race, and being asian, in Rio

It’s been awhile since I last wrote. The itinerary for my trip has come into focus recently. I will be in Rio for another week. Next Wednesday I travel to Sao Paolo, the capital of Brasil and the 3rd largest city in the world, with 25 million people. I will stay there for a week before heading down to Buenos Aires. Sao Paolo is the commercial and economic center of Brasil and is where the major national and multi-national corporations are located. Within Brasil, Paulistas (as those from SP are called) are known for working hard and playing hard. Cariocas (as those in Rio are called) view Paulistas as workaholics that don’t have any fun. Paulistas view Cariocas as lazy and hedonistic.

There’s no denying that the landlocked SP lacks the natural beauty of Rio, but I am looking forward to seeing the city, not just because of its size, but also its diversity. SP has large Japanese and Eastern European populations. To my surprise, I have found Rio to be a somewhat insular and provincial city, with little ethnic diversity to speak of beyond the somewhat ubiquitous blend of African/European/Indigenous that one associates with the classically Brasilian look. As an Asian, the lack of other Asian faces and the quizzical looks and minor harassment I have encountered as a result of my Asian appearance have left me feeling distinctly out of place here, in ways that I have rarely felt in the urban centers of the US or Europe. For instance, while on the beach in Ipanema with a couple of friends from school, two kids came up to me and started making kung fu maneuvers for about a full minute. And a woman at a bar came up to me and after staring at me for a couple of seconds, raised her fingers to the outer edges of her eyes, and pulled outward to create the effect of slanted-eyes. There have been a few other similar instances and it’s all combined to give me the sense that Brasilians in Rio gain most of their understanding about Asians from television and movies, not from real life. And in the three weeks I’ve been here, I could count the number of Asians I have seen in Rio on two hands.

Brasil prides itself on being a country where race does not matter. But the truth I have found is clearly much more complicated than that. A black student at my language school was refused entry into a club until they realized she was an American. I heard the statistic that only 2% of blacks in Brasil go on to college and that more than 50% live in poverty. Such statistics, startling for any country, destroys any notion that race does constitute a large part of one’s destiny here.

I do sense that there exists less race consciousness here than in the U.S., a difference that seems to allow people across the racial spectrum to engage with one another in way that is less burdened and less cautious than back home. There is a smaller distinction between black and white as most people here are some shade of brown. An African family from Bahia in northern Brasil lives with my host family here in Copacabana and it doesn’t feel like a big deal.

After it abolished slavery in 1889 (becoming the last country in the world to do so), Brasil, unlike the U.S., did not institute a legal system of segregation. People of all colors were free to mingle, use the same restrooms, and ride the same buses. Though the legacy of segregation in the U.S. is large and varied, it seems clear to me that the system contributed to the primacy of race in the American psyche. The lack of a de jure system of segregation in Brasil could be one reason, among many, that a stronger racial consciousness failed to develop here even though racial inequity persisted.

I wonder whether Brasil’s belief in its own racial harmony is a good thing. On the one hand, racism is real here and consciousness of this racism by blacks and whites is a necessary step towards eradicating it. Yet, there is something different here that is hard to grasp but feels nice and lighter. In my own experience, race consciousness comes from something real and from an awareness of the ways, small and large, that being part of a racial minority, or at a more essential level, being different, affects one’s sense of self. At the same time, I have found that hyper race consciousness (that is, using my race to explain all the ways that my life is not the way I’d like it to be) debilitates me and further alienates me from others. I see this as the special challenge of growing up as a minority: balancing remaining sensitive to the ways in which race can affect oneself while remaining open and trusting enough to recognize that not all people see you as a color. Dignity and self-worth are precious commodities in this process, easily lost.

Being here has in many ways thrust back into my face the fact of my ethnicity and my race. I am only partly an American here. More so, I am Asian, at times Japanese and other times Chinese. It makes undeniable sense that others would see me first as some kind of Asian, but logic can be unwanted,especially when the brasilian conception of asian-ness doesn't get much deeper than what they see in american movies and on television. It speaks to the diversity and sophistication of the communities I have been a part of (at Harvard, in San Francisco) and the degree to which I have become accustomed to such diversity, that my experiences here have come as such a shock to the system. Yet, their reminder is also useful to me, I think. That perhaps my desire to be seen as an American deserves further exploration. That perhaps there is part of my ethnic inheritance that I have yet to understand and therefore, yet to accept and embrace. I don’t know the answers at this point, but the openness I feel to considering and exploring the questions seems like an opportunity.