The Multi-Ethnic Face

Hallo... one of my cool cousins flies out from New York to San Francisco on a business trip and calls me up to connect. Having made a dinner reservation at a classy Japanese restaurant in SF, we walk in and my cousin greets the Spanish-looking Spanish-name-tag-wearing hostess with a happy and loud "Konichiwa!" - Japanese for 'hello' followed by some other phrase I didn't comprehend.

The hostess smiles and takes us to our table. Then curiosity gets the best of her so she asks, "Where are you from?" as if to imply that non-Japanese looking people should not speak Japanese.

"We are from Zimbabwe,” my cousin states confidently, patriotic passion poring through her body language. The hostess raises her eyebrows in disbelief and expresses her mistrust with a couple of head nods swung left to right.

Before she can verbalize herself, my cousin jumps to explain, “My father is a white European who moved to Zimbabwe a long time ago. He met and married my mother there.”

“Oh, okay!” the hostess says, indicating she now finds our ethnicity a bit more believable and probably true.

At dinner we were from Zimbabwe, at lunch we were from Mongolia, and at breakfast in a little coffee shop we were from Romania. Around the world in 12 hours and we worked hard to convince people into believing us! I love this game. Try it sometime, for it is a lot of fun.

In reality, it is no longer strange to wear a certain face and be from a non-face-matching nation. For starters, I know of an ethnic Indonesian man from Holland, an ethnic Japanese woman from Norway, and an ethnic Punjabi Indian man from Germany.

Common ground? None of them have lived in their face-matching nations and solely follow the culture of the nation they were nurtured in. They acculturated even though they still fall under the category of minority in their homeland.

Our planet is one big multi-ethnic ball of people, and who is to say who is from where just by looking at their face, huh? Think about it – what does an American look like? What is the face of a Londoner like? White, black, brown, green, purple...? Tomorrow, I shall be from Venezuela... because it sounds exciting!

-zensufi-