Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese & Koreans

Wednesday - 23 March 2011

Day 30

I was sitting in the Holt Post-Adoption Center's waiting room this afternoon waiting for my bosses to finish up some work before we headed to the Holt Homecoming Program Welcoming (for some)/Going Away (for others) Party. There was a decent sized array of adoption books and magazines pilled under the coffee table and I decided to browse through some of it. I came across a compilation of pieces written by the first big wave of Korean Adoptees to America. It was published in 1990 out of the Twin Cities. There was one poem in particular that caught my eye and gave me something to think about the rest of the day.

The poem was about the terribleness and agony brought about from people calling Korean adoptees Chinese, Japanese, or Taiwanese. This is a fairly common topic. I hear it all the time and I've even seen it written on shirts. It's also something not only adoptees face, but also Korean Americans.

I understand how annoying it can be to be mistaken for the different flavors of East Asian, but to put things bluntly, I think we can all stop crying about it. Insert World's Smallest Violin cliché. Of all the forms of discrimination and racism we face, I really don't think this is bad. Here's a couple talking points of my reasoning:

First of all, by being offended by being mistaken for Chinese, Japanese, or Taiwanese, it seems like we're implying those are lower ethnicities/nationalities than Korean. People call me Japanese all the time, but after being exposed to Japan's rich culture through Japanese-Hawaiians, I take it as a compliment. Nor would I mind being called Chinese or Taiwanese.

Second, lets face it, we look similar to a certain extent. There are similarities between the big 4 East Asian peoples, but we also do have our differences. To the untrained eye, and even sometimes the trained eye, it's hard to correctly identify all Asian people to their country of origin. Throughout my years in college, I was deeply exposed to a diverse international soccer (football, futebol, calcio) crowd. I mistook Austrians for Germans, Paraguayans for Uruguayans, Puerto Ricans for Mexicans, Brasilians for Portuguese, Tanzanians for Nigerians, etc etc etc and all the vice versa's. In all those meetings and getting to know one another, not one of them cared once. They didn't explode on me because I incorrectly identified their accent, or clothing style. It was a common mistake, they knew I was asking out of curiosity and interest in their hometown, culture, and what teams they supported. They corrected me, we chatted, and moved on with life.

If some uber-racist American is approaching you in a belligerent manner or making stereo-typical assumptions, and wants to hate you for being Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or Taiwanese…or simply hate you regardless of which of the 4 you are, then that’s a crappy situation. That's a bad dude, and he can rot in Hell. But for all the people simply acting out of curiosity and genuine interest in learning more to improve their ignorance about another culture, it's time not be so sensitive. Grow up adoptee community!

I can recall a perfect example of when being overly-sensitive to this sort of situation went bad. I was with a group of adoptees, leaving a grocery store and heading to a Taco Bell across the large parking lot. We were in a primarily white town, and probably 95% of the people shopping and wandering the streets were all white. A man leaving the store, who looked like a hippie version of George Lucas, was walking beside us and asked if we were Chinese. One of the adoptees (I should note, a 19 yr old male adult) exploded at this dude. "WHY DO YOU THINK WE'RE CHINESE…YOU'RE A RACIST…BLAH BLAH BLAH!!!" I told my acquaintance, who I'll just nickname Frank for now, to calm down but he was too upset with this guy. The irony is Frank was making the scene, not the stranger. I told Frank to take a walk and I calmly started apologizing to this guy. The guy was chill and we started talking. He was white, but his wife was Chinese-American, who he had bi-racial babies with, and because of his mixed family, he was very involved with the small Chinese Christian Community in the Eugene-Portland area. He had recently went on a mission trip to China and had the experience of his life. Obviously this connection to Chinese culture, and the fact that he rarely saw Asians in the area, prompted him to as if we were Chinese. Kudos to him. Good guy. This was such a Dave Chappelle "When keeping it real goes wrong" situation.

I'm not the Martin Luther King Jr. of adoptees, but I think I have a fair grasp on what is reasonable to get upset over. I really don't like people who are so sensitive to adoption/racial issues, that their attitude backfires and they are the ones trying to conjure up a racist situation out of a non-racist one.

So to that poem, I say, you're crying over spilt milk. Yes it is slightly annoying that people think we're Chinese, but I doubt you can tell me if a white American is German, English, Irish, Danish, Dutch, etc. People are going to continue to mistake us, but the good people out there just want to learn, so educate them.