Sushi and Racism

It's hard for me to think of Asian people as actually a "different" race from my own. I like Asian people. In fact, I tend to identify with them. Maybe some Asian cultures appeal to my sense of order and organization. Or maybe it has something to do with my brown eyes, my round face, and my tendency to confuse the letters L and R. But I digress.

In any case, I was on my lunch break earlier today, and I saw an Asian woman ordering food from a little sushi stand in the mall's food court. I thought to myself, "Self, you handsome devil, why in the name of all that is sour and sticky would an Asian woman eat sushi that was made in an American mall?" That's like a Canadian coming to America and eating some Americanized version of... um... moose meat. And it would probably be spelled "mousse meat." And it would be cat meat.

Everyone who's anyone knows that the American versions of foreign or fancy foods are generally little more than corn meal and rat feet compressed into the shape of a rack of pork ribs. Let's say someone stole your dog and raped it with with a long tube of fake crab meat. Would you still eat that dog? Wait a minute... I think I may have forgotten what my point was going to be.

Anyway, I was surprised at myself when that initial thought occurred to me. If anything, I'd have assumed that I would take my obvious lack of intercultural experiences in the complete opposite direction: I would have thought "Of course that Asian woman wants to eat some sushi. She's probably homesick." But I didn't. I wondered why she would bother with a crappy, watered down imitation of a traditional Japanese style of food.

Is it racist for me to assume that she would have any degree of familiarity with genuine sushi because of the way she looked? Probably. Would it have been racist for me to assume she wanted to eat our ass-backwards version of sushi as a way of feeling closer to home because of the way she looked? Hells yeah. Do I care even a little bit? I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.

Maybe she's an Asian-American who's never even been to the country her great-grandparents emigrated from. Maybe some American sushi isn't as pooptastic as most of us assume it is. Maybe she has specific dietary requirements that restricted her from eating any of the other foods offered in the food court. Or maybe she was just Chinese.