Q&A: Have I ever had an 'Eleanor Young' moment in London?
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Title : Q&A: Have I ever had an 'Eleanor Young' moment in London?
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news-today.world | Hi guys, I have been shown the first scene from Crazy Rich Asians which has made its way onto Youtube - in this scene, a younger version of Mrs Eleanor Young in 1995 arrives at a posh London hotel with her family, only to be turned away despite having a reservation because the staff didn't want a noisy Chinese family at their hotel. I'll jump to the punchline, it turns out the hotel had just been sold to the Young family and Mrs Young is effectively their new boss, so the staff who had been terribly rude to her are mortified at what they had just done. Of course, the staff had been deliberately racist but this is a movie - it is a work of fiction so the writer Kevin Kwan had deliberately constructed a showcase of how hubris works: the hotel manager thinks he is above Mrs Young when in fact, she is in every way his superior and the writer allows the manager to throw them out of the hotel on a high before realizing what he had just done. Anyway, the scene is embedded below for you to watch for yourselves. Now the question I had been asked is this: as an Asian person in London, have I ever encountered anything like that before, this kind of bare-face discrimination?
If you're talking about outright cases of racism, then no - the answer is quite simply no, the scene presented in the movie was a really blatant case of racism and even back in the 1990s, the staff I have encountered in places like hotels and restaurants are a lot more careful than that. Even if they were to be upset or disgusted with a loud Chinese family behaving badly, then they would be a lot more subtle in the way they would handle the situation. I would have expected that kind of blatant racism to date back to the 1960s or 1970s, that was a totally different era and you would have been dealing with a totally different generation of people back then. So if it had been 1985, I would be more willing to believe that something like that could have happened back then, but 1995? Maybe in some hotel in some remote corner of the UK, but not in central London - no way, London has always been extremely international and cosmopolitan and nobody would bat an eyelid if you're of an ethnic minority here. In any case, I have encountered some situations whereby people have made assumptions based on my skin colour or country of origin, these have led to misunderstandings and I'm going to share these stories with you now for you to judge whether or not these are instances of racism.
Story 1: Is that instant coffee?
I have a sister-in-law who lives in a small town in Scotland and this happened some years ago when I visited her there - it's a small place with not much to do, but people are genuinely friendly and I often get introduced to her friends who live in the area. So one afternoon, I was invited to a small local event and there was an old man making tea and coffee there - he asked me if I would like a cup of coffee and being the snob I was, I asked if it was instant. You see, I think instant coffee is pretty gross and once you have a proper coffee machine at home, it would be hard to stomach your regular cup of instant coffee. I was thinking, oh we're in a small town, they wouldn't know what proper coffee is and if he's going to make me a gross cup of instant coffee, I shall have tea instead. But as it turned out, that old man did have a decent coffee machine there and was able to offer me a good cup of coffee - however, he had assumed that because I am an Asian immigrant, I would have grown up drinking gross instant coffee in Singapore instead of proper coffee, hence I would prefer gross instant coffee instead. So he apologetically said, "I'm sorry we don't have instant here, but I can do you a cup of coffee from our coffee machine?" When then followed was a really awkward conversation about what kind of coffee I liked and if I did grow up drinking instant coffee in Singapore; he had assumed that Asian people (the Chinese in particular) had more of a tea-drinking culture and wouldn't be that familiar with coffee.
Needless to say, we had both made assumptions about each other: I took one look at him and thought, you're an old, working class Scottish man, I bet you're probably barely literate and worked as a lorry driver or something like that. I bet the last time you read a book was when you were 6 and that was 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' because your teacher made you do it to improve your English. you probably had never seen a coffee machine in your life and you probably drink the grossest, cheapest instant coffee because that's all you can afford. He took one look at me and thought, you're an immigrant, you're not from here, I bet you come from a poor, exotic country, you might even be a refugee - you probably don't want to drink what we normally drink here, you're probably going to be different from the rest of us in this town, you probably don't even speak English as a first language. You get the idea: I think we were both equally guilty of jumping to conclusions and making assumptions based on the first impression we made of each other within the first second or so. He didn't see me as someone from London but rather a foreigner, an immigrant, someone from another country. Don't be me wrong, we were both very polite to each other in our brief interaction, but I could sense that we had both made awful assumptions about the other party that were probably unjustified. He was probably a bit racist and I was extremely 'classist'.
Story 2: Remembering English names?
Here is an example of when I encountered ignorance rather than outright racism. Years ago, I used to do coach gymnastics here in London many years ago on my weekends and I've since given that up, though I continue to enjoy the sport as a gymnast rather than a coach. There were loads of kids at the gymnastics club and at the start of every term, there's usually a huge turn over of kids as the parents sign up for a whole term's worth of classes - so you have the situation whereby you turn up for gymnastics class the first Saturday of the new term and oh boy, you see a sea of unfamiliar faces and you're trying desperately to remember all the new names. I discussed this situation with an older British lady and she assumed that I had difficulty remembering the names because I am Chinese: I would be more familiar with names like Chen Yile, Liu Jinru, Liu Tingting, Luo Huan and Zhang Jin (who incidentally the current 2018 China women's gymnastics national team) instead of Jane, Paul, Vera, Frank, Melissa, Edward, Olivia and Christopher. I cringed at that thought - after all, English is my first language and she had jumped to the wrong conclusion based on the colour of my skin. I think you'd have to go to China to find someone who can't speak English well and has little familiarity with Western culture for them to be confused by the more common English names. For crying out aloud, I have an English name. In making that assumption, she had assumed that I was a poor adjusted immigrant who is neither fluent in English nor familiar with British culture - I got rather offended.
