I then launched into a long and passionate tirade to explain how I am only interested in two sports that I actively participate in: gymnastics and diving - I have a very short attention span and I get very bored with football games. Take the boring England vs Costa Rica match which ended with a goalless draw - now that was boring. Over 90 minutes of two teams running around a field without even a single goal scored, duh. Boring! Now penalty shoot outs - that's a bit more exciting given how there is so much tension and how so much action is packed into a few moments. Now my short attention span also explains a lot of things - such as my choice of TV programmes and movies: I can't stand those slow moving films that take ages for the plot to develop and it's all about the atmosphere rather than the narrative. I love American Dad and Family Guy (Seth MacFarlane is a genius) as they pack in a joke every few seconds and you are constantly hit by punchline after punchline seconds apart - now that's the kind of TV programme and movie I enjoy!
Was this guy trying to be racist? No. Was he trying to annoy or upset me? Again, no - but he did upset me in the process. Perhaps I was disappointed that he made such a dumb assumption and that disappointment was based on my (overly high) expectations of a friend. But this is the kind of ignorant crap that I encounter in the UK, people making assumptions based on the colour of my skin - is this racism? You decide. I think racism has come a long way in the West, it has evolved a lot in the last few decades. You're hardly ever going to encounter in its most blatant form walking down the street, no. There are only instances where people misjudge the situation and say stupid things - sometimes I take offence, other times I just let it pass because I believe there to be no malice involved. I know when someone can be stupid without being malicious and no, I believe that it's not worth getting angry with people like that.
 |
| I was irked, but I chose not to take offence. |
In any case, there are plenty of Singaporeans who are fanatical about football (cue 'Andy' from the Singaporean gambling ads who has become an international star) and my sister has been staying up to watch some of the matches live from Brazil. I've had some Facebook chats with her that begin with, "hey, isn't it 4:05 am in Singapore, are you up late or up early? Aiyoh. Don't you have to go into work later? You don't need to sleep or what?" But then again, it is what she really likes and it goes to show that you can take two siblings from the same family and get such different characters: one sibling sacrifices sleep to watch the World Cup in the middle of the night whilst the other couldn't be less interested in it. If two members of the family can be that different, can you see how ridiculous it is to make assumptions based on skin colour, ethnicity or nationality?
That's it from me on this issue - do let me know what you think. Has anyone ever made any assumptions based on the colour of your skin or perhaps your nationality? How did that make you feel? How did you react? Or are you guilty of having made such assumptions yourself? Please leave me a comment below, many thanks for reading.
Ignorance is everywhere. It is a royal trademark of the human race, especially among those who want to read people mainly via recourse to classifying them. "O, you are Singaporean. Do you speak Chinese?" "O, you are Christian/Muslim. You are an extremist." "O, you are Asian. You cannot speak English." The list goes on yada yada yada. I experienced such ignorance in Japan and South Korea, wherein due to my mixed accent, people assume automatically that I must therefore speak another language instead of English. Irony of ironies. Don't these people speak with an 'accent' themselves which is incomprehensible? Plus, as long as you are Asian of another stripe other than Korean in South Korea, you are not allowed to teach English simply because you are not regarded as a native speaker, and even Korean Americans have to pretend that they do not know any Korean (even if they do) so as to avoid association with the idea that knowing Korean 'contaminates' your American accent.
ReplyDeleteI realized after a few decades in my life that people can be pretty d-mn ignorant. You either laugh it off, or just move on if these people are ignorant and do not want to be corrected.
That moment when an American asks a Singaporean friend this, "O, I saw the news about a flood in China. Is your family affected? Do you need to take leave so as to be able to go back and visit them?" (Speechless....) Or, when countries in Asia and Canada were hit by SARS, they asked my friend to take leave for a few days to make sure that he is not infected with anything, although he had actually been leaving in the USA for over 2 years.....Just shows you that some ignorance can be seriously an inconvenience even if not malicious.
