Today after work I ran some errands with some of my Nashville family. It was the usual mix of the planned and the unplanned. Intersections of poverty and healthy food choices and limited resources and budgeting. And I didn't especially think of it in these terms before, but Panera is definitely a middle-class institution.
Anyway, the most unexpected moment was when I was with a child in a Chinese restaurant. We were waiting for a take-out order that we had just placed, and the child first asked me if I was Chinese. I told them that I was Japanese. A few minutes later, the child asked me, somewhat tentatively (I had to ask again to be sure that I heard it right), "How come all Chinese people look alike?"
I rhetorically but gently asked back, "How would you feel if I asked you, 'How come all black people look alike?' Do you think that all black people look alike?" I said a few more things about how I didn't think that all Chinese people looked alike, or all black people or all white people for that matter, and how if you see more and more of them, you start to see the differences. I'm not sure that the child got what I was getting at, but I think that the child's mother did get my point, so there's that, at least.
I honestly wasn't that offended, and I appreciated the little teaching moment that presented itself. But it was a reminder that you have to learn to engage with difference--it's not something that just comes naturally. Granted, it was a child who asked the question, so perhaps it's not as sad as if an adult had asked it. But the thing that struck me, in part because it was a child who asked, was that it points to how, from the start, we don't by default look at others the way we look at ourselves--I don't say about my own people group, "well, I think we all look the same." We don't recognize the common denominator of our being made in God's image--all of us uniquely (and beautifully). And on an everyday level, that's something that I lose sight of plenty of times, not just with strangers but even with my friends whom I can judge and look down on for whatever reason at any given moment. Mea culpa.
Otherwise, the Chinese restaurant was also an interesting little side lens on the immigrant experience in America: there was a seating area near the main entrance where the tables had been set up with a portable DVD player and various toys for keeping the employees' children occupied while their parents worked.
Eventually I came home and went for a short run.
And then watched Conan's first show.
☺