Fortunately, I managed to explain to a mutual friend why I took such offence and naturally, I got a groveling apology. That older lady didn't mean to be racist - she just did what a lot of lazy people did and jumped to the wrong conclusion. In her defence, she was trying to express empathy - she was trying to see things from my point of view, she was putting herself in my shoes to stare out at a sea of new faces through my Chinese eyes. But of course, my situation is quite unique in that I am a complete yellow banana: yellow on the outside, completely white on the inside. The primary language I use at work is English and when I was put in a Chinese-speaking business environment in Shenzhen earlier this year, I completely floundered and struggled. It is not easy to express empathy and I say, if you want to do it, then make sure you judge the situation properly, have all the right information about the person you are talking to before you try to open your mouth - in this case, she was utterly embarrassed at how badly she had misfired over that whole 'English names' incident and didn't want me to think that she was a racist. Did she cause offence with her remark? Yes she did, but did she do it out of sheer malice, was she deliberately trying to offend and insult me? No - she did it out of ignorance and stupidity, she was trying to be nice and express empathy but didn't quite know how to do it properly. I could live with that and forgive her mistake, because of the total absence of malice.
Story 3: Hey big spender
This incident happened about twelve years ago and it wasn't in London but in fact in Dubai - I was in a very upmarket boutique in one of the big malls. Nothing in there was cheap, it was clear that the security guard was ready to ask people who look as if they didn't belong in there to leave and if you looked like you were a big spender, then the friendly sales assistant would come and assist you. Now I was with a group of white friends who wanted to see something in the shop, so whilst I wasn't keen on spending my hard earned cash there, I was in the company of some friends who were interested in buying something in that boutique. This is when it got messy - we had entered the shop together but I got bored and started wandering around on my own instead of sticking with them. I then realized that I was being watched and followed by one of the security guards - after all, I'm Asian and I wasn't exactly well dressed that day (Dubai is ridiculously hot, so most people dress for the hot weather) - there was that moment of realization when I thought, oh shit he's going to eject me from the store. I had about five seconds to react and so I spotted one item in front of me that was and called out to my friend in my most exaggerated British accent. "Oh James, you must come over here and have a look at this one, it is 20,000 Dirhams (£4,236 or S$7,468) but it is so much nicer than the one you saw yesterday. I think you will adore this one."
Right away, the security guard pretended to be looking in the other direction as the sales assistant greeted me with the most forced smile you have ever seen, "hello sir, good afternoon, may I help you?" Thankfully my friend James had realized what was going on (he had been working in Dubai for longer than I have) and he just played along with me. He pointed to one of the most expensive item in the shop and exclaimed, "hey Alex, weren't you looking for something like that? Well have a look at this!" And I replied, "yes James, I was, but I already have it. I got it last week already when I was shopping with Catherine." You should have seen the look on the sales assistant's face, she was like, "well sir, if you like this, then I have quite a few other similar items that you may be interested in." The fact is there are plenty of Filipinos working in Dubai and quite frankly, I had been mistaken for Filipino before whilst I was there - so I could have easily been one of those Pinoy migrant workers there not earning much money, not the kind of customer they wanted in that high end luxury boutique. But the fact that I was in the company of white friends suddenly gave me honorary white status and white people are always welcome in shops like that in Dubai, even if they are poor Russian backpackers. But I had gone from being nearly being ejected from the boutique to being treated like a VIP simply by making it clear that I had come into that shop with white British people and I was not some poor Asian migrant worker who couldn't afford the designer good in there.
Story 4: It will be about Beijing, right?
This story is another example that is fairly similar to story 2: so when I was at university, I did a lot of volunteer work with charities and you run into all kind of random people there also volunteering. A common way to start a conversation is, "so, what do you do?" So when I said that I was a student at university, they asked me what I was studying and one question led to another, I told them I was doing research into public transport patterns and here was the response that shocked me, this guy then just assumed that I would be studying about transport in somewhere like Beijing, China instead of the obvious: I was conducting my research in London as I was a student at University College London. Mind you, even after all these years, I still haven't set foot in Beijing yet despite having visited other parts of China like Shanghai and Shenzhen. There was absolutely nothing about what I said about my research that could suggest any need to do it in China, I had in fact been referencing examples in the London public transport system. Yet the only thing that was Chinese was my skin colour, my face and that led him to jump to that conclusion - I got really angry at that point and called him a racist. Now it didn't help that this other woman, also a volunteer, tried to calm me down by pointing out that whilst he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, he wasn't a racist per se and that it wasn't an unreasonable question.
So let's analyze the situation - this guy was plain stupid, he said something stupid by jumping to the wrong conclusion and when it was clear that he had misfired, he didn't know how to deal with the situation. He was probably autistic and sorely lacking in social skills to handle situations whereby you make polite small talk with people you have just met - really, it isn't rocket science, not insulting or upsetting the other party by keeping the conversation rather bland and open ended. So instead of making an assumption like, "your research will be about Beijing, right?" I would use an open ended questions like, "where would you be doing your research? Is that your first choice? Would you like to do your research in just one city or would you like to have the chance to do it in a few different places? If money wasn't an issue, where would you like to do your research? Which city would be most ideal for your research?" You see, in using questions like that, I am expressing interest in the other person without jumping to any conclusions - I am allowing the other party to give me that information. This idiot who made the comment about Beijing probably wanted me to reward him for noticing that I'm Chinese, but that's hardly something that will impress me since I clearly have East Asian features and have a common Chinese surname. So was his comment racist? I think so, but was his maliciously trying to insult or upset me? No he wasn't, not at all and the key is the motive here: it wasn't malice, just an insanely huge dose of stupidity and a total lack of very basic social skills. Yes he was a stupid idiot, but at least he wasn't a racist idiot - there is a difference.
Story 5: Sweet and sour pork
This story is back from around 2002 - so we're going back a long way here. I was a few weeks into my new job in a new company and there was just a boring afternoon when a group of us were chatting about food as it was coming to lunchtime. And then this British colleague asked me, "so Alex, when are you going to bring us some home-made Chinese food, like your grandmother's secret recipe for us to taste? Like I'm sure it's going to be so much better than the sweet and sour pork kind of Chinese food we get at our local Chinese restaurant." I felt offended by that remark actually, despite the fact that I do have a Chinese grandmother who is a great cook. Firstly, I didn't know this guy well enough to want to cook for him, sure I cook Chinese food at home but why should I want to go through all that effort to cook for my colleagues in the office whom I'm not even that close to? Secondly, it's the assumption that I can cook Chinese food - I am a lover of all good food whether it is Italian, Mexican, Indian, Turkish, Japanese, French, Korean, Thai or Spanish, I'd like to think that I am cosmopolitan enough to appreciate good food from every country in the world. Unlike my parents of course, who will only eat Chinese food - I'm not like that, I am actually really quite adventurous when it comes to trying new foods. So for my colleague to assume that I would prefer Chinese food, I actually felt quite insulted and angry. I'm such a complex, interesting character and all you can do is default to my skin colour to start a conversation?
