I was packing for my trip, drinking wine and listening to an embarrassing amount of Disney music (and also maybe singing an embarrassing amount) when I was struck with a memory of the last time I’d been to Europe. I was in Marseilles, walking to a bar with a German and an American, both white men when some guy ran up to me. He stopped maybe three inches in front of me.
My immediate reaction was to grab my purse and reach for my keys, just in case. But he just looked confused. And very, very drunk.
“Why are you hanging out with them? They’re white, you’re black.”
I walked past him, temporarily abandoning my friends who were immobilized by shock. They realized I kept moving and they ran up to me. I laughed because I was so uncomfortable. And they laughed because they were uncomfortable too.
I hadn’t had too many of those interactions when I was abroad, but when I did, I remembered. This time, I’ll be traveling with my boyfriend Brian, who’s Chinese-American. It’ll be his first time in Europe, and I thought about how we might be exposed to similarly uncomfortable experiences.
I can already hear it: “An Indian chick and a Chinese dude? You don’t usually see that.”
And I wish I could tell them it was a completely normal thing because it feels normal, but honestly, I don’t usually see Indian-Chinese couples either. It’s as if the Himalaya formed a social barrier, in addition to a physical barrier, between the two countries.
In my experience, when I talk to fellow Asian-Americans about what we have in common, we talk about our shared struggles. How people assume we’re pushovers how we’re not considered super hot by the media. And we’re apparently all good at math (Tangent: I have a real fear of mental math). I sometimes feel like these damaging stereotypes are our only common ground. Don’t get me wrong, having a community in which to analyze said stereotypes and temporarily relieve myself from them is invaluable. But it’s not intimate.
Brian and I are in a relationship, something that’s meant to be inherently intimate. Sometimes though, it does feel like our relationship is American – there’s not much Indian or Chinese influence. I mean, he does bhangra, an Indian dance, and I work for One in a Billion, a podcast geared towards Chinese-American millennials, but we don’t do either of those together. It makes me feel like our relationship is intimate despite the fact that I’m Indian and he’s Chinese.
So I searched for a memory that was cultural, where he was Chinese-American and I was Indian-American. I remember one time, I was maybe imitating my mom, and I said “Ayo.” He looked up at me and said, “Aya?” I explained to him how “Ayo” was a Telugu exclamation for “oh no.” He told me “Aya” meant the same thing in Chinese. Both words were so close to each other, we just kept repeating them. And we still repeat those words to each other. “Aya.” “Ayo.”
I’m not sure there’s much etymological similarity between Indian and Chinese languages. I tried to look it up, and I couldn’t find that much information. That didn’t surprise me – I sometimes feel the reason I can only talk to other Asian-Americans about shared struggles is because we don’t often have a multifaceted exchange of ideas. I can obviously only speak for my experiences, as an Indian-American woman who currently lives in Boston, who went to a state school and has a group of friends that represented a variety of identities. Plus, I don’t know much about Sino-Indian geopolitical relations, though after writing this blog post I’d be interested to learn more.
The ironic thing is that Brian doesn’t speak Cantonese, and I barely speak Telugu. So maybe we’re in this unique position of ignorance where there isn’t a greater exchange of ideas between our cultures. But we both want to learn, and we slowly learn about ourselves through each other. I tell him stories I remember from Hinduism, and then we read the Wikipedia page together to see how right I was. He’ll tell me about the difference between Hong Kong food and mainland-Chinese food. And we both ask our parents more about what it was like for them growing up in their home country.
So maybe “Aya” “Ayo” is a little bridge, but it’s a start. I want to remember that for our trip, in case someone points out our differences before our similarities.