July 11

Do you have heritage?

Also: I travel from Cambodia to Laos

This post is ostensibly about my travel day from Cambodia to Laos. TLDR: it was kind of boring. Everything went smoothly and my airplane even departed and landed ahead of schedule.

A few things worthy of note: the new Siem Reap airport, which I wrote about in my post about Siem Reap, is really far away from the city, huge, beautiful, and practically empty.

Lao Airline served a free meal and beverage service, in coach, to all passengers on a 40 minute flight. Granted, there were only 25 passengers.

The new Siem Reap Airport is beautiful and empty

The Pakse, Laos Airport is tiny. So tiny that I was the last passenger on my plane to get through passport control and customs, so that took 15 minutes.

And Pakse is great. It’s the smallest town I’ve visited yet on this journey. But more about Pakse in future post.

I wanted to talk a bit about a conversation I had with a fellow traveller on my last night in Siem Reap. She, like me, is from the US. Unlike me, she was born there to parents, one of whom is of Indian decent. Because of this, she appears outwardly (in terms that originated from a dear friend) “vaguely ethnic.” According to her, for all of her life the people around her have automatically classified her as “other” but can’t figure out which “other” to label her. Which drives them crazy.

Lao Airline is small but beyond on time. We left and arrived early. And they have a separate boarding zone for Monks

In my case, while I have a similar situation in the “otherness” label, I appear clearly Asian of some sort, so the Race part is settled. But still there are the questions about ethnicity. White Americans are pretty bad at classifications beyond “us” and “them” so I have wondered since I was a kid what their fascination is with figuring out precisely which “other” to label me. In descending order of frequency, here are the ethnicity questions I’ve received over my life so far:

  • Are you Chinese?

  • Are you Japanese?

  • Are you Vietnamese? (Although to be honest this is two combined because I assume that “Vietneese” refers to Vietnam)

  • Are you Korean? (Distant 4th)

Lao Airline served a ham and cheese sandwich and banana muffin in coach on a 40 minute flight

My fellow traveler has had similar experiences in her life. People want to precisely label the “otherness” but are pretty clueless on how to do so.

In the modern era, it has become less acceptable to come out and directly ask about race or ethnicity. People in the US, broadly, also can’t figure out what race vs ethnicity even is.

So the fellow traveler told me about some of the round-about ways in which she’s been asked about race and ethnicity. Most match my experiences as well. There’s the standard ones like “Where are your parents from?” which always threw people for a loop when I told them my mother was from Sweden.

But the fellow traveler had recently heard a new one that I thought was amazing and could take a dissertation to unpack: “Do you have Heritage?”

Pakse International Airport. Quite Small.