There’s a game I used to play at events (and will resume when they can safely come back) where I count the number of nonwhite people present including myself, and I’ll whisper a number in my husband’s ear. Sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised, but most often it’s a reminder when I move in predominantly white spaces.
It’s not new to me. I grew up in a heavily white, Mormon area of the intermountain west and I went to PWIs for college. One of my interests is the craft beer scene, which also tends to be monolithic. Theoretically, I should be able to enjoy hobbies and yet sometimes I can feel the eyeballs on me for existing.
The sprinkle on top of all of the challenges in 2020 was/is the increased likelihood of casual racism against people of Asian descent. I’ve talked with friends about how I’d rather stay at home to avoid gatherings of any sort, and thrown on at the end, “…and also because I don’t want to get hate crimed.” There’s a beat, and then their eyes widen with the realization because it hadn’t occurred to them that I might be threatened.
Surprise! I may be your friendly neighborhood Danielle, but to a stranger all they see is my face. I am the mysterious Other, surely here because I’m someone’s wife or out of town guest but not of my own volition. There’s a specific incident I can think of where at a beer release, an out-of-town stranger who tagged along with his friend said to me, “Oh, I didn’t know Chinese people drank beer” and then the very following week I saw him at a different beer festival. I didn’t say anything, but did a cheers gesture.
I didn’t publish a newsletter in December, and that’s due to various work-related things. I changed jobs within the company (for the better, I think) from hands on in the lab to a desk job. There are varying levels of participation in COVID prevention behaviors, and while I’d like to put up a sign in my cubicle reminding folks that there’s still a pandemic on…
I am the only nonwhite person in the office, and more specifically the only Chinese American present. Call it paranoia, but I worry that if I do put something up, I invite pushback from antimask people (who, while dismissing the virus might also peddle the false nonsense of it being engineered or sent by bogeymen who look like me). My scientific inclination is to remind people about how the pandemic works, and yet fear of xenophobia is old, deep in my bones, and has never truly gone away.
This is likely the part where my (largely white) audience recalls a time where they went overseas or visited their local Chinatown and might chime in, “Oh, I can relate because it felt really weird and people stared at me.” I can appreciate the attempt to sympathize, though I will gently point out that was a brief experience versus having that as the norm. And there’s a bit of a balance there too: clearly, being Chinese American is a core part of who I am, but at the same time I don’t lead with that in every single one of my actions. Sometimes I’m just another nerd in line, until someone pops that bubble and tells me about their adopted niece without prompting.
What am I consuming?
My first book read in 2021 is Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park, and it is a fantastic take on the “Little House on the Prairie” type books but with a girl like me. It ended up being thematically appropriate for this newsletter as protagonist Hanna faces aggressions from townsfolk for being the only nonwhite person in their South Dakota pioneer town. Strongly recommend for middle-grade readers, especially as a companion if they’re also reading LH books.
Further recommended reading: Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong
I also binged Netflix’s Bridgerton last weekend, and it’s very much M-rated soapy fun in Regency costumes. There are some issues with the original that the adaptation didn’t precisely fix, but I’m still intrigued enough to look forward to future seasons. Relevant to this newsletter is the discourse in some twitter circles on the fallacy of “historical accuracy” in fiction (N.K. Jemisin had a great twitter thread on this). Media makes for self-fulfilling perceptions, which I’ve previously touched on re: the Bachelor here.