Here's a bit of a context for you: in the West, Chinese people are often associated with Chinese restaurants. This correlation has a lot more to do with racism than delicious Chinese food: in the past, a lot of highly educated Chinese people found it hard to get well paid jobs because of racial discrimination. Others struggled to assimilate and didn't speak English well enough, so they ended up working within the Chinese restaurant trade - it was a way to make money from white people who didn't want to employ them otherwise, but somehow Chinese food was so appealing that even the most racist white people were actually perfectly happy to go for dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Now what I have described above is a situation involving racial discrimination that happened many decades ago, Chinese people are perfectly at home in the West these days and have become the 'model minority' in the West, as most of us have assimilated quite successfully. But still, this assumption of looking at a Chinese person and automatically making an assumption that he must have something to do with the catering trade is inherently racist, because the message is, "white people would never employ a Chinese person like you, so of course you must be working in a Chinese restaurant, right?" The fact is I'm from Singapore, a Chinese-majority country and there is simply no correlation between Chinese people and the catering trade in Singapore, so I found that comment quite offensive.
Was this guy who asked me about Chinese food racist? No, he was just plain stupid - you see, he was trying to establish rapport. He looked at me and thought, ah Alex is Chinese, if I talked about something that is close to his heart like Chinese food, then I can have something in common with him. But it doesn't work like that - this guy didn't get to know me better, I ate Chinese food as a child not because I made any conscious decision to learn about Chinese cuisine; no, it was simply because that's what my parents ate and I was surrounded by it all the time in Singapore. So imagine if you didn't know me well and you went through my Instagram feed, trying to find common ground - then you would be able to see something that I did recently, so for example, if you stumble upon my gymnastics training videos and if you also do gymnastics, then great we have common ground for a conversation. And if you don't feel like trawling through my Instagram feed, then no problem, just ask me questions, so if we're talking about food for example try open-ended questions like, "Alex, what kind of food do you like? Where's your favourite restaurant in London? Do you like cooking at home Alex? Where do you tend to do your grocery shopping? What is your favourite dessert? Where's the best place in London for street food?" It is rather easy to keep a conversation going with open-ended questions, but that idiot didn't have the social skills to do that - no, instead he defaulted to an ethnic stereotype. The bottom line is he even though he was a stupid idiot, at least he wasn't a racist idiot - there is a difference.
Story 6: Are you doing this within your community?
Oh this happened in 2009 - it was one of the strangest questions I ever got and ironically it was from a black person, I would have thought that black people would be more careful not to say anything that could be perceived as racist! When told this black lady that I was an actor, she asked me, "are you doing this within your community?" And I'm like, what? I'm sorry I didn't understand her question initially - then I realized, she thought I was only acting for Chinese people, in Chinatown doing things like plays in Mandarin or Beijing opera for a Mandarin-speaking audience rather than entertaining white people because hey, why would white or black people want to see a Chinese actor on stage? I was mortally offended by her racist assumption - the fact is I have done a lot of acting work in a range of countries in Europe and the Middle East, so yes white people love seeing me on stage, on TV and in films, particularly in Germany. To begin with, she knew nothing about actors or media: you can't feasibly be a Chinese actor only doing Chinese stuff in Chinatown in the West! There won't be enough work: you need to do very mainstream work to be able to entertain the masses, you want to get on a show like Dr Who which is seen by millions of people around the world. As an actor, your aim is to be able to access as much high profile work as possible - rather than limit yourself to a particular niche market. So already, we know she completely has no understanding about the world of actors.
She had this horrific vision of modern day Apartheid - like Chinese people will only entertain other Chinese people, they won't entertain white or black people. Imagine if I saw an actor like Morgan Freeman, Will Smith or Whoopi Goldberg in a film and said, oh there's a black person in this film, I can't watch it. No way could I possibly do that - that would be utterly racist! Yet this black woman can't get her head around the fact that yes, I would gladly watch a TV programme, a play or a film with non-Chinese people in it and many people today are not racist when it comes to seeing a character of a different skin colour in a TV programme. Most British and American TV series these days will have a number of black and Asian characters, along with a gay character, a character of a minority religion and a disabled character. So if you can have an Indian Hindu, lesbian protagonist in a wheelchair, then you can tick more than one diversity box at the same time! Yes, we celebrate and embrace diversity in this modern age - so for this black woman to have an attitude that seemed to have come from the 1950s when people were a lot less open to embrace different cultures and when people were a lot more racist, I was just shocked. Fortunately, I only met her once and our paths never crossed again - I didn't like her, I thought she was very weird.
Yes there are Chinese people in China who make entertainment in Mandarin for a Chinese audience - the Chinese media market is very big today. However, those people who are doing that are in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong - they are not in London. I am a British-Chinese actor in London, but that black lady didn't seem to understand how I can get be employed by white people in a BBC production for example. I tried to explain to her that I get work on BBC radio 4 for example because I'm very good and experienced and you can't see skin colour on the radio! You just have to sound very eloquent and articulate on air - but no, it was like explaining calculus to a cat, this black woman was plain stupid. All she could see was my skin colour, she couldn't process the fact that I am a lot more than a Chinese person - heck, firstly, I'm mixed, secondly, I'm a total banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The bottom line is that my cultural identity is actually pretty darn complex but people like her are extremely lazy and couldn't be asked to take the time to get to know me better. This stupid woman had some stereotypical idea of Chinese people doing Chinese things like doing Kungfu and eating noodles in Chinatown; she couldn't get her head around the concept of Chinese people like me being extremely white on the inside and being very assimilated into British society. I could have taught her a thing about British Chinese people today - but she was too closed minded to learn.
