdom of the tigers me. and part of the way of teaching chinese to my daughter is in the spirit of playing games. and so instead of kind of drolen her with what she laments, mountains this time, the rivers long, she makes up nonsense sentences of english. chairs written into chinese and chairs to figure hovered at the. pure playful nonsense. this game that we have created about to play with language. my daughter would not too well if they put her on the spot to then began to converse with commander in. she has enough now as a core of access so that she has certain instincts. this is what i really feel it is my obligation they you really can't teach otherwise.

reserves stone or whatever it does not quite give you the instinct. you are doing written chinese, the right order strokes which says something. they're is a meeting in the purpose of the history to even being a proper order strokes let alone to what the proper order is from top to bottom, from left right and a certain way, you know, from outside to inside. certain messages being sent about how you compose a character from the outside and, from the community context of the self. but the languages of in the spoken language, is a language that does not have allowed a preposition, does not have a lot of conditional verb tenses and so forth. yet to get what is being set fires in by content. have to transit the precise version meaning of things by the larger context you're speaking in. that is a deeply chinese thing. it is the essence of

chinese, this view of context. this deal of it weaves of relationship and obligation. this idea that language is part of an tradition the feel of their bone and the you feel expressed in your ear, these attorneys have tried to convey to her parents today she has enough of a sense. it comes out sometimes the playfulness with which you speak english and the way they will do things and focus on the musicality and the rhythmic nature of language. chinese is such a poetic and a rhythmic language, particularly if you get into the official chinese and everything is of five beats or seven beats and chinese poetry is in this concise or rhythmic way. it is the way that my

daughter's wedding to write and conversant to choke in english. i would say for me it is shaped the way that i write as well. >> audience questions. there are many parallels. one is the most striking, the cultural identity is in danger of a solution to the dominant culture. deasy the pervasive trend of ventura marriages and subsequent offspring for getting to will cultural messages as positive? >> let me just tart with the end of that question which is that dual cultural messages are positive and. want to assert that his statement. and a bit of a cliche. torn between two worlds, caught between two cultures. anybody growing happen in every household feels a certain paul.

but in general i treat this as an additive, not as zero sum. i see this as a positive something. one plus one equals three. in directing that mindset is very important whether you're talking about a chinese-american, jewish-american, irish-american call whenever. on the question of the kind of parallel or comparison is in sight jewish-american and chinese-american experiences were certain similarities. one of them actually goes to the heart of that question which is that both groups are perceived to be these off the chart overachieving success story groups. end of the chinese-american community today is a really important point.

it's noted more broadly for audience that chinese-americans and asian-americans in general labour under the mythology of the model minority. and i just wanted to dispute the very idea of model minority, wanted to disputed in fact and concepts. all americans are college-educated professional careers nearly half a maria chinese-americans the in party. the poverty rate is higher than that in the non-hispanic white community . this part wilson, the chinese-american community where you and get some people who have achieved in a great success, we have ignored the other side of

after winter generational poverty. not so much with model with respect class. that is living at a time of incredibly concentrated wealth and opportunity particularly people of,. that's one thing i would say to dispute the fact of the model. the concept of there as a model minority. if you go people are modeled and brown and black people and our people not so much i call it can nation. people mean to them not necessarily even of the african-americans to what can you be like these chinese-americans ignoring

the game, ignoring some much of the inheritance that we're growing with today. the jewish experience is instructive in a particular sense. the question is asking it would enter marriage and a dilution of a cultural traditions and heritage partly because the chinese community in the united states, 1 million strong cori injected and refused with fresh blood every year. afresh access and fresh view of chinese culture and norms and worries. does not so much the case for jewish americans and into ridge racer hire. the dilution of those traditions is in a sense

