There's a great post just up at Racialicious called "
Brown and Out of Town: a POC Traveler’s Guide to Racism". It has advice, guidelines and resources for travelers of all colors.
When Asian-Americans travel, we're not treated exactly as the guidebooks (mostly by white writers) might predict. In regions of the world where there aren't a lot of Asians, reactions are very unpredictable. In rural Mexico, some people asked to take snapshots with me to prove they'd met a real live Asian. In China, I was regularly mistaken for a Uighur. In rural Nigeria, my father was once mistaken for a ghost.
Asian countries can also be unpredictable. There are often complicated inter-ethnic dynamics that Asian-Americans don't fully understand until we jump into the middle of them.
When we travel, it's interesting (and sometimes very depressing) to note how our social perception may be quite different than that of a white American, or black American, or another kind of Asian-American.
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