More on race

Why do I have such a violent emotional reaction to being called Chinese by French people on the street? I am Chinese, ethnically. I've been turning it over in my head trying to break it down--probably there is a reason why I studied psychology in school.

To illustrate the situation a little bit. I got onto the bus once and an old man said to me, "Ni hao." At first I was like, Are you talking to me? And when I gave him a confused look he asked, in French, "Are you Chinese?" And I said, "No, American." Or there's this one stall at the market that sells scarves and stockings or whatever, and when I pass by the hawkers yell at me, "Eh! La belle chinoise!" presumably to get me to come buy something. It's annoying to be heckled but doubly so when the person assumes they know where I come from, who I am, based on how I look.

Generally in America, if I were to say, "I'm Chinese," it would mean "China is my country," which it isn't. So when people call me, literally translated, "the Chinese (female)", they've gotten a fact about me wrong. Of course, if it were in the context of a conversation about race and ethnicity, I might say I'm Chinese and mean "Chinese rather than Vietnamese or Japanese or other types of Asian." But in general I think in the States we talk more about race than ethnicity, just because for so many people it's too complicated to go into the details of, "Well my grandmother is Irish but I'm mainly English and German. And there's some Polish and Dutch way back there too." So I am comfortable saying I am Asian (1), but that doesn't say anything about where I'm from. I'm from California. I'm American. Which as it turns out is a pretty core part of my identity, since apparently I get really mad when people confuse my ethnicity for my nationality.

That distinction, though, is a cultural one. I think Natasha, Wendy, and I have all been realizing how unique America is, in that our history is one of immigration. Like Wendy said, we pride ourselves on being a "melting pot"--it is relatively easy to become an American, both legally and socially. Most other countries, however, don't think or function this way. Or as my friend put it, the French don't have a giant statue that is a symbol of their country engraved with the words, "Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Even if immigration is a fact in France, it's not necessarily part of the "natural" order of things. Therefore, there is really no concept of being French if you aren't originally from France. And if your parents aren't from France, even if you were born here, you aren't French either. They are actually pretty consistent on the categorization. I have some friends who have dual American and French citizenship because one of their parents is a French citizen, though they were born in the States. This logic begins to make sense, if you think of "French" as hereditary, an ethnicity rather than just a nationality. Or rather, if you think of nationality as being passed down by blood. It's just a strange confound to make, from an American point of view. For instance, one of the other assistants said to me the other day, "Most of my students aren't French. It was Eid and nobody was in class." It took me a second to realize, Oh, you mean "French" the way French people define it, which is essentially "European" (2).

My point, basically, is that I need to calm down. It is much harder for a lot of French people, and actually I think especially for immigrants to France (the hawker at the market and the waiter in Barcelona were both immigrants), to conceptualize how my parents can be from China, I can be Asian, and I can still be American. I would have to explain that when I go to China I am visiting a foreign country, and at this point my French is better than my Chinese. That I feel most at home ensconced in American culture. This is not really the experience, for example, French people of North African descent have, because in general they are much less integrated into French society, less accepted. So when people here assume I am Chinese, in their minds, they are not making a mistake, because they haven in fact guessed correctly what type of Asian I am, and Chinese means "from China" whether legally or genetically.

This is a simplification, obviously, and purely my musings not really based on any data. I'm not saying that all French people, or even most of them are like this; it only seems like I've noticed the tendency more, though admittedly in comparison to California. I just wanted to clarify in my mind what exactly is so unsettling to me.

(1) And yes, I know, race is a construction. People often have problems with being grouped into the broad category of "Asian" and would rather identify as Chinese-American, for example, to distinguish their particular heritage. But my point is that in the States, if someone were to identify me by race it's much more likely that they would say "the Asian girl". Not to say that's great either but it's more normal, I probably wouldn't be offended, and it wouldn't sound to me like they are assuming I'm from China.

(2) That's the implicit definition, of course, like Wendy was saying it's unspoken. According to the Comparative Human Rights class I took in Paris, however, even the publicly expressed idea of being "French" is much more homogeneous than our idea of "American". I can't say we're always the most accepting of different cultures but the ideal is that people bring their own way of living and our definition what it is to be an American expands. In France, on the other hand, becoming French means assimilating into the established boundaries of how a French person looks and behaves. I'm making it sound terrible, but basically we just have different values. Americans tend to emphasize individuality whereas for the French, the society and solidarity are much more important.