Viewpoints Xenophobes guide to the Chinese | Xenophobes guide to the Chinese |
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29 January 2001 Cherise Fong The "Xenophobe's" guides have become quite popular with the British, less as a colourful crash course on foreigners than as humourously provocative mirrors held up to the people in question. Not surprising, since each nationality is best placed to fully appreciate the tongue-in-cheek observations of their compatriate authors. BBC J.C. Yang "passed his first 20 years in total ignorance of China, and then spent the next 40 years trying to remedy the deficiency." Unfortunately his bi-cultural perspective still seems to lack the fundamental difference between auto-derision and racist remarks: ie. self-identity with the Chinese people. Yang may have done his homework in regards to history and customs and has undoubtedly experienced the rituals of daily life in China and Hong Kong first-hand, but his sarcastic tone in regards to certain issues such as noise, hygiene and spitting, for example, conveys the detachment of a safely observant tourist rather than of a culturally adopted resident. Often he offers no favourable context for understanding local mentalities in other matters, and his personal interpretations are unhumourously shallow, or simply unconcerned: "The reason is that the Chinese are cursed with rotten noses, bridgeless and constricted, and by the time they wake up in the morning their upper respiratory tracts are so congested that only an energetic snorting, retching and expelling can give them enough air to face the day." This is not the case of all Xenophobe's guides, Yang just seems to have taken the title more literally than others. So while the book may still be of value to British and other xenos interested in reading an insider's detailed account of local Chinese, we are still left with an unsatisfyingly jaded ex-patriate view of the "Middle Kingdomers". |
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