This White Devil Right Here

Romeo Must Die, Rush Hour and Cradle 2 the Grave. Three movies with Chinese and black characters and all three were on TV today. What does this mean? Is it a holiday honoring Jet Li, Jackie Chan, DMX and Chris Tucker? Are black folks about to sign some sort of alliance or treaty with China?

No, have no fear. It only means it's still Black History Month since February is not over yet. And now, it's also Chinese New Year. Welcome to the Year of the Pig!

Hmm...Come to think of it, what a combination. Y'all soul food lovers better get ready to cook up a vat of chitlins.

Since the Chinese Zodiac goes in 12 year cycles, I have some very good memories of the last time the Year of the Pig was around. If you know me in real life, you know that twelve years ago, I lived at 56 Sui Yin Lu in Guangzhou, PRC. That's the People's Republic of China.

Living in China was one of the toughest things I've ever done and one of the best things too. I didn't really know what to expect before I got there. Even though I'd read my Lonely Planet book from cover to cover a dozen times, I still wasn't really prepared for life there. For one thing, everyone was Chinese. I mean, you know that going there, but then you see the reality of it. There weren't any black people, no Puerto Ricans, nobody from Hungary or Poland, no rivers being dyed green on St. Patrick's Day. Nope, nothing but Chinese people all around.

You have to understand, twelve years ago, China was not as politically or culturally open as it is today. The Internet as we know it today, was just starting to get going. And, in a city with millions of people in it, there were two McDonald's and one Pizza Hut. There was no Starbucks to be found. There wasn't even a Wal-Mart in China yet. Not even a real shopping mall either.

Even though Guangzhou is the size of LA, there were no freeways because most people didn't own cars back then. I sometimes saw other expats or foreign businessmen if I decided to bike down to the central financial district where the McDonald's was. Sometimes I got a serious craving for scrambled eggs and pancakes and I'd splurge and bike over to the ultra posh Garden Hotel. There'd always be a couple of foreign businessmen there from France, Australia or the UK sitting at the restaurant table next to mine. Sometimes they were friendly, particularly the guys from France. Sometimes they weren't. I often got the feeling that many of them were on the prowl for Chinese prostitutes.

I remember that at the time, Hong Kong was still under British control and my phone calls to and from the U.S. were regularly tapped. I used to laugh a little at the telltale clicking and the occasional sneezes and coughs that indicated that someone was listening in on my phone calls. I suppose the phone updates from friends and family on what was happening with the OJ Simpson trial must have seemed like some sort of big American state secrets.

My life was not as glamorous as that. After all, I was only an English teacher at a private Chinese boarding school. The biggest change was that even though I was constantly stared at, it was the first time in my life that I didn't feel the kind of racism that we get so used to here in the United States. I was still black, but I stopped being black. Sounds confusing, I know, but let me try to explain: Since I didn't look like Michael Jordan or Whitney Houston, people didn't know where to put me racially. They didn't automatically think I was black. In fact, no one ever thought I was even an American because at the time, the perception was that all Americans had blond hair and blue eyes. Actually, to go even deeper, people didn't initially care where I was from. They just knew I wasn't Chinese.

If someone followed me around a store, they weren't following me because they were worried I was going to steal something. No, they were following me around because they were curious about what a foreigner would buy. No one suggested that I only got into college because of affirmative action. No one told me that my hair was ugly or that it would look better straighter. In fact, Chinese people loved my hair because it was so very different in texture from their own. Hairdressers at the shop by my apartment building got into arguments over who'd have the privilege of doing my hair. And, if I didn't see any women that looked like me on fashion magazine covers, it was no big deal because, well, there wasn't really anyone else that looked liked me around and there were billions of Chinese people.

Like I said, in China, the only thing that mattered was that I wasn't Chinese. I was simply a "guai lo" (Cantonese) or a "lao wei" (Mandarin), both of which translate into "white devil". Or, nowadays when people are trying to be PC, they say, "foreign devil". Oh, sometimes I wished Louis Farrakhan was standing next to me getting called a white devil, just so I could laugh.

Most of the time, when I rode my bike for hours around the city, I went into lots of the neighborhoods that are off the touristy path. So many rural Chinese come to Guangzhou looking for work that there were lots of folks who'd never before seen someone in person who wasn't Chinese. I got into seven bike accidents in China and half of them were with people who would freak out when they realized that a "lao wei" was biking alongside them. They'd start shrieking, "Lao wei! Lao wei!" And then, next thing you know, their handlebars would lock with mine and they'd be toppling over on top of me. And then all the bikes that had been riding along behind me would crash on top of me too. They'd apologize, and to save face, they'd invite me for tea. I actually made a couple of good friends that way.

And then, I came back to the United States shortly before the OJ Simpson verdict was read. As happy as I was to see so many of my friends and family, deep down, I was fiercely depressed and wanted to leave again. I wanted to get away from a country divided so insistently along racial lines. I wanted to go back to a place where no one was saying to me, "Do you feel proud that your people got OJ Simpson off because of fear that there's going to be another LA Riots?"

Now, twelve years later, the Year of the Pig has rolled back around. I read over at Field Negro's blog about the racial divides in the blogosphere: It's being called the whiteosphere and the blackosphere. Then, I see how charged conversations about Barack Obama are becoming. "Barack can't win if he seems like he cares too much about black people" or, "Barack's a separatist because he attends a black church." I see how revelers go celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but it feels like someone's trying to brush away the real history of a city that used to be majority black. And it all makes me wonder if China, with her new openness, has lost some of that innocence she once had.

When I was in Guangzhou, all I had to say was that I bought something in America and people would love it. I'd buy a shirt in a Guangzhou street market and if I told people I got it in Guangzhou, they'd think it was ok. But, if I told them that I'd bought the shirt in America, they'd say it was the cutest shirt they'd ever seen. I wanted to tell them, don't love all that we Americans have to offer you. Don't absorb our culture so quickly.

China has a Wal-Mart and Starbucks now, but please, I pray they don't take everything we Americans want to give. We here in America like to say to ourselves, "I'm not a racist". Because we're all living in racially integrated neighborhoods, right? And we all have a diverse group of friends that we hang out with outside of work, right? And we date or marry people regardless of their racial background, right?

In China, I could see only having Chinese friends, etc., because that's all that's around. Here though, what's our excuse?