The racist Indian accent episode in Singapore

Hello everyone. Okay, quite a few people have asked me to comment on the following racist incident in Singapore - I am a few days late because I've been crazy busy with work, but this story is just getting bigger with the police now involved. In case you haven't heard, Singaporean-Indian actor Shrey Bhargava posted a very angry rant on Facebook about the way he was treated at an audition for a Jack Neo film ABTM4, where he was told to put on a comical "full blown Indian man" accent by the casting directors who were Chinese. This came across as mortally offensive to those of us who are quite politically correct over issues like this - but Shrey also became a target of even more vile racist attacks by extremely racist Chinese Singaporeans who felt that he shouldn't have complained in the first place about the way he was treated. I just look at this an shake my head because whilst Chinese Singaporean are paranoid about white people being racist towards them in the West, they don't think twice about unleashing their vile racism on Indian Singaporeans - so racism is okay with Chinese Singaporeans as long as they are not on the receiving end of it? Fucking hell. But let me put aside my anger over this issue and make a few general points about what happened.

Asian people who talk without an accent are rare. Very rare. 

People like me. I may have been born in Singapore to Chinese parents (well, technically speaking, I am mixed but I digress) but after having lived 20 years in Europe, I speak English without a hint of an Asian accent. It is hard to describe my accent - I do put on a more articulate brand of received pronunciation when I am at work but when I am amongst friends, other European influences creep in since I also spend a lot of my time speaking other European languages like Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian and German at work. There is also a certain American inflection to my accent, thanks to years of watching American TV as a child. And if I may admit it, I totally look down on a Chinese accent, which I would associate with the uneducated Chinese people struggling to speak English. I am well educated and if need be, I can speak Mandarin and Hokkien if you really want me to speak in Chinese. I remember the looks I got with my friend Owain at a train station when him and I were happily chatting away in Welsh - I think the people around us were trying to figure what language we were speaking and given how strange Welsh sounds to the uninitiated, I bet some people were wondering if Owain was speaking in an Asian language with me.

Most Chinese/Indian people in real life do have an accent - the media will reflect that reality.

But yes, that makes me extremely rare - I recognize that I am in the minority. I have traveled through China and the number of people who speak English is rather low, those who speak it inevitably do so with a rather typical Chinese accent. Likewise, if you went to India, you would find that even those who do speak English fluently tend to have varying degrees of an Indian accent. That's not being racist, I'm just acknowledging that there's no smoke without fire - English is a second or foreign language in places like China and India, unlike a country like America, Australia or the UK where it is a first language. Singapore is an unusual case because whether or not English is your first language actually depends a lot on whether you use the language at home with your family - is it something you merely use in school or is it genuinely the first language you use in the home environment all the time? So some Singaporeans are a lot more like their counterparts in England or America who speak English as a first language, whilst others have far more in common with their counterparts in China or India who speak English as a second/foreign language and there's everything in between. I work in banking now and ironically, I feel far more free to be whom I want as long as I get the job done. In short, my work today in corporate finance has nothing to do with my skin colour especially since my clients are all white anyway, so to be blunt, I can now be as white as I want at work. That's not a luxury I had as an actor.

A case study from Germany

I had worked as an actor in the past, I am acutely aware of my skin colour and I have written a piece about what it is like working as a Chinese actor in the West. Have I ever encountered white directors who have asked me to exaggerate my Chinese accent? Not really, if they wanted a character to sound more exotic, they would simply ask me to do the same script in Mandarin or Hokkien. I have been to auditions before when the character speaks English as a foreign language and thus has a strong Chinese accent: am I offended by that? Ironically, no - not at all, as long as the portrayal of the character is not derogatory or inaccurate. Can things be better? Sure of course they can. Let me give you an example: you see, being one of the few Chinese-looking German speaking actors in Europe, I am always given a chance to audition every time there is a big Chinese part for a German film or TV project. Some years back, there was a prime time TV programme which involved a Chinese couple who had migrated to Germany from China. The husband speaks what I can only describe as broken German whilst the wife speaks only in Mandarin and when she tries to express herself in German, she struggles and often turns to her husband for help. Overall, it was a compelling story for a big budget, prime time, popular German TV drama series - the script just needed some more work.