ReplyDeleteThe worst one that I have encountered was, "do you have any Chinese currency, RMB? Our props department desperately needs some for a shoot tomorrow." And I would like, why the hell would I have a stash of RMB at home? Same stupid shit. Again, are they trying to offend or upset me by deliberately being racist? No, they're just being plain bloody stupid - but it's hard not to launch into a tirade and berate these people for their ignorance.
DeleteI generally just make sure that people know at the outset that I only speak English as my first language. If they ever get intrusive to the point of asking me what my parents speak to me in, that is when I will cut them off right away and note that they are being intrusive on my privacy. The Japanee have a knack for such things and that is why I say that I am Canadian from the start. It is alright because I can speak the Canadian accent relatively well if not perfectly. But I still hate such racism, as much as it is not malicious. It is just stupidity in its finest display.
DeletePretty sure it is just ignorances. Heard a person said to my local born friend. 'Both of you speak English very well, it seems China have improved their way of educating people in China.' I'm kinda speechless even though that person was being nice and trying to 'praise' us. Nowadays, I just say 'Thanks you', smile and walk off... (And yes, I was rather pissed off at first, now it is acknowledging them as ignorance...
ReplyDeleteI'm guilty of such assumption as well. Such as thinking some of the Caucasian are local/Europe, but they are actually from South Africa. And an Indian girl who is from England.
I once had a colleague asked me if "my people" celebrated Christmas. I am Catholic! I have more right to celebrate Christmas than the average idiot who shops mindlessly at Walmart for useless holiday gifts. Also, when I named my son after a French saint, I was asked, "Yeah, what's up with that? Do you speak French or something?" To that, I answered, "No, but why don't you ask Ming Tsai (another colleague with a Chinese name who was not even Catholic/Christian/Italian) why he named his daughter Isabella? Is he Christian, Italian, or what?" Then there was another white person who named her daughter Maya. She was surprised when I remarked, "Oh, Maya, meaning magic." She had no bloody idea what her daughter's name meant in Urdu or Sanskrit, but she named her Maya. There are stupid people everywhere. Even those with degrees.
ReplyDeleteWell, Di, it sounds like my experience dealing with Japanese and some South Koreans, especially those who are supposedly university-educated. Some Americans are not much better, although they might have PhDs....it is perhaps true to say that stupidity does not discriminate as much as intelligence.....
Delete"O, it must be a long flight all the way from Shanghai..."(that when the professor knew that I was flying from Singapore)...."I do not know if you speak English at all, but you surely speak really good English for an Asian." (at a conference last year in Michigan, upon which I stated that I lived long enough in Canada and consider it my second home)...."Do you speak any Chinese?" (Well, technically, I speak better Korean than Chinese, and at least my Korean intonation sounds better than my Chinese intonation for freaking sanity's sake, and I write better Korean too....). I do not think that people understand that being of Asian heritage does not mean that you need to be born or live outside the western world, for crying out loud.
I don't know if I have mentioned this before: someone at work said, "You know how hard it was to learn English as a second language because you went through the same experience." I said, "No, it was very easy for me because it was my first language at school." Then the silence and astonishment.
DeleteHi Alex,
ReplyDeleteOn a related subject, overall (various aspects of life considered), which have you found to be easier? Being 1) a gay Chinese Singaporean in Singapore, or 2) a gay "Asian" in the West? No worries if this is way too personal a question to provide much detail on.
Despite Singapore's conservative culture and 377A (and Singapore society is definitely changing), you are unlikely to be subject to subtle microaggressions (if not overt racism) on perhaps a daily basis - which racial minorities face (even in Singapore) and which is scientifically proven to cause poor mental health and depression. A gay person can easily live in a bubble and (assuming she is not too 'loud' about her sexuality), she can choose to associate only with people she is comfortable with and can choose when to speak up about who she is; whereas for a person belonging to a racial minority, her "race" is written on her face. Prejudice is everywhere - despite how politically correct the West tries to be.
