east asia and being an outsider

[amw]

It's time for another morning update. I suppose i should write about the last leg of my journey along the Magdalena Alto and through the Tatacoa desert, but i'm not feeling it. Currently in Neiva, strongly considering finding a bus to take me back north - there's not much left for me to do along the Magdalena

Comments

[carriea31]

I guess working remotely might be an option to make things a little easier, but who knows. Working remotely also has drawbacks. You've done both in person and online remote so I am sure you already know.

[geminiwench]

I really like this post.....
... I like it for so many reasons.

[annaserene]

Spot on. You're right. When Japan needed workers, they turned to the ethnic Japanese population in Brazil. Japan, Korea, and China are all still staunchly anti-immigration and have abysmal conditions for and acceptance of refugees, yet no one ever seems to notice

[amw]

Man, that's wild that some restaurants refuse to serve foreigners in Japan. I've heard it happens in Korea too. I don't think it went that far in China, although there were definitely times - especially in more classy/upscale places - where there was a clear sense that both the staff and other diners would look down on a group of foreigners showing up

[king_of_apathy]

I was with a group who weren't allowed into a Busan nightclub due to 'no foreigners allowed', but that's it as far as my experience of being barred from places goes. Certainly never been turned away from a restaurant. Sounds like I've been lucky compared to others.
Then again being a white westerner, I find most people here are fairly friendly, or at least polite. As I mentioned in my other reply, muslim refugees get it much worse.

[coercedbynutmeg]

I think one of the great misconceptions in Western culture is that only white people are bigoted. Um. Every group is bigoted, is slow to warm to the "outsider," and in my observation, Asians are more insular than Europeans (at University, the Koreans/Chinese/Taiwanese kept distinctly insulted almost all the time). But it's chalked up to "Asians are a collectivist, family-oriented culture" and ignored instead of condemned, the way it is in the west, that we're all racist xenophobes.

[amw]

There are so many facets to this. Because the US is a nation that still embraces immigration to a certain degree, it's implicitly more diverse than largely monoethnic nation states. So on one hand, it is probably on average less racist or xenophobic than some other countries. On the other hand, members of specific ethnic minorities inside the US may find themselves targeted by bigots in ways that they wouldn't in other countries where their ethnicity is more common. So, i think it can both be true that white people in the US are racist toward Asians, but also that Asians in Asia are racist toward white people. Of course in other parts of "the west" (notably some European countries) this racism exhibits itself differently, because they never really embraced immigration to begin with

[coercedbynutmeg]

And - something many US Americans don't realize - that's true in Asia too. Lighter-skinned Asians are perceived as higher class (or at least more attractive), everywhere from South Asia to East Asia, and that's not "white supremacy", it's a prejudice that goes back prior to contact with Europeans.

A friend of mine lived in the Philippines for a few years, and she said the number of "whitening" products that were available in the stores was amazing, from soap to body wash to lotion. She didn't think they worked too well, but she was afraid of using them for fear of glowing in the dark.

[amw]

Hilariously, i got a gift of a whitening lotion at Secret Santa in China. Like, of all the gifts to end up going to the one white person in the company, that was the one! I can't remember if i used it or just gave it away, but it was a moment of both humor and cringe for me and the person who i later found out put it in the gift bucket.

[king_of_apathy]

This post got me thinking about the Korean attitude to refugees. There were parents protesting in Ulsan (the city next to me) about just 25 Afghan kids joining the local school