Foreign (but not too foreign)

Despite my being a first-generation immigrant from Asia to North America with my family, I think I have only felt the weight of being a visible minority twice in my life.

I start this reflection with this thought because I recognize that this is not the lived experience of many people. So many people have bravely given their experiences of racism, especially in the past year, and we have witnessed a major shift in the prevailing discourse (in a direction that I certainly think is for the better). But perhaps because of my living circumstances now, I find myself more aware of my surroundings, and how different I seem. And I begin to wonder if my circumstances growing up contribute to the ways in which this racial awareness just simply was not part of my life at all - and maybe this will resonate with someone.

When my family immigrated to Canada, we settled in one of the most Asian suburbs of the country. To emphasize the point, there were restaurants that had menus written on whiteboards that were not in English, and this was commonplace. There were multiple Chinese grocery stores, I went to Chinese school in classes with a bunch of other kids of Chinese immigrants, and due to my educational circumstances, the majority of my classmates in school throughout K-12 education were also Asian. In some cases, it felt like every other ethnic background was the minority. We celebrated the Lunar New Year at school alongside Black History Month, and my teacher in fifth grade had the strange circumstance of being a white guy teaching a class of majority Chinese people tai chi. (I recognize this can sound terrible, but honestly none of us knew any tai chi anyways, so if anything I could actually bond with my grandparents a bit over this.)

To be honest, I didn’t have many friends that weren’t Chinese growing up. When I moved away to Montreal for my undergraduate studies, and then coming to Toronto for grad school, I went to large schools that had a significant international student population. I was actually quite excited to move away and make new friends! Somehow, within my first year of university, I had still found myself in largely Chinese circles of friends, which continued to reinforce that at least personally, I was not a visible minority. In fact, it was when I actually started to regularly go to the Catholic chaplaincy at McGill that I really started having close friends that were not Asian. For all the bad rap the Church gets for being very white (a whole separate conversation), I actually found the most diversity within my chaplaincy communities.

I got to learn a lot about different cultures throughout my long student life, and I appreciated it a lot. But I never felt like a minority in these times.

In 2016 I had the opportunity to do a research visit in Helsinki for eight months. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was the only member of the unit who was not Caucasian. This, of course, was not unique to my work environment, but simply the process of living in a country that was overwhelmingly white, even in the largest city. The environment was very welcoming and my colleagues never commented negatively about my ethnicity; I never once felt unwelcome, and I had no reason to think otherwise; we were an international office, and had colleagues from all over. Even locals didn’t make an assumption about your ability or inability to understand Finnish (I learned eventually to say ‘no thanks’ when they asked if I wanted a receipt in Finnish). But I think this was the first time the difference of being a visible minority really struck me in any profound way.

When I returned to Canada, I thought about this experience a lot. Being so obviously foreign was challenging for reasons that were not obvious. On the surface, nothing bad ever happened to me! I chalked it up to being sort of homesick, and thought that it would eventually go away. But for a variety of reasons (being Canadian, being Asian, being Catholic) I found myself in minority positions and quietly going about my day with some sort of weight on my shoulders on how I should act, lest I give the wrong impression of someone like me. And it started making a bit more sense, what people shared about their experiences being a visible minority, and why I had never even really been able to connect to this experience at all up until this point.

Needless to say, that experience was one I entered into knowing that it was temporary, and then I spent the next three and a half years back in Toronto, and didn’t live this out much. But, as it happens, I ended up in South Bend: similar in weather to where I grew up, but very different in terms of the people I even could regularly be around. And unlike last time, I have no sense of how much time I will truly end up spending here (though my practical sense hopes that this will be a long time, since that means I’ll be employed!). Visits to Asian grocery stores are less frequent, but give me a sense of comfort, and I’m not sure whether it’s because it reminds me home, or it makes me feel less like I stick out like a sore thumb, because at least the storeowner looks like me too.

My only encounters with overt racism against me were once when a colleague’s accent was criticized for being incomprehensible and that they should bring in someone else to talk about the subject, and once when on vacation in Prague and having someone telling me and my best friend (also Asian) to go home while singing Gangnam Style to us. I really consider myself fortunate that racist comments regarding where I come from were never an issue growing up. Or perhaps I was too ignorant at the time to perceive any comments directed to me as such.

Despite all of this, there is still this lingering weight of being foreign that comes from noticing that you’re not like most people. This is through no fault of the people who are here - if anything, the people I have encountered have been very welcoming of me! But writing this out and acknowledging it as my experience has really made me think about how come appeals to my supposed minority status always seemed to fall flat: I never really had that feeling before. And it’s not really anything that any particular DEI measure is going to fix (this doesn’t really have to do work, and to be honest it’s not like I get the chance to see that many people at work right now anyway).

I wouldn’t call my experience one of suffering, because that would downplay those who really are suffering from overt racism and structures that historically disadvantage minorities. If I had to label this, I’d call it ‘self-perceived othering’? The sense of being very different that none of us can really do anything about, short of completely overhauling the local population demographics. I don’t think it necessarily needs to be treated per se, and I don’t need any accommodations or anything like that, but I just thought it would be useful to put this out in the open and see if someone else feels the same way. Frankly, it’s just me facing a reality that many people faced much earlier in their lives, when others were less accommodating and less kind, and I’m kind of struggling with how come it still feels a bit strange.

I suppose one day I may get used to this (I often do end up in ‘when in Rome’ situations). And even if I don’t, that’s fine. In this exercise, I just wanted to pin down what this strange feeling I kept having was, and name it for what it is.