Actually, I think I look like myself

[kate_nepveu]

This afternoon, when I was walking towards the little convenience store downstairs, I passed a man who said something to me. I didn't quite catch it, but it seemed non-threatening, so I mumbled "Hi" and went into the store. As I was contemplating what I wanted for a snack, the man came back in. He said that he'd said "Hi" to me in Chinese (he didn't specify a dialect), but realized that my face wasn't Chinese, it was Korean, and he wanted to apologize for the mistake.

I automatically kicked into Small Talk Conversation #18 ("you know, it's funny, about half the time people think I'm Japanese, and the other half Korean; yes, I was born in Korea but came to the U.S. as an infant when I was adopted; no, I don't speak the language."), and then he went away and I bought my snack and went back to my office.

Being greeted in an East Asian language happens to me, oh, every year or so. It always makes me rather uncomfortable, but for some reason it wasn't until today that I really pinned down why:

It's a manifestation of one of the two major stereotypes attached to people of Asian descent in the U.S., namely "foreigner." (The other is "the model minority.") I wasn't wearing anything more exotic than a business-casual short-sleeved shirt and skirt, I hadn't spoken, I wasn't with a tourist group . . . in short, there was absolutely no reason to think that I was something other than your average native-born U.S. citizen who only speaks English and maybe high-school Spanish. If I'd been a redhead, he wouldn't have greeted me in Gaelic, or if I'd been black, he wouldn't have said hello in Amharic or Swahili or whatever. But because I was Asian in appearance, he assumed he knew something about my cultural and linguistic status.

I'm not precisely offended. He was obviously trying to be friendly, and probably thought he was being culturally sensitive as well. (I was considerably more vexed when an opponent in a case, a pro se prisoner, called me by my first name in legal documents.) But Small Talk Conversation #19 is "I'm lucky, being Asian on the East Coast, at least, is much easier than being black, I've hardly ever had problems." And this is true. (A couple comments in high school, but they wouldn't have liked me anyway; two behind-my-back utterances as I was walking down New York City streets that I found disturbing, but that didn't go beyond that.) But not having problems isn't the same as not having felt the effects of racial discrimination, and now I've found a way that I have.

Comments

Weird anecdote

[hms-yowling.livejournal.com]

About the malleability of perception, or perhaps of my own perceptions' malleability.

Grew up, NY suburb, had friends/acquaintances/schoolmates of various Asian heritages, none of whom spoke with an accent and I have no clue whether they spoke anything other than English.

Later, while in college, I spent a summer canvassing for Greenpeace. Went to Greenwhich Connecticut and spent a day canvassing there. Apparently there were lots of young Japanese execs who'd rented homes there (this was mid-80s). Many, many times during that afternoon, I knocked on doors to have them opened by non-English speaking Asian women to whom I was unable to explain the wonders of Greenpeace, or why they should write Greenpeace a check.

The next day I was working my other job, standing behind the register at an upscale food emporium as bleary-eyed people bought their coffee. A young Asian women walked up to me and I found myself surprised that she spoke English.

One day. In a single day, my brain had made this totally new weird connection/assumption. I was kind of shocked (and shocked out of it).

Not that this contributes anything to the conversation. Just found it both weird and, obviously, memorable.

Re: Weird anecdote

[kate_nepveu]

I wonder if this is related to the tendency that some people have to pick up accents of people around them?

It's fascinating how conceptions relating to people can be both so mutable and so entrenched.

Re: Weird anecdote

[hms-yowling.livejournal.com]

Interesting about the accents since I do that too. (Worked as a "mother's helper" for a English family while in high school. By the end of the summer I'd acquired an accent and I really hadn't been trying to.)

At any rate, thanks again for the reading list. I followed a comment on

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Interesting about the accents since I do that too. (Worked as a "mother's helper" for a English family while in high school. By the end of the summer I'd acquired an accent and I really hadn't been trying to.)

At any rate, thanks again for the reading list. I followed a comment on <user-id=>truepenny</user-id>'s journal and found my way here. I'm always bizarrely thrilled to find people out there who've read many of the same books as I have. I haven't managed to find too many of those people IRL.