Journey to the West

Have you ever been in this situation when you were on your holiday? You are sitting in a cafe or a pub, idly chatting with your friend, and the stranger next to you, turns and gives you a small smile and said ” A’right?” You start chatting with each other and he eventually asks, ” So where are you from?” You tell them and immediately, you notice from his eyes that the little wheels inside his brain are churning and the next thing that pops out of his mouth is a question about a stereotype about your culture, nationality, politics and identity.

As an Asian woman, travelling has opened my eyes to the burdens of nationality. I don’t necessarily mean that i encounter racism. But rather, I feel the responsibility and need to assert my national and cultural identity, something which I never feel when I am in my home country, and also the burden of fighting the stereotypes that people associate with this identity. For example, when I travel to Western countries, I know that some of the locals may be unable to tell which country I am from simply from my looks. So to them, I could be a job-stealing Chinese, a hardworking Asian nerd who studies in the local university or a Japanese girl who does cosplay. And because the East is so diverse and not everyone may have had the exposure and the education regarding this side of the world, stereotypes and hear-says form their basis of understanding about us.

This burden increases when I am travelling with my German boyfriend. No matter where we go, we get stared at with curious and judgemental eyes, and with the increasing trend of mail-ordered brides and the label attached to Asian girls who date Western men as money-hungry whores, it takes a lot of willpower to not get offended and take things personally.

And from personal experience, the misunderstandings and the lack of understanding will mean that I will be asked weird questions and have to be patient about it. When I am asked whether China’s weather is good because the questioner assumes that just because I am Chinese in heritage, I am Chinese by nationality, I have to patiently explain the difference and still retain my temper when I get ” so you are from China then?”. When I am told, in a surprised tone, that I speak really good English even though English is not the first language of the questioner either, I don’t interprete it as a judgement of Asian’s intellect and smile and say ‘Thank You’.

The stereotypes are not necessarily negative. But I feel uncomfortable that people have a pre-conceived notion about who I am and perhaps, more than anything, it is cultural patriotism; I don’t like the associations being made about how Asians behave and live. This probably has to do with our history. For the longest time, we were colonized and seen as lesser beings, and the effects of the past lives on to today. The region still feels that the West is judging us in various ways and this manifests itself in the constant nagging thought at the back of our mind in our everyday lives and during our travels, “Was that racist, or simply an honest question and fair judgement?”

But truthfully, the burden of nationality is not simply from having to deal with other’s stereotypes and judgements about me as derived from where I come from, it is also from my own stereotypes about other nationalities that make me not want to be associated with them.