When I got the script, I knew it was deliberately written in bad German to make the Chinese man look inarticulate - I showed the script to my German buddy Lukas and he was like, "holy shit nobody speaks German like that, not even Chinese people struggling with the language - they are deliberately trying to make him look stupid, I am so sorry, this is fucking awful, it is racist." However, when I met up with the casting director, he was the first to tell me that the script was indeed poorly written and there was no intention whatsoever to make fun of Chinese people trying to speak German. "Most German people are happy to use English to communicate with people from other countries anyway, so if a Chinese person has made the effort to learn German, then we'll totally respect that." He wanted to do was to cast a Chinese actor who had some ability with the German language. Indeed, it would be easier to cast someone who could speak German well and then get him to try out different ways to play the character, ranging from being a fluent German speaker with a slight Chinese accent to someone struggling with German. He didn't want to cast someone who didn't speak enough German and would be then genuinely struggling with the language. So I said to him that I do struggle somewhat with German because it is a foreign language for me - I make mistakes with German grammar as it is quite different from English and I often mispronounce words. I would look at a word like 'sport' and my mind would think, aha that's an English word and I'd pronounce it the English way, but in fact in German it is pronounced 'shport'. 

So this is what I offered the director: I have an accent when I speak German and it is far from perfect, but the mistakes I make are far more typical of an English person given that English is my first language and French is my second language. I do not have a Chinese accent when I speak English, so trying to fake one when I speak German is going to sound painful and artificial. I then pointed out that many Chinese people learn English as a foreign language at school in China and that this character could be someone who already speaks English reasonably well but ended up working in Germany instead, so he could be thinking in English whilst trying to speak German and hence he would make mistakes such as mispronouncing the word 'sport'. The director was very reasonable and listened to what I had to say, he was grateful for my insight into the situation with Chinese migrants in Europe and he allowed me to do it the way I wanted to do it which was ultimately German with an English rather than Chinese accent. I pointed out that if he wanted to remind the viewers that this couple was from China, they are constantly bickering with each other in Mandarin anyway, so there's no real need to make them speak German with a painfully strong Chinese accent. I didn't get the part in the end as they had found a brilliant German-speaking Chinese actress to play the part of the wife and I was told that I looked way too young to be her husband, so they had to go with an older Chinese actor to play her husband. I'm pleased to say that whilst I was not successful that time, I did score another major role in a popular German drama series Alarm für Cobra 11 and despite the fact that my character was Singaporean, I wasn't asked to do any kind of Asian accent at all and I ended up sounding über German in the final edit.

Is there any malice or racism involved?

I was satisfied that whilst a scriptwriter had misjudged the tone of the scene by making the Chinese characters speak in broken German, I am confident that there was no malice involved at all even if a mistake had been made. Furthermore, I accept that Chinese people living and working in Germany will probably have a Chinese accent when they speak German but how strong that accent is would depend on how long they've lived in Germany and how good their German would be. Whilst working on Alarm für Cobra 11, I met a young Chinese-German actor who spoke English with a German accent but he couldn't speak much Mandarin at all (his parents spoke some obscure Chinese dialect and he was brought up in Germany) - we ended up chatting mostly in English and he was telling me how he really ought to learn some Mandarin so it would allow him to play more Chinese parts, given that's how the public usually expect Chinese people to be portrayed on film. As a Chinese actor, you may be asked to portray a character who speaks Mandarin as most Chinese people in the world would be Mandarin-speaking (as opposed to first language German or English speakers), therein lies the dilemma. If you worked in another industry such as banking, then you can be as white as you want and it wouldn't matter at all what your skin colour was. But if you look Chinese, then you'll be expected to do Chinese things as an actor such as speak Mandarin, eat rice with chopsticks or do some kungfu.

Case study of Ling Woo from Ally McBeal

You may remember the character of Ling Woo in the popular American TV series Ally McBeal acted by Lucy Liu. I loved that character - she was sassy, confident, sexy, articulate, bold, unapologetic, she gets what she wants and most of all, I felt that was an extremely positive portrayal of a Chinese American character. She spoke Mandarin sometimes but when she spoke English, she sounded completely white and American. But then, it occurred to me that I liked her very much as I too wanted to come across as unapologetically, unashamedly white in my own life, that's how I wanted to come across, mostly to spite my Chinese parents whom I don't get along with, I'm passive-aggressive like that. You see, an Asian person who wants to come across as 'white' would naturally be attracted to a character like Ling Woo and cringe when they see someone like William Hung on TV. After all, there are some very negative and unattractive stereotypes associated with your typical East Asian nerd whilst Ling Woo is the complete opposite of all of those negative stereotypes. In choosing to associate all these positive attributes that Ling Woo displays with 'whiteness' and assuming that Ling is the way she is because she is a very well assimilated Chinese-American person, then perhaps Asian people themselves are guilty of valuing white culture over their own and looking down on their own culture.

