Читать книгу Yellow and Confused - Ming-Cheau Lin - Страница 4

‘Ming-Cheau is here!’

Roaring laughter erupts from a sea of non-Asians.

‘The yellow peril has arrived …’

‘Our Asian persuasion!

I never truly saw my skin tone as yellow. It looked more white than yellow. My parents told me I was born even-tone milky white with a mop of hair that stood up like fireworks. In our home languages, we’d talk about our own skin tones as white – the elders would remark how beautiful we were with our white skin and warn us to stay out of the sun so our skin didn’t turn black. This is based on direct translation to English. In Mandarin, these words don’t have those direct definitions and connotations. While, yes, there was a sentiment of colourism and anti-blackness, ‘white’ in this instance meant light and pale and ‘black’ meant dark. However, we do also call East Asians – (huáng zhong rén) – when directly translated, this means ‘yellow type people’.

In his book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking, Professor Michael Keevak from National Taiwan University dug deep into the history of when and why the colour yellow was used to classify East Asians.1 During the time of early foreign missionaries and into the eighteenth century Europeans classified East Asians as ‘white’. This transitioned to ‘yellow’ when German physician and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) used the Latin word ‘gilvus’ (light yellow) to describe Mongolians. Mongolians being synonymous with Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Timur and their roles in Eurasia invasions, the connotations of threat and of fear became entrenched – hence the term ‘Yellow Peril’ and variations thereof (‘Yellow Terror’, ‘Yellow Spectre’) and the influence far-reaching and long-lasting. Wing-Fai Leung, a sinologist and lecturer in culture, media and creative industries, ascribes the origins of these terms and descriptions to xenophobic and racist ideology, rooted in Western fears of becoming outnumbered and enslaved by the East.

I hate that yellow became the race colour for Western society’s depiction of East Asians. I hate the biased perceptions that became associated with it, and the harmful outcome of it evolving into broad and ignorant gender norms: the emasculation of East Asian men and the hypersexualisation of East Asian women. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been catcalled with ‘China girl’, ‘Me love you long time!’ or ‘Me so horny’.

Because the West struggles to differentiate between East Asians and light-skinned Southeast Asians – to them Asia is just one big country of Chinamen, and we all look the same with our yellow skin, squinty eyes and black hair – Southeast Asians are included in this classification. While we have our own problems of indoctrination (which include racism, colourism and patriarchy), we are also misrepresented in Western society. But it is the Asians living outside of Asia who are the ones who suffer the impact. We are stereotypes. We are the punch-line. We are seen as objects, without a second thought or concern. And to add insult to injury, the non-Asian side of the world doesn’t even realise that Asians, alongside those of Jewish ancestry, comprise one of the two biggest diaspora groups in the world.

Even in Asia itself, we, the ones who don’t live there, are stereotyped. There we are seen as ‘bananas’ (yellow on the outside, white on the inside): white worshipping and Westernised due to our disconnect with ancient traditions and our ‘desire to survive’ in Western spaces.

In actual fact our identities are complicated and unique. Circumstantial development plays a big part in shaping us, the children of free immigrants who moved their families to different parts of the world in the hope of providing them with better opportunities. We are also the children of history’s cruelty, of slave trade, and colonisation.

I speak here and through this book of East Asian immigrants from my personal perspective, experiences, interactions and research.

I am a first-generation immigrant woman, a Taiwanese-born South African, raised, from the age of three, in Bloemfontein in the Free State. While I don’t speak for all East Asian immigrants, since I can’t say we all have the same experiences, the path I have chosen, of intersection and feminism, has one goal in mind: to encourage and create conversations around unlearning and progression.

My journey is ongoing. Along the road I have chosen to travel as an adult, I embrace my culture and ethnicity, as well as the confusion of feeling displaced, as someone who doesn’t seem to belong in either the country of my birth or the one I was raised in. Only as an adult am I able to make sense of much of this.

And so, in a society that doesn’t recognise me, I choose myself.

I choose to reclaim ‘yellow’. And unless you are ‘yellow’ too, don’t call me that.