Something should now be said about the stupefyingly alienating experience of being an American minority abroad. I'm speaking generally but i would like to focus on Korean adoptees, because it seems we have a penchant for going abroad. You have Christina in Uganda, Martin in China, Ashley in Ireland, and yours truly in India.

Your average Indian or Ladakhi in Ladakh doesn't really grasp the concept that one third of the population of the United States are not white, in the classic sense. This says a little about Indian education and a lot about the type of Americans that travel to India (read: Lily-white). And aside from said Lily-white Americans, absolutely no one correctly guesses my country of origin. Instead, what i get are Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and once (inexplicably) Thailand. Your stereotypical Asian tourists--herds, cameras, broken English--are here in force. Despite the fact that i'm travelling alone and speak pretty damn good English, i'm inevitably lumped in with the real Asians.

In some ways i feel as though this works to my advantage. The behavior of Asian tourists abroad often defies reason to the outside observer, so i feel as though i can get away with a lot of things--breaking rocks and collecting dirt--that might otherwise induce undue scrutiny from the locals and the law. I also feel relatively free of the Sahib mentality and Raj-era white man's guilt, but more on that in another post. On the other hand, it definitely means you have to make much more of an effort to engage people in conversation, since they tend to assume your grasp of English is pretty tenuous. You also get the novel experience of people approaching you and spitting out a mass of Korean.

It's certainly not as bad as Martin "Wo shi hanbuguo" Fisher's experience in China. He was taught how to say "I am a hamburger" in Mandarin to dissuade native Chinese from assuming he was the white folks' translator. Chronic misunderstanding is something you ultimately get the best of before it gets the best of you. On the other hand, briefly explaining exactly what you are, as a Korean-American adoptee, is a task that i might never resolve to my satisfaction.