So was this woman a racist? Well, this is the closest we have gotten to a racist and I'm going to say yes I think she is. You see, she isn't one of those black British people who were born here, she was in fact born in Nigeria but moved to the UK when she was already in her 20s. She was highly educated and had a good job, yet she was poorly assimilated into British society, mostly socializing within the Nigerian community in London. She made little effort to make friends with white people and I was probably one of the very few Chinese people she had ever met. In her job, she was indeed working within her community - most of her clients were from the Nigerian diaspora in London and so she was merely wondering if I was doing exactly what she had been doing, "working within your community". I think what she is doing is wrong - if you want to move to the UK, then you jolly well assimilate and make friends with white people, be a part of British society. Why did she bother moving to London then, if all aspects of her life revolved around other Nigerians? Wouldn't she be happier back in Nigeria then? It was this siege mentality, this self-imposed segregation. Nobody told this woman that she couldn't make friends with white or Asian people, yet she showed a great reluctance to do so - so when she noticed that I'm Chinese, she assumed wrongly that I must be hiding in Chinatown, only working with other Chinese people which couldn't be further from the truth. I find her attitude racist, because her unwillingness to assimilate is a form of racism towards other non-black people around her.
Story 7: When are you going back to Singapore?
Story 8: Where are you from?
I just have to finish with the classic line that most people don't really realize can come across as very racist, 'where are you from?' I would never use a question like that, so for example, I met a lady at my gym the other day called Jana and I thought she had a bit of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to know where she was from so I could see if I could speak her language or not given that I do speak 20 languages. So instead of asking her point blank, "where are you from?" I asked if she spoke Russian to which she replied, "only a little, being Czech I can figure out some Russian." There you go, I got my answer - she is Czech, I got my answer. So why is this question so offensive then? This question implies that the person in question doesn't belong here, so where do you really belong then? There's this brilliant BBC comedy skit which does capture what people like me face all the time - this deliberate 'yes but where are you really from? Where are your grandparents from?' I know exactly what they are getting at but I go out of my way to avoid giving them the answer they want because I just find questions like that highly annoying and offensive. After all, what are you going to do with the answer if I say I'm Chinese - are you going to start speaking to me in Mandarin or Hokkien? I don't think so, so what purpose would telling you my ethnicity serve? Nobody has ever been able to give me a satisfactory answer to that question. Surely you should be more interested in things pertaining directly to me: like what I do for a living, where I had been educated or even what kind of music I enjoy. I can exercise choice over the music I listen to, it can tell you a lot about me - but I had no choice over my skin colour.
So what is the conclusion I can draw from these stories? Well, I think the scene where Eleanor Young gets ejected from the hotel because of blatant racism is highly exaggerated for comedic purposes and it is just not something you would ever encounter in London today. In the eight stories I shared, in most cases, I was mostly dealing with stupidity and ignorance. I had encountered autistic people with really poor social skills. It was only in stories 6 when the woman was definitely racist and in story 7, I didn't spend enough time with that woman to find out if she was genuinely racist or just plain stupid - she could be either or both, I just don't know for sure. For me, the litmus test is the presence of malice: even if someone said something offensive, did they say it because they were stupid or malicious? Ignorance and malice are not the same thing and I have learnt to tell the difference. However, the kind of old fashioned racism of Chinese people being kicked out of a hotel simply for not being white doesn't exist anymore - you're far more likely to encounter people like that Nigerian lady in story 6 who genuinely believes that people from different races shouldn't and wouldn't mix, or that woman from story 7, who will take one look at the colour of your skin and make all kinds of assumptions based on ethnic stereotypes. But even the Nigerian lady was polite enough when dealing with me - I just found her views about different races keeping to themselves absolutely abhorrent. Her views were downright racist, but she didn't act in a hateful, racist manner towards me.
So there you go, that's it from me. What do you think? Have you ever encountered racism in the West? Are some white people still very racist towards Asians? What have your experiences been like? Can you relate to any of the stories I have told in this piece? Have you met people who are similar to those described in the stories? What about the fact that the only truly racist person I encountered was black and not white - did that surprise you? Do let me know what you think, please leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.
If you're talking about outright cases of racism, then no - the answer is quite simply no, the scene presented in the movie was a really blatant case of racism and even back in the 1990s, the staff I have encountered in places like hotels and restaurants are a lot more careful than that. Even if they were to be upset or disgusted with a loud Chinese family behaving badly, then they would be a lot more subtle in the way they would handle the situation. I would have expected that kind of blatant racism to date back to the 1960s or 1970s, that was a totally different era and you would have been dealing with a totally different generation of people back then. So if it had been 1985, I would be more willing to believe that something like that could have happened back then, but 1995? Maybe in some hotel in some remote corner of the UK, but not in central London - no way, London has always been extremely international and cosmopolitan and nobody would bat an eyelid if you're of an ethnic minority here. In any case, I have encountered some situations whereby people have made assumptions based on my skin colour or country of origin, these have led to misunderstandings and I'm going to share these stories with you now for you to judge whether or not these are instances of racism.
Story 1: Is that instant coffee?
I have a sister-in-law who lives in a small town in Scotland and this happened some years ago when I visited her there - it's a small place with not much to do, but people are genuinely friendly and I often get introduced to her friends who live in the area. So one afternoon, I was invited to a small local event and there was an old man making tea and coffee there - he asked me if I would like a cup of coffee and being the snob I was, I asked if it was instant. You see, I think instant coffee is pretty gross and once you have a proper coffee machine at home, it would be hard to stomach your regular cup of instant coffee. I was thinking, oh we're in a small town, they wouldn't know what proper coffee is and if he's going to make me a gross cup of instant coffee, I shall have tea instead. But as it turned out, that old man did have a decent coffee machine there and was able to offer me a good cup of coffee - however, he had assumed that because I am an Asian immigrant, I would have grown up drinking gross instant coffee in Singapore instead of proper coffee, hence I would prefer gross instant coffee instead. So he apologetically said, "I'm sorry we don't have instant here, but I can do you a cup of coffee from our coffee machine?" When then followed was a really awkward conversation about what kind of coffee I liked and if I did grow up drinking instant coffee in Singapore; he had assumed that Asian people (the Chinese in particular) had more of a tea-drinking culture and wouldn't be that familiar with coffee.
