So I've noticed this strange phenomenon happen to me here in Detroit. To give you some quick context, I'm like one of 5 Asian dudes in the entire city. Okay that's totally exaggerating. But there really is not a lot of Asians here. Having this distinctly East Asian male face that I have, more often than not I tend to stand out in this predominantly Black city. Which doesn't bother me at all really. It has however contributed to numerous cases of mistaken identity: "No, no. I'm not Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee was Chinese. I'm Okinawan-Japanese." Usually those comments about my supposed resemblance to the late martial arts icon are from strangers and I'm no longer fazed by any of that stuff. But a similar kind of "mistaken identity" pervades the mindset of some of the people I've actually gotten to know. It usually goes like this: I'll casually mention to someone in conversation that I do karate. For whatever reason that gets construed to mean that I'm some sort of expert. I emphasize clearly that I am just a student and I've only been training for the last 5 years. That then gets construed to mean that I'm just being humble. I explain that it has nothing to do with being humble and everything to do with being real with myself. Then somehow that's taken to mean that I'm just hiding my awesome karate skills and pretending to be mediocre. I mean maybe there's some sort of satisfaction in having secret ninja skills to hide but the fact of the matter is I have none. Perhaps that's just too disappointing for people to handle. I'm reminded of the animated film Rango in which the main protagonist, an "ordinary-guy" type character passes himself off as a slick gun fighter only to be unmasked later on much to the disappointment of those who came to believe in him. Now, while I certainly haven't tried to pass myself off as any kind of martial expert, nor have I survived any serious life-threatening encounters here in the city, certain people still seem to think I possess some deadly secret skills. I mean, if I was some white guy who did karate would people still assume this much about me? It could be that I'm misconstruing something myself here and twisting their comments to mean exactly what I want to believe about myself. Of course, it's not like I don't want to be good with my karate (and that's subjective anyway), but these misperceptions frustrate me at times. Especially when people think that I'm supposed to be some kind of "good fighter" or that I can "kick ass". This is what I believe most people think of martial arts as being about. But "fighting" implies something far more different than what my Okinawan ancestors were getting at when they said things like karate ni sente nashi. Training to attack and defend against an equally trained opponent is not the same to me as training to deal with unprovoked aggression and physical violence by someone intent on doing us harm. I think both types of training engender different states of mind. I could be wrong, as I have no real experience with either fighting or self-defense. But I do see that there is still a serious lack of understanding about this "humble tradition" from Okinawa. I guess in the end it doesn't really matter what people think about karate. No matter what I say, people are still going to see in it what they want. And if being Asian makes a person's Oriental martial fantasies go wild, what can I do? I guess I gotta just keep being real with myself.
Elbow SMASH!
- Hiji Até
No comments:
Post a Comment