TWA: Traveling while Asian

For those of you who actually know me--know my real identity I should say--then you know that I've been traveling non-stop since Thursday. As I alluded to in my previous post, I have left my Southern college town for a big urban city, and then left that place for a small college town and then headed home, only to hop in my car the next morning, with Southern Man at my side (we had to leave our dog "B" at home, but he's being well taken care of by our dog-house sitter "J") and we hit the road to explore THE SOUTH.

Well, actually, this is what happened. I got grant money last year to develop a course on Asian Americans in the South (coming to Southern U next Fall!) and part of the development funds allows you to include a travel component. So I am visiting various sites that relate either to the works I'm teaching or because I'm curious to see if Asian Americans have been at all involved or included in certain parts of Southern history--like the Montgomery bus boycotts. My guess is no--but you never know. In my limited experience in doing this kind of research, you find Asians in the South popping up in the most unexpected places.

I've got a still camera and a flip camera and will be recording parts of my journey--some of which I'll share in this space. But for now, I want to leave you with part of an essay (the first 2 paragraphs) I wrote for a Southern U. campus publication because it explains, very succinctly, the dangers of TWA: traveling while Asian. And I must tell you that already I've had the experience described below happen last night night at dinner--but I'll save that for another post (although I have written before about why asking someone who looks like me where you're from becomes such a fraught question in this post and again in this other one):

"The question that I am asked most often and that I most often dread is a seemingly innocuous inquiry: Where are you from? While this question appears context driven, 99% of the time, even while traveling abroad, what the person really wants to know is: What is your ethnic ancestry? What type of hyphenated, immigrant, ESL Asian are you? Indeed, this is the question that almost everyone who is Asian in America has usually been asked at one time or another. If my interlocutor is familiar with the “brand” of Asian I claim, what typically follows is a litany of everything they have experienced about that particular Asian culture. In my case, because I am Chinese American, I have heard about the trips people have made to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Or their favorite Chinese dishes. Or they will practice random Cantonese and Mandarin phrases with me, expressing keen disappointment when I confess that I speak neither language but have, instead, as a native English speaker, studied French and Spanish in college.

I dread these inquiries and subsequent interactions because they are not designed to find out about who I really am; instead, these questions feel like an interrogation into how well I represent my race. Does my reality as a Chinese American woman match my questioners’ idea of what it means to be Chinese in America? Will I live up to their understanding of what it means to be an Asian person? Do my answers jibe with their previous notions of who Asian Americans, Asians in America, or perhaps simply just Asians are?"