I am the only black person for thousands of miles in a culture that is completely different, and I knew this coming into the experience. One of the reasons I chose to pursue a grant in Indonesia was because of the challenges, but that doesn’t mean I take being uncomfortable as something that shouldn’t be addressed. For example, during a lesson on adjectives, I reprimanded students for laughing at students who are darker-skinned —mocking them with “African” and “hitam” ( meaning “black” in Bahasa)—and I have already told an adult to please not ascribe my beauty to being “impressive even though I’m dark.” I already have a Black Lives Matter lesson planned for my English Club this month using the #FergusonSyllabus curriculum.

All this said, my experience in Indonesia hasn’t been negative, just difficult. But through the challenges, I’ve grown up even more. For every insulting, frustrating thing that’s occurred during this short time, there’s a curious child eager to learn new vocabulary, a co-teacher inviting me to various events with their family, or a student who asks me to drink coffee with him and his friends because he noticed I “go to coffee shops a lot.”

Living abroad while black is tough—tougher in some places than others. But I do believe if you go into the experience believing that there is goodness in people, there’s a possibility of countering those experiences and achieving an experience you didn’t think possible.

Our next reader is an American expat in Rome who lived in Phuket, Thailand, from 2004 to 2015, and she says our expat series “reminds me of a TripAdvisor forum I contributed to in 2005.” Money quote:

[O]f all the countries that I have travelled to in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, I have found Thailand to be the most problem-free. I am less aware of being black here except in all the best ways: celebration of my different beauty, music, cultural heritage, etc. Here, I am a rich farang (foreigner) like everyone else. It’s the color of the money that counts.

Further, I find that some Thai people may think that I am a curiosity: my natural hair, my curvaceous body, and my dark skin. I am always asked shyly “can I touch your hair?,” told that my skin is dam (black), but suay (beautiful) or complimented on my figure (which is hugely different from the skinny Thai beauties). They may be color-struck among themselves—white skin means higher class—but as I am not Thai, I am outside of this issue. They see me as a different kind of foreigner, but I get just as many if not more smiles.

The racist attitudes that I usually experience come from white Europeans and Americans (if one more person informs me which African country I am from, I will scream), but these people are mostly ignored by me. Thailand has not had the history of colonisation and slavery of African people as has the US and Europe, so there is no legacy to deal with. They are, however, subject to the same subtle racist messages via international media that every country is.

This next reader, Laura, touches on “my experience as a Black Canadian in the United Kingdom”:

I am a Canadian by birth, if not more so by mindset. My parents are of Caribbean origin. I know that I am black, but growing up in Winnipeg, I have never had to defend that fact, explain it, or even have to think about it much. I have traveled and lived abroad in several different countries over the past 10 years. When I moved to the United Kingdom in July of 2013, for a two-year stay, I was expecting a similar society as the one I had been raised in Canada, but instead I came into contact with a social structure I had not been prepared for.

To illustrate that experience, Laura points to an op-ed she wrote last year for the newspaper Barbados Nation. It reads in part:

I’m black. There I said it. Where I grew up in Canada, I never had to say it. It was never an issue. Even when I was the only black child in a classroom, and at one point in time an entire school, I never had to reinforce it. I never felt left out or that I was working an uphill battle against a system. I always thought I had received the best of both worlds in my upbringing—the Caribbean discipline and food and the Canadian . . . everything else.

But when I moved here [London], for the first time in my life my Caribbean heritage mattered. It was difficult at first when people wouldn’t accept my answer of Canada when they asked where I was from. [...] I’m fairly light-skinned for a black girl. Again, this never mattered while growing up. In fact, I had never really thought about it. I had always been “darker” than most of my friends. Moving here, I got questions of whether I was mixed as if this made a difference to how I was perceived or my abilities or my personality.

