Asian, female, middle-aged and a happy traveler

Globetrotting with your cultural identity in mind enriches the experience

There is a spectrum of attitudes from which a traveler can choose -- on one end, you immerse yourself in the unfamiliar; being invisible is desirable. On the other, you are fully cognizant of your identity, gazing upon your surroundings as a mirror into yourself; you remain a conscious outsider.

My work as a management consultant provides me with a steady stream of travel. Before COVID-19, my default attitude was to localize. I believed there was nothing more mortifying than to be labeled a tourist. But much has changed in the post-pandemic era, including my approach to travel.

In a recent three-week business trip to Europe and North America I found myself inadvertently taking the approach of a conscious outsider. I was fully aware of myself as an Asian middle-aged woman from Japan traveling alone. And that active recognition made traveling surprisingly pleasant.

Perhaps COVID-19 is the culprit. After more than two years of being confined within Japan -- at times within a 2 km radius of my residence -- the boundary between home and away has never been more pronounced. There is no denying that national borders have retrenched -- the open and fluid world in which self-proclaimed global citizens once roamed now seems a long-gone fantasy.

COVID-19 has also awakened our sense of ethnicity, transcending distance and borders. During the pandemic, the horror of hate crimes against Asians in the United States reverberating in my mind, I found I was projecting myself onto the fearful Asian women of New York City. I felt much closer to them than I did when I lived in the city in the mid-2000s, when I was fooled into believing myself to be another wise-ass New Yorker.

I still believe in the notion of the global citizen. Each individual globetrotter, however, comes with a unique history. Rather than diluting our origins beyond recognition, celebrating them enhances our understanding of the complex multicultural reality of the world.

In every city I visited during my trip, I felt proud of the post-COVID-19 resilience of Asian culture. In an authentic Roman bookstore, I spied a prominent corner dedicated to Japanese authors, ranging from Haruki Murakami to the obscure. In smaller outlets, shelves with tightly packed manga were easily spotted.

I felt even more connected to my Asian roots through passing camaraderie with other Asian women -- something I had neglected in the past for fear of being lumped into an ethnic group. ?

Arriving in Midtown, New York, a colleague and I immediately agreed on a lunch destination: Koreatown. The scene was booming. My younger self might have preferred a Sex and the City catering joint offering blueberry pancakes. But I felt comfortable with the brusque hospitality of the Korean waitress, gruffly filling the table with small side dishes. “Thank goodness,” I thought, that she had survived the wave of Asian hate crimes.

In San Francisco, on the Bloomingdale’s shopfloor, the store’s assistant manager, who introduced herself as WeiWei, was so friendly that I asked her for a dinner recommendation in Chinatown. I would be eating solo that night, so I figured that this middle-aged woman with a Chinese accent would surely be the expert I needed.

Surprisingly, she wasn’t. “I cook Chinese food at home, better than these restaurants,” she announced proudly, “and I don’t trust these places where white people go.” She did, however, text her daughter to get the name of a respectable dim-sum spot.

The outsider approach to travel makes me a better traveler than the “local wannabe” approach. I believe this for two reasons. First it gives me an inner yardstick against which to measure other cultures, enabling me to appreciate them fully. Second, it distances me from the cliché, be it the savvy New Yorker or the coquette Parisienne, which is a trap people can fall into when they try to blend in. Being conscious of one’s roots does not detract from the travel experience; it enhances it.

Perhaps my mental transition also has something to do with age. Before COVID-19, in my early 40s, my excessive self-consciousness as a youngish Asian female -- easily stereotyped as demure, soft-spoken, exotic -- urged me to erase such traits.

Now solidly middle-aged, I care less about the perceptions of others, real or imaginary. As a lone Japanese woman traveler, I feel comfortable in my roots and connected in spirit with my Asian sisters around the world.?

This article was published by Nikkei Asia on September 7th, 2022.