This happened a few months ago. At that time, I had a chance to go to a British city (let’s call it City E) for a student event, and I traveled there and back by train with two other people from my UK university, A and B. In City E, we stayed in a hostel together. Here are my thoughts a few days after the trip.

On the train there, while B and I were chatting, we found out that we actually stayed in the same dorm at our university last summer, so she told me about a Chinese student she met there, whose name starts with the letter “D”, and who was studying math. It took her quite a bit of thinking to actually remember D’s full name, and then I realized that we actually knew each other, so I was surprised, “He’s Chinese? I thought he was either Malaysian or Singaporean.” Because D and I talked about the Malaysian education system and how when he was in Malaysia, he somehow skipped a grade because his school changed when each school year started. That’s when B said, “Oh, D should be indeed Chinese, but he went to school in Malaysia.” Then she said, “You can just ask, right? Ask him if he’s Chinese. I sometimes also ask people if they’re German or something”—because B is German. I replied that I don’t like asking that because there’re a lot of different Asian faces on campus and it’s like I’m assuming that he’s Chinese. Then B went, “But you’re not assuming it, you’re just asking.”

I genuinely admire B’s straightforwardness and how she manages to quickly start conversations and make new friends, but it still doesn’t feel right to me. If one doesn’t have a guess or prejudgement in mind, the question they ask shouldn’t be “Are you Chinese?” but “Where are you from? “. I also don’t like it when people ask me questions with such preconceived impressions and ethnical or national backgrounds, because these questions more or less carry the questioner’s stereotypical image of people from a certain country, as well as presumed connections between those stereotypes and how the other person behaves.

When B couldn’t think of D’s name, I joked around, “Hmm… Someone that has a name that starts with D and studies math… That’s so specific! There’re so many Chinese students at our university, there’s no way I’m going to know who it is.” Then she somehow got reminded of this and started complaining, “I don’t know why so many Chinese people just make friends with other Chinese and only talk to each other in Chinese. Wouldn’t that mean that they’ve come all the way here (to the UK) for nothing?” I’ve really heard this kind of thing too much, no matter from foreigners or Chinese people, so I replied, briefly and kind of indirectly, “I don’t quite understand, but maybe that’s because there’re indeed a lot of Chinese people, and communicating only with Chinese people is already enough (to fulfill any social needs); and from the most utilitarian point of view, a lot of Chinese people are going back to China after graduation, so they need to network with Chinese people much more rather than with foreigners.” What I didn’t say at the time was, who wouldn’t feel it’s smoother and more relaxing to socialize and talk in their native language?

Thinking about this conversation now, after a few days, and also about another awkward conversation that I had on the day of the student event with C, a foreign student who I just got to know at the time, I felt more and more uncomfortable. Even if both sides in a conversation share the intention of being friendly, some people just don’t vibe; some people just don’t resonate. Why does it matter where people are from when making friends? What matters if C is a foreigner? What matters if A and B are foreigners? They are all foreigners to me, but if we don’t get along, we don’t get along. If we get along, then we get along. I grew up with the vast majority of people I knew being Chinese, and not all of them became friends with me either—of course!

That sort of reminds me of when I was at the youth hostel in City E. As A, B and I were going back to our room together, a white lady who seemed to be a staff member of the hostel stopped us and asked me and/or A, “Are you from China or Japan?” After A took on the heavy task of having a small talk and answered that it was Japan, the lady said that she knew that a lot of people in China were learning martial arts, and that she’d heard from the Japanese guy in one of the couples at the hostel that there were also a lot of people learning martial arts in Japan. Then she started to ask A a whole load of questions about Japanese judo, kendo, karate, and so on, almost non-stop. Asking if it’s something that a lot of people learn in Japan, if they learn it at school, if A himself could do kendo, all sorts of things. She went on and on. Eventually, the lady ends her long list of questions by saying that she asked because she loves martial arts and she thinks people should ask each other more questions about culture, and that “different cultures think differently and there’s cultural psychology”.

As soon as we got back to the room, A said that he didn’t really like kendo at all, even though he’d taken it in school, but the lady was so passionate that he couldn’t say that in front of her. We all cracked up laughing.

Looking back, I was quite unhappy when I heard those questions - even though A was the one who was asked, and the topic was Japanese culture; and even though the lady was very passionate about it. But putting myself in A’s shoes, I would really dislike the fact that I was treated as some kind of a spokesperson for Chinese culture, and that I was thrown so many random questions right off the bat, including the kind where no one but the statistics could say anything meaningful—like, “Are there many people practicing martial arts in China?” Those questions, no matter how they’re answered, would just reinforce stereotypes, wouldn’t they? Also, isn’t it offensive for someone who doesn’t know me well to suddenly stop me and bombard me with so many supposedly cultural questions? It’s fine to ask a few simple ones, just like saying hello or “how are you”, but when I’m asked so many, my impression is that the person is watching and observing me and my culture in a condescending way. Maybe the questioner doesn’t have that intention, but it certainly causes problems.

When I interact with people, I want it to be between individuals, and I want us to be equal and mutually respectful. While I understand that some people will ask such cultural questions when they can’t find anything else to say, I definitely prefer to talk about myself, or the other person themselves. I don’t hold any hope that simply meeting someone will make me understand a culture—even if I could get to know something about a culture this way, I think it’s unlikely that I’d be able to “understand” it. I also don’t want people to go through me just to learn about the so-called Chinese culture—isn’t that talking to me, but ignoring me as a person? Then what am I? A free cultural tour-guide?

I find it boring and superficial to try to understand a culture by asking strangers directly. That knowledge is plagued with stereotypes and erases the individuality of people of other cultures. Only after knowing a specific person, and then a specific person, and then many, many more specific people without preconceptions, can one more or less get rid of the existing prejudices and summarize a certain culture. I believe that a culture is made up of people, and I’m interested in people - complex, real people, not abstract descriptions summarized by previous generations with who knows how much prejudice and ignorance.