Immortal Ignorance

Once in a while I come face to face with; what I like to call pure ignorance ( I used to belive that it only served to remind me of my ethnic heritage) which is hard to hide from. I am well aware of my ethnicity, it's sort of unmistakable when you're living in a Western society where the majority used to be ethnic Swedes or Europeans.

These days we have many immigrants with other ethnicities, and maybe the untrained eye is fooled to believe me as an Asian immigrant or mail order bride. I'm honestly not sure.

Once in a while I hear cool teens exclaiming Chinese when they encounter me, they usually smile. When it happens I put on my mask, pretending I'm a foreigner that doesn't know any Swedish.

But a while ago I came face to face with this ignorance when I was walking home from the gym. There were some young children on bicycles accompanied by an older male which I presumed was there dad. It was kind of hard for me pass them as these children were cycling back and forth and not going straight forward. Anyways this young girl usuddenly asked:

"Are will still going to the stable ?"

"Yes we are, if we only can get passed this Chinese person." The Chinese person was me of course, there were no other people on the road other then me and definitely no other Chinese or Asian looking people.

It might seem odd, but my mum and dad have never as far as I remember and know treated me differently because of my Korean heritage. They have never been guilty of any racism although they begun telling me about my Korean birth family when I was 2 or 3 years old. Maybe it also helped that my younger brother not only was a fellow adoptee but also a KAD.

But there's still some things I still question.. like why I never was told of possabilites to learn Korean as a child. Once in grade school my teacher informed of the possabilility to study parental tongue in my class there were a few children that had to learn Finnnish. Learning Korean as a parental tongue in grade school since I didn't think you could learn your parental tongue if you were an adoptee, but also since I didn't think there would be so many other Korean adoptees.

Now I know that the school has to offer pupils the possability to learn their parental tongue if they manage to get enough interested pupils.Not even my adoptive parents knew this at the time, so I can't really blame them can I...

© Taste of Kimchi, Elle

Related posts:
Geochang

Relative Deprivation

Reunion

Together