Now I’m not Asian enough?
November 10th, 2007
In a recent entry called Am I From China? No, I’m not, I talked about attempts by new acquaintances to make me a perpetual foreigner (despite the fact that I was born and raised in the US and hadn’t even visited Asia once until I was eleven).
Well, yesterday, something weirdly the opposite happened. As part of my job, I answer a lot of phone calls (in addition to some other duties, I’m the receptionist for my office), and I’d spoken to a Chinese woman (not an American of Chinese descent—really from China) several times. I met her in person yesterday and she had this really shocked look on her face when I said we’d spoken on the phone before. Her eyes widened, and her first words to me were, “Oh! I didn’t know it was you. You sound like a white person!”
You just can’t win, can you? You can’t just be Asian-American, can you? You either have to be “really from” some Asian country (even if you’re really from Connecticut) or you have to be too white to be truly Asian. In truth, though Asian-Americans feel it in a unique way in this country, most people with distinctive dual ethnic identities feel this pull (or push—however you look at it). There were a lot of hapa kids at my last teaching job, and I noticed that most of them felt the need to surround themselves with almost all white friends or almost all Asian friends. There’s a lot of pressure to pick a side and not straddle the line.
What really confuses me about the incident most is… what did she think I was supposed to sound like? There isn’t, as far as I know, an Asian-American accent. There are Asian accents if you aren’t born in America. There’s what people call a “Black accent.” There are Southern accents, Boston accents, New Jersey accents. As far as I know, there isn’t a way that an Asian-American can sound Asian without faking a bad Suzie Wong accent.
Well, the lady was friendly and well-meaning enough, I suppose. Or maybe I do sound too white. Again, not sure what that means…
November 10th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I know kind’ve how this is. All my friends try to group me into white or asian. I don’t have that all-one-ethnicity friend problem though.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:44 am
I don’t go around calling myself a European-American. Nobody does. Why do feel like you have to be called Asian-American? Aren’t you and I both Americans?
It would be better to call yourself an American of Asian descent. To modify the adjective “American” is to suggest that Americans should divide themselves on racial grounds, or to say being American is not good enough.
November 12th, 2007 at 1:33 am
I would tend to disagree. While motivations for calling oneself asian-american vary, mine is not one of racial division, but of honesty. To call myself american only, is to state that this is my primary, perhaps only identity. If you find that your values and experience have been so intricately tied to Europe as to divide your personal sense of being between two continents, than by all means, call yourself European American and I won’t feel insulted. Why not accuse Notre Dame’s fighting Irish of being divisive? Or is it okay that as a group they enjoy celebrating a heritage?
On a different note, thanks for the B-day wishes. Cool film festival in the Castro.
http://www.eastraordinary-cinema.com/
November 12th, 2007 at 2:56 am
I know this frustration all too well. I’m technically not Canadian-born, but I grew up here since the age of 5 and consider myself wholly assimilated into the local culture. Of course, none of this is immediately apparent just from looking at me. The cover of my book screams “ASIAN” and, well, you know what they say about judging…
I am still struck by the utter narrow-mindedness of some people who seem to think that if it _looks_ like an Asian person, then it _must_ be from China, and it can’t possibly speak English fluently. It must also be _just like all the others_: it must (near-)exclusively associate with other Asians, and it must have a culture totally foreign to _ours_. It also needs to have _our_ local customs explained to it, slowly and in a condescending voice usually reserved for speaking to utter imbeciles (provided it is one’s intent to insult the imbecile).
To sum it up bluntly: “Them Asians all look the same, an’ they _are_ all the same.”
Online, though, I get by just fine with barely any of this nonsense. It’s just too bad that, on many occasions, I’ve been told by surprised online friends: “Jeez, I thought you were just good ol’ white!” Is that even supposed to be flattering? With my immersion in what some hardline traditional Asians disparagingly call “white culture”, even _I_ have absorbed the implicit notion that being “Asian” is somehow negative.
Terribly troubling, it is. I suspect this sort of superficial judgment will only end when the entire world goes blind.
November 21st, 2007 at 8:45 pm
As a white person who never gets misunderstood for anything, I can’t say as I’ve experienced any of that. But I do find it interesting that *things* from Asian countries are in such high demand, and yet this behavior still exists toward *people* from Asian countries. I’ve seen the number of Japanese/Korean/Chinese restraunts more than double in this area, it’s not uncommon to hear someone drive by with JPop on their car stereo, and most of the game stores around here are starting to cary import only titles – and sell out on the first day.
I understand the same is very true of Japan. There’s an intense obsession with all things American, yet most Gaijin are treated slightly better than criminals, if at all better.
I came from a northern teir area with very little racial diversity. I don’t think I saw anyone not-white until I was 10, and that was a black staff-sergeant at the local USAFB. As such, I never really thought about race as an issue at all until I moved to the South. I don’t know if it’s just because we came form an understanding town or if it’s just different in a racial vaccuum, but race is proudly trumpeted down here now. If someone fails to get a job, it’s because they’re black – or because they’re white and the higherer was black. If somebody’s pulled over, it’s not because they were speeding backword with no signal through a stop light – it was racial profiling, or the cop was black and the offender was white. It seems like everything down here is about pointing out that not everybody is the same. I really don’t get it. It’s been this way for hundres of years, and if a new person can just accept it, why can’t they?
The same thing is true with people of Asian decent. There have been Asian decended people for a very long time, 1800′s minimum. You’d think people could just get overthemselves by now and accept others.
I have often made the point David Thatcher did, however. If we were all just Americans, and not This-American or That-American (or Canadian, as the case may be), perhaps we’d just forget that there was something “different” and realize the sameness – a person is a person, not to be treated differently because their skin tone is different.