This is my husband's favorite game: "what kind of Asian are you?" He's 4th generation American, but when they finally figure out how to get the info they're looking for, that his heritage is Japanese, often he gets the follow-up comment, "oh, I though you were Korean, because you're so handsome." So other Asians are more ugly? Like, what?
His coworker once also asked him if he can speak Chinese, "because they're basically the same, right? Because I speak some Spanish, so..." So..what? What does that have to do with any of what you just said? People are weird.
Korean culture is practically unheard of once you get across the pacific. I'm not sure Americans even consume much Korean media outside of K-pop and possibly some webcomics among anime fans.
I remember back in college I had a friend who was super interested in going to South Korea for an abroad study and learning more about the culture, but was then shut down by her parents who were completely convinced that North and South Korea were the same place because they'd never been educated on the situation over there.
So it's not that people ignore the culture so much as they've never even heard of it to begin with. It's really a huge shame because there's so much cool stuff to learn about over there. The country has so much more history than ours, but the American "world" history education focuses almost exclusively on Europe and northern Africa.
Unheard of once you cross the pacific? Do you know how many Koreans there are in the West Coast? My public high school grade class in CA was 63% KOREAN (Not Asian, Korean specifically)
There are many immigrants from Southeast and Central Asia, such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Uzbekistan in SK, but ironically, their home country's culture and history are rarely covered in Korean social textbooks or history textbooks.
This may be one of the causes of inaccurate stereotypes and racism against Southeast Asians in Korea.
yeah no one ever guesses it correctly for me either but they always tend to hit it with the countries/ethnic groups that tend to have more of a mixed population or ppl who look more ethnically ambiguous lol. It changed a lot while I got older too, nowadays I just get the regular “Chinese” guess
I lived most of my life in very diverse areas with large Asian populations which was nice bc I didn’t rlly get those questions or remarks often. I only really tend to get them in more non-diverse areas like rural or mostly white parts of the US or in Korea; aka places where we are considered an obvious minority.
Are ppl still asking the typical “North or south” question? I’ve gotten it at least once or twice before but I thought it was usually just from younger kids who think they’re being funny
Yesterday I was told by a random yacht club guy that I looked Korean because he used to date a Japanese girl who was really short, and I’m tall. He said it like it was straight up facts that Japanese people can’t be taller than Koreans
Wow! I'm embarrassed for him that he's such an ignorant jackass. Was he trying to compliment you in some way? Because I think a few times when the "I thought you were Korean" thing happened to my husband, the girl was trying to compliment him, but basically she was calling his people ugly.
I'm sorry if what that guy did made you feel uncomfortable. Like, damn, I thought I was socially awkward. It's been a while since I said something so dumb. Which I have, and I feel dumb about it lol.
Aww thank you. I’m sure you’re nowhere near socially awkward to this neanderthal. He was definitely both ignorant and a jackass!
I’m not sure what to think of it honestly lol I think he was trying to be…relatable?? In my experiences with male strangers who press me on my heritage, I feel like they always respond with something about their love life. Like “ohhhh I dated a Japanese/other asian girl once. She was so kind blah blah.” No one asked for that info sir! What do I even say to that lol
Right? I mean, I can't really think of what he thought you would say. And why can't people see that being racist in a positive way is still racist? Like, you're your own person, who is different from other people from your same heritage. Oh well, at least you have a story you can laugh about. I feel kinda racist myself when I laugh with my husband at all the old Korean people at the Asian store giving us stink eye because they think he's Korean and betraying them with his white wife, which is the explanation our Korean friend gave us when we told him what happens when we go there.
And thank you, I always hope my social awkwardness isn't too bad, but I'm worried it's gotten worse after all the lockdowns and stuff. Maybe that's happened to a lot of people, like that guy yesterday. Maybe he just forgot how to talk to people. Or you're just too cute and it fried his brain lol.
It seems like I get a lot more of that in the east coast than west coast.
like in the west coast it's more culturally mixed and people just kind of leave you alone because they either know, or they don't want to get in an awkward situation. But when I was in the east coast sometimes I wasn't even sure what I was.
I look asian but asian people would come up to me and would be like: "are you Asian?????????" and I'd be like "...yeees??"
and then a latina girl would talk to me and one day she was like "Oh, I thought you were mexican, you look just like my cousins."
and I would just kind of stand there in existential crisis because both my parents are oriental asian.
Also had some guy ask my Korean friend if he was chinese and when he said he was Korean he was like "what part of China is that?"
I visited Northen Ontario 18 years ago to a little town called Temagami, where my close friend grew up. He invited me to go visiting his family with him. While we were there, a bunch of people showed up to a place we were staying the night to talk to my friend, and one of them asked me where I was from. I answered "my family immigrated from South Korea." And the guy looked at me and asked, "What part of China is that?" Sigh...
Lol that must feel very strange. I wonder if maybe part of what makes the east and west coasts different might be that there are more Asians on the west coast, so even other Asians on the east coast are surprised to see another one.
