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I was playing volleyball at the beach, and a few elementary-aged kids rode by saying “ching chong ching chong.”
I often get the question of “where are you from?” To which I respond “New York.” Occasionally, I’ll get the follow-up, scaffolded question of “where are you really from?”
One of my friends calls me chink, and I let him do it.
I am a first-generation American of Chinese descent and could say that any of these things offend me. But I would be lying, and I frankly think there are far greater things to worry about in my day to day life.
In most of these off-hand comments or jokes about my race, I stay silent. In fact, sometimes I laugh at jokes about Asian and Chinese stereotypes, and even pile onto the discussion with my own experience growing up in a Chinese family and in a Chinese community. When someone asks me “where are you really from,” I like to let them guess and laugh at the responses as well as what my appearance dictates. In fact, I let my high school students guess at my ethnicity in summer school because they were curious — I got Korean, Vietnamese, and Filipino before they got the right answer.
