Comment by runewell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runewell | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in rural Kentucky. People were polite to me but there was always this strange distance I would encounter when interacting with people, a distance that my friends never seemed to receive. I always chalked it up to my personality. I became a bit of an introvert, took on a passion for computer science, and moved to Silicon Valley after graduation. I fit in splendidly and for the first time in my life I felt like I was part of a real community. It was at this point that I started getting asked "Are you white or Asian?" by many people. It was a completely innocent question but it surprised me so much that I mentioned it in a conversation with my old friends and to my amazement they all wanted to know the answer as well. It blew my mind. Here I was, a 22 year old white guy from rural Kentucky, who just found out he was Asian. No one bothered to tell me growing up, it made me feel both incredibly stupid and somewhat perplexed. Pieces of my past started falling into place all of a sudden. All the strange looks I used to get on the field as a little redneck kid topping tobacco during the summer. The old white farmers at the local BP station asking me questions about the world as if I held some sort of mystic wisdom. My ex-girlfriend who would constantly mention how much she liked Asian guys before we started dating. All of these things and more just hit me like a bag of bricks and I laughed my ass off for a good 10 minutes. My grandmother was Japanese and my mom was half but as a child I was a blonde white kid so as I got older and my hair darkened it never occurred to me that I was anything else. Now that I'm older I kind of like it. My differences, although superficial, make me feel closer to my late mother and grandmother who were both wonderful people.

I got a laugh out of your story - thanks!

It reminded me of a story on Reddit recently about a couple who adopted an Asian baby and then raised him diligently and positively introducing him to Chinese culture, language classes, special efforts with food and communities, etc so he didn't lose that part of his background. At around 18 years of age after almost two decades of efforts along these lines, the father discovers the kid is actually Korean and can't bring himself to tell his oblivious son or wife!

Korean here. Really, there's rather little difference between a Han Chinese person and a Korean. People can tell...sort of...at least some of the time...ish. By the time you get to that point, you're really splitting hairs. Which isn't to say that people didn't try and think it was somehow very important in the past when "racial purity" was enshrined in traditional Korean society.

Reminds me of a friend's anecdote about people in Scotland in the 60's talking about differences in accents resulting from being from a town 9 miles away.

Scotland is still like that FYI.

Ireland too

Reminds me of a friend's anecdote about people in Scotland in the 60's talking about differences in accents resulting from being from a town 9 miles away.

A lot of places in Europe are still like that. "In USA 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100km is a long distance"

In fact (I'm sure you know this but most won't), Korea in Mandarin is Han Guo. There is a lot longer history of sameness than difference.

"Han" in "Hanguk" is not the same "han" in "Han Chinese". Within East Asia, Koreans and Han Chinese are distinct ethnicities.

Within the British Isles, Scottish and English are supposedly distinct ethnicities. How well can you tell this from still photographs devoid of cultural cues? Not very. Are there distinct gene pools? According to the documentary, "A Celtic History of the British Isles," not so much. Basically, there was so much interbreeding under the Romans, there's hardly any genetic distinction left.

I'd expect there to be some small degree of genetic distinctness, but there has always been a history of interbreeding. There's even an old Korean stereotype about rich bewhiskered Chinese merchants who come down to marry a hot young Korean wife.

In short -- Ethnic differences between Han Chinese and Koreans: mainly cultural.

Here in the UK you can pretty much pinpoint where a person's from down to a 10 mile radius if you know the local accents, sometimes finer than that. It's fading a bit and accents are becoming more homogenised, but it's still a thing.

Henry Higgins claimed better precision than that in My Fair Lady.

Same in Slovenia (and other parts of Europe). My mother and her relatives will use words when speaking their village dialect that someone from a short distance away could not comprehend.

In this Reddit story, I think they did things like get him Mandarin lessons, practice various customs, find a Chinese "uncle and aunt" to take him to dim sum and whatever else. Then when signing his son up for college applications, the father noticed the surnames of his kid's birth parents were very typical Korean names. All those good intentions!

i'm fully asian with a white last name. when people meet me for the first time after communicating with me electronically they're always a little surprised. although, in my case i can see them kind of experiencing a little cognitive dissonance, which is fun.

One of my professors though I was Hungarian. Turns out, my Korean Catholic name is also a perfectly good Hungarian one, if you don't see the middle one spelled out.

A similar phenomenon sometimes occurs with Europeans who have an epicanthic fold, e.g. Sami or Hungarians whose ancestry includes people from the Golden Horde. Locally, they are unremarkable but if they move to an area with many people of Asian descent they are often considered "Chinese".

Oh man that is almost exactly my story too, except in rural/suburban Texas and being mulatto. The part about "mystic wisdom" is spot on as people always thought I had special insight into "urban" culture.

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