L'Étranger

To be foreign is to experience humility and humiliation on the daily. Humility comes from awareness of one’s limits, the boundaries of language translating to an inability to understand or be understood, curtailing one’s access to the mental (or sometimes physical) spaces of the natives. Humiliation can arise from any mundane interaction, regardless of how sympathetic one’s interlocutors might be: a trip to city hall for paperwork, a fumbled transaction, an indecipherable phone call. The foreigner remains other or outside, not privy to the same language, literal or figurative, of the collective. He comes from an unfamiliar narrative, another country. To the majority, the strangeness of the foreigner is bemusing or bewildering, at best; alien or threatening, at worst.

So much depends on language, that most fundamental mechanism of communication that allows us construct whole worlds out of nothingness. That tool by which we can express the range of human emotion, or simply accomplish a menial task. A foreigner grasps for a language and culture different from the one in which he was reared. Sometimes this fluency—in language, in culture—can be achieved with remarkable poise, accumulated over the course of years and years, or a whole lifetime, even. But it is not uncommon for the foreigner to remain forever at the peripheries. Unable or unwilling to be integrated, adrift in the in-between.

Four months after moving to Japan, I can’t help but mull these things over, day by day. Notions of identity, dancing along an axis of belonging and estrangement—this can be a weighty subject, or not. When I was twenty, I lived in Paris for a semester. (Weird how I’ve already been in Tokyo for longer than that stint abroad.) I remember feeling flustered by how egregiously other and othered I was in France. I think of the former as an innate quality, a recognition of one’s own difference; the latter is a category imposed upon a person. Though I had a stronger command of French language than many of my peers, there was something else that set me even further apart from the world around me: I wasn’t white.

I’d venture to say a white person, no matter how their body language or appearance might betray their origins, can avoid scrutiny most anywhere in North America and Europe, and quite a few other parts of the world, too. Meanwhile, there was no hiding (from) my Asianness in France. I think I may have attempted to make qualifying statements, talk about myself as américain d’origine chinoise, but I probably felt less American than ever as time went on. In spite of my passport, my bleached hair, the life I had on hold in California. Could any French person conceive of me as American, just by looking at me? Maybe more importantly—did my Americanness sound believable to myself?

Yet I certainly wasn’t Chinese, either. I remember dining out at a Chinese restaurant near Place d’Italie and making a polite request in Mandarin on behalf of a friend. Granted, my Chinese back then was shitty and stunted, to be quite honest. The waitress stared at me like I’d sprouted an extra limb. I later saw her, wide-eyed, whispering to her colleague. Probably from Hong Kong, I overheard her say. Eventually, over the course of many trips to China, I’d get asked if I was from Hong Kong or Taiwan, sometimes Singapore. I’m from Hubei, I learned to tell people cheerfully, confusing them even more. (Side note: this has happened less and less in recent years. It’s either the generational mobility of young Chinese, transnational lives being par for the course, or perhaps my Chinese has gotten better. Probably both?)

These memories have recently resurfaced as I’ve been navigating what it means to foreign again, this time in Japan. I want to say I’m much worse at Japanese language now than I had been with French back in the day, but maybe this isn’t entirely true. Or rather, I am probably equally self-conscious now as I was then. And I realized, in thinking about all this, that my discomfort with foreignness began not with my experiences in Paris or Tokyo, or even China, but in America—my uneasy homeland.

What I mean is, the being-looked-at-ness of the foreigner, for me, is inextricable from the experience of being othered in the land where I actually did grow up. A country where I lived for a solid thirty years. As an adult, I carved out my own space in New York over time, found and fell in love with my communities and chosen families. I’ve been saddened and outraged by the wave of anti-Asian violence that has swelled amidst the pandemic. And one part of me is also unsurprised. I long ago understood that American society viewed Asians with bigotry and contempt, or scorn and rejection. That this ill will can come in many forms. It can be blunt as a baseball bat, a spat word ending in a sharp scrape of a syllable—“chink.” Your flawless American English means shit. Perhaps, more subtle and yet most pernicious of all, American antipathy can refuse to acknowledge our right to that very identity. The model minority as a class of perpetual foreigners, inscrutable others.

Being perceived as “foreign,” then, in any context, will recall something of this background and baggage. Whether vacationing with my family in Italy, on a work trip in Latin America, or getting into a new groove in Japan, I’ve found myself wincing on occasion. Because we don’t speak the same language. I cannot understand and be understood. I shrink in their gaze, reduced to archetype and other. Foreignness renders a person helpless and vulnerable. To exist as a foreigner calls for courage and stamina.

For many expats, living in Asia might be the first time they’ve ever been othered to such a degree. To be gawked at or treated with brusqueness, kept at arm’s length, condescended to, by turns idolized or ignored. For me, the strangest thing of all about being in Japan is that, in spite of my inexorable foreignness, I also have the luxury of anonymity as a person of East Asian descent. The shape of my face and my features may be a giveaway of my non-Japanese genes, but I’d venture to say that I can blend in for the most part—especially now, masked up as we are in this pandemic. Until I have to speak, and thereby reveal my clumsy command of language, I can move about unobtrusively and inconspicuously.

As a foreigner in Tokyo, I live with the humility of language, the status of being other and outside. But the surface-level ambiguity of my existence here is also deliciously freeing. I’m certainly not and will never be Japanese. Though I may claim American or Chinese identity, by blood or by paper, my legitimacy is forever suspect in these societies that prefer hegemony and homogeneity to hybridity.

Who am I, then? Rimbaud, with whom I share a birthday, may have had the answer all along: Je est un autre.

Springtime in a small town: passing through Dinan, France fifteen years ago.