When in Spain...

Sometimes in the United States it’s easy to forget that I’m Taiwanese, that I actually look different from a majority of the population. The United States has its fair share of racism, as I’ve seen in incidents that I’ve covered in the past two years for our Asian-interest campus newspaper, ranging from the “Chinks in Jack’s Armor” article concerning the show “24” to the media coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre, but ultimately, particularly where I live, it’s so easy to just fit in. I look in the mirror everyday and see myself: my tan skin, my black hair, my black eyes, my little nose and my lack of noticeable cheekbones. I see it, it’s me, but that’s not how I intend to portray myself to the public. To the public I want them to see Karen as an aspiring journalist, just another roommate, another student, not just another person, but certainly not somebody to point out for how I look. I’m aware that I’m Taiwanese and I take pride in it, but it wasn’t until I planned to and left the country that I realized how lucky we are to be in the United States, where in many places, color genuinely doesn’t matter. When I started planning for my semester in Spain, I read all the advice for students going abroad: how to dress, how to act, how to talk to fit in. I took it all to heart, intending to do it all. Then my friend gave me a friendly little warning about the racism he encountered in Barcelona during his post-graduation trip. This jolted me in awareness of the fact that when I went abroad, I wouldn’t just be another American student going abroad. It was strange to contemplate being not just American, but Asian-American, Taiwanese-American, since it seemed it would matter abroad. I’d been going about my preparation much as anyone else would, but in that moment I realized no matter how well I spoke, how well I dressed, how I carried myself, I’d still be recognizable as a foreigner, and perhaps one that people would target. I’m different. And maybe in this moment it’s not an asset. But it’s something I carry with me, and now I’m more cognizant of than ever. I’m happy to say that in the six weeks I’ve been here, I’ve encountered little racism. It’s happened, for sure, more times than I’ve ever had to deal with it in my life in the D.C. suburbs, but it’s been minimal. There was a guy who came up behind me, muttering “Sayonara!” and some gibberish that was supposed to be Japanese, I suppose, and I’ve heard yells of “La china!” Italy was a little more blatantly racist, with older men yelling racial slurs and staring. It's disconcerting, really. In Granada, who makes these comments? Younger guys, who in general I'd say in any society are just looking for some sort of female attention, no matter how it's gotten. All of this makes me thankful for our great U.S. melting pot. It’s allowed me to be proud of my heritage but not place undue emphasis on it, so that I can view my culture as an asset and a positive part of my life, not something to cause me problems. Karen is currently studying in Granada, Spain, for the fall semester. She's rapidly confusing Chinese and English and Spanish as she speaks more and more Spanish and less and less Chinese. Going to Taiwan this winter will be an adventure, she thinks. Feel free to contact her at kshih33(at)gmail.com!

