Dim Sum on New Years Day - and feeling "foreign"

Sunday we went to a really good Dim Sum place here in the DFW area -- JS Chen's DimSum & BBQ.

New Years Day, and the place was absolutely filled with families. Long lines outside, etc. Mostly Chinese -- with a meager sprinkling of other folks. Even though almost all the servers spoke English as well, or better than I do, I saw myself as "foreign" -- in truth, I saw them as "foreign" also. There is a good chance most of the other folks in the restaurant saw us as "foreign" too.

The "restaurant chatter" -- something I tend to attempt to listen to (because I'm nosy) was in one or another Chinese dialect -- adding to that sense of "foreignness".

Ah-ha, I thought, this must be a little like the way my mother felt as an immigrant to the USA -- surrounded by people who see YOU as different, speaking a language you do not understand, eating food you really don't quite understand, with customs just a little (or, a lot) different from yours.

This must be the way a Mexican housewife, new to the USA, feels wandering around places in the USA. Is it any wonder she wants to deal with, shop, in places where she is understood? Is it any wonder she wants to raise her children in a way that respects her heritage?

So, as a result, people who do not think, refuse to think, will not think, accuse her (and her family) of being unable, and unwilling, to "assimilate".

The USA has had a history of immigrants who were seen as "unable to assimilate".

Germans, Italians, all the various Slavs, the Irish, Jews of all sorts, assorted Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, various folks from South America, the Caribbean area, South Asia, Asia, China, Japan, etc., etc., etc., and of course, those folks we brought here in chains, as slaves, as less than human, as nothing but chattel.

ALL those folks were seen as "less than" -- often by folks just a few steps above them on the socio-economic ladder (sometimes thought of as "the road to whiteness").

I guess no one thinks of the poor Scots-Irish descendents in "Appalachia" as "unable to assimilate", even though folks tend to discount them, ignore them, and denigrate them. In many ways, an awful lot of folks see them as "not quite citizens", and a subgroup worthy of intense study -- to be celebrated for their "independence", ridiculed for their stupidity "folkways", and shunned by "polite society". In many ways, the Scots-Irish in the USA have "assimilated" less than any of the immigrant groups

Still, since they tend to stay "among their own" -- folks tend to ignore them (even though they have roots in the USA that go back to BEFORE The Revolution).

Most of the vile discrimination that is "acceptable" is directed toward "illegal aliens", toward those "Latinos"/"Hispanics"/etc., etc. -- with a subset directed toward Muslims, and "Brown People".

In the USA this is just a rerun, an again. Just the same old script claiming "we are lost", "the Republic is gone", etc., etc., etc.

In fact, the truth seems to be the folks who cry the loudest, are the very ones who want to destroy The USA, want to limit citizenship -- the way it is in other countries. They want to limit opportunity -- only their kids, or grandkids -- not those strange brown, black, yellow, "different" white folks, etc.

Oh yeah -- and while you're at it -- destroy education, science, climate studies -- but make sure we all have cell phones, flat screen TV's, and the fruits of science.

Insanity.