Link Love – Asian Women Blog Carnival
by Latoya Peterson
Long-time reader Jha tipped us that she is hosting the 3rd Asian Women Blog Carnival over at her place. The call for submissions can be found here.
Her email reminded me that I never got around to prepping the Link Love post for the second carnival, so I’ll take my late pass and present it to you anyway.
You see, the Chinese are not a monolithic race/culture. The dominant culture is the Han. But there are also other ethnic groups under this wide umbrella term. Half of my heritage comes from Southern China which is closer to regions like Vietnam and Yunnan. The languages that come out from these regions are rich, textured and unique. Mandarin Chinese is supposed to be the unifying language, the pu-tong-hua (common tongue/language); it is what I grew up with, because there was (and is) a government policy to eradicate all the “dialects”. Therefore, many adults from my generations grew up speaking only English and Mandarin Chinese. Our knowledge of the “dialects”, the languages from the specific provinces in China, is dismal, a smattering of words or two.
My Ah-Ma saw it in her grandchildren. Only a couple of my cousins are able to converse with her in Hokkien. The rest of us flounder and have to look for interpreters (namely my father). Once, after returning from Australia for summer vacation, I visited her and she called me an “ang moh”, a white person. The comment, though spoken in jest, stuck with me for a long time. Was I an “ang moh”, a white person? Or – worse – was I a banana? Yellow outside, white within. I cannot speak Hokkien to save my life, but I try to understand my Ah-Ma. These days, I have taken to speaking to her in Mandarin. Even then, I feel as if I am a failure, a hack pretending to be what she is not.
Karanguni – On Race, Or Privilege, or Just Being Human
I try to explain, stumbling because I hardly share most of the values myself, that women down here don’t usually go for one-night stands, but then again some do, I mean — we, we’re a lot — about family? We– we want stability? Or some of us do???
Contrasting answers, until he leaned in and said, “Stability? But are you happy? It’s like all of you – not just women – are like slaves. And coming from a Western country, I find that honestly, truly sad that you can’t be who you want to be. Because of the patriarchy, it controls — family is like a cage –”
If I tried to explain it it would’ve taken me a few dictionaries, a few travel adventures, and probably most of my sanity. I don’t know how to describe to someone who has no conception, no 17 years of exposure to “Eastern” television and art and music and culture the same way I’ve received, via however horrible proxies, “Western” definitions, what an “Eastern” viewpoint is. There’s an overarching, traditionalist structure there. But it dissipates, and everyone has different ideas of what is right, appropriate, good. But I know this much – it’s a lot more common down here to not talk about rights.
Rights, I guess, equals entitlement, equals a demand for privilege. It’s hard for me to think of a right to be free when I’ve grown up in a family and a society where my family members – and country members – have sacrificed everything they are (in “Western terms”) for their family. Their time, all their income, every inch of their soul and being, in family. Their children are their assets, their stability is their bedrock. Whatever right one has to be something less than practical, to leave the family home, that right gets overwhelmed by other desires. Same as freedom. The desire to see parents happy, or the wish for a smooth life, even in exchange for doing what one loves.
I don’t know. I’ll never know. So much of it is ingrained, unspoken, territorial, subconscious, natural. I look at the world and accept it without trying to pick it apart, because how can I? How could I ever explain to my Spanish friend that I think that sometimes breaking my heart in exchange for not breaking my parents’ is valid? That I would give up what I love for income? That I would avoid an argument against my values in favour of maintaining a relationship? And that those things complete me rather than break me, make me who I am instead of making me downtrodden, dis-entitled, discriminated, underprivileged? That it is, in some ways, something I give away in exchange for something I receive?
I am in college, and I am in an Asian restaurant with a group of mostly white friends. At this restaurant, we have the wooden, disposable chopsticks, with directions printed on the red packets.
One of my white friends says, “I wish I knew how to use chopsticks.”
I hold up my hand to show her how to bring the two ends together, so that she can mimic the motion. It is comfortable and familiar to me, and I feel secure in the knowledge that was hard-earned. She copies me with the awkwardness of someone who has never tried it before.
One of my white friends laughs at me and says, “No, no. That’s not right,” pointing at the directions on the packet. He demonstrates for her himself. His hand is just far enough back, and the bottom stick does not move as he brings the top stick down. The way he holds his chopsticks is technically perfect.
