This is mostly a response piece to a truly awful article I
read over the weekend, titled Dear
white people, stop saying ‘Ni Hao’ to every East Asian student you see. DISCLAIMER:
Before I go further into the complete asininity of the piece, I am not speaking
about all Asian Americans, only for those who feel as strongly as the author
about the issue. For the vast majority of Asian Americans, the real world is not
actually a figment of their imagination.
The article was mainly a grievance piece about how white
people make tactless assumptions about East Asians by calling out Ni Hao to
every one they see. For those who do not know, Ni Hao is a Chinese greeting.
She also pointed out that there have been threats of physical assault
accompanying said verbal assaults, that gradually culminated to her having the
equivalent of a minor heart attack every time she left the house. Now I
absolutely do not condone physical violence or the threat of it in any form,
and I fully acknowledge that that is extremely serious and should be reported
to campus authorities. I am reasonably sure that physical assault on racial
basis in the UK is a prosecutable offence, so she has the full backing of the
law if she ever decided to take legal action against those people.
But let us focus on what she is really angry about, the
verbal macroaggressions. And while I admit that saying Ni Hao to every Asian
you meet is tactless (Please do not do this, I will get my hopes up and start
talking to you in Mandarin, only to be disappointed if you are unable to follow
through), it is not any more tactless than people in mainland China speaking to
foreigners in English. What if the foreigner is French? Or Russian? If the
author is being honest to herself, would she be able to tell the difference? Secondly,
why are we still getting upset that Westerners cannot tell the difference
between Asians? Let me divulge a long-kept secret: When I was an exchange
student in South Korea, locals would come up to me and start talking to me in
Korean until I explained that I didn’t speak the language. The truth is, most
Asians can’t even tell each other apart. *Gasp*
 |
| Everyone else: I don't know what to believe anymore. |
Furthermore, there is a significantly larger Chinese student
population than any other Asian group, so white people really are just applying
basic statistics, much like we do when we say hello to white people. I’m sorry,
but 1.3 billion is unequivocally a lot more than 50 million. Why am I talking about white and Asian people in group terms? It's so bizarre. People like Jin Hyun are turning me into a racist.
If someone says Ni Hao to you, laugh and call them out on
it. Better yet, speak in your native language and embarrass them. But if being
greeted in another language is enough for the author to develop
‘anxiety-inducing nightmares’, she needs a serious reality check.
When did we decide that it was alright to speak derisively
about an entire race of people? We complain about being categorized into a
tiny, single-race box, only to dismiss white people as exactly the same racist,
bigoted group. Was it when it became trendy to bash Caucasians as the root of
all evil in the world, and we decided we wanted to be hip like the cool kids on
the left? Was it because that even after all the social progression that has
been made, even after we conquered the top income/social class, we are still insecure enough to play the victim card and are thus compelled to post scathing opinion pieces that
generalize white people as high-and-mighty Western imperialists out to conquer
the poor, minority Asians?
We from the Four Tigers and the Cubs are unique in the sense
that some of the fastest economic developments ever seen in the history of time
are taking place in our countries at this very moment. When I was a child, my
family was so poor that getting a meal at McDonalds was as likely as ordering a Beef
Wellington hand prepared by Gordon Ramsay. Today, I am lucky enough to be given
the opportunity of an education in the United States. There are people born in
developed countries who grew up taking wealth and privilege for granted. There
are also people who were born in less developed countries who might never ever have
the chances that we were given. We were born during a time when our people were
struggling to survive, and we are alive today to witness the economic boom that
made it possible for us to stand our ground against the other big players. We alone understand what a
blessing it is to be alive during this time, when the whole world is watching
us and trying to emulate us. But instead of being proud of a civilization who
had progressed this far, the author is appealing to her Asian heritage for the
sole reason of playing the victim.
I am going to end the article with this comment: The author
is American, not Asian. She has no idea of the experiences and struggles that
people from Asia had gone through, and the article perfectly expresses this
because I have never once heard of an equivalent article written by a Korean,
Chinese or Vietnamese. We do not whine about macroaggressions and trigger warnings
because there are always much more prevalent, serious issues that we are still
dealing with. If the author truly cared about issues in regards to her
ethnicity, I invite her to tackle challenges prevalent to South Korea, mainly
the unrealistic beauty standards, suicide epidemic and treatment of women.
The only question is whether or not she, like so many born in the Western world,
would be willing to leave her privilege long enough to give a damn about the
people she claims to speak on behalf of.
