In Chinese American Families, There’s a Generational Split on Mamdani
Many older Chinese immigrants are shifting to the political right, dividing from their children
New York Times | 2nd November 2025 | Li Yuan
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.
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.
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.”
(Excerpt)
Additional Context
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.
Community Voices
Cronos: I heard the report of the great longtime family-run Chinese restaurant near me where the kids would cut fresh vegetables and the teenagers would work in the kitchen with their parents or aunts and uncles or drive the delivery truck, that the younger generation decided to sell out for cash because continuing to run the restaurant was “too much work.”
Frank Ballenger: (There’s a battle outside and it’s raging. It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.)
MarlonRando: I’m pretty sure we will never be in danger of the chinamen coming to the rescue regarding exactly anything. Didn’t they just murder millions of people all over the world with their bioengineered bat virus? Oh yeah, I almost forgot.
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