This topic starts in so many places, and leads to so many places, that I’m not sure where it will end. So bear with me.

A few weeks ago, J and I were at an afternoon get-together. It was actually a nice mix of people, an equal assortment of Asians and Westerners, and maybe that’s what relaxed me. To be honest, I don’t like being alone in a crowd of Westerners. It makes me feel uncomfortable and, to be honest, quite vulnerable. That’s because there haven’t been many events where I haven’t been — even unconsciously — insulted. The put-downs are varied — because I speak English well or because I have a Western accent when somehow an Eastern one is expected. Because I’m smaller than I sound, browner than I sound. Because I’m too “intense”, too “heavy”, too “depressing” to be around. Whatever it is, there seems to be absolutely no hesitation with a stranger telling me exactly what’s wrong with me to my face on very little contact. Is it because I’m female? Or brown-skinned? Or both? And, therefore, does that make it easier to use some kind of superior tone towards me? (This opens up a whole ‘nother grocery store of canned worms, so I’ll just leave it there, for the time being.)

In any case, we were at this event and, because I usually get on very well with older people, I stopped to talk to the father of the hostess. I mentioned where we lived and he commented that he’d seen me walking around the house a few times (they live quite close), “but I thought you were the servant.”

You’d think I’d be used to all this by now but, weeks later, I have to admit that that one throwaway line still bothers me. That person was English, and he made his comment with such blithe unconcern, that it stopped me in my tracks. I’m still trying to figure out what emotion is ascendant in me — anger, confusion, indignation. Shame. Shame that whites can look at people like me and the first thing that springs to mind is “servant”. Shame that, in the country where I was born, a foreigner can look at me and, with one word, reduce me to the level of a slave. Realisation that, in the eyes of a white, I have no status except what they deign to give me.

This unsettling vulnerability strikes at the oddest times. I’ll be watching TV, looking at someone cute and then wondering whether he’d give me the time of day if we met, purely because of the colour of my skin. It was a question that dogged me from teenagehood. When I met J, I went through the same angst. Would his parents approve of me? Not because I was a professional, tertiary-educated woman with successful businesses of her own, but because I was brown-skinned? Everything in my life — all my skills, experiences and accomplishments; my past, my present, my future — reduced to one, genetically-determined, completely irrelevant, factor. Ah SLC24A5, thy sting is sharp.

The mothers of two ex-boyfriends heartily disapproved of our liaisons. The first mother was Indian, her son was her first-born and she was worried about him liaising with an Eurasian girl because, “everyone knows Eurasian girls are sluts”. We’re of mixed blood, you see, and so can’t really be trusted. The Japanese thought the same, which was why they tried to exterminate my race during WWII. Srinivas went on to marry an Indian girl. The second mother used the old “think of the children and what they’ll have to suffer” argument to dissuade us. Peter the Pom eventually married an Australian Italian. All this is water under a several-decades’ old bridge and yet, all it took at a party, to bring it all crashing back, was one thoughtless comment from an old man.

The other thing that I’ve come to realise is that you can’t change the mind of such people. What he said as a 70+ year old was only a public utterance of his own attitudes that were formed years earlier. And those attitudes are nothing that I can demolish with one witty comment at a social event. Not that I had any in reserve, even if I wanted to. All I can do is hope he dies soon so he infects as few additional people as possible with his views though, considering how long he’s been alive, it’s probably a forlorn hope.

But do you want to know the kicker? He married a Chinese woman. I spoke to her as well and she’s a very charming, quick-witted, erudite lady. They had two daughters. But he only had to look at me and see “servant”. The mental convolutions in that mind are too complex for me to even begin to unravel, as they are in most bigots, so I didn’t even try. (But I do, don’t I? Was it because I’m shorter? Darker than his wife? Was it my bearing? My features? Some other non-verbal characteristic?)

It’s too much to think that I’ll manage to keep my own children away from people like that old man. And it’s not a question of age, really it isn’t. I’ve found that, in general, you can only expect bald bigotted honesty from two groups – youngsters and oldsters. The rest are (usually) a little too smart to come out with things like that in company, and certainly not when they’re without their allies. But it doesn’t bother those who are young, and those who are old. And while you may be able to do something about the youngsters, it’s way too late by the time they’re pensioners. All you can do is smile, excuse yourself, and move on.