Mixed Feelings about Race, Language, and People

Sigh. This post is like a huge garage dump for all my conflicted thoughts on several interrelated matters. I revised the title like 3 times already because I kept delving into other topics from the one topic I wanted to write about.

Sometimes it feels like the gap in the generational and cultural differences between my parents and me just gets wider the older I become. This is especially true as I am continuing to grow into how I interact with people and places in this world that is unlike the experiences my parents have or have had. I think everyone has things they will never see eye-to-eye with their parents on. I know I do, and I have tried to put myself in their shoes when they’ve asked me stuff I just find so totally irrelevant or inappropriate.

I want to be clear that the opinions I’ve given in this post are not intended to bash my own parents. I don’t think they are bad people but they are flawed just like I am. No one is perfect in their manner and speech. My own expressed opinions may not be entirely “correct” either.

The discomfort I feel in association with a particular question I get from my parents (more often from my dad than my mom, actually) is pretty much very immediate after the question has been asked. Then I get anxious and afraid to give an honest response while simultaneously getting upset that I am having a fearful reaction over something that, to another person, is no reason to get so worked up about. What follows is usually a quietly simmering frustration that rises up in me like, Why is this so important? Why do you even need to know, anyway? I would like to speak those unspoken inquiries at my parents but I’ve never done that.

I’m stuck feeling like my sensitivity and paranoia can get the better of me, particularly when my anxiety literally takes a front seat every time, and that I’m overreacting. But I also feel a little justified in my annoyance and the idea that maybe it’s not only myself but my parents who have skewed views. Or, I perceive it’s skewed because I can’t relate to their perspectives at all.

One of the first questions my dad asks me frequently no matter where I went is the racial background of the people I was around. To say he has a fixation with race would be too harsh of a judgment that I can’t be 100% accurately reflects him. I think a better elaboration is he finds the question fine to bring up as a casual subject matter and/or a conversation starter.

The negative connotation I have with this question stems from my perception of how much my parents still keep to their cultural bubble despite living in the U.S. for more than 30 years. I understand why immigrants do that; it is easy to gravitate to familiar things and people in a country that is unfamiliar to them. So their exposure to a multitude of different cultures and people has not been very diverse, and the exposure they have had, it’s sometimes given way to prejudice or unflattering remarks about a racial group based on any bad experiences they’ve had with a person within that specific race.

My dad has had more exposure than my mom, for sure. He has worked previous jobs where his coworkers were people of different races and he was often the only Asian person there at all. Outside of his workplace, I’ve seen that he can really be an extrovert in some instances of interacting with people outside his race. For example, one time in a clothing store he found a coat he thought would be perfect for a friend’s mother. He ended up asking a woman (who looked to be about the same dress size) to try on the coat so he could gauge if it was a good fit. Then again, in a past situation where his supervisor invited him over to watch sports on television, my dad did not go. I remember him expressing sentiments about how uncomfortable it would’ve been as he had never been around his supervisor’s Caucasian friends before and his English wasn’t fluent like theirs.

Perhaps in some situations it’s just he doesn’t have any issue with approaching people in general, and the fact I am noticing how he acts with people of other races is making me biased in my own assumptions about how he sees people of other races. This could also be a contributing factor to why I continually feel hypersensitive when he asks me “the racial question” and believe he has a negative reason for asking it.

Just yesterday I went into a neighborhood several subway stops away to register in-person for a vocational training opportunity. The place is populated with a Jewish Orthodox community but I didn’t go there expecting to only see Jewish people there, especially since the area I ended up walking home from after I was done with the school stuff overlapped into another neighborhood with a different racial make-up. Even in the neighborhood I live in, the demographic can be “super Chinese” depending on which streets and avenues a person is walking through but it’s never going to be 100% of any race.

Anyway, when my dad did ask me, “Were the people there Jewish?”, I felt kinda exasperated like, Here we go again with this. In the line of work he does now, many of his clients are Jewish people. It could be he was partially asking out of curiosity because of that. He followed up with other questions such as, “Were the employees there Jewish?” I said no, and he prompted me, “Were they Chinese?” I said no again and replied somewhat impatiently that they spoke English, in the hopes he would get the hint that whatever race they were was completely besides the point of why I went there in the first place.

Do I hold it against my parents for never assimilating? Well, I used to. It was easy to have that ideal when I was younger but nowadays it’s not so black and white. I can’t imagine how scary and unpredictable it was for them to come to a country where everything is unknown. I still feel touchy and uncomfortable by their views, though, and how they tend to categorize non-Chinese people and everyone else who isn’t their race. They do that just from the words they use to refer to someone of a specific race.

When they talk about a Caucasian person, it’s “lao wai” (literally the word for “foreigner” in Mandarin). The odd thing about “lao wai” is it is commonly accepted that the words describe someone who is Caucasian when the word doesn’t actually specify racial origin.

