There are certainly hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of kids in America who feel the same way about their cultural identity because they grew up with an immigrant parent or grandparent or spoke a language other than English at home.
But the question asked was not about her identity. It was about her citizenship, a topic that is now at the thrust of her story during an Olympics where it is impossible to glide over the political issues between the U.S. and China as easily as Gu thrusts herself into the air and performs body-bending feats.
When the decision was made to compete for China in 2019, the context of the relationship between the two countries was different. The crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong was just beginning. The extent of the human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region and detainment of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities wasn’t well-known to the world. Peng Shuai was a relatively low-profile tennis player.
And Gu was just another burgeoning American business looking for opportunity in a wide-open market.
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