Positive Liberty

“So tell me, why are you guys so Asian, anyway?”

Still chewing my last bite of ma-po tofu, I pondered the question. Scott and I were having dinner at a friend’s apartment. A first-generation Taiwanese-American, our friend had invited us to play go with his visiting grandfather, who speaks no English. The grandfather had been astonished to find two Americans so enthusiastic about the game, and as we talked over dinner, it soon became clear that our Asian cultural interests were a lot wider than most people of our, um, genetic stock.

“To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about it,” I said. And yet if being Asian were a crime, Scott and I would have a lot of explaining to do. By blood we’re just typical Euro-American mutts, but you might never guess it if you couldn’t see our skin color.

In the mornings I drink green Japanese tea, and for dinner we’re as likely to use chopsticks as a knife and fork. There’s a half gallon of kimchi in the fridge and a pint of miso paste. I recently bought some high-quality kitchen knives, mostly so I can make my own sushi.

Scott grows bonsai trees and makes homebrew sake, a batch of which is bubbling away behind me even as I type. We both play go, Chinese chess, and mah jong. We’ve also recently taken up Chinese-style ink painting.

We each have our areas of expertise, to be sure. Scott always wins at Chinese chess and mah jong, but I win at go, and for reasons that I can’t fully explain, I’m a natural at the ink painting. I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I don’t have any real masterpieces yet, but the strokes and techniques–use this much ink, and that much water, press here, not there, maybe three more strokes until I have to reload the brush–just seem intuitive to me.

Mah jong is intuitive for Scott. He just wins all the time. The other day we bought a set of stunning mah jong tiles on E-bay. They’ve got a very 1950s look, with transparent plastic backs that reveal a shimmering metal fabric beneath. Orientalist imports are the only things in the world allowed to glitter like that, and these certainly do.

Thankfully the tiles were made in the era when you could still get good quality plastic. They’re heavy and solid, like a good chess set, and I suspect that they’re nearly indestructible. In retrospect they might have been worth more unopened, but it’s too late for that now. Ten games in, and Scott’s won seven of them–with two draws and one doubtful win to my name. We’d also love to find company to play with: Four-player mah jong is much better than two.

Like I said, if being Asian were a crime, we’d be in a lot of trouble.

So now for the question that drives the whole essay: Are we doing this stuff because we just happen, by some extraordinary chance, to like all of these things on their own merits? Or are we doing them because we fetishize the exotic, because at some level we’re elitists who want to set ourselves apart from the ignorant masses? Or is it somehow patronizing to go in for all this stuff, demeaning to lump together the many diverse cultures that created them–Am I practicing a kind of genteel, affected racism, in that I like Korean kimchi, Japanese sushi, Chinese-American mah jong, and a good hot Thai curry every so often? Is some crabbed corner of my mind lumping “those people” all together, and placing some nice, reassuring label on them?

I’ve thought a lot about these things recently, in part because of the disturbing questions above, and in part because of the Implicit Association Test, a test that supposedly reveals the subconscious racist assumptions that nearly everyone carries within them.

A typical test flashes on your computer screen a series of words; half are words generally deemed “good” or “bad;” the other half are names that are associated with a given racial group. The test measures how quickly you can pair the names with the words in various combinations.

There are also variant IATs for religion and sexuality. There’s even a test comparing George W. Bush and Franklin Roosevelt, one which I have not yet taken.

By measuring an individual’s reaction time when manipulating the various names and value-laden words, it’s thought that implicit associations can be revealed that the person himself may not even be aware of. The researchers running the test have found an apparently remarkable fact: White and even Asian people tend to find it easier to pair “good” words to “white” names. Blacks show no such preference, although the data for black people is still inconclusive. Intriguingly, people of all ages show a strong tendency to pair “good” words with youth, while a gender-based IAT shows that women are more easily associated with the liberal arts, while men are more easily associated with the sciences.

So how did I do on the IAT? I’ve only taken some of the fourteen IATs at the site, but in most the ones I’ve taken, I’ve had no implicit biases whatsoever. My measurable implicit associations are roughly equal for blacks and whites, for young and old–and for Asians and whites.

I’m at a loss to explain it, because I know I encountered at least some pro-white racism in my formative years. Granted, I don’t believe it now, but I still figured some of it would be up there somewhere. If it is, the test can’t find it. Maddeningly, I’m left exactly where I started: Whatever racism or racial preferences I may or may not exhibit are purely my own damn fault.

Once I also took a now-defunct IAT measuring self-centeredness versus other-centeredness, and here I found the one place where I’ve got a measurable implicit association: I strongly prefer myself over others. Given that I am a philosophical egoist, I’m not surprised. Rational self interest is also my explicit attitude, and to tell the truth I was faintly satisfied to find that my subconscious was keeping up with it all. Additionally, this finding suggests that the other results–showing no implicit racial or age biases–are correct.

I know better than to get all lyrical about the “Asian sensibility.” It’s nonsense, of course. There isn’t any one American sensibility–and there’s a lot more cultural diversity over there than over here. And let’s not forget that I’d definitely prefer America when it comes to greater personal liberties, economic freedoms, and limits on the power of government. Somehow, though, all of that is beside the point when choosing my hobbies.

So… What’s with the kimchi, the bonsai, the mah jong? I still don’t know. We’re not doing it to impress anyone or to fit in with a crowd. Neither of us have any Asian travel experience, and we don’t (yet) speak the languages. I can only barely recognize a few characters of Chinese, just enough to get me started on the ink painting. Next to “real” Asians–like our friend and his family–Scott and I must seem odd indeed.

Perhaps one day it won’t matter, and I won’t have to ask myself these annoying questions. Maybe then, in the far-distant future, race will no longer arbitrarily associate skin color with a set of constraining cultural dictates. Maybe–after our children’s children’s children are all a nice, uniform tan color–race will be nothing more than a very loose set of affinities, adopted taken off again as we see fit, following the inscrutable, unmeasurable dictates of the soul. In that great future time, the one that we all dimly know is coming, there might not be anything threatening about race. And perhaps there need not be anything threatening about it now.