Who am I? (Hypothetical question, don’t answer)

Anyway, so everyone knows Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but apparently, Asaph tells me that Ugandans often ask if I’m the brother of Ji-Sung Park. Now, I wonder how many of you know who he is, because, until Asaph told me, I had never heard of him. As you’ve already probably gathered from the picture, Park’s a soccer player. And maybe it’s just that I don’t normally follow soccer, because Park’s apparently quite well known (Ugandans and Time Magazine both seem to think so anyway). Anyway, I thought it was pretty funny, because even Asaph thinks that we look alike. He’s mentioned it a couple times that, “When they see you, they must think Park has been here!” And when I ask him why, the casual response is “Don’t you think you resemble him? I think!”

Now, the most common thing I get called here is ‘Muzungu,’ which basically means white man. Running a close second is ‘Muchina’ (Chinese), and once in a while, a confused Ugandan will call me ‘Muhindi’ (Indian). Yona, often introduces me as a Bukonjo, which is the type of people in the Kasese area, while some on the ACTS construction crew affectionately call me a Runyankole, the type of people in the Mbarara area. So, you can imagine that I have reason for somewhat of an identity crisis. To make matters worse, I went to two Chinese restaurants when I was in Kampala a couple of weekends ago because I needed to get my fix of Chinese food after going more than three months without. At the first place, I tried to order in Cantonese (just cause I figured that I could), but the waitresses spoke Mandarin, so I had to revert back to English. The next day, I tried out a different restaurant, where the waiter, a Ugandan man, kindly informed me that I was not Chinese. He told me that, “You can eat at a Chinese restaurant, but you are not a Chinese, I know Chinese and you don’t look like them. You are a Japanese.”

So, let’s just run through the list again shall we? Some people call me a white man; others, Chinese; still others, Indian. I wasn’t able to use Chinese to order at a Chinese restaurant, and a waiter at another Chinese restaurant helpfully explained to me why I could not be Chinese. Many Ugandans apparently think that I most resemble a famous Korean soccer player, while others insist that I am from their native land of Uganda. In Canada, some might call me a banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. But what do they call someone who is, as the Sunday school song puts it, “Red and Yellow, Black and White?”