while walking around town this morning searching for my wallet, which i'd managed to lose in a drunken haze last night (it has been found in the most ridiculous of places), this woman walking towards me on the pavement smiles and starts to wave at me. i hesitantly smile and give a slight wave in response while instantly flipping through my mental rolodex to figure out how and when i may have met her before. she comes closer and speaks.
lady: "n ... ni hao."
my smile falters slightly. clearly this woman and i have never conversed before.
me: "no."
i shake my head and attempt to continue walking along, but she touches my arm. i sigh and stop walking.
lady: "hello. do you have a minute?"
i figure she must be a tourist and is hoping i might be able to provide her some assistance.
me: "sure?"
lady: "are you from china? do you speak chinese? i'm a local and i love meeting everyone!"
me: shaking my head and calling upon patience. "nope, sorry. not from china. don't speak chinese."
lady: "oh, i'm sorry." she looks rather disappointed. "i'm trying to learn chinese."
me: "well there are a lot of other students here from china. two of my flatmates are from china."
lady: her face lights up. "really? i nod. "oh, are you a student as well?"
me: i nod. "yes."
lady: "well that must mean you're picking up on the language really fast."
me: "... not really. i don't talk to them a whole lot cause usually i'm in my room working."
lady: "oh, you must be really busy."
me: "yeah ... speaking of which i really ought to be going now."
she bid me a friendly "nice meeting you, good luck with your work" and went along her way.
when i was studying at dundee a few years back i used to have these sort of conversations a lot. flocks of students from china would come up to me and eagerly ask me the question: "are you chinese?!?!"
me: "no."
flock: with confused expressions on their faces, "really?"
me: "really."
flock: "but ... but why you look chinese?"
me: "because my parents are of asian origin."
flock: "where are you from?"
me: "chicago"
flock: "where are your parents from?"
me: dying a little bit on the inside "taiwan"
flock: excited expressions "oh! so you are chinese!"
me: "no ... no ... i'm really not."
flock: "but you are from china!"
me: " .... i have to go."
i am, for lack of a better description, extremely whitewashed. as my friends have affectionately dubbed me, i am a banana (spoken as it was in don hertzfeldt's rejected video, if you haven't seen this - look it up -- NOW) . yellow on the outside, white on the in. my cousins have agreed with me that i am fact a terrible asian when they learned, with what i suppose to be an understandable amount of shock, that i was in fact NOT a whiz with calculus. many of them are now doctors and surgeons. i guess you could consider me the blacksheep of the family. i got good grades, but i never took any sort of honors or advanced placement courses in high school. my parents, in their special way, tried to encourage me to be more clever by pulling out my brother's reports cards from when he was whatever age i was at the time and do side by side comparisons.
mom: "oh, eric got an A when he was in that class. you have a B+"
it was a source of animosity between my brother and me for many years until more recently when we talked and eric informed me that he did not in fact get straight A's every year, and that my mom was possibly changing marks in her efforts to get me to do by through competition with him. hilarious.
i do not speak chinese or taiwanese. when i was a small child i apparently spoke chinese for a whopping two seconds until my kindergarten teachers told my parents to stop teaching me the language as it was negatively impacting my english learning and causing me to speak funny. cue four years of embarrassing and ridiculous speech therapy. my mom tried sending me to chinese school when i was in jr. high, but honestly ... what 12 year old willingly goes to a second school every saturday morning? it also didn't help that rather than placing me in a class group based upon my knowledge of chinese language (that being absolutely nil) the teachers instead placed me in a learning group based upon my age (so a more advanced level). i spent many saturday mornings being yelled at by an instructor in chinese for not being particularly clever. only mildly traumatizing for my young mind. chinese, to me, has always had a very agressive and harsh tone to it. i spent much of my childhood convinced my parents were on the verge of divorce because every time they conversed in chinese i was convinced that they were arguing. i've tried to learn a bit of the language now and again, but to little avail. my brother, on the other hand, is one of those annoying and blessed individuals that seem to pick up on things rather quickly. bollocks to him (only cause i'm jealous).
i spend a lot of time making fun of the asian stereotypes, and also at how i fail miserably at being asian.
