School is staring soon, and I'm scared.
The anxiety is keeping me up.
Here I am, a grown ass man, freaking out at the idea that I, a tall fluent Chinese-speaking Black foreigner, am going to be in front of a grand total of 193 Chinese teenage students in a week.
Every year it's the same spiel. Every year I have to put up with the "Oh sorry, I didn't realize you understood me" followed by the awkward laugh because there's always at least one who will make a racist comment right in front of me.
Shamelessly. And will point and laugh without even flinching.
And I have to stand there, unable to unhear the "hey look, a BLACKIE! lol" or "wow, what an ugly h**g**! (the Mandarin equivalent of the N word)" or "holy shit, that BLACK guy scared the hell out of me!" comments.
Right. To. My. Face.
And I have gather myself, NOT get angry, and then find a way to address this AND THEN pretend it never happened... because that's how they do here.
The first lesson has always been me dodging the random innocent *cough cough* tokenizing, commoditizing, noveltizing questions: "Do you play basketball?", "Do you eat tacos?" (in reference to Kobe Bryant and Taco Tuesday) "Do you do drugs?", "What kind of rap do you listen to?", "Will you rap for us?" (I don't even care for rap... or any music for that matter...).
Every year. No matter the age group. This has been my experience. A fleet of spoiled rich kids who have been led to believe I'm there to entertain them with talks of Robert Frost and New Orleans when really we're just learning how to read and there's no textbook available to help with that. An administration that never understood was racism was until covid happened. Two other foreigners who are blissfully unaware of damn near EVERYTHING. Chinese teachers who witness this shit and runaway hoping I don't call them over.
I'm tired of being the school clap trap.
It's upsetting how I feel that I'm the only person in this big ass country who has no idea how to deal with this, as all the other foreigners like me (fluent in Chinese, of African descent single, in China and not courting or engaged to a local) have left.
I feel numb.
Whenever this is China thing is over, assuming it ends with me still alive, I'm going to need all the therapy because this is traumatizing as sin.
