The racial stereotyping Asians face when travelling and where it is worst
- From ‘konichiwa’ and ‘ni hao’ to being called ‘Bruce Lee-ski’ in Prague and Cubans pulling back their eyes, writer Kevin Chong has seen it all
- He talks to other Asian travel writers who share their insights on how they deal with being stereotyped in foreign countries
I could be in an open-air market, one of those places you go to find key chains and shrink-wrapped T-shirts, or in a restaurant district where men in aprons wave tourists into empty bistros, when I hear: “Konichiwa. Ni hao ma. Chinese, or Japanese?”
It’s impossible to overstate how grating I find this comment, and those like it.
I travel, in part, to be decontextualised: anonymous, outside the grooves of my routine and home culture. But it’s in these moments I feel shackled by the stereotypes associated with my East Asian face.
In Cuba, locals addressed me as “Chino” and pulled back their eyes. In Bali, a cab driver insisted on telling me where to find mie goreng – the Indonesian variant of chow mein. Once in Prague, I was given directions out of a subway station by a group of teens who called me “Bruce Lee-ski”.
There would be no point explaining to them that I’m a Hong Kong-born Canadian who does not speak Mandarin, much less Japanese. I’d just get asked: “Where are you really from?”