pantsfarm

Another Quora link. I guess it’s good that most people I know are also active there because I guess until then these links will be pretty meaningless to everybody else.

Anyway… What is it like to be a hapa in an Asian country?

One thing for me has occasionally been the expectation of language skills. I learned no Chinese growing up and occasionally this is seen as a failure on my mother’s part. This however I suspect is not unique to being a hapa in China as I know this happens for many Asian Americans in Asia as well.

There seems to be this assumption that 混血兒 (mixed blood) people are smarter and better looking. I can’t really tell if this is just something that people say as flattery or if this is a widely held belief, though I am coming to suspect the latter.

My experience has mainly been one of a (white) foreigner in an Asian country and less so a hapa in an Asian country though. I guess unlike an actual white foreigner though, I do occasionally get mistaken for minority Chinese until I screw up in conversation and say something only a foreigner would say.

On second thought, being a hapa I find I get a lot of passes where somebody who was either fully Asian or fully something else would not. For every time I’m told the Chinese half of my family has failed to instill me with Chinese language and culture, I’ve no doubt there are many instances of it simply being chalked up to my non-Chinese half/upbringing.

In basically any situation I can choose to emphasize one half over the other as it suits me, which affords me a nice degree of flexibility and eases dodging any sort of ethnicity based assumptions that would work against me.

Edited after Owen’s answer: The above refers pretty much entirely to my experience in China. Elsewhere in Asia (India, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam) I am pretty much 100% white guy foreigner, probably in no small part as a consequence of spending my time in those countries as an obvious tourist.

Note June 8: updated here because I updated it there too.