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Where are you really from? Asian Americans and the perpetual foreigner syndrome
Civil Rights Journal, Wntr, 2002 by Frank H. Wu
What makes these incidents disquieting is that the passenger at the airport, the waiter at the restaurant, the doctor, any Asian individual who turns around, leans over, or pulls me aside to ask, "Where are your people from?" "Where are your parents from?" or "What province is your family from?" does so as if they are asking me what has not been asked them before. They do not care that they are reinforcing prejudices that affect them.
In the diverse democracy that makes up today's United States, we have decided that we will not be bound by our collective past. Yet we remain acutely aware of race--which is not to say that we are racists. We want to know about race, but for many different reasons.
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The question "where are you really from?" shows that we interact with others around us with a sense of race even if we are not mindful of it. Being asked "where are you really from?" likely will not result in my being denied an apartment or a job, except in isolated instances. I wonder what people are thinking, though: when I was interviewing for a position as a law professor only seven years ago, I was told by a senior faculty member at one school (in California no less), "How appropriate that we have the Asian candidate today"--he was referring to December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. I believe the question is a signal, along a spectrum of invidious color-consciousness that starts with speculation but leads to worse. To be met with it so quickly and so often reminds me, over and over, that I am being treated differently than I would be if I were white.
Yet some people who want to talk to me about where I am from want to share with me where they are from literally or where they are coming from, so to speak. For that rare individual, asking "where are you really from?" is intended as an invitation to a dialogue about what it means that each of us has come here from elsewhere and where we can go together. The late Isaiah Berlin, a great philosopher of pluralism, once wrote, "Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from." But he included that subject of self-inquiry in a lengthy list of topics in "the pursuit of the ideal." He thought that the civilized person ought to care about, as importantly, "how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not."
Whether "where are you really from?" begins or ends the conversation is crucial, then. The answer depends on why the question is asked.
Unfortunately, there is worse. Whenever I have had the privilege of appearing in a public forum discussing a controversial topic--and any issue worth discussing in a public forum is likely to be a controversial topic--I receive letters, phone calls, and e-mails from people who disagree vehemently with my perspective. I enjoy the 15 minutes of fame, but I am taken aback by a few of the messages. They run along the lines or, "Yeah, and what do they do in China?"
I have been told, for example, that because it would not be easy for a white person to become a Chinese citizen, it is obvious that all countries value their sovereignty. Thus, according to this reasoning, the United States is no different in making it hard for a Chinese person to become an American citizen.
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