I had to start thinking about this: what does it mean when you’re the only black person in the room? Do I need to think about this? This pushed me to think about what it means to be me as a woman, as a black woman, as a Canadian black woman in the 21st century in a foreign country. Does my identity change depending on where I live? Should it change?

Should it? Email us if you have any strong views on the question. Here’s one more reader, Lillian Kalish, reflecting on her time spent in Myanmar:

At Htauk Kyant cemetery, an hour’s ride outside of bustling Yangon, the air is thick in the middle of monsoon season. Young couples swoon under the shade of umbrellas, oblivious to the surrounding gravestones of men who fought for the British during WWII. The cemetery is a lush respite for some, with its close-cut green grass, stone pillars, and, unusual in these parts, silence.

I, on the other hand, have come up here to mourn. I write only weeks after 13-year-old Tyre King was fatally shot by police, after Keith Lamont Scott and Alfred Olango—who bears an uncanny resemblance to my uncle—were also killed. Just the other day, another black transwoman was found dead, in a motel room in Alabama.

I touch the white pillars where engraved are the names of the roughly 90,000 West African soldiers who fought for the British Imperial Army. Is it comforting to know that black folks have graced and died on this land?

With a sporadic internet connection, I am transported from life in Myanmar—where restrictive laws reminiscent of Jim Crow leave the Rohingya minority on the verge of extinction—to life at home, in a fearsome, entangled America. Mourning black lives in Myanmar is a private ritual. With my white American expat friends, conversations become a fumbling of words. With my Burmese friends, particularly a few young poets—who use art to express their marginalized identities—our words forge some fragile kind of solidarity.

Recently, I reached out to a lifelong friend who like myself—queer, black, Jewish—does not know how to return to the States. “I feel guilty for leaving,” he said, from his current home in Mexico City. “There is so much else going on here.” With this distance, however confusing and isolating, it is easy to disconnect from home, and propel myself into Yangon with noisy, colorful, betel nut stained streets, an embryonic democracy unraveling itself slowly to the world.

As I walk past each gravestone, remarking on the multiplicity of scripts, creeds, and details denoting each loss, I am reminded of the reverberant words of Claudia Rankine on the limits of white imagination on black death. “There really is no mode of empathy,” she writes, “that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black.”

A known fact to me at home now weighs heavily abroad. I resort to traveling to cemeteries outside of the city, in search of black death and also a reminder of black life. It is a quest, if anything, for intentional contemplation. As Yangon is home to few black folks—though there are people of all darker skins—there is no one with whom to mourn. No one who feels the duality of this pressure, being caught in-between Myanmar and America.

I have written about this before while traveling through Tibet and thinking about the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. On my second stint in Asia, I find the words harder to come. That is, wherever I go, I cannot help but feel guarded any time a pair of eyes follows me. I clench up, tighten at the shoulders, too hyperaware to realize that it is not with violence that people approach me. These encounters are little blessings, fissures in my imagination of how it ends. These days the echoes of kids popping firecrackers to welcome Thadingyut, the festival of lights, sound a lot like gun shots and I remind myself that it doesn’t always end with death.

Some context: Since I lived in a small inaka town, the only Japanese people I was only really able to associate with were older Japanese adults and the small children I taught in schools every day since people in my age range (20-29) had left for larger cities. Because of this, I used a lot of my free time talking to older Japanese people and I was struck by both their awareness of and appreciation for African-American culture. Particularly, many older Japanese are avid jazz listeners (as shown, for example, by the Japanese releases of jazz CDs having a few Japan-only bonus tracks for the loyal domestic fan-base). People ranging from random taxi drivers to small bar owners would excitedly speak to me at length about their love of figures such as Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker.

Additionally, my experiences in my schools were mostly positive. The students, of course, had grown up seeing a black president on their television screens all of their lives so “black” and “American” were not two incompatible concepts for them. The Obama Factor, combined with students’ generally positive perceptions of figures such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Michael Jackson, made my life there much easier.

