Back at home in the South

I'm back--a bit jet lagged, especially after taking a red-eye flight. But the title of my post is true and accurate: I am back at home in the South.


[I live in one of these "red" states--although perhaps in the next election, one or more will turn blue? Actually, I got this map from the website Carbon Tax Center. Check it out--especially if you are interested in environmental issues and ways to offset our every increasing carbon footprint]

All in all, the trip was wonderful, although this was the first time that I traveled to California with "Southern Man" and seeing familiar things through the eyes of someone else, especially an intimate someone else, is always a good exercise in reality checking.


Case in point: my rosy colored portrait of California as this Promised Land, particularly a live-action version of Disney's "It's a Small World," as a multicultural/multiethnic/multiracial paradise. We had some interactions and one pretty harrowing bus incident that threw this romanticized vision out the window. I'll write about it later--it's a bit lengthy and complicated, and truth be told, I'm still trying to process parts of it.

What I will leave you with, dear readers, is a small anecdote that happened on my flight into California. We were on Continental Airlines, and I have to commend Continental to be one of the last if not THE last airline in the continental U.S. that will serve food gratis to its passengers. We were en-route during the dinner hour and got box sandwiches (turkey or ham) and the requisite beverage. Now, I always get orange juice as a help to the dehydration of flying but I noticed that the flight attendant was handing people soda cans that had Chinese script on them--and as she got closer, I could see that it seemed to be some kind of tie-in with the Beijing Olympics--you know, Sprite and Coca-Cola cans with the Beijing Olympic symbol and the writing in Chinese. Except I think these cans were actually meant for their Asian airline route because everything was in Chinese: the ingredient list, the advertising, the processing plant.

Apparently a few passengers were skeptical about the contents of the cans--sure, it looks like the classic Coca-Cola can--it says "Coca-Cola" in English, but everything else is in this strange foreign script?! How will I KNOW that I'm getting a real Coke? And the flight attendant wasn't helping matters much--especially when she apologized for the cans--acknowledged that the soda tasted different because it was bottled "over there" and that they were Japanese and Mexican sodas.

WTF???!!!

When she approached my row she had apparently grown so frustrated over these foreign soda cans that she got another flight attendant to help her swap out these offending cans with American ones (the foreign cans were put into a lower shelf and then who knows what was going to happen to them?). I actually told both flight attendants that there was nothing wrong with the sodas--they were simply cans with Chinese script on them and were promoting the Beijing Olympics and furthermore, that I WANTED a soda can with the Chinese writing. The first flight attendant, the one who had the cans banished, told me that the sodas were Japanese and Mexican. And I said, "Well, no they are Chinese." And she said, "Well, I can't sell them to people; they taste different because they were bottled over there in Mexico, but if you want one, here you go."

WTF???!!!

It seems fascinating to me that this woman, even after I confirmed that the script was Chinese and not Japanese (I may not be able to read Chinese but after years of growing up in a Chinese American home and having grandparents live in Chinatown, I can recognize Chinese script) still insisted that the cans were somehow Mexican, and THAT was bizarre because there was NOTHING resembling Mexican references let alone Spanish on these cans. It would seem, perhaps simplistically, that for this flight attendant, anything "foreign" and perhaps "distasteful" must come from south of the border.

Segregated Sunday

I had lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant with my boyfriend (who is a white Southerner). We were the only interracial couple in the restaurant (not unusual for the South) but what WAS unusual was that my boyfriend was the only non-Asian person (and almost every table was full) for the first half-hour we were there (eventually a white family of four came in). When I realized the different racial dynamics at work, it dawned on me that not only is this a rare occurrence in the South for anyone Asian American, outside of restaurants (seeing a majority of Latinos in a Mexican restaurant or African Americans in a Caribbean restaurant would not seem unusual), is there any place where the patrons would be mostly non-white?

According to my boyfriend, Sunday is the most segregated day of the week--at least in the South--because apparently white Southerners go to white churches and black Southerners go to black churches and with the burgeoning immigrant population, there are also special Sunday services held in Spanish at Catholic churches for the largely Mexican-Spanish speaking population and Vietnamese for the Vietnamese immigrant population (there is a local Baptist church that holds services in English, Spanish & Vietnamese).

Apparently segregation also follows you into death because funeral homes also cater to specific communities--black people go to black funeral homes and white people go to white funeral homes.

I can't quite believe that this is true--and yet, this is the South and as I am constantly reminded by people, I live in an academic liberal bubble and life outside my college town is very different. Perhaps, but I can't help wondering, especially as rates of inter-marriage and mixed-race children increase, what does the half-white, half-black person do? Or the trilingual English-Spanish-Vietnamese person of mixed Mexican-Vietnamese ancestry? I suppose you have your pick of any of the three services, and yet, it seems like the ongoing difficulty of where you fit in is ever-present. And if the rates of inter-racial couples and mixed-race people increase in the South, will there eventually be an option--beyond black, white, Spanish, Vietnamese, English? A mixed-race America church--wonder what it would look like, sound like, feel like...