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!