Needless to say, we had both made assumptions about each other: I took one look at him and thought, you're an old, working class Scottish man, I bet you're probably barely literate and worked as a lorry driver or something like that. I bet the last time you read a book was when you were 6 and that was 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' because your teacher made you do it to improve your English. you probably had never seen a coffee machine in your life and you probably drink the grossest, cheapest instant coffee because that's all you can afford. He took one look at me and thought, you're an immigrant, you're not from here, I bet you come from a poor, exotic country, you might even be a refugee - you probably don't want to drink what we normally drink here, you're probably going to be different from the rest of us in this town, you probably don't even speak English as a first language. You get the idea: I think we were both equally guilty of jumping to conclusions and making assumptions based on the first impression we made of each other within the first second or so. He didn't see me as someone from London but rather a foreigner, an immigrant, someone from another country. Don't be me wrong, we were both very polite to each other in our brief interaction, but I could sense that we had both made awful assumptions about the other party that were probably unjustified. He was probably a bit racist and I was extremely 'classist'.
Story 2: Remembering English names?
Here is an example of when I encountered ignorance rather than outright racism. Years ago, I used to do coach gymnastics here in London many years ago on my weekends and I've since given that up, though I continue to enjoy the sport as a gymnast rather than a coach. There were loads of kids at the gymnastics club and at the start of every term, there's usually a huge turn over of kids as the parents sign up for a whole term's worth of classes - so you have the situation whereby you turn up for gymnastics class the first Saturday of the new term and oh boy, you see a sea of unfamiliar faces and you're trying desperately to remember all the new names. I discussed this situation with an older British lady and she assumed that I had difficulty remembering the names because I am Chinese: I would be more familiar with names like Chen Yile, Liu Jinru, Liu Tingting, Luo Huan and Zhang Jin (who incidentally the current 2018 China women's gymnastics national team) instead of Jane, Paul, Vera, Frank, Melissa, Edward, Olivia and Christopher. I cringed at that thought - after all, English is my first language and she had jumped to the wrong conclusion based on the colour of my skin. I think you'd have to go to China to find someone who can't speak English well and has little familiarity with Western culture for them to be confused by the more common English names. For crying out aloud, I have an English name. In making that assumption, she had assumed that I was a poor adjusted immigrant who is neither fluent in English nor familiar with British culture - I got rather offended.
Fortunately, I managed to explain to a mutual friend why I took such offence and naturally, I got a groveling apology. That older lady didn't mean to be racist - she just did what a lot of lazy people did and jumped to the wrong conclusion. In her defence, she was trying to express empathy - she was trying to see things from my point of view, she was putting herself in my shoes to stare out at a sea of new faces through my Chinese eyes. But of course, my situation is quite unique in that I am a complete yellow banana: yellow on the outside, completely white on the inside. The primary language I use at work is English and when I was put in a Chinese-speaking business environment in Shenzhen earlier this year, I completely floundered and struggled. It is not easy to express empathy and I say, if you want to do it, then make sure you judge the situation properly, have all the right information about the person you are talking to before you try to open your mouth - in this case, she was utterly embarrassed at how badly she had misfired over that whole 'English names' incident and didn't want me to think that she was a racist. Did she cause offence with her remark? Yes she did, but did she do it out of sheer malice, was she deliberately trying to offend and insult me? No - she did it out of ignorance and stupidity, she was trying to be nice and express empathy but didn't quite know how to do it properly. I could live with that and forgive her mistake, because of the total absence of malice.
Story 3: Hey big spender
This incident happened about twelve years ago and it wasn't in London but in fact in Dubai - I was in a very upmarket boutique in one of the big malls. Nothing in there was cheap, it was clear that the security guard was ready to ask people who look as if they didn't belong in there to leave and if you looked like you were a big spender, then the friendly sales assistant would come and assist you. Now I was with a group of white friends who wanted to see something in the shop, so whilst I wasn't keen on spending my hard earned cash there, I was in the company of some friends who were interested in buying something in that boutique. This is when it got messy - we had entered the shop together but I got bored and started wandering around on my own instead of sticking with them. I then realized that I was being watched and followed by one of the security guards - after all, I'm Asian and I wasn't exactly well dressed that day (Dubai is ridiculously hot, so most people dress for the hot weather) - there was that moment of realization when I thought, oh shit he's going to eject me from the store. I had about five seconds to react and so I spotted one item in front of me that was and called out to my friend in my most exaggerated British accent. "Oh James, you must come over here and have a look at this one, it is 20,000 Dirhams (£4,236 or S$7,468) but it is so much nicer than the one you saw yesterday. I think you will adore this one."
Right away, the security guard pretended to be looking in the other direction as the sales assistant greeted me with the most forced smile you have ever seen, "hello sir, good afternoon, may I help you?" Thankfully my friend James had realized what was going on (he had been working in Dubai for longer than I have) and he just played along with me. He pointed to one of the most expensive item in the shop and exclaimed, "hey Alex, weren't you looking for something like that? Well have a look at this!" And I replied, "yes James, I was, but I already have it. I got it last week already when I was shopping with Catherine." You should have seen the look on the sales assistant's face, she was like, "well sir, if you like this, then I have quite a few other similar items that you may be interested in." The fact is there are plenty of Filipinos working in Dubai and quite frankly, I had been mistaken for Filipino before whilst I was there - so I could have easily been one of those Pinoy migrant workers there not earning much money, not the kind of customer they wanted in that high end luxury boutique. But the fact that I was in the company of white friends suddenly gave me honorary white status and white people are always welcome in shops like that in Dubai, even if they are poor Russian backpackers. But I had gone from being nearly being ejected from the boutique to being treated like a VIP simply by making it clear that I had come into that shop with white British people and I was not some poor Asian migrant worker who couldn't afford the designer good in there.