Hemispherical Discomfort

I’ve answered telephone calls with a broad array of people. I’ve encountered many an American telemarketer, a business client, a car maintenance worker, a friend, a political campaigner, and yes, a Chinese-speaking telemarketer calling from who knows where. Though those telemarketers can be irritating to get rid of, it is those family friends that I have the most trouble with. I can’t hang up on them, and when half of them are actually calling from Taiwan, I feel obligated to speak Mandarin. Obligated I may feel, but I balk. When I answer the phone, I automatically say hello in English – it is the language I am most comfortable with and, as it is the language of the country of the telephone line, it is most likely that the caller will speak English. And if the caller greets me in Mandarin, I relentlessly plow on in English. Sometimes the caller will hesitate for a moment before asking me a question in Mandarin. Usually I’ll answer briefly in English. If I recognize the voice as that of this one man who doesn’t speak English, is friends with my dad, and I have no idea who he actually is, I either hand off the phone or automatically say that my dad isn’t home in Mandarin. I think that that is the only sentence I feel comfortable ripping off. It is short (three words) and requires no potentially confusing accent or inflection. When I picked up the phone tonight and said my hello, I suppose I subconsciously recognized the voice of my aunt. She lives in Tainan, near a stationary store I love. I couldn’t immediately place her voice however, and began conversing in English. She replied, in Mandarin, that I had to speak Mandarin because she couldn’t understand me. Naturally I had to switch over. But it was particularly difficult to do so tonight. I was having trouble digging up the right words. She asked me how old I was but I couldn’t remember at all how to say my birthday was next month and I had to quickly count from 1 to find my own age. It was all on the tip of my tongue… in any language not Mandarin. I couldn’t remember how to say “work,” “business,” or anything semi-related to the concept, and had to resort to saying that my sister was in “New York.” How are my parents? What are they doing? They’re in “Colorado.” Proper nouns that don’t have translations are always safe bet. Tonight was just one isolated incident of the event that often plagues me. It is not usual for me to be searching for a certain word, phrase, or idea that I can express in another language. Once, when writing a draft of a major Spanish paper, I substituted a Spanish word that I didn’t know with one in Latin. My Spanish teacher and my Latin teacher both got a kick out of that. There is a word in Spanish whose meaning I could never remember until I realized it meant the same thing as a favorite Latin word. More than once, I’ve suddenly fallen silent in the middle of a conversation in Spanish because my brain has suddenly switched to Mandarin. And there are all those Mandarin sayings that my parents have trouble translating for me. All these isolated incidents combine to create a linguistic mush, like an unorganized filing cabinet in a corner of my mind. I take pride in my skill at languages. However, most of my skill extends only toward Indo-European languages. I can only imagine how much it might sadden my parents that I can read and write Spanish, but can only read about ten Chinese characters excluding numbers. That only my oldest sister graduated from Chinese School, while their two youngest daughters quit just a few years from graduation. That I never immersed myself in Chinese School, though I specifically devoted time to dabble in Ancient Greek. I can only imagine their wonderment of what their grandchildren will speak. The generation gap in our family has certainly been increased by moving to a whole other nation. There is some question on how to define a nationality. Some say it is defined by region, or language, or culture. I am nationality challenged. In terms of language, I speak only English fluently but have some experience in a fistful of others. Regionally, I’ve lived in one place nearly my entire life, but was born on the other side of the planet. As to culture, I grew up in a Taiwanese home in the American Midwest. But I know what I am. My nationality is what I associate myself most with, after taking into account the lifestyle in and to which I’ve grown up. So ask me: what are you? Taiwanese American. It might be a fragment, but I consider my mind fragmented anyway. Plus, it's a proper noun. Jessica needs to work on her Spanish project that is due tomorrow.

Just a snippet of familarity

I was going to pick up my parents from the airport, and as usual I found out that I botched things up. I read the departure time as the arrive time on the flight information sheet posted on the refrigerator door. I blame it on bad coffee. So I had about three hours to kill, so I figured I'd head over to the nearby Japanese market to get some food. Despite all the time it took to figure out where it was, I found it where it stood, and was excited for some nice warm food. I looked over the different shops in the food court. Miso ramen. Yakisoba. Good stuff. The shop I decided on had a relatively young cashier in his late 20's. He looked mixed, but presumably comfortable enough with japanese to run a noodle shop in a japanese market food court. I went up to on shop and ordered tempura soba, which ended up to be decidedly salty. He took my order in english. It was the safe bet. When you don't know what the other party might speak, you just default to english. Besides, I hadn't ordered in japanese in a long time, so I probably wouldn't have been comfortable. Since I was there at the beginning of the day, the cash register doesn't have any change yet. The male cashier told me to wait while he wen to get some. While standing there, waiting for some change, a female cashier came out and tried to take my order. In english, of course, because it was the safe bet. However, she didn't speak english very well, so it was kinda hard to get across the idea that I had already ordered. At the end, I just let her take my order. It was easier. Also at the end, she asked me the usual question. "Where are you from?" I replied Taiwan, and she simply said, "Oh." When the male cashier came back, there was some confusing as to what had occured. I explained that I had ordered twice, and we both tried for a bit to explain to her, when I just took a stab in the dark and explained in chinese. To her surprise, she understood what was coming out of my mouth. It ends up that she was a chinese immigrate that had just come over to start work. She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief by the mere fact we spoke the same language, despite that we were essentially strangers. I ended up translating between the two co-workers, and settling out the confusion. When I think of my peers who think of them as American first and Asian second in the term Asian American, I imagine the lot of them might be offended, if not merely allergic to someone asking them where they were from. In this case, however, I can see that when you're a stranger in a strange land, it's always a comfort to find some snippet of familiarity. In a way, I sort of wished I had talked to her more, asked her about how her time as been so far, and a small word of encouragement. But then again, in a land where the idea of nationality ebbs and flows, the experiences of being a minority in America that gets mistaken for a foreigner at times makes me balk. It's a strange dynamic, and I wish her the best, as she trends over the hard terrain charted by so many others in the last 200 years. Wil Chung is a programmer that is currently working on a way to expand your world. He likes eating miso ramen the most and enjoys eating the tempura before it gets soggy in udons. Maybe one day, he'll 'invent' miso tempera udon.