Maybe this is an obvious story – white guy travels to foreign country where he’s a racial minority and learns something about the other side of the racial divide. But it was the subtlety of the experience that made it more profound, at least to me. So come along if you like…
I took a trip to Japan about 30 years ago. The ostensible purpose was language study but really I was just trying to get lost somewhere for a few weeks, to get far away from my life and return with a few memories to keep me going when I got back. I had a year’s worth of college study under my belt and had learned a good bit of basic phrases and the syllabic writing systems; in other words, not much. A Japanese colleague gave me a big smile right before I left – “One thing you might be surprised to find is: Nobody speaks English!” Uh yeah, thanks.
It was a great trip. I got lost plenty, and alternately exasperated or amused many of the locals with my cluelessness. Thank goodness for the food models in the restaurant windows. While usually shy at home in anonymity, I felt, paradoxically, very free about approaching people in this wonderland where I stood out as the blundering foreigner. There were few Westerners around and that’s how I liked it. One time in a small town a couple of little girls, maybe first or second grade, in their school uniforms, smiled at me on the street and stopped. They approached and I thought they might want to talk and I said hi. One of them shyly reached out her hand … and brushed my hairy arm and they laughed. That’s what they wanted – they were amazed by my hairy arms and wanted a closer look. Oh well, there you go, that’s a good memory right there.
Even though I was a strange looking foreigner wandering around, I noticed that no one looked at me or gave any notice. If I asked a question, everyone was very polite, sometimes going out of their way to help (as in oy, this guy is hopeless, come on dude let’s get it over with, I’ll show you the way myself). But I was basically ignored most of the time, punctuated by a few episodes of people breaking through their own reticence to help or to show me something interesting. But one thing for certain is that I never felt the least bit of hostility anywhere.
Eventually though, I tired of playing the foreigner. It was on an afternoon on a train platform probably toward the end of my stay there. It was just me and far down the platform another woman. I looked down and, slightly annoyed, thought “she’s probably checking me out” and looked up quickly, and sure enough she quickly turned her head. I thought, “I’ll be glad when I get back home and I’m just another guy again.” And that’s when it hit me: What if I couldn’t go home. Ever. What if this was home, what if I knew no home but this? What if, everywhere I went, people would pass me thinking, “ foreigner”, if forever I would look up and see myself being observed from the side. What if every time I walked into a store, the shopkeeper and the customers would never move an inch or bat an eye but would be thinking “Foreigner in the store.” And I knew where this line of thinking could only lead: What if I was a black man in America? What if I was a foreigner in my own country? And what if, instead of everyone being very polite and occasionally helpful, what if I never knew when I would meet outright hostility? What would a lifetime of that do to me? Do to anybody? A cold chill ran though my body, with a feeling of sadness and regret and fear and exhilaration all at the same time. That’s what it’s like, that’s what it is, I thought. Oh my gosh, how can you endure a lifetime of that. I thought, racism will never end in American, not until until a black man in American is just a man in America.
And there, for a moment, I got it. I don’t try telling the story to a lot of people, things like that don’t go over well in the telling, you kind of had to be there. You hope people can figure it out themselves, but it’s not easy. To tell the truth, I sometimes have to work hard to remind myself of that moment of understanding, it’s too easy to slip back into that white world of ordinariness and think it’s the same for everyone, and wonder what’s the problem. Of course I know the problem, or a little bit of the problem, but mostly intellectually. It’s hard to reach back and feel it again. But yeah, that feeling is still there.