Of course, there were some truly horrible moments I experienced due to my skin color in Japan, but I chalk those instances up to the actions of bad individuals more so than anything else. (Also, to be completely honest, these horrible moments are just as likely to happen to me here in the United States as they are to happen anywhere else.)

Overall, however, the Japanese people showered me with an appreciation and affection that I will never forget for the rest of my life. Knowing just how deeply and widely the artistic and cultural contributions of my people are admired by people around the world filled me with unspeakable pride.

It was curious that it took leaving the country for me to reach this level of pride. At various points in my life, I have been subjected to both an education system and the wider popular culture portraying black history/culture as a smaller, less important subsidiary of white culture/history, which is the supposedly the real American story. It was amazing to me that so many Japanese do not share this view. While too many people in the world do still unfortunately think in these terms, I think my time in Japan jump-started my process of personal healing. It is a personal source of solace and comfort during this difficult time in race relations in this country.

Let me not forget the whitening creams I’m suggested to buy by store clerks, or the time that a Korean Airlines employee wanted to know why I was flying into Hong Kong instead of Guangzhou—where most Africans fly into—all while holding my passport in his hand.

It’s exhausting. And my only support were two white American women who worked with me (they have since left) and the black expat groups that give me support and advice. I knew that I would be met with some ignorance and barriers because I’m not fluent in the language, but this is more than I bargained for.

I can’t be myself, and I usually escape to Hong Kong to feel normal or hide out in expat populated places. Those can be frustrating too, when I have to encounter expats from other countries who are racist.

It’s weird and frustrating, but I think this has opened my eyes to how people in different countries view me before even getting to know me. I am trying to see this as an opportunity to get thicker skin, and deal with my own humanity, because it is trying. And I want to learn how to deal with these kind of situations outside the U.S.

I’ve offered a workshop on African-American history, which garnered the questions “What do Native Americans look like? Are they white?” / “This guy is really light; is he black too?” / “What is Beyonce? No, What is she really?” The workshop was meant to focus on the subject lightly and offer exposure to a kind of identity. I’ve also taught a workshop on jazz, and everyone in the room was surprised that the genre was started by African Americans. Asian-American history failed because I didn’t know how to teach that effectively. I hope to find more creative ways to discuss the layout of the U.S. that Hollywood movies in China may not show.

I’m making the most of my time here, and I hope to see more of the silver lining in my experiences before I leave this country.

To be clear, I don’t categorize these instances as racism. I categorized them as systemic cultural ignorance and lack of awareness. You can not blame children or their parents for lack of exposure to other cultures. (I blame the Korean government for not embracing cultural awareness at a national level, but that’s another story.) However, this same ignorance can easily be transformed into racism without proper education, as we see happen so often in America.

It was extremely frustrating and exhausting living in my Black body and living this particular expat life. Eventually, I connected with other Black American teachers in Korea and was able to share my experiences and acquire coping strategies. In time, I saw an opportunity to not just teach English, but to culturally educate my students and co-workers simply by existing in my Blackness. I spoke Korean outside of class, I learned KPOP songs, and I tried to always have a smile when answering difficult questions. These actions helped to challenge assumptions and bias attributed to my skin color. Kaylee-teacher was a human being just like them, just a brown version from America.

More importantly, I was able to introduce a few lesson plans on racism and discrimination to my 5th and 6th graders. One student even gave a speech on racism and related it to discrimination among East Asian races!

Through my genuine passion to teach and my fun spirited disposition, parents warmed up to me as well. Though my race became a focal point of my time in Korea, I utilized it as part of my teacher toolkit. Was it stressful and debilitating at times to have my Black body—skin, hair, and intellect—viewed as a teachable moment instead of as a human being? Yes. However, my particular experience of being Black and abroad provided a chance to stymie ignorance before it transformed into discrimination or racism. It was quite a rewarding feat when race relations back home felt, and continue to feel, stagnant.