For example, some Asian Americans I know do not feel like they "belong" in the US (this is partly due to unlike the African Americans who were a huge part of American history, Asians (e.g. in recent times, the Japanese during WW2, the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War) are often depicted as the "other" (e.g. Q: Where are you from? A: I'm from California. Q: Where are you -really- from?), and a young gay Chinese American man I know ironically felt a stronger sense of self-esteem when he studied in China (which is apparently not as gay-friendly).
Sgin
Hi Sgin, thanks for your question - I will try to give you some insight into my personal experiences but I fear that you're asking the wrong question and if I may even go as far as to accuse you of being racist: you're assuming the very, very worst of white people by assuming that they are anti-Asian or racist, whereas in my article here, I made it clear that there are people who are ignorant and ask stupid questions or stay stupid shit (such as the football incident, as described in this post) - whereas the amount of true anti-Asian "fuck off back to china chink" kind of racism is extremely rare to say the least.
DeleteIn any case, let me ask you this: if the UK was such a nasty, horrible, racist place (not that it is, but let's go with the argument for a moment), what kind of bloody stupid idiot would I be to stay here and suffer the racism like a dumb idiot? If things were really that bad, I would have moved a bloody long time ago - the fact that I chose to stay here and make this may home should tell you that I am pretty happy with the way things are here and that things are pretty good for me here. I know there are some Singaporeans who will stay in Singapore no matter how crap things get for them, even if they have PRCs taking a shit on their door steps everyday - but I am not like that. I am intelligent, versatile, multilingual and have worked in so many countries, I am not the kind of idiot who cannot survive in another country and I will move if things get bad.
As for whether it is harder being gay in Singapore or the West, I have actually covered this in another post earlier: http://limpehft.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/q-sex-sexuality.html and my conclusion is that it depends on your wealth at the end of the day. Rich gays are happy and comfortable anywhere, their wealth protects them from discrimination. Poor gays are screwed everywhere, it is their poverty which is their greatest enemy. Get real, we live in a material world. Money talks. Money trumps everything.
As for whether you feel like you belong or not - life ain't a popularity contest, I don't give a shit what some stranger thinks about me, I do care about what my friends think about me, what my co-workers think about me, what my bosses think about me, what my peers in my industry think about me, This then boils down to the kind of relationship I have with them and how I have won their respect and trust, and it becomes all about how they view me as a person, as an individual, rather than anything to do with my skin colour, ethnicity or sexuality.
DeleteAs for the young gay Chinese-American you talked about, I think he is totally barking up the wrong tree when it comes to his sense of self-esteem. Your sense of self-esteem and self-worth should boil down to the things you have done, the things you have accomplished, the things on your CV rather than anything that you have no control over like your nationality, your skin colour/ethnicity or your sexuality. For him to attach his self-esteem to being Chinese is fucking stupid if you ask me: be proud of the fact that you have done something amazing like left the comfort of your home city and went to study halfway around the world in a foreign country where they speak a different language, be proud of the fact that you mastered a difficult foreign language to a very high level, be proud of the fact that you are independent enough to take care of yourself halfway around the world at a young age without your parents help - there is so much this young man can feel proud about in terms of what he has achieved personally, but no, he has to attach himself to some bigger Chinese cultural identity and borrow some kind of second hand pride from it? That's bullshit. That's stupid, that's lame-ass dumb. There's something extremely illogical about this young man Sgin and you should question why he is so bloody illogical rather than just accept his case study as something unquestionable and factual. Like did it occur to you that this young man is barking up the wrong tree, that there is something very salah and wrong with his thinking in the first place, huh?
Duh.
