Monday, November 29, 2010

Thoughts on 'race' and living in Asia

Living in Asia has been a lesson in living as a minority-- on getting extra attention and being treated as not quite a real person. Don't get me wrong: My experience bears little or no relation to the experience of underprivileged minorities in their home countries. I am a very privileged minority here. And there's something more than that: this is not my home. I do not have to take responsibility for the demons here, and even if they did affect me negatively, it would be more like the misunderstanding of strangers than the disapproval of a parent.

I learned during my first two months in China, over the summer of 2006, how much I used 'race' to define people in my mind, despite education and good intentions to the contrary. You see, whatever the majority of people in a person's life look like is what they will spend the most time defining. Growing up in predominantly White Iowa, I noticed a lot more about the variations in skin, hair, and eye color in white people I met than I did about others. For the most part, I probably would not know more than a couple people in a given minority in any particular social group, so their being Black or Asian or Latino/a or Native was enough to give them a unique identity in my mind.

I'm not sure that this tendency itself qualifies as racism*, but it is definitely a convenient jumping-off place for discrimination. When I have put everyone who is not The Same As Me into handy categories, it is very easy to attach any label or stigma to all of them at once, instead of having checks built into my mind to remind myself that no one characteristic, even one as defining as heritage, can tell you what is most important about a person.

So, when I came to China, at first everyone just looked Chinese to me. Everyone had black hair and skin a different color than mine, and my mind was overloaded. There were simply too many people to fit into a convenient Minority category, and I had to start paying attention to what they actually looked like.

What I realized was that Chinese people look a lot like the White people I was used to describing more carefully in my mind's eye (and, I have since had time to confirm, a lot like people from many other races and backgrounds). There are Chinese people with long faces and thin noses, with melancholy eyes and mouths that droop in the corners. Tall and wide with booming voices, thin and pale so that it seems an unkind word could knock them over. Over and over again I looked at someone and realized that if their skin was a just a little lighter, or the lines in their face had slightly different angles, I would think of them as White rather than Chinese.

I am always afraid when I attempt to voice realizations like this that it will sound like I have been amazed to find that other humans are human, which feels horrible. What amazes me is to find that despite always having known and professed that all humans are human, I still use racist shortcuts in classifying people in my mind. I am sure that I do this is all kinds of ways. Living in China and Korea, and especially trying to function in Chinese, has made it easier for me to remember that a persons ability to express themselves in a language I understand is not a good indicator of their intelligence, but it is still much easier for me, in a frustrating situation, to think of people who I can't communicate with as stupid. I know I make assumptions about people's gender or intelligence or even just interests based on things that are simply convenient and not all that meaningful. Perhaps all of the evidence I use does mean something about a person's identity, as race certainly can, but they are not all-meaningful.  I am grateful for my constant opportunities to re-learn how to pay attention to who a person really is.

*so I'd love to hear what you think!

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

And when I wake for goodness' sake, these are the songs I'll keep singin'

I have been reading a translation of Anne Frank's diary into German*, just saw at the back an advertisement for a book by a childhood friend of Anne's and knew that Jacqueline van Maarsen could not have guessed when she was a child that that particular friendship would be a topic which thousands of people would want to read about later. It put me back in touch with the truth that you cannot treat any human being with too much respect. It makes me wonder how many of the people whose lives are tangent to mine, how many  old classmates and acquaintances or current Facebook friends, are living with thoughts too big to share with me, and even too weighty to share with the people much closer to them. 


I have been working on being alright with myself, on feeling confident enough about who I am and what my past joys and mistakes have been to see who I want to become. A friend introduced me to a video called "How To Be Alone" yesterday, and it gave me a lot of momentum.


I have been seeing so many people who didn't mean to end up where they are or, worse, don't want to be there. I think it would be more than alright in many ways to know a few things about myself and just see where they take me. That may, in fact, be the genuine best life path. 


At the same time, though, I want to know that my goals are formed of more than convenience or ambition. I want to become something(s) that I want to be, and not things for which I want to be recognized, and not things things that just don't make me uncomfortable.


I have been thinking about expectations and their dangers. We expect children to learn in a classroom, often on teachers' terms and not according to the individual shape of students' minds. We expect ourselves to be happy with reasonable situations, and don't allow for the emotions that run in monthly or yearly or decade-ly cycles and can pull us from functioning to stuck in our thoughts or to exhilaration at merely being alive in the space of a thought.


Goodness, I thought this was a post with a point but I am wandering again. Ah well, welcome to my mind.


This talk that a friend shared has helped me a lot in finding words for what I have been struggling with: Brene Brown at TEDxHouston. She talks about
*it was originally written in Dutch. I had been certain it was German to begin with, but the Frank family moved to the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. So by the time Anne started writing in 1942 she was functioning in Dutch.


Title is from Weezer's Heart Songs

Friday, November 5, 2010

"All this living's so much harder than it seems// you know, this livin's not so hard as it seems"

So I've had kind of a strange couple of weeks. I was rather low for awhile and this was compunded by my feeling foolish for feeling low and it took me a while to, first, give myself permission to not be happy and, second, to investigate why I wasn't happy.

This is a phase that I go through regularly; I want to say once or twice a year. I have to re-realize that being unhappy does not make me a failure, but it is probably telling me something important about myself. It trips me up and makes me realize I've been crawling. I have been thinking about this article (Depression's Evolutionary Roots, in Scientific American), which discusses depression as an evolutionary necessity, as the mental analogy to a physical fever-- an automatic response that helps to eradicate another problem.

Other than dealing with my emotions, as always, I've started seriously looking into education as a career. I'm looking into Iowa state certification, Chinese language teacher training, and Waldorf and Montessori certification. My ego will be a bit upset with me if I don't decide to pursue higher education in Science and become part of my generation's Badass Female Scientist League, but I think I might be happier as an educator. I see many of our problems today rooted in the fact that students don't learn to investigate truth on their own in school; they learn to mimic those 'smarter' (probably really only more educated) than themselves, so that after school all important issues easily become a competition between sides who have already decided what they think. (There will be more on education later, I hope, as I have yet to understand to my satisfaction the difference between the Waldorf and Montessori philosophies.)

Basically, after a couple of weeks of mental bewilderment, I have come to the conclusion that what I need to decide what direction to move in my life is a systematic exploration of topics I am interested in... like, maybe, a weekly blog series! I am too clever for myself, sometimes.


Title is from Jack Johnson's "Dreams be Dreams."