Story 4: It will be about Beijing, right?
This story is another example that is fairly similar to story 2: so when I was at university, I did a lot of volunteer work with charities and you run into all kind of random people there also volunteering. A common way to start a conversation is, "so, what do you do?" So when I said that I was a student at university, they asked me what I was studying and one question led to another, I told them I was doing research into public transport patterns and here was the response that shocked me, this guy then just assumed that I would be studying about transport in somewhere like Beijing, China instead of the obvious: I was conducting my research in London as I was a student at University College London. Mind you, even after all these years, I still haven't set foot in Beijing yet despite having visited other parts of China like Shanghai and Shenzhen. There was absolutely nothing about what I said about my research that could suggest any need to do it in China, I had in fact been referencing examples in the London public transport system. Yet the only thing that was Chinese was my skin colour, my face and that led him to jump to that conclusion - I got really angry at that point and called him a racist. Now it didn't help that this other woman, also a volunteer, tried to calm me down by pointing out that whilst he had jumped to the wrong conclusion, he wasn't a racist per se and that it wasn't an unreasonable question.
So let's analyze the situation - this guy was plain stupid, he said something stupid by jumping to the wrong conclusion and when it was clear that he had misfired, he didn't know how to deal with the situation. He was probably autistic and sorely lacking in social skills to handle situations whereby you make polite small talk with people you have just met - really, it isn't rocket science, not insulting or upsetting the other party by keeping the conversation rather bland and open ended. So instead of making an assumption like, "your research will be about Beijing, right?" I would use an open ended questions like, "where would you be doing your research? Is that your first choice? Would you like to do your research in just one city or would you like to have the chance to do it in a few different places? If money wasn't an issue, where would you like to do your research? Which city would be most ideal for your research?" You see, in using questions like that, I am expressing interest in the other person without jumping to any conclusions - I am allowing the other party to give me that information. This idiot who made the comment about Beijing probably wanted me to reward him for noticing that I'm Chinese, but that's hardly something that will impress me since I clearly have East Asian features and have a common Chinese surname. So was his comment racist? I think so, but was his maliciously trying to insult or upset me? No he wasn't, not at all and the key is the motive here: it wasn't malice, just an insanely huge dose of stupidity and a total lack of very basic social skills. Yes he was a stupid idiot, but at least he wasn't a racist idiot - there is a difference.
Story 5: Sweet and sour pork
This story is back from around 2002 - so we're going back a long way here. I was a few weeks into my new job in a new company and there was just a boring afternoon when a group of us were chatting about food as it was coming to lunchtime. And then this British colleague asked me, "so Alex, when are you going to bring us some home-made Chinese food, like your grandmother's secret recipe for us to taste? Like I'm sure it's going to be so much better than the sweet and sour pork kind of Chinese food we get at our local Chinese restaurant." I felt offended by that remark actually, despite the fact that I do have a Chinese grandmother who is a great cook. Firstly, I didn't know this guy well enough to want to cook for him, sure I cook Chinese food at home but why should I want to go through all that effort to cook for my colleagues in the office whom I'm not even that close to? Secondly, it's the assumption that I can cook Chinese food - I am a lover of all good food whether it is Italian, Mexican, Indian, Turkish, Japanese, French, Korean, Thai or Spanish, I'd like to think that I am cosmopolitan enough to appreciate good food from every country in the world. Unlike my parents of course, who will only eat Chinese food - I'm not like that, I am actually really quite adventurous when it comes to trying new foods. So for my colleague to assume that I would prefer Chinese food, I actually felt quite insulted and angry. I'm such a complex, interesting character and all you can do is default to my skin colour to start a conversation?
Here's a bit of a context for you: in the West, Chinese people are often associated with Chinese restaurants. This correlation has a lot more to do with racism than delicious Chinese food: in the past, a lot of highly educated Chinese people found it hard to get well paid jobs because of racial discrimination. Others struggled to assimilate and didn't speak English well enough, so they ended up working within the Chinese restaurant trade - it was a way to make money from white people who didn't want to employ them otherwise, but somehow Chinese food was so appealing that even the most racist white people were actually perfectly happy to go for dinner in a Chinese restaurant. Now what I have described above is a situation involving racial discrimination that happened many decades ago, Chinese people are perfectly at home in the West these days and have become the 'model minority' in the West, as most of us have assimilated quite successfully. But still, this assumption of looking at a Chinese person and automatically making an assumption that he must have something to do with the catering trade is inherently racist, because the message is, "white people would never employ a Chinese person like you, so of course you must be working in a Chinese restaurant, right?" The fact is I'm from Singapore, a Chinese-majority country and there is simply no correlation between Chinese people and the catering trade in Singapore, so I found that comment quite offensive.
Was this guy who asked me about Chinese food racist? No, he was just plain stupid - you see, he was trying to establish rapport. He looked at me and thought, ah Alex is Chinese, if I talked about something that is close to his heart like Chinese food, then I can have something in common with him. But it doesn't work like that - this guy didn't get to know me better, I ate Chinese food as a child not because I made any conscious decision to learn about Chinese cuisine; no, it was simply because that's what my parents ate and I was surrounded by it all the time in Singapore. So imagine if you didn't know me well and you went through my Instagram feed, trying to find common ground - then you would be able to see something that I did recently, so for example, if you stumble upon my gymnastics training videos and if you also do gymnastics, then great we have common ground for a conversation. And if you don't feel like trawling through my Instagram feed, then no problem, just ask me questions, so if we're talking about food for example try open-ended questions like, "Alex, what kind of food do you like? Where's your favourite restaurant in London? Do you like cooking at home Alex? Where do you tend to do your grocery shopping? What is your favourite dessert? Where's the best place in London for street food?" It is rather easy to keep a conversation going with open-ended questions, but that idiot didn't have the social skills to do that - no, instead he defaulted to an ethnic stereotype. The bottom line is he even though he was a stupid idiot, at least he wasn't a racist idiot - there is a difference.