Culturally for them, “lao wai” is probably normal to use in conversation, and as I wrote in an earlier paragraph, my parents stick to their cultural bubble. I want to believe it’s just as likely they don’t even have the awareness that how they refer to someone or something as “foreign” can sound negative, but it also matters how someone perceives the phrase “lao wai”. I obviously see it with a negative connotation because I don’t like how the phrase seems to point out the “lao wai” has physical and cultural distinctions, almost like the person is being immediately written off by the speaker because of those differences.

Race seems to important to my parents and I don’t know why. It’s never “Oh, that person was awful”, but it has to be, “Oh, that Russian person was awful.” And then there is my dad’s sometimes know-it-all attitude when he talks about certain neighborhoods or people’s backgrounds.

For a while one of my female cousins was dating a Korean man and they were getting serious but the guy hadn’t brought her over to see his parents yet. My dad said on more than one occasion that “Koreans don’t like Chinese people and that’s probably why he doesn’t have the guts to let her see his parents.” It’s terrible how he generalized a whole racial group based on his own personal bias. I get that people tend to have looser tongues in private and they may say things they might not truly mean. His own logic about Koreans not liking Chinese people was debunked anyway. At one of his old jobs in New York a long time ago, his boss was a Korean woman who made him lunch one day. Whenever my dad recounts this story, he recalls how surprised he felt that someone was that nice to him.

My mom is a lot more wary than my dad. She prefers to avoid danger of any kind if she can help it. It may be she was shaped by her upbringing and past experiences. The little I know about her time growing up in Cambodia, she was surrounded by family and they are all really close-knit today. She survived the Cambodian War, too, and she basically had to start over in the U.S. with almost nothing. I do think that influenced her distrust of strangers but to a larger degree than necessary. She worked a long time at a bank that serviced mostly low-income Cantonese Chinese-speaking people in Chinatown. She was really good at her job though since most customers didn’t speak English, she didn’t need to either. I suppose that is a reality for a lot of people who primarily use another language that is not English at their job.

I sense there is a correlation between race and language which impacts my mom’s behavior towards non-Chinese people. She has a higher level of education in English (up to high school) than my dad but she didn’t improve beyond her school years. So in some regards she and my dad have relied on me and my brother for help with things that are beyond their speaking capacities. The topic of parents being dependent on their children, sometimes to a degree where it’s more about their comfort of letting other people deal with everything instead, could be a whole ’nother post I might write one day.

My mom is more shy about approaching people. While she can be loud and talkative around her group of friends, I suspect she’s more timid around other people when she has to utilize English because she isn’t sure how to strike up deeper conversation. My dad is kinda different from her. He speaks English brokenly but is not in the least bit shy about going to a random person to ask for directions. He can be a jokester with people and easily starts conversations by saying something funny.

I can relate to my mom’s behavior, except I am more comfortable and fluent in English. I get by with speaking Mandarin around my parents although at times it feels like an obligation I’ll always have. They can’t help that their main language is not English and I know I can’t ever master Mandarin completely. Which is why how my mom may feel if someone tries to talk to her in English beyond basic pleasantries is how I feel when a Chinese person tries to do the same with me in Mandarin. Worse for me is what appear to be some cultural expectation or norm that just because I look Chinese, strangers expect I am fine with being spoken to in Mandarin or Cantonese without even asking me first. I had one Chinese coworker at a former job do that seconds after she met me.

I have never felt at home around my own race either. I have no idea if I would feel any differently had I been raised in a more homogeneous country like China or Taiwan. In school, I looked down on students who appeared to be a bit clannish, in that they stuck within their race speaking Mandarin or Chinese with other Chinese students and the only time they seemed to use English (with some difficulty) was during class. To me that type of behavior gave the impression they were disinterested in improving their English and/or making friends who weren’t Chinese.

Then there was another “type” I saw often; students of Chinese descent who spoke fluent English, and depending on the person, they were either equally fluent or conversational in their native tongue. I regarded this positively because it seemed like they had the best of both worlds; being able to befriend people who were bilingual like them but also having non-Chinese friends who were culturally similar to them, whether in personal interests or hobbies.

I was never part of either “group”. I can barely make friends at the age I am now in adulthood, lol. My belief is a person’s character matters most, not their race. It’s a concept I’ve grown into but am still deeply self-conscious about mainly because I feel I haven’t had enough confidence to explore those opportunities without feeling like my immediate family are judging me for it.

I am not saying I want to hit up a bar and meet new people; that is so not my scene for hangouts. For a period of time I did try to meet people through meetup.com in various group events I was attended. Some of those people became acquaintances or friends, but only for a bit before it all fell at the wayside for one reason or another. For one thing, I never liked how my dad always wanted to ask me about who I hung out with at those meetups. I used to know a friend who went to meetups too and his parents were the same way, except he would divert their questions by pointedly telling them he was socializing with people and that’s all he was willing to share with them.

Partially I feel I would be more comfortable getting out there if I didn’t still live at home so I could have more space for myself and put some distance between me and my parents. Like, I am already a really private person. I don’t need people to know everything about my whereabouts in a whole day, and unfortunately living with family makes it so I can’t go as I please without informing them first. Hopefully the school thing will lead to employment and I can work towards something.

There’s the end of my ranting/raving. If you’re still reading this, I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about anything I wrote about here.