Deceit, Greek, DNA, liars and reality TV

Hi there, today I would like to share with you a silly story from many years ago, during my NS days in Singapore. I was reminded of this story by a recent episode from Nora from Queens when Edmund Lin does a DNA test and finds out that he has Icelandic ancestry, then they go to Iceland. Then there's also a funny story from one of my favourite Youtubers Abroad in Japan when Chris Broad confesses to the time he was caught lying to the famous actor Ken Watanabe whom he was interviewing. So let's call this guy Henry (not his real name) and I have removed any details that might identify him as this is not a 'name & shame' piece - I just wanted to share the story without making it personal. First a little bit about the two stories that inspired this piece: in the American comedy sitcom Nora from Queens, Edmund Lin (Chinese American as the name suggests) did a DNA test which revealed that he is part Icelandic despite not having any real links to the country or even looking mixed Eurasian. He then takes Nora to Iceland where he dyes his hair blonde and puts on blue contact lenses to embrace his newly discovered Icelandic roots, only to find out why the DNA test was wrong (it is actually hilarious though quite implausible - I won't share the punchline here as I want to encourage you to watch that episode shot in Iceland). In Chris Broad's video, when he was asked by Ken Watanabe how long he had been living in Japan, he lied and said 5 years instead of confessing to have lived in Japan for over 10 years. He was afraid that Japanese people might expect him to have attained native standard Japanese after living there for that long and admittedly, his Japanese is rather good but far from native standard fluent.  Nonetheless, Ken Watanabe found out the truth a day later and Chris was even more embarrassed about having lied about it to Watanabe, far more embarrassed than he was about the standard of his Japanese. Today I'm going to talk about Henry's lie from the period 1996 to 1997. 

Henry is a year younger than me and I met him through a mutual friend - he is gay and came from a fairly wealthy family. He was cultured and loved classical music, but particularly medieval music. I'm sure you're painting a picture in your head right now of a somewhat effeminate gay who isn't the kind of guy who would thrive in NS, seeking solace in a rather niche form of medieval music and you'll be right. So Henry dreamt about finding a boyfriend who was tall, strong, macho and would be his prince in shining armour but still equally intellectual and cultured. Oh and on top of that, Henry was also quite overweight at that time (he did lose a lot of the weight later on in his life, but that is another story for another day) but for the purpose of this story, he was quite fat. I could have certainly sensed that Henry lacked self-confidence as a gay man then, but he did this thing: he lied about his ancestry. He claimed he was a quarter Greek, that was a lie of course. Henry didn't look Eurasian at all, no, he looked very typically Chinese but he claimed that his mother was Eurasian, Chinese + Greek mix, making her half Greek and him quarter Greek. This was back in the 1990s, we couldn't simply Google his parents on the internet and verify if his claims were true - so it was just a question of whether or not he could successfully convince us that he had Greek blood. For him, it was like a mind game, especially with people like me who were cynical but had no way to disprove what he was claiming. To carry it off convincingly, Henry did have a really good knowledge of Greek culture and history, he had travelled to Greece a few times as a teenager (I told you he was quite rich) and even knew some words in Greek. I thought, yeah just because you love all things Greek and you wish you were Greek, doesn't make you Greek: you wish you were Greek, as that might make you more interesting than you actually are but you're not actually Greek or even a quarter Greek. However, despite the fact that I had challenged him on a few occasions, he very adamantly insisted that he had some Greek blood and that was something I would never understand as I was just Asian like everyone else in Singapore. The irony was that I did do a DNA test years later only to find out that I am genuinely mixed, unlike Henry, however, DNA tests like that were not commercially available back then.

