"Ching Chong, Ching Chong, Ding Dong, Ding Dong"

Before I get into the weeds of relating a recent experience, it's important to understand something about me. I am super white. I couldn't be a whole lot "whiter" in appearance. My skin is very pale. I have blue eyes. My hair is very long and red-blonde (though streaked through enough with white to look closer to blonde these days). My eyebrows are the same color as my hair. I've been told that I have a very "English" face by a British person. I have a long, high-bridged now and a long face. I'm also an endomorphic pear-shaped person (which is to say, I'm fat and squishy like many middle-aged ladies). I've done very little research into my family history, but my sister claims my family is a muttly mix of Scotch, Irish, and German. My family name either means "day laborer" or "sexton" (a sort of grave digger/maintainer) which feels about right for my social status growing up.

There is pretty much zero chance that anyone is going to mistake me for a person of Asian descent. This is the reason that I'm telling you about how white I am. You'd have to be utterly stupid to think I came from China or have very atypical notions of what it means to be Chinese.

Not an hour ago, I was walking down the street from the local library to my apartment. I went there to use their change machines for quarters to do my laundry. The machines are meant to dispense change for copies, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to occasionally feed them dollar bills to clean my stinky britches. Today, I'm wearing a shirt that I picked up at a shop called "Daiso Japan". It's got a graphic on one side of three monkeys in a vertical line. The top one has his hands covering his eyes and it says, in Japanese characters, "See no evil". The next has his hands over his ears and it says, "Hear no evil" and the last, you guessed it, has his mouth covered and, again, in Japanese, it says, "Speak no evil." The joke of the shirt comes in the last bit where a final monkey has his hands over his crotch and, instead of a Japanese phrase, there are just three question marks next to the picture.

I picked up this shirt because I lived in Japan for a long time and they felt that they invented this monkey concept and I saw it many times. I don't know what culture actually spawned the idea of "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" or who decided that it was good to illustrate it with cute animals, but I have a feeling it is one of those things which may have simultaneously developed in various cultures independently. Humans, being of a similar bent psychologically, do that far more often than people realize.

As I'm walking down the street, a man who couldn't have been younger than 24 and was likely no older than 32, is walking in the opposite direction. As he approaches me, he says, "ching chong, ching chong, ding dong, ding dong." You can now see why I made it clear how whiter than a bar of Ivory soap that I am. He was not saying this to me because he thought I was Asian. It could only be a reaction to my shirt.

I resisted the impulse to say that the shirt was Japanese, not Chinese, and that his racist babble was improperly directed. The situation was very peculiar, to say the least. If I could have been mistaken in any way for a person of Asian descent, it would have been a straight up racist move on that dimwit's part, but that could not have been the case. Why would he say such a thing?

I thought this over and I can only conclude that it was an act of social ineptitude. He noticed the shirt and saw the characters. For some reason, he felt compelled to say something to let me know that he noticed the fact that it had what he concluded were Chinese characters (they actually are Chinese - the Japanese appropriated them and changed their pronunciation, but they are the same actual characters, but the language is clearly Japanese to anyone who knows the difference). Instead of saying something like, "cool shirt," he uttered this bizarre nonsense.

I lived outside of America for a very long time and I live now in an extremely racially diverse and relatively progressive area. There are lots of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Hispanic, and, yes, even white, people in this area. There are far fewer African Americans, but they are not uncommon either. I can't imagine someone living in this area with exposure to such diversity would knowingly say such a racist thing while fully comprehending how racist it is. On the other hand, there's been a fair bit of media brouhaha about it in the not too distant past with both Rosie O'Donnell and Stephen Colbert taking some heat and getting some attention for saying those very words.

Colbert knew it was offensive, but used it for satirical purposes. O'Donnell professed genuine confusion and ignorance of how bad it was. She said she really, truly did not know it would offend. The thing is, I believe her. I live din Japan for many years and there were numerous occasions when Japanese people did things which were racist or rude and it was never their intention to be either. They often did them in a way which they felt displayed their admiration of me ("You can eat with chopsticks! That's so great!") or were genuine attempts to connect with me in some fashion ("Americans love hamburgers. I love hamburgers, too!"). They didn't know what a microaggression was nor did they comprehend that applying stereotypes was offensive.

Even if what is done is not meant to be offensive, it doesn't change the fact that it is offensive. In Japan, I gave up on calling people on their actions when they applied to me because it was too frequent and the culture did not support any sort of education in this regard. It was largely impossible to get through to people. I only talked about it with people who were going abroad so that they'd know they shouldn't say such things while traveling. In America, I think people should know better by now, but I am not so sure they do. That guy who made his "ching chong" comment to me may have been trying to be racist, but given my near translucent coloring, I think he was just a dumb ass saying something awkward to a stranger in response to a T-shirt.