I’m talking about after going through borders and I put away the US Passport…
And the average everyday people ask me “where are you from?”
Like if the place has anti-American sentinments, could I just pretend to be… not American…
cuz you know… the US has been getting a bad rap recently due to ahem a certain person in Capitol Hill…
Like most people in the world falsely assume “American” = “White” anyways…
They’d never suspect a thing… would they?
I can speak Cantonese and Mandarin… I can try faking a Chinese person’s accent when speaking English. Or pretend to be a Hong Konger (via the Cantonese). Or pretend to be Taiwanese (most people can’t tell the difference between the sound of Mainland Mandarin vs Taiwan Mandarin).
I heard that there are people who hate Chinese tourists… so is this actually gonna backfire?
But then again, I might also get hit with the double-whammy of “looking Chinese” while “acting like an American”.
So this is basically like code switching… but with national identity…
Is this morally okay? Or am I like crossing some ethical line here? Is this like the “cultural appropriation” thing where it’s inappropriate to do?
In that case you are a Chinese who immigrated to the USA very young. While you probably think and behave more like an American than a Chinese, that doesn’t erase where you were born, even if for a technicality you no longer have a passport from that place. I would say that you’re one of the few people that are correctly described by the term Chinese-american, as you grew in both cultures. Unfortunately the popular use of that term is for Americans who have some ancestor from China.
That’s cool, where are you imagining traveling to?