Throughout my journey around the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur in North India, I was being greeted warmly left and right by swarms of people saying the same thing. “Konichiwa!,” they would yell out at me, and I would simply laugh or smile back in response. They thought I was Japanese. It was quite understandable why they had this assumption: though some would argue that I have some racially ambiguous features, there is no hiding my outwardly Asian appearance. I am of Filipino-American heritage, and even at home in New York, I am no stranger to getting mistakenly labeled as anything but that.
While on the Indian Railways train at the crack of dawn from Delhi to Agra, I was seated next to what seemed like the only other tourists on the entire train: a duo of young, enthusiastic Japanese men. As I sipped on a tiny five rupee cup of steaming hot chai, the Indian family on the other side of the berth interrogated us about our origins and whereabouts as if they were police investigators. They, too, thought that I was Japanese, and I had to debunk their claim of my identity. In a similar fashion, I had questioned them in return. The most important question I asked was why they thought I was Japanese. “It’s a big holiday in Japan, and they’re all here right now. And the Japanese love India, and we love them!” I guess their assumption was pretty valid since I was, in fact, sitting next to two guys who were perfect examples of these statements. Just like many other times along my trek through India, we ended our conversation by taking a few pictures together as proof that we had crossed paths.
Fast-forward to Vietnam where the perception of my nationality was in stark contrast to my experience in India. I was immediately able to tell a difference because, while most hawkers on the street would boast their goods or shove their pamphlets to the typical Eurocentric-looking tourist, I was more often than not spared of that nuisance. There were many times when shopkeepers and other locals would begin speaking to me in Vietnamese, and I would politely gesture to inform them that I was indeed an English-speaking American. Their reactions had a wide range but usually consisted of a combination of confusion, interest, and joy. Confusion about what my true identity was, interest in how that became so, and joy because, for a reason I still do not quite understand, the Vietnamese are extremely fond of Americans despite the troubled and brutal shared history of conflict between the two nations only a few decades ago.
One night when going to a nice restaurant filled with a fair amount of other tourists, I walked into the establishment with a group of other Semester at Sea students. While showing us to our table, the host initiated conversation with me in Vietnamese just as many other locals did. Once again, I went through the little jig I knew all too well about being American. He gasped and began apologizing profusely, “I just thought you were Vietnamese, I’m so sorry!” He went on with this apologetic behavior thinking that he had offended me somehow, though I found it quite flattering. “You look like a Vietnamese,” he kept saying to me in a somewhat pained and frantic tone. He made it known to me that he made an honest mistake, and didn’t want me to feel out of place, awkward, or unwanted in his homeland.
As much and I stood out in the earlier ports, and as much as I seemingly fit in at many of the later ones, I had split feelings about the situation. In every country on the itinerary before Singapore, I wished nothing but to blend in because I didn’t want to be targeted as some kind of ignorant tourist as per Jamaica Kincaid’s description of such a traveler in A Small Place: one who perpetuates exploitative imperialist legacies and diminishes the validity of local sentiments. From Singapore onwards, it felt awkward that all I wanted was the complete opposite of how I felt previously: to differentiate myself as a foreigner because I hated being mistaken as a local somewhere I was clearly out of place. I was an outsider, but I did not want to be defined as solely that. This is the plight of the international traveler with a transnational identity.
The forces of globalization, especially in respect to the movement of people around the world, has complicated notions of identity, whether that be one fashioned by the individual or imposed by a larger group. With this in mind, the idea of national and racial identity begins to blur as people continue to move around. These distinctions become less concrete since one’s location is no longer fixed to a singular place nor is identity defined as a sole ideal. For that matter, not only do we as travelers struggle to fit into the narrow classifications available to us, but even those who we have encountered on our journey are becoming globalized. This just comes to show the ever-growing diversity which we should embrace. Of course, these differences in identities have probably been the root to many of the world’s conflicts, but the acceptance of the plurality of identities has also been a source of pride and a sign of prosperity. We can take post-Apartheid South Africa as an example of a country plagued with a history of racism which is now a vibrant world power in the making. What I know for a fact is that the African principle of ubuntu pervades our lives more than ever. No matter how uniquely we may identify ourselves as individuals, we are all global citizens who share an integral role in the intricate and interconnected web of humanity.
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