Asian monkeys and misconceptions

I love Paul Frank shirts.  My latest purchase was made in Dallas when I went back over spring break, because there are no PF stores in the IE.  The shirt that caught my eye was one in which Paul's main "character," Julius the Monkey, appears with Asian (read: slanted) eyes, and the word Konichiwa appears in various colors behind him.  I had to have it.  

Unfortunately, being Asian and wearing this shirt leads people to believe that I speak Japanese or at least that if they say "Konichiwa" to me, I will answer in kind.  Thus far, the assumption has only been made by older (over 50-looking) white males.  WTF? 

The first time this happened was as I was going through airport security at Love Field in Dallas. I had just bought the shirt a couple days before, and I had decided to wear it home.  As I was putting my laptop into a bin, I could hear someone saying "Konichiwa" to me.  I looked up and an older man is saying it, while grinning at me like I should be impressed.  Forgetting I had put that particular shirt on that morning, I just gave him a look like he was an idiot and moved on. It wasn't until after I arrived at my gate that I realized that he was responding to my shirt.  This is not the only time this has happened.  However, I'm thinking next time, I will respond with a resounding "Howdy!"  (For once, releasing my inner Texan.) Or even better, maybe I will start a conversation with the speaker in Spanish. Either way, I will not say Konichiwa back. Maybe I am being stubborn, and maybe it is not such a big deal.  I know that I do tend to be little touchy about these types of assumptions.  Just because I am Asian and I wear something that is "specific" to one Asian culture, does NOT mean that I belong to or identify with that culture.  Is it my fault that I wore a shirt that has a Japanese word on it, when I am actually Korean (and an adopted one at that!)?  I have little tolerance for the hasty generalizations like this that people make.  If I wore a shirt that said "Bon Jour," you can bet no one would assume I was of French descent and tried to speak French to me.

I should put the shirt on my girlfriend and send her out in public with it to see if people say the same things to her.  Of course, if I am with her when she wears it, it may just look like she has an Asian fetish.  

And so it begins...

I was telling Chris the other night that I am in a weird place, maybe not weird for international adoptees, but it feels weird to me.

While looking at my coursework from over the years, I have noticed a number of both psychology and sociology courses that deal with race, ethnicity, culture, or some combination of the three. (I have neither a major nor a minor in psychology, sociology, or any ethnic studies type of discipline. In fact, my major is organizational studies, and my career history, until 4 years ago, was healthcare related.) Until recently, I had been taking these courses thinking that I was trying to prepare myself for work regarding healthcare disparities, health and social policy, or even organizations and cultural competence. However, I have realized that like a few old friends who were psychologists, my need to examine my experiences, my baggage so to speak, is what has driven my academic pursuits. From the experiences that I have had growing up in a predominantly white area, while being somewhat protected by my parents' white privilege, to my exposure to people who judged me solely based upon my appearance, I have attempted to understand the cognitive and social processes that gives strength to racism, whether covert or overt. Years ago, I discovered that prejudice and discrimination was most painful when it came from other minorities, especially those who looked like me. Those negative experiences with the Asian community closed my mind to accepting my ethnicity. Many years later, I am now at a place where I feel I am ready to open myself up to discovery, whether that be of biological roots or just exploration of Korean culture. I do not expect this to be easy nor happy, and I realize that I may end up with more questions and possibly angrier. However, I am at a place where I feel I need to face the "it" that is my adoption and my ethnicity and the culture that is tied to it.

So, if you are so inclined, I invite you to join me as I struggle to continue making sense of my newly accepted (within the last 2 years) status as a person of color, how society reacts to me and others like me, and my journey toward learning about my cultural heritage. I hope that somewhere along the way, the rantings and musings found at this address will help someone else who has had similar experiences, because I know there are others like me out there who just need to know that someone else understands.