What do you call the person of Chinese descent who actually feels like 'White'?
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My grandmother, like many Singaporeans of Chinese descent, decided to use this description to me. Specifically, she called me 'Hin Jiu Lang', which just literally means, 'banana man'. Unlike her sons, I speak in a different tongue that she doesn't speak, I read books that she doesn't really understand - and that she always thinks, oh, this guy is simply useless, just don't bother to even try to use the language I use any more.
If people gave a slur in Chinese (it's ok for me to accept 'perpetual foreigner' or 'chink' or 'ang mo' or whatsoever ethnic slur at me, as long as it's in a non-Chinese language - but never in the Chinese language), I feel highly, highly charged and I will lose my sense of being and self. I am not good in Chinese and might never be. I need a lot of help understanding the same poems my great-grandparents recited in their tea plantations. But I know what's hurled at me, if they're of negative terms. (I can also get the positive endearment in Chinese though, but I'd also love to have them...)
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If unknowingly, I use a Chinese term (or an equivalent homonym) to say something bad, I apologise. But really, I do not want to do that.
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If someone decided to call me Jook-sing, oh, that's quite highly offensive, but not really hard to the core - because like a bamboo stick, one can be hollow. No substance inside. Really? Those people calling me such names are stupid themselves, for they have nothing better to do not to see that there is a sign within me that says, 'disappointed for being totally rejected by my own culture'.
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But the worst remark ever hurled on me is anything that suggests that I am a banana man. Nothing is worse than that...
Because unlike the term jook sing, which at least suggests I am not part of any culture (and hence accurately describes me), it is really quite puzzling to really see me as 'white' because I am deemed as the ang-mo pie (someone similar to Caucasians) when I know actually, I can probably never be accepted as fully European or European-like. Never happening.
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So maybe all I can do is to accept that I am a weirdo, a stranger in a strange land, an anomaly of glocalization (localization in a global context)...
I am just what I am, not a single stereotype or ethnic-based slur.
View attachment 1932
View attachment 1933
View attachment 1934
View attachment 1935
My grandmother, like many Singaporeans of Chinese descent, decided to use this description to me. Specifically, she called me 'Hin Jiu Lang', which just literally means, 'banana man'. Unlike her sons, I speak in a different tongue that she doesn't speak, I read books that she doesn't really understand - and that she always thinks, oh, this guy is simply useless, just don't bother to even try to use the language I use any more.
If people gave a slur in Chinese (it's ok for me to accept 'perpetual foreigner' or 'chink' or 'ang mo' or whatsoever ethnic slur at me, as long as it's in a non-Chinese language - but never in the Chinese language), I feel highly, highly charged and I will lose my sense of being and self. I am not good in Chinese and might never be. I need a lot of help understanding the same poems my great-grandparents recited in their tea plantations. But I know what's hurled at me, if they're of negative terms. (I can also get the positive endearment in Chinese though, but I'd also love to have them...)
View attachment 1932
If unknowingly, I use a Chinese term (or an equivalent homonym) to say something bad, I apologise. But really, I do not want to do that.
View attachment 1933
If someone decided to call me Jook-sing, oh, that's quite highly offensive, but not really hard to the core - because like a bamboo stick, one can be hollow. No substance inside. Really? Those people calling me such names are stupid themselves, for they have nothing better to do not to see that there is a sign within me that says, 'disappointed for being totally rejected by my own culture'.
View attachment 1934
But the worst remark ever hurled on me is anything that suggests that I am a banana man. Nothing is worse than that...
Because unlike the term jook sing, which at least suggests I am not part of any culture (and hence accurately describes me), it is really quite puzzling to really see me as 'white' because I am deemed as the ang-mo pie (someone similar to Caucasians) when I know actually, I can probably never be accepted as fully European or European-like. Never happening.
View attachment 1935
So maybe all I can do is to accept that I am a weirdo, a stranger in a strange land, an anomaly of glocalization (localization in a global context)...
I am just what I am, not a single stereotype or ethnic-based slur.
