By sheldonwongg
One of the things I wasn’t prepared for when I came to Nepal was the mistaking of my identity and how common it would be. Pretty much from day one, people came up to me speaking Nepali and mistaking for a plethora of ethnicities. Coming from a strong Chinese American heritage and the diverse culture of the United States, the case of mistaken identity in Nepal was an unexpected challenge I’ve had to navigate in during my time here. In the US, I almost never get mistaken as anything other than Chinese and if I do, most people have a pretty easy time understand how I can be Chinese AND American. Here in Nepal, people’s gut reaction is to assume that I’m Nepali, and since I interact with a lot of Tibetans, I often blend in with them as well. When I tell them I’m Chinese and I’m from America, I can see the gears in their brain working. They ask, “But where are you from from?” Or “But where are your parents from?” Even though I’m ethnically Chinese, my parents were born in Vietnam and escaped as refugees during the war. Often times, they walk away more confused than before and at first, I was frustrated with my lack of ability to effectively communicate the complex history of my family. It took a lot of thinking to fully comprehend how, even though Nepal is multiethnic and multilingual, the populations perceptions of identities and physical appearance weren’t as detached as mine were. Their perceptions of Americans stems from this idealization of whiteness and despite the reality of America being an extremely diverse country, the fantasy that exists in their minds have a hard time accepting this. By no means is this phenomenon their fault, they are only reflecting what they have been acculturated to, but does bring up the larger questions of what validates a person identity and how that relates in a larger context.