I really enjoyed this post by Jade on Wai-Taiwan: “Someone Else’s Stew.” It’s a nice piece about the cultural appropriation that all visitors take part in and how it can go wrong.

An excerpt:

Occasionally, it felt like they were speaking as “experts” about the country that they had (briefly) lived in and were outsiders to. At one point someone said, “I don’t know why, but [ethnic group] just loves to eat [type of food] with their meal.”
I cringed.
Several times.
Throughout the entire dinner.

Being mixed but also somebody who comments on Taiwan and its culture a lot, I think I stand as both an outsider and an insider. I come up with lots of theories about the way things work here and try to guess their motivations and history, but basically, my perspective is that of an outsider. I have done my fair share of cultural appropriation during my time here, but I think my experience here and my heritage helps me to seek out the least ridiculous of explanations.

That said, I think cultural appropriation is a process of learning about a culture. Our first instincts are to map a new culture to our own understanding of the world, in order to find parallels. This is a flawed process, but I believe it allows people to “fail forward,” leading to better understanding each time a dissonance is exposed. I think the problem is when you’re early in the process of learning about a new culture and you have to share what you know with others without really understanding that new culture – that leads to lots of cringe-worthy moments.

Thanks to Elie who commented on a previous post, I was introduced to Gdumb.com which uses the auto-suggest feature in the search bar as an indicator of some of the most ridiculous search queries you could imagine. Elie’s own post about it explores three partial queries: “Why is Israel…”, “Why are Jews…”, and “Aliyah is… .”  The results are very interesting and a transparent* indicator of the attitudes and questions that people have.

* As transparent as Google is.

This being a site about mixed identity, the next obvious extension was to try plugging in queries containing racial identifiers.

Before we jump whole hog into this, I think there are some things to consider:

1. Whose queries are these? I have no idea from which regions Google takes its samples
2. Google censors its queries, so queries using racist epithets are censored from the auto-suggest
3. The questions about certain prejudices and what demeaning racial terms mean bolsters the observation that prejudices are really passed down, they are learned behaviors and attitudes

There are probably some more things that will bubble up eventually, but for now, here are the results:

Why are mixed…

Why are chinese people…

Why are black people…

Why are mexicans…

Why are jamaicans…

Why are australians…

Why are italians…

Why are vietnamese…

Why are koreans…

Why are french people…

Why are indians…

While in Kending during the last weekend of the Lunar New Year, I witnessed the boldest manifestation yet of that crudest and most-desperate species of the Taiwanese cock-block family: the Brokeback Attack.

Here’s the scenario:

There was a group of guys and girls dancing together, probably a high-school reunion or something. Some Filipino and African guys jump on the dance floor and start to rip it up. These guys are really enjoying themselves and start to dance with the Tai-girls. Not just dancing, but freaking. The guys are digging it, and the girls are enjoying it as well.

So, to protect the girls from the dirty and dangerous immigrant folk, or maybe to protect the girls from themselves and their intended harlotry, the Taiwanese males jump in to save the day, going where no man should go, namely in between the gyrating hips of the colored men and the local girls.

It happened over and over again. I suppose the sailors were used to it, because they played it cool, but the Taiwanese women looked more and more frustrated at their male counterparts. It really surprised me that the whole situation didn’t break down into a fight, because the Taiwanese males were unusually aggressive during the cock-blocking. In addition, the women’s reaction to the interruptions was quite telling: their friends’ “help” was really a good micro-representation of male-female relationships here: being a man is protecting and controlling your woman, who by extension can’t protect or control herself.

Just returned from a work junket in Japan and have observed some behavior on my part which exposes how culturally “flexible” I have become. Maybe “quick to assimilate” is a better way to describe it. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing. Perhaps there’s a point when one becomes so open-minded and flexible that one loses something of their own identity or personality.

I’ve become so used to capitulating to others that it’s like I don’t have any taste. When I say “taste”, I mean, my own likings, my favorites, my dislikes, etc. Instead, I just go along with what others like to do, or what they offer. I believe this is a habit that has developed during my time in Asia. My experience is that it helps to accept what others offer in order to warm a relationship up. Also, locals can offer a new experience and more insight into their culture. So what I like takes a backseat. The by-product of this continual acquiescence is a gradual, but noticeable fading of my own personality.

In the end, any healthy relationship must be based on a truth and honesty. Acquiescing to others, while helpful at the beginning of a relationship, may actually create distance later on between two parties.

Assimilating to a culture I guess is the next extension of acquiescence, though I guess it’s more subtle and much less conscious. In a way, after an extended period of time in a foreign culture, I believe assimilation is inevitable. To remain unchanged requires intense self-awareness and active resistance – an unnatural act which only makes one’s continuing presence in that culture less and less sustainable. Most people I’ve met in Korea and Taiwan have assimilated in certain ways and have resisted in others. They’ve found some sort of equilibrium between reaching out and guarding their identity. Others I’ve met (though few), actively defend against assimilation on all fronts and in turn make life miserable for themselves and others around them. Those are definitely not the travelling types.

I used to think that if one opened themselves up completely, then they could find their true “self.” But now, I’m not so sure. Maybe you just end up getting lost.

An interesting blog entry by Sam de Brito at The Age, which is a great glance at the assimilation of Asians in Australia.

How do you say ‘yobbo’ in Vietnamese?