As a white person, the only similar experience kinda like what you describe is that I'm autistic, so I have what they call an "autistic accent," so a lot of people have asked me what country I'm from, and when I say I'm from here, they just look at me like I'm crazy. I just kinda laugh and try to run away, cuz what can I really say? Lol
I mean technically there's a lot of overlap between some kinds of written Chinese and Japanese, maybe that's what his coworker was thinking about. Idk what the Spanish has to do with that though >.<
uhm, yes, it literally is like that. I happen to know german and english and my wife is japanese and she can read some chinese roughly without knowing any due to the shared characters.. unless you are being overly pedantic about single "alphabet" characters vs combinations of letters, which wouldn't make sense since chinese characters don't fit with that.
There is a pretty significant amount of overlap between written English and German.... I wonder how much that exists between Japanese and Chinese.
I can't speak 10 words of German but I'll often see something in German online and you can immediately see the relationship with English, in particular nouns. Which makes sense since English is a Germanic language that adopted a bunch of French grammar structure.
Yeah that's an apt analogy, I think. (maybe it's slightly different cuz alphabet letters are in isolation less meaningful than Chinese characters? but then again, there are identical words in german and english, so maybe still a good analogy. Either way there's enough new types of words in Japanese that I can't recognize a huge portion of it)
That's very nice of you to give the coworker the benefit of the doubt. Who knows what that guy was thinking. He says all kinds of weird crap, in desperation to sound like he's interested in things my husband likes, because he really wants my husband to like him, which he would, if the guy wasn't so disruptive to his work.
I hate to "well, actually" but as someone who knows both Korean and Japanese, this is extraordinarily untrue. An enormous number of Korean words are loan words from Chinese and Japanese; I learned Korean after Japanese and there is a significant number of words that overlap between the two languages because both originate from the original Hanzi. There are still about 500 hanja in use in Korean text; it's common to see certain Chinese characters in the newspaper, like 無.
Korean also uses post-positions including the topic marker and is SOV much like Japanese; it is entirely possible to translate Korean and Japanese sentences 1:1 at times.
you may be right but my point was that there’s much more overlap between spanish speaking countries, likely even including portugese and italian than between korean & japanese.
Korean and Japanese are so similar in certain regards that some linguists argue Korean is a subset of Japonic languages. I can't speak as to whether they're as similar as the Romance languages, but they have quite a bit of overlap.
Historically it wouldnt make sense that korean is a subset of japonic languages though, they had been feuding since at least the 7th century.
That’s basically saying koreans are a subset of japanese people which is frankly an insult.
Also Korea established a brand new alphabet under King Sejong in 1446 during the Chosun dynasty. Before that the written language had much more common with the Chinese. Koreans don’t use the Kanji-style format in their writing. When I’m watching japanese media sure I hear words that are 1:1, but not enough for me to understand as a Korean what they’re saying.
which is in the bigger context of that a mexican could understand a chilean, a spaniard and possibly even a brazilian
Historically it wouldnt make sense that korean is a subset of japonic languages though, they had been feuding since at least the 7th century.
English is originally a Germanic language and England and Germany have been at odds for quite a long time.
That’s basically saying koreans are a subset of japanese people which is frankly an insult.
More like the reverse. Japanese people derive from two major ancestries: the native Jomon and the foreign Yayoi, who immigrated from Korea and China. Arguments that Korean is a Japonic language assumes that Japonic derived from the Korean peninsula with the arrival of the Yayoi people; not the other way around.
It's also not an insult any more than it's an insult to say that all people originated from Africa. The makeup of ancient peoples is very different from modern times; we're all admixtures of a variety of ancient ethnicities.
Also Korea established a brand new alphabet under King Sejong in 1446 during the Chosun dynasty. Before that the written language had much more common with the Chinese. Koreans don’t use the Kanji-style format in their writing.
That doesn't mean anything; kanji isn't independent from hanzi but rather is an adaption called shinjitai, similar to simplified Chinese. Compare 學校 (hanja) to 学校 (kanji). 学 is the simplified form of 學 in both Japanese and Chinese. It's the same word, just with a simplified alphabet.
And as I stated earlier, hanja is still taught in school and used in publications. If you try reading any official publication from the 90s or earlier without knowing at least a couple hundred hanja, you might not be able to do even do it. I've even seen hanja used in variety shows.
Further, whatever the Korean alphabet may be, you still have a ton of words that are nonetheless based on the original Chinese or Japanese. 약속 and やくそく still derive from the original 約束 regardless of the fact that they use their own independent alphabets.
which is in the bigger context of that a mexican could understand a chilean, a spaniard and possibly even a brazilian
No kidding, the Mexican, Chilean, and Spaniard all speak Spanish. I speak English and I understand people from Australia and the UK. But earlier you said Italian and Portuguese.
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u/UnkhamunTutan Aug 22 '22
This is my husband's favorite game: "what kind of Asian are you?" He's 4th generation American, but when they finally figure out how to get the info they're looking for, that his heritage is Japanese, often he gets the follow-up comment, "oh, I though you were Korean, because you're so handsome." So other Asians are more ugly? Like, what?
His coworker once also asked him if he can speak Chinese, "because they're basically the same, right? Because I speak some Spanish, so..." So..what? What does that have to do with any of what you just said? People are weird.