There is an invisible stigma that, the coolest Asian kids are Korean, second coolest are Japanese, and if you are Chinese, you are somewhat lame. I know I’m gonna get so much hate from the hardcore mainlanders, but it’s true. Chinese culture in general just isn’t very elegant, they are more often than not louder, less mild-mannered, and have a tendency to tuck in their half-sleeve dress shirts in with a belt and wear sneakers with business suits. Also, they do not have a cute accent, nor are they posh. “Ching Chong Ling Long Wing Wong” is at best funny.
As a little kid, education in China taught me to be proud to be a “Chinese”, to be proud of the race that fought and struggled and “won”, taught me to honour people like Mao Ze Dong and the communist red army. I still have some foggy memories of what was in the elementary school textbooks… there was a lot of things about how soldiers were tortured and killed in the war, how they walked this ridiculously long journey to some place, and how they ate leather belts as food. A Chinese nationalist would hate me for saying this (and I know some of you are!). But seriously, why should I be proud? I didn’t know. Because my ancestors ate leather belts as food? Because they struggled so that China was not handed over to Japan? So what if China was handed over to Japan. What if Chiang Kai Chek won the war? Would I still be born? Did leather belts taste good? All these questions hurt my head. I was never good at politics or history. I never understood it as a seven year old, so I never really got why I had to be proud to be Chinese. It’s not like I could ever do anything to “un-Chinese-fy” myself. I was born a Chinese kid, my parents grew up there, I have Asian skin, black hair and dark brown eyes, isn’t that enough? Why did I have to support this mysterious red army thing that has nothing to do with me?
I should not forget to mention that my kindergarten teachers also grotesquely described Japanese people as basically monsters; one could not go as far to say she did not hear that Japanese people all had yellow teeth sticking out from the face of a mutant troll. Yellow teeth stick out from inside the mouth you say? No sir, it was yellow teeth ON the faces. Can you believe that this was my very first image of a Japanese person? A person with yellow teeth sticking out of their face? My kindergarten teachers had too much perverse enjoyment out of these kinds of stories, there was way too many vivid stories of how soldiers were tortured in the name of honour, and how yellow-toothed the Japanese were, for me to not remember much of anything else I had learned in elementary school.
The truth is, to this day, memories of what happened in elementary school still come to me in waves. From yellow teeth to leather belt-eating to red army worship. What I learned was nothing short of ridiculous, and sometimes comically so. One shall learn not to take one’s past too seriously, but sometimes I do wonder in what ways those experiences actually shaped who I am today.
