The School Papers: Multicultural History Final

During this class, I often reflected upon my own experiences with race and multiculturalism. I spent grades 2 through 5 in a diverse classroom environment. Among my friends were Vietnamese, Thai, and African-American kids. We had a number of Russian and Romanian families living in our apartment complex as well. Even when my family moved to the suburbs, our religious affiliation connected us to immigrant and disabled communities that occurred only incidentally within our neighborhood. Diversity and other ways of being were not new concepts introduced upon adulthood. I often wondered then, how I could have slid into a racist relationship with Asians quite so easily as an adult. It would turn out that my question, like many questions surrounding race, would not be resolved with a simple, straightforward answer. Instead, it came in the form of a journey, both personal and academic, that resulted in what anthropologist Allan Goodman referred to in Race: The Power of an Illusion, as a paradigm shift, wherein an old way of seeing a race was destroyed, and a new way of seeing people emerged.

The Asian first came to me as a voice in a headset while employed as a Telephone Banker at the now defunct Washington Mutual. It was female, it was demanding, and it repeated itself. The Voice had an accent that made it hard for me to understand what it wanted- the fact that it was upset was quite clear, despite the language barrier. Compounding the matter, the Voice didn’t appear to understand my explanation of the issue at hand. A few years later, I found myself working as a cashier in a Japanese-family owned market that boasted the most impressive selection of Asian foods within a “normal” grocery store. Now The Voice had a Face. The Face wanted to know why I charged it so much for produce that was on sale, in the same demanding tone it had questioned me about “sehvace feee” while working at the bank. This would prompt a very professional but very forced review of their bill. “See? The promotion is 4 for $5. That’s $1.25 each. The system applies the discount after I ring all of the peppers in.” “But peppah on sale?!” They’d reply, and I’d repeat my explanation a few more times, noticing that the simplest one was the one they finally understood. This lead to the broad overgeneralization that Asians were also stupid. Stupidity as a trait within people was something I’d learned to tolerate. But, beneath the tolerance I displayed was a seething and growing resentment of all people who looked like this person. I began to see all Asians as an unblinking-register watching face, bound and determined to make my life miserable with a 4 minute, lather rinse, repeat-style explanation that yes, the peppers really are on sale. Repeat this scenario over a hundred times, and I had an attitude toward the Asian that was quickly escalating. While I knew that prejudicial behavior wasn’t acceptable, it wasn’t long before I found myself justifying my experiences as fact. My family and friends helped this along by contributing their own similar experiences and together we cemented our notion that we could go on disliking an entire race of people, despite the voice in the back of my mind that suggested quite the opposite. But what did that mean?

Racism and its practitioner, racist, are two small but hefty words within American culture. The classic understanding of racism suggests a demonstrative state of prejudice on the part of one toward a member of another race. Barbara Trepagnier author of Silent Racism explains that defining racism is challenging for multiple reasons, one of which is that white Americans still operate on the the pre-civil rights definitions of racism. Racism was based on the concepts of prejudice and discrimination (2). It follows then that a racist was a person who actively demonstrated prejudice and discrimination. In my mind, since I wasn’t acting on my dislike for Asians my feelings were allowed to exist in a land of limbo.

I saw the system as it had been set up for whites and blacks and had been desperately concerned with the concept of white privilege for a number of years. A literal interpretation of this situation meant I would elect to hire a black person instead of an Asian one. It is important to note that this choice will be based, according to the theory of race, on skin color alone or in my case, by the shape of a person’s eyes. But I wasn’t in the social position to do something like that, or to really influence the life of an Asian person at all, for better or worse. It never occurred to me that they might be in a position to influence mine.

And then there was the night I walked in to the Roman Casino in Skyway, WA to apply for a job. It had every indication possible of being someplace I ought not be. Compensating for the fact that it was located in the “rough” part of town, the parking lot was bordered by some vicious looking barbed wire fence. Some of the largest black men I’d ever seen opened the mirror-glazed doors on our behalf when we approached the entrance. As I stepped into the room and sized up my surroundings, I heard my Mom’s voice in my head, asking in the same tone used when I’d been caught at mischief, “Um, what are you doing?”. Housed in what looked to be a “double” strip-mall space, The Roman reminded me of a Spirit Halloween store that had been painted over to look like a Roman den of inequity. And everywhere I looked I saw them. Asians. Everywhere. The urge to back away slowly had become the urge to turn and run by the time my husband grabbed my hand and said “Come on, babe.” I tried really hard not to get that job at The Roman, but as life and a persistent husband with professional connections would have it, I was hired as a graveyard cocktail server.   My first week’s schedule was written on a coaster and I was told to dress “as sexy as you want.” Three months earlier, I had been the one explaining the company dress code to a group of call center new hires, and advising them of the opposite, while handing out color coded excel spreadsheets of their schedules.  