What is wrong with an Indian accent per se? 

There is a great film coming soon called Victoria & Abdul featuring Bollywood superstar Ali Fazal. In the film, of course Fazal has an Indian accent, Abdul Karim arrived in England in 1887 to serve Queen Victoria as a servant - so of course he had an Indian accent. Make sure you catch it later this year. In fact, it would be ludicrous if not historically inaccurate if Fazal portrayed Abdul with a modern American or British accent. But of course, there's absolutely nothing racist or offensive about the way Fazal portrayed the character of Abdul - if anyone watching the trailer (see below) and laughed at the Indian accent that Abdul has, then that's more a poor reflection on the person that found it funny. But then again, Victoria & Abdul is a serious film that would only appeal to a certain more high brow, educated, intellectual audience - the complete opposite of that would be a film like Dumb & Dumber, which relies heavily on slapstick humour to make the audience laugh. So I can imagine if there is an Indian character in such a movie, then the audience would expect the Indian character to be a "full blown Indian man" playing up to every Indian stereotype. I have watched plenty of Bollywood films - I went on a binge after I was given a chance to audition for one some years back and I felt I had to do my homework: my favourites include Bajrangi Baijaan, Kabul Express and Ek Tha Tiger. And of course, when English is spoken in those films, it is inevitably with an Indian accent - so there's really nothing wrong with that because that's just the way Indians speak English. But let's look at Shrey's case in a bit more detail now.

Who is making the joke? 

Now imagine if I got on stage to do a stand up comedy routine and I made a number of jokes about the menstruation cycle - that would come across as deeply offensive and sexist because as a man, I don't know what it is like to have a period and so it is simply a taboo subject for me to touch upon. Like I just wouldn't dare touch a topic like that but if a female comedian chooses to talk about her period, then she has the right to do that if she so chooses to. Likewise, if I choose to make a Chinese joke, then that's perfectly fine because I am Chinese and I an effectively making fun of myself - I have the right to do that.  But say, if a straight person wants to make a gay joke, then that's very tricky as s/he may come across as homophobic if it is somehow perceived as disrespectful or derogatory. So someone like Shrey has the right to make fun of Indians in a way that Chinese people simply do not - if you make fun of a community that you belong to, then that's self-deprecation and totally acceptable because the comedian is in total control of how s/he deals with the topic. But if you choose to make fun of another community without first gaining their trust or consent, as in the way the casting directors had asked Shrey to do an exaggerated Indian accent, then no, that's deeply offensive and racist. They have clearly misjudged the situation and crossed the line there. They have not won Shrey's trust before asking him to indulge in self-deprecation, that was a gross misjudgment on their part.

It is a question of trust. 

Now, if you were to tell me that the casting director was another Indian person, would that make it more acceptable? I think it depends - after all, it goes beyond what one considers funny or acceptable, it is then a question of trust. When I worked with the German casting director (who saw me a number of times before casting me in Cobra 11), I trusted him and had confidence in his judgement. A big part of that confidence came from the fact that he was always willing to listen to me as well, so that respect went two-ways and we had a great working relationship. There is a very popular stand-up comedian called Pam Ann who makes loads of jokes about the gay community despite being a straight woman, however, she is loved and totally embraced by the gay community so she gets away with making such gay jokes. So if a Chinese casting director had asked me to do an exaggerated, stereotypical Chinese accent, I would challenge the director about why he wants such an accent for the role and whether or not I take offence would then depend on casting director's response: I wouldn't rush to judgement but I would not automatically give that casting director the benefit of the doubt either. I'd give them the chance to explain their choices before passing judgement.

