Traveling while Asian

Yesterday marked one year since we left San Francisco. It’s hard to talk about the past year without going on forever or lapsing into boring generalizations. The first three months are the most exciting, when you are figuring things out and everything is a ‘first,’: first time making tacos in the van, first time sleeping in the main square, first time swimming in the Caribbean, first time hiking to a waterfall. After the first three months, things become routine. We cross another border. We change currencies. We acclimate to the regional accents. We set up camp on a breezy beach or a chilly mountain. We pine for the tacos we had back in Mexico.

There is one thing that always reminds me that I am traveling, that shakes me and makes me remember who I am and where I am and how odd it is what I am doing. It happens when I am walking the dog, or crossing the street, or buying a loaf of bread. It happens when I am asking for directions, sitting on a bench, or just driving through a town with the window down. Once, while walking on the beach, a man ran up to me and we had this conversation:

De donde viene? (where are you from?)

Los Estados-Unidos.

Eres china? (are you Chinese?)

Si.

Eres japones? (are you Japanese?)

No.

Habla español?

Hm.

Then the man reached out and shook my hand. This happens to me—all of it, all the time: the curiosity about my heritage (all things Asian being one and the same), the refusal to comprehend that I can speak Spanish, and the desire to touch me. Sometimes they take my hand without asking, and sometimes they offer theirs and I always take them, even though I don’t want to. If I knew a polite way to decline a handshake, I would employ it, but I always err on the side of civility, particularly in foreign environments, even though I absolutely hate these interactions. It feels as though I am being petted, the object of an impulse to touch a horse or some other animal simply because it is a tame yet exotic creature that you don’t see every day.

This sort of exchange is in the middle of the spectrum of distastefulness, a word I use carefully, because I still have not yet figured out what appropriate degree of offense I am entitled to, if any. I have been dealing with people and situations much more benign and much more aggressive since I hit puberty, leading me to believe that this is not really about being Asian, but about being an Asian woman—which, in many parts of the world, appears to be similar to being a sexy puppy.  People want to touch me and coo things at me: I love your eyes! I love Asian women! They’re so slender and beautiful! Men have asked Juan how and where he got me. Once, in Barcelona, a man was able to mime (because at the time I spoke even less Spanish than I do now) that he had never met an Asian woman with such large breasts. Imagine this thought being communicated in hand gestures: hilarious or offensive? Well…to a twenty-year-old traveling in Europe with her best friend…it was a lot more pleasant to find it hilarious.

This past year, I have found that my reaction from ten years ago has changed from finding all of these exchanges charming and innocent to finding them humbling in an unpleasant way. After all this time, I have still not learned how to negotiate traveling while Asian. At least once a week, I am reminded that I am just as much a novelty to the people we meet as they are to me. My ethnicity is the first—and sometimes the only—thing that people see.

When people ask me where I’m from, the vast majority do not want to hear Chicago or San Francisco or anywhere in the United States. They want to hear China, Japan, or Korea. Nothing else will satisfy them. When I lived in Argentina, many people assumed my Spanish was much better than it actually was, but only because I had perfected exactly one conversation that I had over and over and over again:

Where are you from?

The United States.

But you look Chinese?/Really?/No, really—where are you from?

Yes, really. My grandparents were born in China. My father was born in Taiwan. My mother was born in Malaysia. I was born in Chicago.

Do you speak Chinese?

I don’t speak Chinese. I speak more Spanish than Chinese.

Your Spanish is quite good.

Well, thank you! I’m learning.

*

We are all people, some more displaced than others. Once, at a military checkpoint on the Tabasco/Chiapas border, a guy in camo fatigues who, after the usual exchange about where I came from—like, really, ethnically, came from—asked me to write my Chinese name on his hand. When I told Juan about it, he said, ‘A lot of these guys are eighteen-year-olds who have never left their hometowns.’

And this is the thing—why I do not allow myself to feel offended. Most people—I must believe—are not trying to be offensive. They are just as curious about me as I am about them. I am one of the few Asian people they have seen, will ever see, and one of the smaller subsets still who can speak Spanish. And even though I get bored of having the same conversation over and over, I try my best to be polite. I am, whether I like it or not, an ambassador of Asian-American women.

There are Asian people everywhere. In Mexico, they own the ubiquitous Chinese buffets that also serve French fries and chicken nuggets. We always exchange looks as members of the diaspora, and I am just as curious about them as they are about me. How did they get here? How many of them are there? They are always disappointed that I don’t speak Chinese. Ever see two Chinese people speak Spanish to each other? Comedy gold. Once, in San Luis Potosí, the teenaged Mexican server had to come translate for us—Span-ish to Span-ish.

The worst interactions, however, are not the direct ones where people tell you who they think you are—but the offhanded ones where people tell you who they think you aren’t. One night, our lovely dinner in San Jose, Costa Rica was ruined by the American couple sitting next to us at the bar. They talked to Juan about me, refusing to believe I could speak English. When I clearly told him—in my Midwestern English that is so straight-up American that I was once even used in a linguistics class as an example of neutral American English—that I was born and raised in Illinois, the guy told Juan with his big, dumb smile that I was not American.

This is when I tap out of conversations. It incites in me a fury that even after 33 years, I cannot describe nor control, resulting in manners not becoming to an ambassador. Juan went on to voice my indignation in the way that only Juan can, asking the man where his ancestors were from—did his ancestors come over on the Mayflower? Was he descended from Native Americans? The man was a little slow-witted and couldn’t get see where this was going, even when he said his wife’s parents were born in Germany and “she was as American as they come.”

Luckily, then the man said something so stupid that it made the entire exchange worthwhile: “I’m not being racist, I’m just saying that because of the way she looks!” (The ‘she’ almost being the best part, because he still refused to acknowledge that I could, in fact, speak and understand every ill-formed English word coming out of his mouth.)

This line has become one of the best things I’ve heard this trip. We joke about it all the time.

Coming from a culture that proclaims itself race-blind, it is strange to have complete strangers tell me that their children have a Japanese teacher at their school, or to applaud them for identifying the fact that I am Chinese by shouting ‘Chinita’ to me on the streets.

This is the one thing that still feels like traveling, after one year. Not how strange everything seems—but how strange I seem to everyone else. I don’t have the chance to forget this. Even when I am stumbling half-awake around a small town trying to find breakfast before hitting the road, I have people looking at me and wondering, or approaching me and asking. I have the sense that I must be on my best behavior, that people are watching me. This, more than anything, gets tiring.