Kindness, Alienation, and Humanity in East Asia

I'm a Chinese American, and I've been existing in East Asia for about a month in an effort to reconnect with my own roots. When you think about modern tourism, you might think of atomized consumers wandering through highly-commercialized vacation zones, pausing to get a few brief doses of local flavor before retreating to cozy, familiar hotels. But if you have some sort of previous connection to your travel spot -- language, culture, blood -- you can unlock secret experiences, friendships, curious encounters of daily life, and a strange new lesson in what it's like to be a human. During my time in China and Japan, I got to experience the thrill of tourism mixed with the feeling of coming home.

First, let me tell you what it's like to be Chinese in the west. As a Chinese American, it's not hard for me to say that I've been treated like a foreigner in the USA even though I've lived here all of my life. There's an essential "friendliness deficit" that you experience by not sharing the same racial characteristics as the majority of people in this country. You are treated, in general, like a discount human being, and you'll occasionally experience random bursts of unfriendliness or outright rudeness because of your skin color. The topic of your race becomes something that you carry with you throughout your entire social existence, along with your proximity to various stereotypes. In the modern American mind, the Chinese man is a technician, a mathematical executor, a bean counter: book-smart but missing out on the big picture, incapable of leadership, usually playing the sidekick role for someone else.…Unless your personality happens to fit like a glove within the social roles that others have set aside for you, your soul can suffer tremendous damage under the weight of these external prejudices.

Some East Asian people deny this reality because they’re treated decently well in their adopted homes, but they don't realize that the small friendliness they experience in the west would translate to great kindness in their ancestral countries. It takes significant effort for an Asian person to impress an American audience, and someone with a rockstar personality in Asia might get downgraded to Ordinary Joe in the west. There's also a vocal minority of Chinese Americans who control the discourse on Asian diaspora culture, and they will say all manner of crazy and hateful things about their own parents and co-ethnics to get attention from newspapers, literary magazines, and social media. Although not everyone agrees with them, their feelings do truthfully represent the secret problems of the diaspora: alienation, hatred, and confusion. And as for the Asian Americans who get destroyed by the thousand papercuts of continuous soft violence, or who are actively treated with genuine malice and violence -- well, such stories are usually so tragic that I can hardly bear to write about them. May God grant them peace.

During my travels in China and Japan, the feeling of racial estrangement and all of its associated ugliness completely disappeared, and the difference was so stark as to make my previous experience in the west seem like a dream, hazy and unreal. If you're an Easterner in the East, people are much more likely to treat you kindly, which -- at the most basic level of existence -- is extremely addictive. Within a few weeks I got used to this new lifestyle, and I was happy to be spoiled rotten by the genuine warmth and hospitality of the people around me. It's like a sea otter swimming for the first time: he's never been in the ocean before, but he knows at an instinctive level that he'll flourish. Being a Chinese American in East Asia feels like being a normal person in a normal place. And you really notice the absence of burdens that you'd gotten used to, like Goku taking off his 500 pound turtle shell and jumping into the clouds. You can blend into crowds, it's easier to make friends, people care more deeply about what you're saying, the food is suited to your tastes, the scenery is exciting, and the local culture was designed with people like you in mind. You stop wasting your energy fighting against the problems of being an outsider, which frees up brainpower to make progress on actual authentic living.

Daily life in East Asia wasn't all great, by the way. In China, I encountered extremely rude people, dirty streets and toilets, chaotic train stations, the severe inconvenience of not having western internet, and scammers trying to sell me stuff at night. In Japan, I encountered forced politeness and insincerity, frustrating rules and restrictions, mandatory service charges, great inflexibility from service workers who don't want to make special exceptions for you, and also nighttime scammers (again!). But somehow, these surface level annoyances don't really penetrate into the soul. Somehow, the life of an authentic human, with all the chaos and noisiness of an imperfect but spiritually-compatible country, feels much better than being trapped with luxury and abundance in an inauthentic racialized pigeonhole.

An obvious-in-hindsight and yet still shocking experience was to spend deep quality time with non-immigrant East Asians. To me, the Chinese immigrant is someone who loves studying, making money, getting highly visible quantitative achievements, and is extremely competitive. But actually experiencing daily life in East Asia exposes you to a large number of people from all different points on the bell curve. In just a few weeks I met: people with great dreams and small dreams; who are full of love and energy, or burnt out from the new economy and just cynically scraping by; who dropped out of college, or even high school; fashionable supermodel delinquents sitting on the streets, smoking cigarettes with their friends; a government worker who pridefully refused to please his superiors; a wealthy bartender whose secret interest was medieval Mongolian history; people who have strong opinions on right and wrong, past and present; who are religious and love their country; people who drunkenly play elaborate Confucian etiquette games at large parties; people who chose unconventional paths and somehow found themselves as business owners. And to all of this, add my extended family members, most of whom I'd never met before in my life, loving and affectionate people, tender old grandparents and tiny giggling children, connected to me by blood and history, telling me stories about our shared ancestors.

Being an overseas Chinese means you only get to be friends with a teeny tiny demographic province of 3 percent, the small herd of people who chose to leave their country in the pursuit of great success and opportunity, a minuscule droplet in the vast sea of personal existence. Being in the homeland means communion and understanding with the other 97 percent, those real individuals filled with hot human blood and differently-colored lives, people whose stories are often forgotten and neglected abroad, a massive blind spot in the diaspora vision. In our fast-paced and chaotic times, feeling at home is a great privilege which is denied to many. If we've already gotten used to a mediocre world, we might forget to reach our hands out to grasp for something more. Zhuangzi 庄子 said: "A frog in the well (井底之蛙) cannot conceive of the vast ocean." In the next few days, I hope to keep swimming in this vast ocean and to escape from the well of my limited experiences, to unlock the 100 percent, to learn something more about being a real human.