Story 6: Are you doing this within your community?
Oh this happened in 2009 - it was one of the strangest questions I ever got and ironically it was from a black person, I would have thought that black people would be more careful not to say anything that could be perceived as racist! When told this black lady that I was an actor, she asked me, "are you doing this within your community?" And I'm like, what? I'm sorry I didn't understand her question initially - then I realized, she thought I was only acting for Chinese people, in Chinatown doing things like plays in Mandarin or Beijing opera for a Mandarin-speaking audience rather than entertaining white people because hey, why would white or black people want to see a Chinese actor on stage? I was mortally offended by her racist assumption - the fact is I have done a lot of acting work in a range of countries in Europe and the Middle East, so yes white people love seeing me on stage, on TV and in films, particularly in Germany. To begin with, she knew nothing about actors or media: you can't feasibly be a Chinese actor only doing Chinese stuff in Chinatown in the West! There won't be enough work: you need to do very mainstream work to be able to entertain the masses, you want to get on a show like Dr Who which is seen by millions of people around the world. As an actor, your aim is to be able to access as much high profile work as possible - rather than limit yourself to a particular niche market. So already, we know she completely has no understanding about the world of actors.
She had this horrific vision of modern day Apartheid - like Chinese people will only entertain other Chinese people, they won't entertain white or black people. Imagine if I saw an actor like Morgan Freeman, Will Smith or Whoopi Goldberg in a film and said, oh there's a black person in this film, I can't watch it. No way could I possibly do that - that would be utterly racist! Yet this black woman can't get her head around the fact that yes, I would gladly watch a TV programme, a play or a film with non-Chinese people in it and many people today are not racist when it comes to seeing a character of a different skin colour in a TV programme. Most British and American TV series these days will have a number of black and Asian characters, along with a gay character, a character of a minority religion and a disabled character. So if you can have an Indian Hindu, lesbian protagonist in a wheelchair, then you can tick more than one diversity box at the same time! Yes, we celebrate and embrace diversity in this modern age - so for this black woman to have an attitude that seemed to have come from the 1950s when people were a lot less open to embrace different cultures and when people were a lot more racist, I was just shocked. Fortunately, I only met her once and our paths never crossed again - I didn't like her, I thought she was very weird.
Yes there are Chinese people in China who make entertainment in Mandarin for a Chinese audience - the Chinese media market is very big today. However, those people who are doing that are in places like Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong - they are not in London. I am a British-Chinese actor in London, but that black lady didn't seem to understand how I can get be employed by white people in a BBC production for example. I tried to explain to her that I get work on BBC radio 4 for example because I'm very good and experienced and you can't see skin colour on the radio! You just have to sound very eloquent and articulate on air - but no, it was like explaining calculus to a cat, this black woman was plain stupid. All she could see was my skin colour, she couldn't process the fact that I am a lot more than a Chinese person - heck, firstly, I'm mixed, secondly, I'm a total banana: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. The bottom line is that my cultural identity is actually pretty darn complex but people like her are extremely lazy and couldn't be asked to take the time to get to know me better. This stupid woman had some stereotypical idea of Chinese people doing Chinese things like doing Kungfu and eating noodles in Chinatown; she couldn't get her head around the concept of Chinese people like me being extremely white on the inside and being very assimilated into British society. I could have taught her a thing about British Chinese people today - but she was too closed minded to learn.
So was this woman a racist? Well, this is the closest we have gotten to a racist and I'm going to say yes I think she is. You see, she isn't one of those black British people who were born here, she was in fact born in Nigeria but moved to the UK when she was already in her 20s. She was highly educated and had a good job, yet she was poorly assimilated into British society, mostly socializing within the Nigerian community in London. She made little effort to make friends with white people and I was probably one of the very few Chinese people she had ever met. In her job, she was indeed working within her community - most of her clients were from the Nigerian diaspora in London and so she was merely wondering if I was doing exactly what she had been doing, "working within your community". I think what she is doing is wrong - if you want to move to the UK, then you jolly well assimilate and make friends with white people, be a part of British society. Why did she bother moving to London then, if all aspects of her life revolved around other Nigerians? Wouldn't she be happier back in Nigeria then? It was this siege mentality, this self-imposed segregation. Nobody told this woman that she couldn't make friends with white or Asian people, yet she showed a great reluctance to do so - so when she noticed that I'm Chinese, she assumed wrongly that I must be hiding in Chinatown, only working with other Chinese people which couldn't be further from the truth. I find her attitude racist, because her unwillingness to assimilate is a form of racism towards other non-black people around her.
Story 7: When are you going back to Singapore?
This happened a few years ago when I was attending a wedding up in the north of England, that's the kind of awkward social situation where you meet a lot of people you don't know for the first time and try to make small talk. So I got into a conversation with an older lady and at first it was all quite polite, talking about the weather, where we were staying for the night and the food we were enjoying at the reception, then she asked me a strange question. "When are you going back to Singapore?" And my initial answer was, "I had only just visited my family back in Singapore earlier this year, so I have no plans to visit them again in the near future, possibly next year or the year after I suppose, but I don't know - I've not thought about it, I guess it depends if work may bring me to that part of the world." And then she said, "no no that's not what I meant." She meant when I was leaving the UK for good, to return to the country where I am from - she had assumed that I was in London temporarily for the purpose of work and that I would eventually return to Singapore when the work was done or when I had made enough money. I had to explain to her that home for me is London, I may be born in Singapore but I have no desire to ever return there apart from as a tourist on a short visit to see my family and old friends. "I'm an immigrant. I'm here to stay - does that bother you?" Of course, she could clearly sense that she had asked the wrong question and made her excuses, like "sorry I have to go to the bathroom" and we never spoke again at the wedding, nor did we keep in touch.