more urgent in that community. of all i can say is this is the beautiful tragedy of american life. a beautiful tragedy of american life is that things to live. that is the tragedy side. the beauty of it is the in deleting things find new combinations. and so maybe it is sad that some third-generation americans don't know out to make can sheet and some to her generation mexican-americans still use mexican home cooking the way they used to. matters such a thing called kimchi doritos. as the beautiful thing along some of the tragic thing that the pastor were talking about the jewish community. >> three questions together

a citizen university said headquarters in seattle expanding to other states and in the others, how you define american, what does it mean to be a citizen. do you think that the united states education system has any influence on the general idea of what american activity is? >> request is on round. yes is my answer to a last question. a sense of coherent national they don't do that anymore. an endangered species in a classroom. and more broadly apart from the teaching of civics we have got it is interesting transition to read how you

define americans. think we're in n.h., an incredible second great wave . the time of incredible integration the century in this century and a half ago, will we have this country is the ad unit to become americans must americanize. across the board, schools, churches, houses and some of that was due. the color blind credo was describing earlier some move was planned. with the realignment was to americanize is to become one. to stop being so it's time incomes up being so noisily errors.

learn to behave properly. and so they've -- it is because of that the very word americanization in decades and centuries later has gained negative buzz around your particularly in a multicultural city like this did not talk about americanization. forced assimilation it is urgent that we embrace our multiculturalism, take it upon ourselves to redefine the meat and it americanization. it does not have to be about a witness, about a civil wedding, but again redeeming the creed and pushing ourselves to see all around it the ways in which every part of our community and society still is failing to live up to that.

that is a fight worth getting behind, an identity with embarrassing, and it is that effort to push this country to live in closer alignment and insisted that deals. they're is a great -- or 100 years ago or more years of fellow who ended up becoming in general and the union army the winner of the united states senator from illinois became a senator about a hundred years before barack obama became the united states senator. there was all this nativism and fear, americanism and america first, these non wasp immigrants, these darker skinned and funny language of immigrants.

then there is a debate in an era of low or patriotism and heath. my country rider on the super relevant right now. true patriotism is not my country right or wrong. true patriotism is my country. right to be kept right, when wrong to be sent right. if you can buy into that creed you are american. if you live up to that creed and show up as a contributor and a participant to making this country live up to that set of ideals i call you american. that is the toast our work is national in scope. some of our work is in the nature of teaching, workshops, six girls, teaching, our call power

literacy, understanding how power flows and civic life which is topic would all like to talk about because it seems dirty or sorted or some help contrary to democratic mips that each citizen is a king. some of will we do. and then this one again america project, all these projects and work is about trying to foster the stronger the culture of citizenship in the united states. again, not in an inward looking parochial wait. in a way that in a sense harkens back to my paternal grandfather's name how will we deliver this nation? how will we fulfil the destiny in the comments. use the label that many kids did. my parents call me an

american-born chinese. american-born chinese is a phrase that kind of implies that were ever kid is born they are essentially and forever unchangeable chinese it's just not true. this is not true. from the minute i was born, from the myth that my parents arrived is ever no longer undiluted unchanged chinese. they have begun to become something else. by the time i was born i was something else. i am an american-born chinese american. you must give it an acronym. but i think that idea of whether you were born here or not, the question is will you live like a citizen? will you claim this country, live up to its ideals, fostered a culture and spirit of openness? if we do that tent obamacare said, like our chances in the world by matter how great china or other nations become. >> so with apologies to all of you who sent in questions we did not get to, we are

out of time. but the conversation will continue. downstairs. just to the right. and we will be there. we would like to continue chatting about this. john would like to now to think eric for a thought-provoking and interesting evening. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> eric will be signing books just over here. anchorage you to go and get a copy. he will be there to sign for you. >> think you. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching book tv on c-span2. forty-eight hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers.

>> up next on book tv after words with guest host chart todd of nbc news. this week dr. ben carson and his latest book the prominent former neurosurgeon and presidential critic proposes a road out of what he calls u.s. decline. he contends that his solutions appeal to every american is decency and common sense. this program is about an hour. ..