What are you?
At UCLA, almost everyone used to ask me what race I was. I'm not sure why there was such an obsession with trying to figure out, but it was almost always one of the first questions that people asked me, especially other Asian-Americans. At American, no one had asked me until a funny little exchange yesterday on the metro.
Vicki: Andrew calls our little section of the three of us sitting together "Chinatown."
Me: You know I'm not Chinese right?
Vicki: Wait, you're not?
Liam: Right, because you're Korean?
Me: *laughs*
Vicki: What are you?
Me: I'm Vietnamese!
Today, on a completely different topic than race...
Andrew (another Andrew, not the Chinese one): Don't you hate it when the cork gets stuck in the wine bottle?
Me: My dad can get corks that fell in the wine bottle with a pair of chopsticks.
Andrew: Can he catch flies with them too? (Karate kid reference, for those of you who live under a rock)
Vicki: Kristina's last name is actually Miyagi
Me: Geeze Vicki, I'm not Japanese either! I thought we straightened this out yesterday. (joking of course).
Vicki: I still can't believe you were Chinese all this time.
Alexia: Wait, what are you?
Andrew: Wow, I always thought Kristina was American.
I really don't mind if people ask me what ethnicity I am. I'm proud of my Vietnamese heritage and I thoroughly enjoy learning about other people's backgrounds, traditions, customs, etc. I would just rather have the discussion come naturally in discussion (strangely, like it did in these interchanges), rather than the very first question someone asks me (like what happened for 4 years at UCLA). Then, it just feels like I'm being classified immediately into a box and I feel like there's more to me than just one part of my identity.
As Andrew said, I'm an American, and I'm also Vietnamese, and I was born in Minnesota (yeah, that always throws people way off about their perception of Asians), and I'm a true Californian, and I'm a lot of other things.
2 comments:
Funny, somewhat related story -
Remember my friend Mary? She and I met via LiveJournal before we started college, so we decided to meet up for lunch during zero week of our first year and hang out for real. Our first conversation went something like this:
Lauren: (strolling into the waiting area in front of De Neve) Hey!
Mary: (waving) Hey! (beat) Damn, I knew you were white, but I didn't know you were so... NORDIC looking!
I think part of the reason people at UCLA are so fascinated with race is because college is a time when people really start getting in touch with their own backgrounds and histories, and they want to draw in people who have similar histories so they can compare stories and have somebody who understands. Also, UCLA seems to be pretty compartmentalized as far as race goes, so people seem to like figuring out what race somebody is so they can figure out where that person is "supposed" to be. It's kind of a crappy situation, but I think people get over it after a while.
Chào chị!. Yeah, it's probably not written correctly, but it's the only Vietnamese I know, aside from "I love you" and various profanity.
Glad to see you're enjoying DC. Keep in touch!
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