So how was Henry's lie exposed? Well he actually did something interesting that put him in the public eye, at least in Singapore then. I'm not going to name the film as it was pretty forgettable but back in the 1990s, it was a pretty big deal to actually have a film that was entirely Singaporean - written by a local, shot in Singapore with a local cast and seen in local cinemas by Singaporeans who were quite used to watching movies from Hollywood, Bollywood, Hong Kong, just anywhere but Singapore. At least Jack Neo had some success with his Mandarin/Hokkien films back in that period but then, he was effectively making a Chinese movie whilst these were movies that were in English/Singlish. On main feature of the film was to capture the ethnic and cultural diversity of Singapore - so the main characters were Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian. Henry wasn't cast as the Eurasian guy, no he was cast as the Chinese guy in that film whilst they got a real Eurasian guy to play the Eurasian part. This Eurasian guy was the real deal, he looked mixed - complete with a much larger nose and European eyes (unlike Henry, who had a much flatter Chinese nose and very Chinese eyes). He had a surname that was Syrian in origin and back in the 1990s, he achieved quite a lot of fame in Singapore as an actor and singer. Henry was remarkably lucky to have been working alongside someone who was quite a lot more established and successful but of course, that's when Henry's friends were like, come on Henry - now there's a real Eurasian guy who is your co-star in this film and you're playing the typical Singaporean Chinese guy in this film. If your Eurasian co-star claimed to be half Greek, we wouldn't question that at all so why don't you just accept that you had been telling a crazy lie all this time just to pretend to be more interesting? After all, you have achieved the one thing you had wanted all this time: you wanted to be interesting and for people to notice you, now you are recognized when you walk down Orchard Road by random strangers. You are interesting now, you are in the public eye, people have noticed you, you now have all the attention you want, you do not need to pretend to have Greek blood anymore, you can just be yourself.

Henry could have came clean about lying about his Greek ancestry at that point, but instead he doubled down - he insisted that I was putting our friendship on the line by calling him a liar and a fantasist, that he was definitely part Greek and I was insulting his Greek ancestors. But he wasn't prepared for what happened next; you see, Henry had a very typical, common Chinese surname from his father so he had claimed that the Greek blood had come from his mother's side of the family. Most of us had never met his mother and so he had painted a picture of her being this fascinating, gorgeous, sexy, cosmopolitan Eurasian lady who was part Greek. Well in order to convince Singaporeans to actually watch the movie that Henry was in, the local TV programmes started promoting it and interviewing not just the stars of the movie but also their parents. Thus Henry's parents were interviewed as part of a segment whereby they talked about how they liked this film, how entertaining it was and how proud of their son they were for being a part of it. There wasn't anything controversial about that interview, it was fairly bland to be honest but Henry's elusive mother was finally in the public eye. Oh she wasn't some sexy Eurasian supermodel with Greek blood called Aphrodite; no, she was your pretty typical Singaporean auntie whose English had a very strong Chinese accent and she often lapsed into Singlish - now that identified her as 100% Singaporean and 0% Greek instantly. I remembered how Henry loved all that media attention and he would call me up to inform me each time he was featured on TV, radio or in the print media but he had kept very quiet about the interview with his parents. But most of us saw it anyway and usually, Henry would be like, "hey did you see me on TV last night? Did you hear the interview that I did on radio last night?" However this time, he decided to lie low for a while and ignored our calls after that interview, claiming that he had come down with a bad case of the flu and was decidedly unwell. So rather than talk about it and be confronted with the truth, he decided to pretend to be sick to avoid us altogether. This actually went on and on for a few weeks and I thought, oh please - you are just being silly now. 

However, this whole Greek thing had become such an integral part of Henry's relationship with his friends, I don't even think he knew how to deal with it. Having chosen to double down on the lie each time the topic was raised, he had raised the stakes - either believe every word I tell you or else we are not friends, friends trust and believe each other. I never got to speak to Henry about that interview with his mother - quite frankly, there really isn't much to say about it. His lie about his mother was exposed live on national TV and whilst I wasn't going to kick a man who was already down, I wasn't prepared to just ignore the whole Greek thing either and pretend that it had never ever happened. After all, it was at that same period when I started learning French and I fell in love with all things French - I did go on to live, study and work in France, French became my second language and I speak near-native standard French today but at the same time, I have never ever claimed to have a drop of French blood. After all, I have a friend from gymnastics Celine who is in fact half-French and her mother was a French teacher! She admitted to me that she had a rather difficult relationship with her mother and so one of the passive aggressive ways she used to annoy her mother was to refuse to speak French. So whenever her mother spoke to her in French, she would reply in English and refuse to use the French language even if she did have some knowledge of it. Thus someone like Celine can be half-French but even she would tell you that I'm a lot more French than she ever would be, given that I speak French like a native and I have spent a lot of time living in France. "No way French people would ever think I'm French or half-French, they would just assume I'm as English as they come." So for me, my connection with the French people has never been based on having French blood, but my ability to speak French fluently and have an intimate knowledge about French culture, history and politics. Ironically, Henry had that same interest in all things Greek, but he felt it wasn't sufficient and he had to claim to have Greek blood for that interest to be validated even if he evidently didn't have any Greek blood - his mother certainly wasn't half-Greek. 