There had been a few other instances before The Roman wherein I’d experienced what it felt like to be what Takaki terms the “Other- different, inferior and unassimilable” ( 4) . But this was a unique confrontation, one as palpable and indivisible as a crowd. Perhaps made worse by having spent an hour and a half attempting to tease, powder and slick myself into a version of sexy (a concept outside of my comfort zone anyway), I stepped out onto the casino floor on my first night excruciatingly aware of myself. I was white, they were Asian, and I was sure we didn’t like each other. At first, it made me feel somewhat better than they didn’t appear to like me, because it provided balance for my dislike of them. But I realized that this attitude wasn’t going to actually accomplish anything, and I was going to have to assimilate.  

It would be three weeks of a Multicultural Communication course that helped turn Asians into Asians, which was the first step along my path. Asian, as said by my inner voice came with a derisive sneer and a host of derogatory associations. Asian was now simply a group of people representative of a particular culture, which I discovered I knew absolutely nothing about. It helped me decipher the points of difficulty in my interactions with Asians. It also wasn’t long before I realized that most of my customers were immigrants who did not speak much if any English, which meant that every single one of them had a story automatically richer than my own. I realized that I had been born in the place they’d ended up, and that they presumably came here for the same things I valued about being an American. I found a new form of respect within that realization, and things began to turn around.

Just as Multicultural Communication assisted in developing a basic understanding of the people whom I was serving, Multicultural History facilitated a deeper understanding of the long and tenuous relationship between Asian- and Anglo-Americans. Not long after my attitude improved toward my customers, I started to develop regulars which lead to the realization that The Roman wasn’t just a casino, it was a community center.  While reading Takaki’s chapter Searching for Gold Mountain, I realized that my now-former customers were in much the same state as they had been in the 1800’s. They had no doubt left their home lands in the hope of making more money in America, raising their families and achieving something more than was previously possible. I saw parallels between the Chinese laundry of the 19th century and the ubiquitous convenience mart of today- a work undertaken out of practicality and social allowance, not passion (Takaki 185). In the story of the Japanese Internment camps I read of people who looked Asian, but identified as American. A group of people who were rounded up and stashed away in the desert because of the shape of their eyes and what that could mean to the safety of our precious America (Takaki 344). Many white people file that piece of American history under “it was different then.” I’m not so sure it’s always different today.

And then, the paradigm shift. I realized that there was no such thing as Asian. A group of people from the same quarter of the world could not be so neatly described, when there were such rich cultural differences defining them. This came to me the day I was at the local convenience mart, run by the Wilson family, who are Korean-American. I had noticed their son’s wedding invitation on the side of the beer cooler, and used the dull moment waiting for my debit transaction to ask Mrs. Wilson about the wedding.

“It was very nice,” she said.

“Was it traditional?” I asked, meaning of course, traditionally Asian, with red envelopes and big feasts and traditional ceremony. What I didn’t realize was that I had simultaneously mixed together the marriage customs of multiple Asian cultures.

“I don’t know, she’s Vietnamese and we’re Korean, so I don’t really know how traditional it was.”

Just like that, it hit me. Under the label of Asian fits a huge group of people who have varied culture, varied history, varied values.   Although we live by it, believe in it and navigate around it socially, there really is no such thing as Asian, no one unifying trait that makes them all the same. In retrospect, the issues I had with my phone and grocery customers were about communication and culture, not the value of one person over another and certainly not about any one’s intelligence.

I only worked at The Roman for three weeks, but it was enough time to facilitate a significant personal change. The casino I work in now features more Asian-Americans, individuals with connections to both cultures. Each night around 2:30, the Chinese and Vietnamese menus become unavailable to our casino customers, and this is known to the staff as “Last call for Asian.” This leaves me wandering the room, calling out “Last call for Asian… last call…”. It was one evening amidst the standard snickers and questions “What kind of Asians? All Asians have to go?!” or, “You hear that So, last call for Asians,” that I stopped. “Ok guys. Last call for Chinese food… Last call for Vietnamese soup…   Is that better?!”   The players at the table laugh at me and say, yes.

The night goes on and I smile that I happen to know the difference.