Japan Society of Fairfield County
Culture Watch, Society Watch (8)
by Dr. Ikuko Anjo Jassey
When I opened the front door, an unexpected
visitor, a man who was in his forties, standing there said, "Good
morning." Then he paused one second and continued, "May I speak
to a person of the house?" He identified himself as a
handyman. After about a year later, this time another man who
said he was an electrician greeted me in the same way at our front
door.
Apparently both of them did not expect an Asian
woman to appear in front of them. I wore a T-shirt and jeans on
one occasion and a cotton shirt and jeans on another. It seems that for
our visitors an Asian woman in those clothes was enough to make a
judgment of what she did in this area. They had mistaken "a
person of the house" for a house sitter or a cleaning woman. What
amazed me was that both men did not think of a possibility that I might
have been "a person of the house." It is true that I live in a
small suburban town of 18,000 residents of which the ratio of Asian
residents is 2.69%, while that of white is 95.55% as of year
2000. And yet I don't live in a remote area where people don't
see anyone but white people. I live in a town that is reachable
within one hour from New York City. A Japanese woman living in an
adjacent town, Westport, told me a similar story in which she was
mistaken as a babysitter when she played with her child at a
park. Her child looked more like her husband, Armenian.
In these cases, I don't believe that those people,
who thought we were a house sitter, a cleaning woman, or a babysitter,
discriminated racially. Their stereotypical notion on race, or you
might call it a racial divide, simply overtook their mind. I still
remember one letter-to-editor appearing in The New York Times several
years ago. A wealthy black man who was dressed in something like
a sky-blue blazer, a white shirt, and gray slacks approached his
Jaguar, which was just brought up from the garage of the Four Seasons
Hotel where he stayed. And when he opened the front door, an elderly
white woman, who had followed him, opened the back door of his car to
get in, believing that he was her chauffeur.
In the evening, when I told my husband about being
mistaken as a helping hand of our household, he said, "Don't worry. If
you are a cleaning woman, I'll become a gardener." (I prefer a gardener
myself to a cleaning person since I like gardening much better.)
Honestly speaking, I was not worried at all; instead, I would say I
enjoyed the incident. It is a good example of how our latent
distinction--of color, age, gender, religion, or ethnic group--bubbles
up when we meet people.
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