I believe it is possible to gain that sense of belonging to a part of community through the language and culture, another language I have done that with is Spanish (which is my fourth language). Let me give you a simple example of this: I was in Panama last year and I had wanted to visit a shop there called 'Mumuso' at the big Albrook Mall, the moment I walked into the shop, they were playing the song Chantaje by Shakira. It is a song that is on my playlist and I knew all the lyrics, I may have been halfway around the world in Panama but there was something that linked me to the people working in that shop - we both listened to the music of Shakira and were very familiar with this song. I saw the lady behind the counter was lip syncing to the song, she was working so she couldn't sing out aloud but you could tell she really liked this song. I caught her eye and at first she was a bit embarrassed but then I started mouthing the lyrics along with her - that's when we both shared a laugh before her boss gave her a very stern look. And that's when she looked back at me with this facial expression that said, "oops I'd better get back to work now." It was all non verbal and over in no more than like ten seconds but it was incidents like that which made me feel as if I had a real connection with a stranger through a shared culture. I didn't need to have Latino or Spanish blood in order feel that connection - you can earn it through knowledge of that community's language and culture. Thus the question I never got to ask Henry was this: why did you feel the need to lie about being Greek when obviously, you weren't at all? Did you think that it would make you more interesting to others? Did you think that others would like you more if they thought you were Eurasian and if that was the case, then aren't you somehow being quite racist against other people by assuming that having European blood made you superior to your Asian peers in Singapore? Did it ever occur to you that one day, your blatant lie would be exposed if your friends ever got to meet your mother who was so quintessentially Chinese and not at all Greek? How do you think a real Greek person would react to you if you claimed that you had Greek blood, would you be able to relate to a real Greek person through their culture and language? Could you even convince a real Greek person that you are Greek too?

There are some lies which are easier to carry off than others and he picked a really difficult one. It is the psychology of this kind of lying that has formed the basis of two of my favourite reality TV shows. In The Mole, you have a group of ten people: nine contestants and a mole. The team has to work together to earn money for the prize pot but the mole will do everything to sabotage to make sure that the team always fail to earn any money. At the end of each episode, everyone has to take a test about the actions and the identity of the mole, the contestant who knows the least about the mole is eliminated each week and in the final, the contestant who knows the most of the mole will take home the entire prize pot. It is not as straightforward as you think. In the early stages of the game, most contestants have no idea who the mole is so they will pretend to be the mole just to buy themselves time in the process, to confuse the others. So if I am in the process with Amanda, I know I am not the mole but I am totally clueless who the real mole is, I would pretend to be the mole (a process known as "moling"), thus if I can convince Amanda that I am the mole, she would score badly on the test and be eliminated. So this game is all about deceit and lying whilst trying to figure out the truth from the lies. Then there is another very similar reality TV show called The Traitors, there is also a group of 22 contestants with three traitors amongst them. the contestants will have to work together to try to figure out whom the traitors are and each episode, two contestants would be removed from the process, either through banishment (when the group votes off whom they think is a traitor) or murder (when the traitors eliminate a contestant who is too close to finding out the truth). If a traitor manages to make it to the end, the traitor will take home all the prize money. If the last three or four contestants manage to eliminate all the traitors from the process, then they get to share the prize money. It is a lot of fun when the stakes are so high (the prize money for the Traitors US season 1 was US$250,000) but Henry played a similar game with his friends in Singapore back then and he failed in this rather bizarre task that he had set himself. At least in The Mole or The Traitors, the participants were lying as part of the game - but what was Henry's excuse? What was his 'reward' in this game then? 

