I Am Not a Spy -- Are You?
By Helen Zia

There is something I must tell the world, especially Congress, the pundits and all those self-declared China experts. I need to say it out loud, in print and for the record:

Helen Zia

“I AM NOT A SPY!”

Whew, what a relief. I needed to share this highly classified secret with the world because I can’t stand the suspense any longer. I’m tired of waiting for that knock on the door by some short-haired, straitlaced FBI-types, coming to my home to inform me that I am finally, officially under suspicion for spying. Perhaps I’m letting my imagination get away from me -- I concede that they might not actually knock on my door. Maybe they’ll merely phone me, the way the Democratic National Committee did in 1996 to its Asian-surnamed donors. The DNC threatened to turn over to the FBI any Asian Americans who did not consent to being investigated as though they were criminals; now many high-toned Asian Americans have FBI files, all for the crime of participating in the democratic process and making a campaign donation.

Or maybe they won’t even phone -- they’ll just post large bulletins announcing that we should report to concentration centers, as the entire Japanese American population on the West Coast had to during World War II. Or they might post notices in Chinatowns, asking us to turn one another in as possible agents of China -- akin to what the Feds did during the McCarthy era.

“They” are the sudden rash of experts on Chinese people and culture, who trace our supposedly genetic compulsion to commit espionage back thousands of years. As James Woolsey, CIA director in the first Clinton administration, said on ABC Nightline “The Chinese have been running intelligence operations professionally for 4,000 to 5,000 years, and there’s no reason to think they’d stop with us.”

The media-anointed grand expert of Chinese intelligence is Nicholas Eftimiades, who has recently surfaced as someone all-knowing of things Chinese -- our people, culture and history. He says that Chinese espionage involves cajoling morsels of information out of visiting foreign experts and tasking thousands of Chinese abroad to bring secrets home “one at a time like ants carrying grains of sand,” according to the Washington Post’s Vernon Loeb. “The Chinese have been assembling such grains of sand since at least the fourth century B.C., when the military philosopher Sun Tzu noted the value of espionage in his classic work, The Art of War,” wrote Loeb of Eftimiades’ views. (By the way, alluding to Chinese people as insects was a common theme during the anti-China rhetoric of the Cold War and the Korean War eras.)

Some journalists rely less on history, more on stereotype. The Santa Fe New Mexican, whose readers include the many Asian American scientists working at Los Alamos laboratory, likened China to the evil Fu Manchu; “so sorry” for bombing Fu Manchu’s embassy in Belgrade, it editorialized. Even National Public Radio reported that Chinese “ethnic pride” is what makes Chinese espionage so uniquely insidious, unlike the spying done by other spies, who are presumably just motivated by money.

As the “evidence” continues to mount about the evil, inscrutable, diabolical, culturally ingrained spy behavior going all the way back 5,000 years, I am afraid that it is only a matter of time before I, too, will be accused of espionage. I’m beginning to look at myself and wonder if my personal quirks are actually part of a demonic cultural drive. I confess to my own ant-like proclivities to collect bits of information. My little notes and news clippings are all over my house, like grains of sand. Who knows if they might assemble themselves into a nuclear warhead one day? It’s hard enough to assemble them into publishable stories, but you never know.

I also confess to having visited China and other parts of Asia where Chinese people can be found -- I’ve gone several times in the course of my journalism career. Worse yet, I have committed the crime of ethnic pride for being a Chinese American, the daughter of immigrants -- only one generation away from the Ancestral Anthill. So I’m taking this pre-emptive step to announce that I am not a spy.

Of course, I know Asian Americans are not genetically predisposed to spying. Do those who would argue otherwise really think the Greeks weren’t spying during the Peloponnesian War, around the time of Sun Tzu? Or that the Cro-Magnons weren’t snooping on Neanderthals? The only thing this new wave of Chinese espionage experts proves is that you don’t need much intelligence to talk about it.

But when you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, some people are bound to believe it. Adolf Hitler was a master of that concept. The race card has been pulled on us. The wolves are out for blood; as William Safire announced, its time to connect the dots. It doesn’t seem to matter how absurd those dots are, or that they point to us.

Americans like to believe that we will be treated as “innocent until proven guilty.” Tell that to Wen Ho Lee and thousands of Asian American scientists. In March, when the story about Lee first broke, Jim Lehrer asked Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, “Why hasn’t this man been arrested?” not once, but several times on the same show, as though it was a foregone conclusion that Lee must be guilty. And why not, given the weight of all that history and culture?

How do we fight a suspicion that is tied to our ethnicity? How do a people prove their loyalty? Hysteria happens in America, and the tactic of being the “good” minority, laying low and working hard does not immunize Chinese Americans now, just as it did not protect Japanese Americans 57 years ago. First their household cameras were taken away, along with maps and anything else that “spies” might use. Then it was their personal freedom.

This time around, jobs are already in limbo, as is access to information. The fund-raisers for both Al Gore and the Republican Party are keeping their distance. What’s next? Travel restrictions for Chinese Americans -- scientists, business people, students, tourists, journalists?

Let the world and our political representatives know that we will not accept treatment as second-class, expendable Americans. Perhaps if enough Asian Americans proclaim long and loud that “I AM NOT A SPY! ARE YOU?” some of us will begin to get heard. Join my campaign. Wear a button; tell your friends. If we don’t take action ourselves to show the absurdity of this spy hysteria, who will?

Helen Zia is a journalist and activist based in the Bay Area. Her book, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of An American People, will be published next year by Farrar Straus & Giroux.