Jack Neo and the Singaporean market

So in Shrey's case, clearly he had walked away from the audition feeling very insulted and offended by casting directors who seemed intent on finding an Indian actor who was willing and able to deliver a kind of racist caricature of a "full blown Indian man" who would appeal to a certain kind of audience. This tells you far more about the kind of audience that Jack Neo is trying to appeal to with this movie - certainly, it won't be the same movie-going audience who will watch something like Victoria & Abdul. No, rather he is trying to appeal to a Chinese-speaking, less educated, working class audience which is in fact rather large in Singapore. This segment of the market actually does support the local film industry by going to see local films! Hence by that token, is there anything wrong with trying to appeal to that market, when the more educated, English-speaking audience is Singapore is probably going to turn their noses up at any locally produced movie and go for American and British films anyway? Jack Neo is trying to make a profit with his films at the end of the day - so trying to appeal to the highly educated, jiat-kentang, atas crowd in Singapore is going to be nothing short of commercial suicide. No, they will never ever see a film from the ATBM series, not in a million years - they would much rather watch something like Victoria & Abdul instead. So Jack Neo has to appeal to a different audience, one that will laugh at a slapstick portrayal of an Indian man's accent and mannerisms. Whilst I can understand the commercial reasons behind the decisions made by Jack Neo and his casting team at J-Team productions, I still cringe at the idea of an audience laughing at an Indian actor's exaggerated accent and mannerisms.

Who do J-Team Productions make films for in Singapore?

Shrey was auditioning for the fourth installment of Neo's ATBM series, it is not as if it was a brand new movie - so surely he must have had some idea what he was auditioning for and realized that it wasn't exactly a Singaporean remake of Hamlet or Othello. So there's a certain part of me that wondered if Shrey was somewhat naive in his expectations. Is he even familiar with the -ahem- quality of Jack Neo's work? To his credit, Jack Neo knows his market well and has paid his dues doing comedy skits on Channel 8 for so many years where he was best remembered for his drag acts. I remember much of Jack Neo's skits with Moses Lim from the late 1980s and 1990s (see clip below) and they were not just cringeworthy, but they were designed specifically for a certain segment of Singaporean society that Shrey was no part of (and trust me that is a compliment Shrey). He's not Chinese, he's not working class and he doesn't speak Chinese as a first language - that renders him as far removed from Jack Neo's core audience as possible and if he wants to get involved in a project for that audience, he's unlikely to be able to do it on his terms. So Shrey has a choice - either accept the limited opportunities he has in Singapore, or go seek greener pastures abroad in somewhere like Mumbai, Los Angeles or London. Heck, he can also try the German-speaking market (not just Germany, but Austria and Switzerland as well) if he can learn German like me. So Shrey, sprechen Sie Deutsch bitte?

A big fish in a very small pond?

Such is the problem of being an Indian actor in Singapore - there is Vannathirai and Vasantham, but wait: Shrey doesn't even speak Tamil, he is a Hindi speaker. In any case, these channels are struggling and without government money, they would be wiped out in the face of competition from cable channels from India. Heck, for that matter, I do wonder how much longer local Mandarin and English channels can survive when they are faced with much better programmes and channels from abroad? Shrey's options are extremely limited in Singapore - I have been on his Facebook page and had a quick look at some of his posts. I can see that, he has spent time in Los Angeles working in America (not sure how much success he has had there) but  I can imagine him being far more happy there, feeling far more at home culturally in LA than he will ever be in Singapore. Except of course, it is a lot harder to be a small fish in the big ocean than the big fish in a small pond. There are so many more opportunities for actors in LA, but can Shrey become famous and find success thee when so many have tried and failed? Or if he really has no desire to do 'Indian things' on film, then he can go into banking like me where he can be as white as he wants at work. 

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue. In conclusion, I do feel sorry for Shrey because he didn't deserve to be treated like that - but on the other hand, sigh. There's a part of me that thinks, come on lah - this is a Singaporean film and you should know what they are like, seriously, what did you expect when dealing with a production company like that? Didn't he knew what kind of film it was? And as for the hate he received from Chinese Singaporeans after the story went viral, well that just shows you how nasty and racist Chinese Singaporeans can be and I hope this incident will inspire Shrey to seek greener pastures abroad. You deserve better than this bro, good luck to you. Leave a comment below, let me know what you think. Who do you blame most in this sorry episode? Many thanks for reading.