Here is a common scenario that I run into every time I visit an Asian country that is not Japan.
I am walking down a busy street choked with souvenir kiosks and owners desperate to sell their overflowing stock of key chains, jewelry, handbags, T-shirts and other hokey tourist junk that are mass-duplicated every stone's throw away.
"Are you from Japan? Konnichiwa!"
I ignore them and keep walking. They then go through their repertoire of other Asian greetings to try to get my attention. "Ni hao ma?" Maybe I'm just overanalyzing, but they always seem to start with the konnichiwa first. And it's never directed towards any of my other traveling companions who are of Asian descent.
Bangkok, Melaka, Phnom Penh - it's all the same in the end. No matter what Asian country I go to, the local people are quick to capitalize on the fact that I am not from here and I must hail from the land of the rising sun. I might as well be dressed in an anime schoolgirl outfit with a samurai sword strapped to my back.
This is a common icebreaker that is used among the Asian American folks back home. Put two AA strangers together in a social situation and inevitably one of them will try to guess the other person's ethnicity. Thousands of centuries from now when alien anthropologists piece together the lifestyle and habits of the AA race, the textbooks will say that AAs were very fond of drinking boba, updating their Xangas and guessing each other's ethnic background.
Supposedly, there is a preexisting science to all of this and all of us like to think that we are experts at it. The non-Asians who complain that all Asian people look the same are wrong, of course! There are subtle variations of eye shape, skin tone, and other seemingly minor details that are glaringly obvious if you are an individual of Asian descent.
As I've come to Singapore to study abroad for a semester, I realize that this phenomenon is far worse in Asia. Because if you're an Asian person living in Asia, your inner Spidey sense of ethnic taxonomy is hyper-amplified. And when there's an outsider in your midst, you can sense it a mile away. Unlike us AAs, Asian people must have special evolutionary adaptors that enable them to sense the different pheromones that different Asian ethnicities give off.
Mine must smell like a combination of wasabi and raw salmon.
Maybe this is an innate power of observation honed over the centuries to make sure that our bloodlines remain pure. Either that, or to make us more careful that we don't accidentally marry a distant cousin.
Ironically, though, one of my most memorable ethnic guessing game incidents that occurred in Asia did not occur with an Asian person, but a fat, 30-year-old British man who stopped me and my friend when we were walking out of a night club in Singapore.
"Excuse me," he said. "But are you Japanese?" I told him that I was.
"I knew it!" he said triumphantly. "I could tell from the way you walk."
I should have walked away at this point, but I humored him and asked him to clarify.
"Japanese women have a very distinctive way of walking," he continued explaining. "When I saw you walking around the club, I just knew that I had to go up to you and ask."
He then went on to tell me how much he loves Japanese culture, how he goes there every year to participate in their seasonal festivals, and demanded why me - a Japanese person out of all people - would not make time to visit the beautiful motherland every year.
A sharp observation of a very ardent Japanophile or the pathetic pick-up line of some yellow fever creep? In any case, I was horribly amused. After about 30 seconds of listening to him ramble on about how much he loves Japan, I abruptly cut the conversation short and my friend and I took the taxicab back home, away from the throng of dancing Asian people, all with their different eyelid shapes and cheekbone structures.
Published November 3, 2006
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