So you want intercultural

One big part of this experience is the meet-new-people-all-the-time ritual, you go to an orientation meeting, a class or to dinner and is more or less expected that you look out for new people and immediately introduce yourself to a total stranger just like that, or just out of the common bond of being SASers, as we are called around here. Incredible as it may seem I have participated in this activity as actively as my antisocial autistic side can handle. It can be frustrating to meet so many people whose name you’ll forget as soon as you turn your back or knowing that most of the first conversations are extremely formulaic, so feel empty of real human candor and probably nothing will develop out of it. In my very practical approach to social encounters, sometimes this poses a problem. Usually I just live my life, along the way see a couple of people that interest me, I observe and interact with them minimally for a while to see if I really want to spend time and emotions in actually getting to know them, and then the real friendship process can begin. Its kinda like a credit card, I need to check your background before anything can happen and after that you get a bigger credit as you prove yourself trustable. It a very arrogant policy because basically its all on you and I just seat there like a deluded judge but its more or less how it works out and I’m sure even the most spontaneous social person has some kind of reserve of parameter regarding how his/her identity interacts with others.
Thus the idea and practice of the standard lets-meet SAS dialog sometimes gives me trouble. Yet I suppose I can say I have actually gotten involved and accepted that a new environment requires new patterns and strategies. I have become quite good at asking questions that can drive a conversation, although in the back of my mind I still can help but feel almost caricature like out of the cliché bordering possibilities of first encounters and introductions. I have become so flexible that I’m willingly to sell my so called nationalism as my best tool for a unique touch. Willingly I tend to give predominance to an identity trait that has never been that constitutive of my persona as a whole, such as land of origin. However, the truth is that everyone wants to know where you come from, it’s always the next thing to find out/inform after saying your name. I feel weird being the Porto Rican kid around here, or at least one of the 5 Porto Rican girls, but still I do it cause there’s a perverse excitement by being the exotic object, in letting it be know loud and clear that I m not one of the hordes of Americans that constitute this American ship. I knew they would be majority, but I never expected so much of them … and so waspy looking. I never expected to create a me-them equation, it seems tribal and archaic as a social construction equation. And that’s what shocks me, I have never been much for race, either negative or positive, maybe I have lived a sheltered life, which I probably have, but I’m usually race blind in real life, I can definitely see it in media in literature and stuff like that or when something bad happens, but very rarely do I See race as in it being an issue for my everyday life activities and those around me. I know there are a lot of race and ethnic issues in Puerto Rico, I’m not completely deluded, but still I’m not used to seeing or expecting seeing whites with whites, blacks with blacks, asians with asians, etc. It just seems tribal, underdeveloped and barbaric, one things is to uphold your culture and the other is to accepts those race segregating cannons with the excuse of cultural preservation, it’s actually racist cause culture always changes, and rarely can it be considered as polluted. But hey, maybe it could be argued that I can say that because I’m in the favored group/s whatever they may be, cause they seem to change according to environment.
As part of my lets meet new people unofficial extracurricular I went to eat by myself and looked out for a table when I could seat with new people to meet. I found one right outside with a great view of the Pacific ocean and started talking with them, they were a little shy, but quite nice. They didn’t seem as impressed by my Porto Ricaness as others, but that didn’t offend me at all, so we continued eating and talking about the usual suspects (major, college, SAS trips, SAS classes) and then another girl came to seat with us. She was Chinese and that’s where the other girls became Korean and I the occidental chic. They were Asian, they spoke Korean, mandarin and Cantonese, so did much of their friends, they knew their parents language, they even jokes bout how finally some of them had found “the white people” since all of them were asian and immediately I knew I was “the white people” and had broken some silent code when seating with girls that were sitting by themselves not out of luck, but by the feeling both from within them and from without that they were different… the Great wall goes a long way. They all seemed to share a feeling of being exiled even though they were born and raised in the US and will probably marry and have 2.5 kids and a dog in a couple of years. To me they were Americans, the so called first class occidentals in globalized world theories, but for them it was quite the opposite and I was pretty soon left out, as if I couldn’t understand what it is to struggle with cultural identities, which even the waspier of wasp has to struggle with somehow. I laughed at some jokes that now I’m not so sure I had “the right” to laugh at since they involved so called asian people and behaviors. Kinda when all hell broke loose when JLO said nigger, cause heck she had been dating Diddy for a while and she really felt like niggering around, yet suddenly while dating a black man she became a racist… nice.