Just consider her the girl next door

I was window-shopping in New York recently when a woman flagged me down in the friendly way that strangers do when they want to ask you where you get your hair cut or where the nearest ATM is.

I never found out what her question was, because the first thing out of her mouth -- “Do you speak English?” -- prompted expletives from me and a shellshocked look from her.

This conversation opener used to leave me hopelessly flustered. After all, the intent is not malicious -- the person is only trying to determine whether you share a common language.

But to have “Do you speak English?” and its corollaries (“Where are you really from?”) thrown at you everywhere from a street corner in New Haven, Conn., to a restaurant in Silver Lake is to realize that you will always be labeled as “the other” merely because of the way you look. In the eyes of many -- middle-aged passersby, twentysomething guys throwing pickup lines at a bar -- I am a foreigner who just got off the boat, less than a full American even though I was born in Chicago, the heartland’s capital.

Although questions like “Do you speak English?” don’t rise to the level of racism, they stem from the same dangerous fallacy: that a person’s physical appearance is an absolute proxy for where she was born, what work ethic she has and what kind of food she eats at home.

In my younger days, the best I could muster for an answer was a sarcastic “Yeah.” I’m older and more shrewish now. What I screamed at the lady in New York cannot be printed in full but more or less meant “I certainly do speak English! I was born in the U.S. of A.!”

In the dating arena, common sense would seem to dictate against bringing up a touchy subject like race with someone you’re trying to impress. But the racial questions and comments come all too often from men I’ve just met: “Do you speak Mandarin or Cantonese?” “I just went to Japan and I loved it!” These men are lucky to escape with a cold shoulder and not a gin and tonic in their faces.

I was at a bar with an Asian female friend once when a nice-looking young man struck up a conversation with us. He asked us about our jobs, and we replied that we were both journalists. His next question: “What language do you write in, English or Chinese?”

We had spoken to him in unaccented English. What’s more, we hadn’t said anything about whether we were Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Thai. The layers of assumption embedded in that little question were astounding: (1) that we were both Chinese; (2) that we spoke Chinese; (3) that we were so fluent in the language that we could write it for a living.

I have sometimes tried to explain why I find their questions so offensive. Their tone invariably becomes belligerent. “What’s so bad about being from a foreign country? I’d love to speak another language.”

Of course there’s nothing wrong with being from a foreign country. I wish I spoke more languages too. What’s faulty is the assumption that I’m fluent in another language merely because I have an Asian face. This same assumption of foreignness is what led to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and what is causing Muslim Americans to be unfairly singled out as potential terrorists today.

So don’t ask me whether I speak English -- assume that I do. Ask me where I like to hang out or what movies I’ve seen lately, not whether I can cook Chinese food. Treat me like you would the girl next door. Then maybe you’ll realize that I’m not so different from her.

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Cindy Chang may be reached at weekend@latimes.com.