There's nothing to be gained by being in the majority per se - you wanna complain about being the 'other' but a sense of belonging is meaningless and worthless unless it becomes something personal and tangible. You're just fooling yourself if you walk down the street in China, see all the Chinese faces and think "oh I am Chinese, they are Chinese, I belong here." Fucking stupid bullshit. Fucking bloody idiotic bodoh salah bullshit. You want a sense of belonging - you bloody well earn it: there are Singaporeans in Singapore who are lonely, isolated and have no friends because they have not made the effort to connect with the people around them in their lives. I remember this rather odd guy in my JC who had no social skills, thus he had no friends and threw himself into his studies and got very good grades - but he was the weirdo who was always eating on his own during recess or lunch. He was very lonely indeed and what I heard was that he kena bullied really badly during NS, he felt so isolated and alone that he tried to kill himself (but luckily survived). Now that's an example of someone who is Chinese-Singaporean but felt so incredibly lonely and didn't feel that he belong in Singapore because he didn't have any friends.
Now in London where I live today, I have good friends, I have co-workers who respect me and value me for what I can do, my sense of belonging is based on these meaningful relationships that I have: both personal relationships with my good friends and professional relationships at work - these are what make me feel at home here because I know I have people here who love me, cherish me, rely on me, like me, want to work with me, want to spend time with me - that is what feeling a sense of belonging is about and it is what your self-esteem and self-worth should be based on.
So I really fucking hate it when people blame society, blame racism, blame homophobia, blame the government blah blah blah when they don't have a sense of self-esteem: stop making bullshit excuses, look into the mirror and blame yourself. You want self-esteem, you get off your fat ass and you work hard and you earn it. You earn the trust of the people around you, you work hard and win their respect, you work hard and make them realize what a valued member of the team you are and then they will reciprocate and that is how it works.
Sorry for all the swearing Sgin, but as you can tell, I feel that you are totally misguided and salah in so many ways on this issue and that young gay Chinese-American is equally salah and wrong on so many issues - instead of questioning his illogical ways and his thinking, you just accept that he is justified in thinking the way he does? Aiyoh. What the fuck man? Is this how you go through life? Do you not look at someone in this situation and exercise some judgement about whether or not they are right or wrong, whether they are justified or just plain bloody salah?
DeleteThat is what irks me about you. You don't seem to exercise any judgement in the case of this gay American guy - you are just looking for evidence that matches your preconceived notions of the West being racist when really, I don't think you're that stupid. You're just too Singaporean to exercise the notion of critical thinking and form an independent opinion when given a case study like that. Try thinking independently and asking more questions in the future, when presented with a case study as such.
I agree with almost everything you said. I think what my Chinese American friend was getting at was the dynamics of the gay scene, and 'sexual politics'. He was referring to how the standard of beauty in the West is white as compared to Beijing where the standard of beauty is East Asian; to how in Beijing he no longer has to put up with stupid Grindr douchebags in the US who write "Not into Asian" on their profiles and how this made him feel growing up. Our dating preferences are largely shaped by the demographics and the media (which includes pornography), and Asian men get the short end of the stick (no pun intended) in the West with all the stupid stereotypes; you wouldn't see a film/television show in the US like the Japanese TV serial in the 1996 "Beach Boys" which portrayed Asian men as confident and attractive, masters of their fate. And don't get me started on (gay) pornography. You might have heard of the 'minority stress' model in social science; persons of colour who are subject to subtle microaggressions (and I do mean that most 'racist' behaviour of whites is unintentional) have additional baggage, and in the gay dating world, I read a study which showed that minorities are in the weaker bargaining position when it comes down to something as important as negotiating condom use in gay saunas with a white man apparently higher up on the food chain in the gay dating scene. Again, this is all very personal, so you may leave out whichever details you're not comfortable sharing in your reply (if you care to reply).
DeleteSgin, I'm currently watching TV so I will write a longer reply later but again, you know I am going to disagree with a lot of what you said.
DeleteI will write more later, only because I oh so totally disagree with you in principle on so many points.