Henry never spoke to me again after that interview, I remember once running into him at Pacific Plaza on Scotts Road a few months later. Our eyes met and then there was a brief flicker of recognition, then he looked right through me as if I was made of glass - he decided to cope with the situation by simply ignoring me, as if I wasn't there at all. I suppose I could have confronted him but that evening, I just wasn't in the mood for that kind of argument, what would be the point of it? I didn't want to berate him or even embarrass him. In any case, that was in 1997 and I was about to leave Singapore for university, so I was happy to let sleeping dogs lie. Henry was able to hit the reboot button after that incident, he couldn't face old friends like me but since he had become a minor celebrity in Singapore after that film, there were so many people who wanted to get to know him. Thus he simply exchanged his old friends for new ones, starting anew with people without having to lie about being Greek. Henry never acted again, it was a one-off for him. When he finished NS, he went to university in the UK and that was when our paths sort off crossed again. I was chatting to a gay student from his university in 1999 and that guy said to me, "I don't want to assume that you're going to know every Singaporean student in my university but that's this guy I met recently, I was wondering if you might know him. He said he was an actor and half-Greek." I rolled my eyes - of course it was Henry, except that he had gone from being just a quarter Greek to half Greek. So yes, I spilled the beans and told that guy the whole story. He just rolled is eyes and said, "yeah to be honest, I wasn't convinced that he was half white as he did look so Chinese to me but I didn't want to call him a liar though, so it was really awkward." Henry had gone from being a minor local celebrity in Singapore to just another foreign student in the UK, once again he felt worried that people wouldn't find him interesting enough to want to befriend him and old habits die hard - claiming to be Eurasian with Greek blood was hard enough to pull off in Singapore but in the UK? In Europe? Really? I could only shake my head in disappointment - clearly, Henry hadn't learnt his lesson at all. 

So where is Henry today? I did try to look him up on Google but he didn't have much on an internet footprint, most of the articles I found related to the film he did all those years ago back in the 1990s. Through some mutual friends, I found out that he had returned to Singapore after graduating and has kept a fairly low profile. His father had passed away some years ago so he is living with his elderly mother now, taking care of her. Unfortunately, his real name consisted of a very common Christian name along with an even more common Chinese surname, thus it was impossible to find him on social media. But according to my sources, the death of his father was under tragic circumstances (and that's another story for another day - I won't go into it here) and Henry was never the same again. Mind you, I'm 47 and Henry is 46 - not all older, middle aged guys have embraced this social media thing; quite a lot of them simply ignore it or are simply passively consuming content on platforms like Instagram or Tiktok without every posting anything. But I would want to leave you with a memory from 1996, that was when Henry told me about a trip he took to Athens when he managed to sneak away from his parents for a few hours to go sightseeing on his own - it was June and the mid-afternoon heat was just too much to bear for his parents. So he ran to the nearest gay bar, met a gorgeous tall Greek guy called Konstantinos and they had a torrid afternoon of earthly pleasures (I'm skipping the details here) before he returned to the hotel for dinner with his parents, claiming that he got lost on the way back to the hotel and that was what took him so long. Back then, I was just happily listening to a story about Henry on his holidays, but now I don't even know which part was true and which part was just pure fantasy. I definitely didn't believe the part about the tall Greek hunk called Konstantinos but wait - did Henry even go to Greece? If he did go, did he manage to go to a gay bar in Athens and what really happened there? Talking to Henry back then was like being on The Mole or The Traitors, as I had to try to pick out the truth from all the lies - I was already jealous enough that he was rich enough to visit Europe regularly as a teenager. 

Okay so there you go, that's it from me on this issue. It has come up quite by coincidence as Choaniki and I were just talking about someone else we know who has been caught lying a few times - we both know how we feel about people who lie but what do you think about the story of Henry? Is it simply a bit of harmless by a young man to try to make himself more interesting or is there fundamentally wrong or disingenuous about pretending to be something you're not? Why wasn't Henry content with being that Singaporean guy who loves all things Greek without claiming to be Greek? Did it surprise you that Henry went right back to claiming to be Greek after arriving in the UK to start university? Do we now live in a world where someone can simply 'identify as Greek' if that's how they view themselves? Do you think that Henry is still claiming to be Greek in Singapore today or might he actually look back at what he did in the past and think, "what the hell was I thinking playing a game like that?" Would you gladly be friends with someone like Henry whilst putting up with his lies, as long as you categorize them as "harmless lies"?  Or would you struggle to differentiate the truth from the lies in such a relationship? And finally if you lived in Singapore in the period 1996-1997, could you actually figure out who this Henry actually was based on the few clues left here?! Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.