I was in a conversation about globalization recently and twice I inadvertently used the example of China as being tantamount to foreign. As in, China came first to mind as being the epitome of otherness. In retrospect, I don't think this is fair but I think it is a pervasive American sentiment. A lot of our minds jump to China as being extraterrestrial because of the current discourse between our countries, it's a discourse of competition, of a rising China and faltering America. I wasn't alive during the Cold War, but I imagine how we speak of China now is not altogether different from Russia. In each of their contexts, those countries serve as black to our white.
But in the face of a globalizing world where our neighbors might just be anyone on any continent, what does foreign mean anymore? What does it mean historically? Where is foreign located? Are there degrees of foreign? Is it people or ideas? Languages?
I have the sense that it is a political definition. It is used as a border to separate a homeland from a perceived danger. But what does it mean when a political discourse established by the rhetoric of government trickles down to the everyday people? Is it potentially xenophobic of me to think of China as foreign? Isn't there more to be learned from an outside body if I think of them at once as both different and the same?
