Tabula Raza

Last fall, I went to visit a friend in Lima, Peru, a city where ethnic ambiguity and occasional Asianness are part and parcel of daily life. There, I underwent a mildly interesting if ultimately banal experience of race: As a biracial American—half Chinese and half white, an affiliation admittedly characterized in the United States by benign alienation more so than by the violence levied against many other minorities—I found myself in a locale where I could be said to resemble the average citizen. I have no real ties to Peru. My trip wasn’t a homecoming or cultural awakening of any sort, arguably just a coincidence of physical aesthetics. While I did occasionally bask in feeling like part of a racial majority, my time in Lima was dominated by one petty realization: I wasn’t at home here, but in the country I came from, I was perhaps even less so.