Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

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Even though everyone has surely noticed it by now, nobody has been able to conclusively determine why an overwhelming majority of Asian people, especially girls, routinely drag their feet when walking.

Asian shuffling is unmistakable indoors, but often still audible outside—especially with groups, and the more egregious individual cases. It’s not confined to any particular age group, though it seems to be more common in the Northern Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) than in the Southeast Asians (e.g., Filipinos).

Unsatisfied with the few speculative hypotheses that exist on this subject, I resolved to come up with a better explanation for this phenomenon. This is the product of that “research.”

Three Theories for Asian Shuffling

1. Active minds. Lazy bodies.

The human body has a finite number of resources. In Asian people, many of those resources are dedicated to the higher faculties, the brain functions—working out math problems, reaching new heights in online gaming, stressing out about your parents’ ever-smothering pressures. With the mind working overtime, the body gets fewer resources.

2. Collectively tired from working so hard, being so pressured.

School all day, after-school tutoring, piano lessons, violin lessons, Calculus homework, helping out at the family business—those things all add up. And when you’re that tired, things like a deliberate, heel-to-toe gait go by the wayside.

3. Weird walking habits from years of wearing slippers, or tube socks, in the house.

I knew an Asian guy in junior high school that stepped on the backs of all of his shoes to make them, functionally, into slippers. It didn’t matter what kind of shoe it was, or how expensive they were, he wore them all like a pair of house shoes. Remarkably, he could play several sports like that and never have a shoe slip off.

If you’ve ever worn slippers, you know there’s a specific way to walk in them. It’s a forward-leaning “foot drag and shuffle.” You still lift your feet, but not as much. There’s always a little contact with the floor. This is very different than walking around in flip-flops (previously known as “thongs,” until the G-string mysteriously appropriated the name). With flip-flops, you have the aid of the toe-thong, which turns your motion into more of a “lift and slap.” This is why White Girls don’t drag their feet.

I’m sure this guy I knew, like many Asian people, wore slippers in the house. In fact, he was so used to it, that he felt compelled to replicate it outside of his home. Asian people with less of this impulse, wear their shoes normally on the outside. But, years and years of wearing slippers in the house—and unwittingly practicing the “foot drag and shuffle”—make walking any other way inconvenient, if not impossible.