I think that's quite a loaded question, when people make the assumption that I will leave the UK and return to Singapore one day: let's put it this way, say Brexit well and truly crashes the British economy and I decide that London is no longer a good place for me to call home, then I know exactly where I will move to - Paris. It is a city that I have lived in both as a student and have worked there before too and as I am married to an Irish national, I can get my hands on an EU passport which will still allow me to live and work in France. Furthermore (and I can't stress this enough), French is my second language whilst Chinese is my third language - I am far more at home in a French speaking environment than a Chinese speaking environment. And even if I don't go to Paris, I may end up somewhere else like Berlin, given the amount of work I have done in Germany. The assumption that I would return to Singapore is based on so many other assumptions: that I don't have the skills (social, professional, technical etc) to succeed in a European country, that the only place I can possibly thrive is the place I grew up in because at least I am dealing with a social context I am familiar with. Now, even the latter isn't true at all, because I have now spent more of my life in Europe than in Singapore given how long I've been there - so when I was back in Singapore earlier this year on a business trip, I did truly feel like a fish out of water. Furthermore, just last month, a deal I had worked on involving a Singaporean company fell apart because I was totally hopeless at managing the Singaporean client whilst I had no problems dealing with the other Belgian company.
Since I never got to follow up with that lady who asked the awkward question, I followed this up with my friend Amina, who is also an immigrant like me. She explained it to me this way, "yes I get that too sometimes, people ask me when I am going back to India even though I'm from Pakistan! The fact is a lot of people who do come here for a few years and then leave - say they come here on a student visa for university, they have to leave once they graduate and they can't stay on to work. Not easily anyway. Or they get a work permit to do a job, the work permit is not indefinite - the contract clearly defines how long the work permit is valid for and once that expires, you either leave the UK or you find a way to extend the work permit. May I state the obvious - even if you do manage to get a visa to come here as a student or get a contract which comes with a work permit, it doesn't always lead to permanent residence. That is not easy and especially with this current government, they are not making it easy for people to migrate to this country unless you're a very highly skilled migrant like a doctor or a engineer earning a lot of money. So on one hand, it isn't a completely unreasonable question if you were indeed on a student visa or a work permit, because you would eventually have to leave the UK when either runs out - but if you are clearly already a British citizen, then that's a completely ridiculous question."
Amina continues, "If she didn't know you well, as you've described you've literally just met this lady at a social event like a wedding, so she had no way of knowing whether you were in the UK on a visa that has an expiry date or whether you were born here or had already naturalized as a British citizen. It's appalling that she can't get into her head that there are non-white British people around, we're not all just short-term visitors who will go back where we came from! If you have just met a person and so you have no idea what their immigration status is, then it is presumptuous to assume that they are short-term visitors, it's presumptuous to assume anything. Why not just ask polite questions to try to show interest in the other person? Oh you live in London, what do you do? How long have you been doing that job, do you enjoy working there? Is it a nice place to work? Simple, open-ended questions like that: you can easily gleam a lot of information whilst showing interest in the other party, you allow the other party to volunteer the information you're after without sounding as if you're from the Home Office and UK Border Agency investigating whether or not you're an illegal immigrant. You want to make polite conversation and not come across as if you're interrogating the other person. Yes she was interested in you but she asked the wrong questions because of her poor social skills: so I don't think this woman you met is racist, I can't say that for sure, but she seems more ignorant and stupid, rather than downright racist."Story 8: Where are you from?
I just have to finish with the classic line that most people don't really realize can come across as very racist, 'where are you from?' I would never use a question like that, so for example, I met a lady at my gym the other day called Jana and I thought she had a bit of an Eastern European accent. I wanted to know where she was from so I could see if I could speak her language or not given that I do speak 20 languages. So instead of asking her point blank, "where are you from?" I asked if she spoke Russian to which she replied, "only a little, being Czech I can figure out some Russian." There you go, I got my answer - she is Czech, I got my answer. So why is this question so offensive then? This question implies that the person in question doesn't belong here, so where do you really belong then? There's this brilliant BBC comedy skit which does capture what people like me face all the time - this deliberate 'yes but where are you really from? Where are your grandparents from?' I know exactly what they are getting at but I go out of my way to avoid giving them the answer they want because I just find questions like that highly annoying and offensive. After all, what are you going to do with the answer if I say I'm Chinese - are you going to start speaking to me in Mandarin or Hokkien? I don't think so, so what purpose would telling you my ethnicity serve? Nobody has ever been able to give me a satisfactory answer to that question. Surely you should be more interested in things pertaining directly to me: like what I do for a living, where I had been educated or even what kind of music I enjoy. I can exercise choice over the music I listen to, it can tell you a lot about me - but I had no choice over my skin colour.
So what is the conclusion I can draw from these stories? Well, I think the scene where Eleanor Young gets ejected from the hotel because of blatant racism is highly exaggerated for comedic purposes and it is just not something you would ever encounter in London today. In the eight stories I shared, in most cases, I was mostly dealing with stupidity and ignorance. I had encountered autistic people with really poor social skills. It was only in stories 6 when the woman was definitely racist and in story 7, I didn't spend enough time with that woman to find out if she was genuinely racist or just plain stupid - she could be either or both, I just don't know for sure. For me, the litmus test is the presence of malice: even if someone said something offensive, did they say it because they were stupid or malicious? Ignorance and malice are not the same thing and I have learnt to tell the difference. However, the kind of old fashioned racism of Chinese people being kicked out of a hotel simply for not being white doesn't exist anymore - you're far more likely to encounter people like that Nigerian lady in story 6 who genuinely believes that people from different races shouldn't and wouldn't mix, or that woman from story 7, who will take one look at the colour of your skin and make all kinds of assumptions based on ethnic stereotypes. But even the Nigerian lady was polite enough when dealing with me - I just found her views about different races keeping to themselves absolutely abhorrent. Her views were downright racist, but she didn't act in a hateful, racist manner towards me.
So there you go, that's it from me. What do you think? Have you ever encountered racism in the West? Are some white people still very racist towards Asians? What have your experiences been like? Can you relate to any of the stories I have told in this piece? Have you met people who are similar to those described in the stories? What about the fact that the only truly racist person I encountered was black and not white - did that surprise you? Do let me know what you think, please leave a comment below. Many thanks for reading.
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