In Chinese American Families, There’s a Generational Split on Mamdani

In 1976, Song Ying swam for eight hours from Shenzhen, then a small fishing village, to Hong Kong, joining millions of mainland Chinese who risked their lives to escape hunger, indoctrination and repression under Communist rule.

Today, at 72, she is a New Yorker who voted for President Trump three times and voted early for Andrew M. Cuomo in Tuesday’s mayoral election. She views socialism as a curse she barely survived when she fled China and fears that Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and the Democratic mayoral nominee, is a threat to her adopted home.

Ms. Song cannot understand the broad enthusiasm young people have for Mr. Mamdani, who leads the race.

He wants to raise taxes on the rich to fund programs like free child care, buses and city-owned grocery stores, which is vastly different from the Marxist socialism that was practiced by China under Chairman Mao Zedong.

But her views reflect a growing divide within many Chinese American families between parents who fled collectivism and their children, who were raised in freedom and drawn to the promise of equality.

The political views of many older Chinese American immigrants are shifting to the right, a trend that is playing out in the mayor’s race. The generational split, accentuated by memory, media and class experience, has turned some Chinese American households in New York into microcosms of a broader debate over what fairness and freedom mean or what the American dream is really about.

Ms. Song and her husband arrived in the United States in 1978 with nothing. They borrowed $168 to pay their first month’s rent in Chinatown and hustled to build a life. She became a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper while he started a small telecom business. One of their sons graduated from Cornell, the other from M.I.T. Both have professional careers — the kind of American success story that once symbolized immigrant hope.

Ms. Song’s political convictions are rooted in the country she fled. “Socialism has been a disaster,” she said. “Everything I’ve seen and experienced points to that. It breeds laziness and kills the motivation to strive.”

To her, Mr. Mamdani’s proposals sound like echoes from her past.

Ms. Song calls her children, who declined to be interviewed, and those of her friends “Ivy League types,” kindhearted progressives who, in her view, fail to see socialism’s destructive side. Her perspective resonates with other older Chinese immigrants who doubt the city can afford such free programs.

For younger Chinese Americans, however, Mr. Mamdani represents hope in a city facing an affordability crisis. Many have watched childhood friends and relatives be priced out of neighborhoods like Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Elmhurst in Queens. Some are delaying or forgoing parenthood altogether because raising children in New York feels impossibly expensive.

Angela Li, 26, supports Mr. Mamdani’s plan for free child care. She works at a philanthropy that aids low-income mothers and has seen firsthand how a lack of affordable care keeps women from pursuing an education. Her own childhood underscores the issue, too: Her parents, who immigrated from Fujian Province in southern China in the 1990s, sent her back to China when she was barely 2 months old because they couldn’t afford to care for her. Her father worked in restaurants, her mother in garment factories. They brought her back just before she turned 5.

Ms. Li, who attended Hunter College High School and the University of California, Los Angeles, was dismayed when her mother, 56, voted for Mr. Trump last year — her first presidential vote since becoming a citizen. Like many older Chinese Americans, her mother plans to vote for Mr. Cuomo this week.

Ms. Li believes language and media consumption drive much of the generational divide.

“Language barriers really deepen the generational divide within our communities,” said Ms. Li, who lives with her parents in Kew Gardens, Queens. At home, she speaks a mix of Mandarin and the Fujian dialect with her parents and translates between them and her two younger siblings, who speak primarily English.

Despite decades in the United States, many middle-aged and older immigrants speak little English and rely solely on Chinese-language media. Ms. Li and many young Chinese Americans blame misinformation on YouTube, the Chinese messaging app WeChat and local Chinese-language newspapers for hardening pro-Trump views among older immigrants.

In last year’s election, support for the Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, among Chinese Americans fell to 53 percent, from over 70 percent in 2020, according to the American Electorate Voter Poll, a large-scale national survey of voters.

A New York Times analysis of the 2022 New York governor’s race found that voters in Asian neighborhoods across the city shifted 23 percentage points to the right, compared with 2018. Chinese enclaves in Sunset Park and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn even flipped Republican for the first time in at least a decade.

Joey Zhang, a registered Democrat who lives in Sunset Park, said her 13-year-old daughter could not believe she planned to vote for Mr. Cuomo, who has faced sexual harassment accusations. (Mr. Cuomo has denied the accusations.) But Ms. Zhang, 44, said she didn’t believe in “free stuff,” even if she understood why her children were excited about Mr. Mamdani.

“The U.S. has changed in recent years,” said Ms. Zhang, a customer service representative who immigrated from Fujian in 2003. “It wants people to believe that everyone deserves the same, no matter the effort. But life doesn’t work that way.”

The divide has caused tension in some households.

Jessica Liew, a graduate student born and raised in Sunset Park, recalled arguing with her mother last fall. Her mother urged her to vote for Mr. Trump, saying he would lower living costs. Ms. Liew, 25, countered that he would cut Medicaid, Medicare and other social programs that her grandparents relied on.

She hasn’t asked her mother about the cuts Mr. Trump and Congress have made to social benefits. “I’m too scared that it will cause another argument,” Ms. Liew said. She has been canvassing for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign since the spring.

Her parents voted for both Democratic and Republican candidates until 2016, when they became steadfast supporters of Mr. Trump. They believed he would bring down the Chinese Communist Party, Ms. Lau said, “even though a lot of his instincts and approach are very much reminiscent of an authoritarian government.”

Ms. Lau’s father died last year. Her mother, Wah Mei Lau, said she hadn’t decided whom to support for mayor, but wants someone who will take crime seriously. She also echoed a conservative refrain: that too many people exploit social programs.

“There should be proper vetting,” she said. “Don’t let people take unfair advantage of it.”

Her daughter finds that view frustrating. Her parents benefited from the programs they now criticize: free child care, food stamps and other support for low-income families. When she challenged them about that, she said, “they just pretended not to hear me.”