She's an African American from the deep South, displaced because of Hurricane Katrina. She thought she would ride out the disaster by ex-patting in Taiwan. After six months, she is going back, but she's not sure where she'll end up, as the Gulf Coast is still a disaster area.
She had nothing good to say about Taiwanese and the racism she encountered here. I listened deeply to her, recognizing that she didn't want feedback, she wanted to vent, she wanted to rant.
She's very tall and imposing and her skin tone is closer to African blacks than the milked down tones of Americans, so the Taiwanese judgment of her racial appearance was particularly harsh. For one English teaching job, they knew she was black, but they rejected her when she came in for her interview because she was the "wrong kind of black". Whoa, dude!
It was an odd moment standing there listening to her invective against Taiwanese, hearing how close she was getting to being racist, having heard similar sentiments from white people in the U.S. who were clearly racist.
What she experienced was racism – it pertained to her race. But she wasn't being racist. Her venom was focused just on Taiwanese as a culture and nationality, not on Asians as a race. She was able to vent to me because she wasn't racist, she saw me as a fellow American.
Understanding this, I could listen to her. Her experience was real and valid, and her anger was totally understandable and justified. If I was in a culture and was insulted and humiliated and dehumanized because of my race, I wouldn't have anything good to say about it, and for a long time during and after college, I didn't.
My hope, and I hope I expressed this well enough to her, is that when she goes back to the U.S., her bad experience with Taiwanese doesn't turn into racism against Asians. It's a slippery slope, anger is a seductive emotion. Look what happened to Anakin. It could happen to any of us. I even had asthma when I was a kid.
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| 1:22 p.m. Shida's Mandarin Training Center, central atrium. Sony Cybershot P-9 didn't have panorama or stitch features. The windows are the classrooms, ground floor had a study room. |
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| 6:14 p.m. - Bought a bike and immediately went out onto the riverside bikeways, but it was already getting dark. |
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| March 14, 5:17 p.m. - default shot |
