There I sat, a Midwestern American boy—most recently from the small farm state of Iowa—- in a restaurant in China’s “Global City” of six million. (Side fast fact: Iowa has a population density of 20 people per square km, my new home Kowloon, Hong Kong: 44,000 people per square km.) I was the only apparent foreigner in the room, fresh off the plane, and feeling out of place swimming in the unfamiliar sea of Cantonese inflections, chops sticks, and exotic culinary smells. And that’s when the day’s second surprise occurred to me…

…no one seemed to notice.

What I learned my first night and subsequently since my arrival is that when you take a Japanese American nurse and a German American social worker (both of Midwestern American origins), marry them in the 1970’s and ask them to have a child. This first child—when he, at the age of 27, moves to China—will find that everyone thinks he is Chinese. This has come as a surprising answer to the many race related question I had thought about since confirming 10 months earlier that I would move as a Japanese-American person to China. My concerns arising out of the fact that the Japanese and the Chinese have a very long complicated love-hate history stretching back thousands of years (the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) is still fresh in the memories of much of the older generations here in Hong Kong when the Japanese invades major parts of China). I was concerned about which half of the Japanese-American blend they’d choose to see, not whether or not they would see see neither side.

Though some may dismiss my worries as overly guarded, they are not when you are someone whose identity created by others has always revolved around how you are “seen.” In America, especially in the prominently Caucasian Midwest, I stick out everywhere I go. The frequent looks and questioning micro-glances have followed me around for as long as I know. As a child it often bothered me, and all I wanted was to look like “everyone else.” As I grew and matured, I began to see my often unclassifiable race as an asset, and have since prided myself as a guy who is easy to find in a crowd, explaining to new acquaintances when meeting in coffee shops that I’ll be, “the tall Asian guy in khakis.” I have never taken the looks and glances as insulting, but as a confirmation of being different, distinguishable, and memorable.

But here I am a foreigner in a foreign land, unable to speak the language, unknowledgeable of its history, new to its culture, naive to its nuances, and as different as I am, for the first time in my life, I looked just like everyone else.