Unlike me. I hold my chopsticks wrong.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist! wrote:
I can relate to the chopsticks story. I feel humiliated and angry if a white person can fluently speak, read and write Hindi/Urdu, but I am not (I can read Hindi and Urdu, though, because I taught myself). It’s hard for me, a Deaf person, to learn a different language. I cannot really pick up Hindu or Urdu by the ear. I can only read it, and even when I read it, I have to ask my parents and siblings to translate the meaning for me.
I always feel inferior as an Indian when I meet a white person who has perfect Hindi, and you know what? It makes me angry.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 10:29 am ¶
Heather wrote:
I hate the term “banana” (or “oreo” or other similar terms). I hate it because it implies that you are something other than what you ought to be, and I hate the guilt associated with those terms. We are all products of our genetics and our environments, neither of which are really in our control as we grow up. We can’t pick the way that we’re exposed to culture as children. I hate the expectation that if you don’t speak the right language, or dress the right way, or learn enough about a specific culture (presumably the culture from which your DNA hails), that there is something not quite right about you, that it is something disgraceful. I hate that others and myself feel shame for not matching other people’s cultural expectations of us and that these terms exist to perpetuate the embarrassment.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 12:25 pm ¶
Oyce wrote:
Thanks for the link!
I’d also like to point out a critique of Karanguni’s post, which points out how the post perpetuates ethnic injustice in Singapore and how it ignores people there who are being oppressed.
Posted 17 Jun 2009 at 1:28 pm ¶
Anonymous wrote:
Re Jolantru’s post: YES. There is NO one Chinese ethnicity and NO one Chinese language! I always refer to Mandarin as Mandarin, not Chinese. I myself am ethnically Han Chinese, but my family comes from Southern China and we are Cantonese speakers.
I’ve always had a bit of a complex about this. When I think of my Chinese-American identity, I strongly associate the Cantonese language with it and when people ask me how good my Chinese is, I always assume at first that they’re asking about my Cantonese skills. But then I pause to think and I realize that they’re actually referring to Mandarin. It’s always bothered me that what I mean by saying “Chinese” is different from the mainstream’s.
Re The Dead Parrot’s Post: This entry makes me feel so sad. I mean, it’s chopsticks. The point is of chopsticks is to eat food. No one should say you’re using chopsticks wrong if you’re managing to eat just fine. I used to use chopsticks in a scissor-like motion, and then I did the whole separate-top-and-bottom-chopstick-then-bring-together one. Both worked just fine. I can still do both depending on my mood. I hope that the Dead Parrot does not feel that his/her Asian-ness depends on the way s/he uses chopsticks!
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 12:05 pm ¶
Clara wrote:
Er, sorry Latoya, I forgot to put my name and email in my comment. My comment was about being Cantonese and about using chopsticks. Sorry again!
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 12:09 pm ¶
kate wrote:
@anonymous #4 agree on the chopsticks, and it’s so sad that our society is such that someone can be made to feel “less” than their culture because of something like that.
it’s occasionally embarrassing (in certain company) to not hold a fork correctly but while it may problematically imply other things it doesn’t imply that someone is somehow a lesser version of his/her european heritage.
Posted 18 Jun 2009 at 3:25 pm ¶
Daniel wrote:
Oh, don’t feel so bad. I never took a lot of those comments that seriously but I do understand that uneasy feeling. Once in a while I would run into people who could speak a foreign language better, could do some type of cultural activity (like martial arts) or had a lot of knowledge and empathy regarding certain topics like history or philosophy. Then comes a comment where “oh he or she is more Japanese than the Japanese, more Chinese than the Chinese, more Italian thatn the Italians, more Jewish than the Jews…etc. etc. etc.”
Sometimes, for minorities, place yourselves or imagine for a bit being in places where your demographic group forms a majority. You’ll realize how majority populations behave quite similar and how imperfect they are regarding language, knowledge, culture, etc. After doing that, you’ll realize how silly those comments are that so and so is more “Alien than the Aliens”.
Nothing wrong with speaking a foreign language well or doing all those things with cultures not your own. People who are arrogant because of that have issues and if not for this then they will find other reasons to feed their egos. It’s only a short “high” when hearing those comments. Deep down, no one can belittle your dignity for whatever reason people will come up with.
Posted 20 Jun 2009 at 3:40 pm ¶
Pheagan wrote:
Oh wow, Karanguni, that– and I can’t say more or examine this right now but I will later– it just about the most beautiful thing I feel I’ve read it a long time, just a perfect explanation about the line between being human and being whatever it is you’re supposed to be.
Posted 21 Jun 2009 at 3:36 am ¶