Education Quote by Iris Chang

There is praise here, but it lands with a wince. Chang starts in the register of civic optimism, applauding an American public newly curious about Chinese culture. Then she snaps the camera to where “mainstream” actually lives: advertising, the soft power of credit-card commercials, the bland utopia of consumer belonging. The image is deliberately jarring - “white couples and Chinese babies” - because it exposes how multicultural “progress” is often measured not by understanding, but by marketability.

Chang’s intent is double-edged. She’s acknowledging a real shift in visibility, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s when China’s global profile rose and transnational adoption (including from China) surged in American family life and media. Yet she’s also diagnosing a shallow kind of cultural literacy: Chinese-ness as aesthetic and sentiment, packaged into a safe, aspirational tableau. If Chinese culture has “filtered into the mainstream,” the filter matters; it strains out history, politics, and discomfort, leaving a consumable symbol of tolerance.

The subtext is about ownership and narrative control. A “Chinese baby” in a white domestic scene can signal compassion, cosmopolitanism, even virtue - without requiring the audience to confront why that baby is there, what “culture” is being preserved or erased, or how power moves across borders. Chang, a historian attuned to what America forgets as much as what it celebrates, uses the ad as a quiet indictment: representation isn’t the same as recognition, and inclusion that arrives via a credit-card pitch may be the most flattering form of erasure.