Reading as Local

The map of warm and cold countries has a missing piece: the person carrying it. Most foreigners travel behind a face that announces them — the reception, warm or cold, arrives pre-sorted, guest-shaped, before a word is spoken. Some faces announce nothing at all. Mine reads as local almost everywhere in Asia, which sounds like an advantage and lives like something else.

The signals scatter across half the world. A whole life lived in a white neighborhood — I consider myself 100% white, whatever the ethnicity says, and the ethnicity ties to the Asian continent, through parents from a Southeast Asian country that often catches racism, as most Southeast Asian countries do. The mannerisms are White American. The clothes are Japanese-ish. Taiwan was home for a while, and the Chinese stuck. No single category survives contact with the whole list — and categories are exactly what receptions run on.

“Everyman” can be a curse. Blend in too well and you’re not distinct enough to be categorized as coming from any particular country — you simply read as local wherever you stand. The wardrobe pages call the style Everyman but distinct, and the “but distinct” is doing more work than it looks. A local face gets local expectations: none of the foreigner’s grace, none of the guest-warmth, and every mis-read lands on the person underneath. The fight is daily — to be seen as someone more than what Asia tends to label me as.

So the culture heuristics in these pages are wanted, not incidental. Making readings of cultures is something I want to do, and something I’ve earned — as a person who has literally lived his whole life trying his best not to be judged. The world spent decades running its heuristics on me; these pages are the reading running the other way.

None of the categories held, and the life got built anyway — mannerisms from one continent, clothes from another, a language from a third. We all transcend who we wish, or don’t, depending on our path and choices in life.