My Parents Dressed Me As An Asian Girl In The 90s To Perform For Adult Asian Men

As a child I trusted adults with cultural appropriation

I was about 8 years old, a timid and young white female being raised by an evangelical American family when it happened. A sheltered child, I didn’t know much of the outside world, life beyond our Southern culture.

My father, grandfather, and other relatives had just returned from a visit to China, for some sort of business trip. I was too young to understand the details, but I was jealous of the pictures of the beautiful things they saw in Beijing. The buildings, the people, the artistic details were all strikingly different and charming.

They brought me back a gift of an exquisite custom stamp seal, stone carved into the shape of a horse with my name etched at the bottom of the stamp, written in both English and Chinese. The symbols of their language looked like an artistic design for each word. It came in a red and golden silk embroidered case, with a round tin can of red paste ink. I was fascinated by this prize I scored of this foreign culture. I used the stamp often for awhile then stored my special souvenir in a secret spot of my closet to treasure it, to ensure I would never lose it. I still never have.

Months later, my mother began discussing that we had a big event approaching. My wealthy grandfather was going to be hosting a business banquet in his home for about forty Chinese men who were traveling internationally to our Southern states to discuss a business ordeal I had no knowledge or understanding of.

It had nothing to do with me as a young child, but then again, without any understanding… it did.

“You and your sister will be performing a song and dance for everyone at the banquet.” In a family of tireless performers, this did not seem at first too unusual of an assignment. After all, we had performed at big birthday parties, for lectures my mother gave, for church events, and on stage for dance revues.

Being hardly 8 years old, I was unsure of how to feel when we were presented with the assignment. Instead of doing a welcoming performance to these traveling Chinese men to portray our culture, we were to essentially re-enact theirs “to make them feel welcome.”

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