Yellow gal in the country

I spent the weekend with a gal pal and her family in a very very small town in a remote area of a certain Midwestern state. I don't view myself as a prissy little city girl (I drink Jack Daniels on the rocks and I like hole-in-the-wall diners). But I can't deny that I was a little scared when my friend and I stopped at a truck stop in the middle of rural America at 10:30 at night. The fifty-something-year-old waitress sported a well-coifed mullet and smoked a cigarette while she waited for our orders. The place was empty. The jukebox played a mournful country song. And we saw a couple guys by their pickup trucks standing by our car.

"This feels like a scene from a movie, doesn't it?" I asked my friend.

She smiled at me. "I'm used to it."

As a non-white person, I get very paranoid. I was warned by others that there are people in parts of the country who have never seen a minority -- EVER. I can't imagine going through my entire life and being exposed to only one race. People can be harmless-ignorant ("Do you know kung fu?") or mean-ignorant ("Go back to China"). So what would they do? Stare at me? Yell at me? Assault me?

My friend didn't help the situation by informing me she wouldn't have brought me along if I were African American. She told me that some of her family members in those parts still use a certain N word to refer to African Americans. My jaw dropped when she told me this and I started freaking out. "Don't worry," she assured me, "you're fine!" As in, "you" as an Asian.

Well, I came, I saw and I went...unscathed. The family was very friendly. No one asked me the "What are you?"/"Where are you from?" questions. I suppose I was treated like I was white, which is always a relief. I was also grateful to see other minorities speckled in the area (granted, there were only two others, but still).

So I admit, I'm more comfortable in a world of bums, lewd construction workers and pickpockets than a world of cornfields, dirt roads and 503 country stations. I guess that makes me a prissy little city girl.