I am on my fifth passport, so I’ve done my share of traveling abroad. But most of my international travel has been relatively unadventurous. Spring break trips to England, the Netherlands, Belgium and France with my grandmother. A college term in London. Baltic and Mediterranean cruises. A bus tour of Ireland. An American Bar Association judicial exchange trip to Russia (back when that was possible).
All those trips were well organized, professionally managed and very safe. One foot somewhere else, one foot in the comforts of home. My most adventurous time abroad was the month I spent in China 15 years ago.
The traveling party was me, Nancy Jo, our Chinese-born daughter, two American friends and a family from China we met at the local restaurant they owned. Our Chinese friends wanted to visit family. Nancy Jo and I wanted to show our daughter the country where she was born. All of us wanted to do some sightseeing.
We flew in and out through Hong Kong and stayed at Hong Kong Disneyland. Talk about one foot there, one foot here. On the mainland we visited Fuzhou, Nanping, Changsha, Xi’an, Beijing and Jinan. Our Chinese friends had family in Fuzhou, Nanping and Jinan. Changsha is where Nancy Jo first met our daughter. Xi’an has the terra cotta warriors. Beijing has the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. We all got what we wanted and needed.
The trip made many deep impressions on me. The sights. The sounds. The flavors. I can still taste many of the meals we had, and I can still feel the sting in my throat from inhaling invisible air pollution as I huffed and puffed along the Great Wall, savoring every monumental view.
Of all those indelible memories, one stands out. Several of us were taking a stroll in Nanping, the hometown of one of our friends. Nanping is far off the tourist track, and when we were there, I saw few white faces other than the one looking back at me from the bathroom mirror.
On our stroll, everyone but me ducked into a grocery store to buy snacks. I was carrying a bottle of Coke, so I waited outside where I spent the longest 15 minutes of my life.
As I stood out on the street, the only white guy for miles around, I started to wonder what would happen if a curious police officer were to take an interest in me. I spoke no Chinese. I didn’t know the address of the apartment where we were staying. I didn’t even know the names of our Chinese friend’s mother and father, who were our hosts.
I started getting really really nervous. I prayed for my friends to emerge from the store and release me from my ever-escalating anxiety. Finally they did. But I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had for those 15 minutes when, for the first time in more than 50 years on Earth, I was the Other, stripped of the privilege I had worn every day, for more than five decades, without a second thought.
Ever since that day in Nanping, my uncomfortable 15 minutes as the Other has reminded me that today, in our country, millions of people, many of them people of color who are American citizens or legal residents, spend every minute of every day as the Other, simply trying to get by while swimming against a tide of faces that don’t look like theirs, some of those faces expressing outright hostility.
Nothing bad happened to me in Nanping — simply feeling like the Other was enough to unsettle me. Just imagine that baseline discomfort augmented by words or actions intended to inspire fear. Is sowing the seeds of fear really how our human instincts or spiritual teachings instruct us to treat people we can find a way to identify as not us?
There is a flip side to my China story, our daughter’s side. In China, Nancy Jo was the first to recognize in our daughter the comfort she drew from being surrounded by an ocean of people who looked like her. That was her first chance in 10 years not to be the Other. To our knowledge, our daughter has not faced much discrimination, but one day, when she was about 16, in a field in Concord harvesting produce for her employer, some racial-profiling busybody sent the police to investigate her for picking vegetables while being non-white.
As we can see so clearly today, it is easy to identify someone else as the Other, to make them a “them” in opposition to “us.” But that comes at a cost. When we demonize “them” we diminish ourselves in equal measure. Conversely, when we gaze upon faces that don’t look like our own and see ourselves, we are all enriched, and the world is a better place.