So there’s this guy from New York City. He’s Japanese. He’s bringing take-out over to his girlfriend’s apartment. On the ride up the elevator, a fellow passenger asks him which apartment ordered the Chinese food. The multiple layers of prejudice in this encounter spurred this man to wonder why it was so difficult to differentiate one Asian nationality from another. The result is alllooksame.com, a website that shows photographs Asians, and you have to guess the nationality, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. This exercise is difficult. The average score for all visitors to the site is 7 out of 18. One Chinese lady in my class was confident she could determine who was who. She scored an 8 out of 18, slightly better than chance. Another girl in the class, a white girl, took the test multiple times, and her highest score was a 6. I understand that the man in this anecdote was fed up with not being recognized for who he was, but isn’t he just proving his point, that telling one from another is not as easy as a Japanese man might assume, that, in fact, Asians really might all look alike? Is there really outward phenotypic indicators that one could use to differentiate with certainty, or has there been enough gene flow between the Southeast Asian populations that differentiation is impossible?
I guess I can understand why someone might take umbrage to having their heritage mistaken for another. It’s part of who you are. You know it absolutely; the thought of it being a part of you comes automatically, and when you know something about yourself so thoroughly, it’s easy to assume that others should know it as well. But shouldn’t you also give people who have no idea the benefit of the doubt? My mom is Filipino/Chinese. My dad is Irish/Scottish. I know this makes me look ethnically ambiguous, but I’ve been mistaken for Mexican. I suppose if you took the geographic average of the Philippines and Ireland, you might land somewhere in Latin America. This has happened to me more times that you’d think. I’ve even had Mexicans mistake me for Mexican. I don’t get mad, though. I just laugh and shrug. I just say, Sorry, dude. No hablo. Not being a full blooded anything has not really become part of my identity.
