Shanghai Shorts: Racial Silliness

Recently I've been getting a lot of calls at my current workplace. All of them call, speaking in English, looking for the owner, a foreigner with a very Western-sounding name. He's not in the habit of taking calls from people he doesn't know so I do what I can to deter them. (I am, for the record, not his secretary; my phone number just happens to be his old contact one.)

Sometimes they'll catch on and realize that okay maybe this dude isn't the way to go, maybe I can give them the name of our company's CEO instead?

So I'll prod and pry and see how likely it is that it is a sales call and sometimes I'll go, okay they seem legit, I'll give them my boss's name.

My boss, like me, is also a foreigner, but he's Chinese by race and his name reveals as much.

The second the person on the other end hears the name, their reaction changes. They ask "Oh is he Chinese?" Expressions of shock abound!

So I'll ask them, in a very sharp tone, "Is there a problem?"

They'll stammer and mutter and you KNOW there is a problem just based on a violent shift in their attitude, but they'll eventually realize they gave themselves away and then recollect themselves and say "No, there's no problem, I would just like to know if he's Chinese."

Then I get playful. "What difference does it make?"

"No difference, ma'am, we would just like to know."

I decide to test my theory. "He's a foreign-born Chinese."

"Ahhhhh, foreign-born Chinese. Okay okay. Yeah it's just... *lots of hesitant stammering* no problem, no problem."

"Would there have been a problem if he wasn't a foreign-born Chinese? I would imagine if you're sending business documents that they should go to the right person in the right position."

"No ma'am, no difference. I'll send the documents within the hour. Thanks for your help, goodbye!"

This is just the tamer of the phone calls. Once I got a call from a Chinese speaking woman asking if any foreigners worked at our office. I said yes, there were two, me and my boss. She asked for our names because she wanted to send us a free expat-only magazine. I gave her our names. She said, "Hang on, are these people Chinese?"

I snapped and said, in English, "You asked if we were foreigners, and I answered you honestly. Neither of us hold Chinese passports. We are expats working in Shanghai. Is there a problem? Are you calling me a liar?"

She stammered, clearly not fully understanding what I was saying nor how to react, and told me, now in English, to "hold on" as she'd talk to her manager. She returns some minutes later saying, "I apologize, there's been a misunderstanding. Sorry, I didn't mean to waste your time." And she hangs up.

Don't get me started on a rant about how Chinese people are treated like second-class citizens on their own goddamn turf BY OTHER CHINESE PEOPLE. I thought this shit was over and done with last century, guys.

I know that expats are a target group for specific marketing campaigns and initiatives. That's fine. That's narrowing a target demographic, everyone does it. But racial profiling WITHIN the group of expats, just because we're not white or not visibly distinct from Chinese people? We took the fucking time to learn to speak multiple languages fluently, to understand multiple cultures, and this is the thanks we get?

Shanghai may like to call itself "modern" and "progressive" and "multicultural" but man the shit some of these people pull is pretty fucking archaic, if you ask me.