In the town where I used to live, I had a favorite Chinese restaurant where I would go for lunch a couple of times a month. It was a mom-and-pop operation run by an aging Chinese couple, she working the front, he back in the kitchen. As a regular customer, I got to be friendly with the wife, Priscilla. (I don’t know her real, Chinese name, and I never knew his at all.)
The TV behind the counter was usually playing some Chinese-language program or other, but one day I went in and found her listening to a speech by then-President George W. Bush. I asked her (I never had before) if she was a U. S. citizen and whether she’d voted for him. Mind you, this was the San Francisco Bay Area, where Bush was not exactly Mr. Popularity. She said yes, she was a citizen, but “Not vote for him. But still my president.” She held up a hand with fingers outstretched. “Mother teach me, five finger, all different. But work together, make strong fist” as she clenched her fingers closed. One of the wisest things I’ve ever heard said.
Once, in my career as a technical writer (now retired), I had a short-term job for a French software company. They had a product manual already written in English by a Frenchman, and they needed an anglophone editor to tidy it up into proper idiomatic English. The good news: easy work. The better news: they would fly me over to Paris for a month, all expenses paid in addition to my fee for professional services. The bad news: the month was January. Still it was, needless to say, the best gig of my life.
The town was teeming with tourists from the Southern Hemisphere on their summer vacations. One night after work, I wandered into a Japanese restaurant for dinner. There was one other customer in the place, an Argentine guy sitting at the bar talking with the Japanese bartender. I somehow got drawn into the conversation and ended up staying and talking with them for hours. I don’t remember now what we talked about, but here we were, three strangers from three different continents, speakers of three different mother tongues, sitting on a fourth continent conversing in a fourth language native to none of us. This is what we mean when we talk about diversity.
If only we could all learn to identify racially simply as “human.”