OK TV over, now to deal with why I disagree with you so profoundly, with all due respect.
DeleteOh I can't even begin to tell you just how wrong I think you are.
For starters, I fucking hate it when people allow others to define their self-esteem by their standards, it is in principle so so fucking wrong. Why can't you look into the mirror and like what you see? Why oh why do you have to turn life into a fucking popularity contest and only allow yourself to give yourself that self-respect when others actually like you? And oh no, not only that, you have to turn life into a fucking beauty pageant and allow others to judge what they make of your body and looks instead of listening to yourself and allowing yourself to define what your beauty standards are.
Am I a vain person? Yes I am, I do spend a lot of money on clothes and grooming myself and I do care how I look, but I am doing this according to my standards and I have a clear idea of what I think would make me beauty on my terms, and I do not allow the gay scene or anyone else define that for me.
As for your gay American friend going to China, you're once again not questioning the evidence! I have spent time in China myself and it is fucking painful to see all these ads in Shanghai in broken English and the image of an Angmoh on the ad - wanna sell more (insert name of product)? Make an ad and slap the image of an Angmoh on it - PRCs totally kowtow to Angmohs when it comes to what they define as physical beauty. Angmoh = better than Chinese in China. Oh the number of fat beached whales (ie. very old and fat Angmoh men) who have a string of 18 year old nubile young slim Chinese ladies fighting over them is obscene.
As for Grindr in America, what the fuck, is your friend some kinda cock hungry whore who is desperate to such as many cocks as possible and trying to break Annabel Chong's record when it comes to the number of men he wants to bed? Even when it comes to casual sex, there is an element of quality vs quantity and the very basic premise of sex is that there has to be some degree of mutual sexual attraction for it to happen thus if someone says "not into Asians" - just say so what and move on. I am not into fat guys - does that make me an evil person for being fattist? Or is it simply a matter of being honest and not wasting the other person's time?
As for the fucking idiots who are dumb enough to even treat condoms as something you have to negotiate or bargain - oh for fuck's sake, like WHAT THE FUCK are you on about for crying out aloud? Listen, take some fucking responsibility if you want to have casual sex, don't start giving me all this bloody stupid bullshit about racism when you don't have the fucking guts to say "use a condom or we're not having sex".
What totally pisses me off about you is that you fucking blame everyone else, you blame white people for being racist and oppressing Asians - how about blaming these spineless stupid useless Asian guys for not having a fucking backbone and standing up for themselves for a change?
Your stance is fucking sickening, you so fucking love being a fucking pathetic victim.
It's fucking pathetic. Yes, it is. Grow a pair for balls for crying out aloud and stop being such a fucking pathetic LOSER.
Sgin, the main point I want you to take away from this episode is this: you can take one issue like this, present it to a group of people from the same community and you will get a RANGE of responses. Different people will have different opinions and react very differently to the same set of circumstances.
DeleteYou are making the assumption that I must somehow agree with your point of view - when from the strength of my response, I hope it is exceedingly clear how profoundly I disagree with you on so many levels and I have come up with a very different kind of response to the kind of circumstances that you have described. That I have more than adequately covered in my previous replies.
I am sorry if I have used strong language - but I am not sorry about disagreeing so profoundly with the points you have made. I hope it is clear that I take an extremely different stance on these issues - it is a matter of principle for me. As much as I want to do the whole "with all due respect thing", I can't even begin to state just how wrong I think you are.
Even if I can't change your stance on the issue, I want you to at least acknowledge that hey, different people would have a different take on the issue, have a different perspective and point of view and react differently to the same set of circumstances. You are making the mistake of universalizing your point of view and assuming that others will agree with you - when clearly, given the diversity of human characters out there, that is never going to be the case, is it?
So, stop seeing the world only from your own point of view and start considering the views of others and start taking into account their point of view, which may be radically different from yours because they are quite simply, different people. You may learn quite a bit from people who are different from you.
Over & out.