Obviously Foreign

One thing that global nomads experience is that our skin tone causes us to be perceived differently in different places. In some places we can blend in as potentially local, or assumed local (depending on how we dress or speak). In others, no matter how well we might blend in otherwise, we will stand out as Obviously Foreign.

It doesn’t matter who you are, or what your skin tone is, this can happen to all of us. The sorts of prejudices and/or privileges experienced change from place to place, and from skin tone to skin tone. It’s something that I ended up discussing a lot with the adult TCKs I interviewed for my forthcoming book - the instability of outside perceptions changing so dramatically from getting on a plane to getting off it, though you yourself as the same in each place.

I’ve had many experiences of being Obviously Foreign in places where I was foreign, and in places I called home. I’ve had many experiences of being assumed local in places that were, or felt, foreign to me.

The reality is that despite my years lived there and my language skills, I will always be Obviously Foreign in a country like China whose citizens are, for the most part, quite ethnically homogenous. I stand out. My skin colour, eye colour, hair colour (and texture), not to mention my height and body shape, are all very much other. It’s pretty hard to get past that obviousness. For someone like me who likes to blend into the background, it always made life in China a bit confronting. Which was honestly part of the appeal of living there - daily life there challenged me in ways it hadn’t (and doesn’t) in Australia.

Today I want to share a very small story from my time in China of someone seeing past my Obviously Foreign exterior.

I dropped into a small restaurant (a Chipotle rip-off) to pick up dinner. There was just one person on staff at the time. She was standing outside as I walked up; perhaps it was too lonely, or too air conditioned, inside for her liking. She was older, with silver sprinkled through her hair and wrinkles on her sun-darkened skin. She had the face of a woman who had spent a lot of time working outdoors, unlike the freshly pale faced young people who often serve at the counters of western restaurants. The part of the interaction that sticks with me is that she asked for my help working out how to find the number of a received call on the store’s mobile phone. I know, it’s a small thing, but it’s a small thing that had nothing to do with me being a foreigner. She, the native speaker, asked me, the white girl and a customer, for help with something that required reading Chinese. It was like the opposite of house plant syndrome.

Moments like this, interactions that didn’t centre around my foreign-ness, were more rare than you might think. If I was speaking in English, well, that was already foreign. If I was speaking in Chinese, it often took a while to move past the shock of a white girl speaking Chinese. Even after knowing me a while, it wasn’t unusual for a Chinese person to ask me lots of questions about foreigners in general (because I could answer things they’d wondered about for a long time) or ask my help with translation or language learning. So, a lot of conversations revolved around topics that were very foreigner-centric. It’s not that I disliked these conversations, but it meant I remained very aware of my foreign-ness – and aware of their awareness of my other-ness.

This was especially true during my last few years in Beijing. My work and life centred on the expatriate community, so I had very few local Chinese friends. Hardly any of my Chinese friends from earlier years still lived in Beijing - they had moved to other cities and countries. It meant I spent very little time having friend-level conversations in Chinese. Most conversations I had in Chinese were largely practical, or about my foreign-ness. This meant I really valued the rare occasions where my nationality and native language had little or no impact on the interaction – conversations which weren’t specifically Chinese-to-foreigner, but which could happen between two Chinese (or any two people).

Not everyone can see past all the differences and connect with the person underneath. I treasure friends who do. But what I realised in the restaurant that day was how unusual – and amazing – it was to have that sense of feeling not-foreign with someone who wasn’t a friend, who hadn’t known me long enough to see past my skin colour. For someone to simply see me as a person, not just a foreigner.

I was touched to sometimes receive that understanding as a privileged expatriate in China, to be seen rather than assumed about. I try to see the people around me in the same way, no matter where I am. I want our world to move more and more toward being a place where every person is seen as a whole person, and receives life-giving understanding rather than living under the weight of soul-crushing assumption - which won’t happen unless we are all part of being the change.

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An earlier version of this post appeared on storiesfromtanya.com