Asian American Culture - Asians as 'Perpetual Aliens'

Back where I’m from – that is to say, the Bay Area, which is more like home to me than Korea – Asians are not such a rare occurrence as they are on the East Coast. There are large areas with high concentrations of Asians – such as San Francisco, LA, and Seattle – and the further one gets from these concentrated areas, the lower and lower these concentrations become. But it remains that, overall, Asians are not so foreign to Americans on the West Coast overall.
However, my experiences during my short time here at Wheaton have shown me that the case back home is not necessarily the case all over America. I knew that in regions like the Midwest, Asians were few and far in between, and that the white majority would be unfamiliar with ‘my kind,’ but I never expected how alien I would feel here on the East Coast. As the area of America with the most history, as well as being home to some of America’s most iconic cities like New York City, Boston, and Washington D.C., I never imagined just how alienated I would feel here. Granted, Norton isn’t exactly a ‘big’ city in the least, I never expected so many ‘Americans’ – a.k.a. white Americans – to react to me in the way they did.
When I first meet white Americans, they give me the ‘smile-and-talk-slow’ sort of attitude that I often see them displaying when speaking to foreigners. However, when they hear my perfect – at least, near perfect – English, they give a bit of a surprised look. It is, for the most part, not a really big expression, but having run into this situation so many times, I have come to notice some traits that white Americans display when they realize that I’m not actually all that ‘alien.’ Some of these include their voice sounding less strained, their face losing the forced smile and adopting a more natural, comfortable expression, and speaking at a regular pace. Perhaps the attitudes of these people don’t stem from any ill-will – after all, the majority of Asians at Wheaton are international students; I just happen to be one of the few exceptions – but I still find it annoying that, after almost twelve years of not being treated too differently, people are suddenly treating me like I’m an idiot. That is to say, I do not mean that foreigners are idiots in the slightest, it is just that it was a culture-shock for me to suddenly enter this environment where I’m suddenly treated like I didn’t belong there.
One of the most common questions I get is, “Where are you from?” I used to just simply answer by telling them I was from California, or the Bay Area, or San Francisco, or next to Stanford because, well, all of those describe the place I consider to be my ‘home.’ But there have been many instances where people followed up the first question with a second one along the lines of, “Yeah, but where are you originally from?” Of course, it’s usually never this blatant, but the general message is clear: What sort of Asian are you? Now I have gotten into the habit of answering the first question like this: “I’m originally from Korea, but I’ve been living in California/the Bay Area/SF/next to Stanford since I was seven.” This way, I circumvent the socially sensitive topic – at least, I think it’s socially sensitive, the way my peers act when they ask what type of Asian I am – and we can move on with the conversation to other inconsequential drabble. Sometimes, I forget to add the fact that I’m from Cali, and people assume that I’m an international student. I found this to be strange, because although I obviously speak perfect English (at least, I’m pretty sure I do…), but I’m still assumed to be an international student?
This brings to my mind an interesting thing I learned a while back. Sometime earlier in the semester, I had done a presentation in the AAC – Asian American Coalition, Wheaton’s club for Asians and their allies – about the portrayals of Asians in popular American media, and came across a number of stereotypes placed on Asians. Some of them were familiar to me, such as Asians being good at math, Asians being ‘model minorities’ and Asian women being objects of desire and so on, but one that had never actually occurred to me was this: Asians as perpetual aliens. I had always had some inkling of this stereotype, the way Asians were portrayed in popular culture, but to see the stereotype stated and explained so overtly was like opening my third eye.
I find it very interesting that such a stereotype exists – Black Americans have obviously been ingrained in American culture since the country’s founding, and the Latinos have been a constant presence in American history. Compared to these other minority groups, Asians are relatively new entrants to this theater of American culture, and this notion that all Asians are immigrants strikes me as odd, but inexplicably almost acceptable. Of course, I realize that this isn’t really the case, and I feel like Asians are being cheated out of something; not necessarily anything tangible, but almost like our dignity, as if they were saying that Asians didn’t really ‘belong’ in America.