Yellow Racism, As Large As White Racism

This non-fiction book by Hong Kong based Arielle Gabriel startles with its
bold premise that racism in Asia is just as powerful and unjust as racism in
Western democracies. Her book covers Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea,
Singapore, Malaysia, and Mainland China, with thoughts on half-Asian
children, and inter-racial marriages.
Hong Kong: Foreign Devils!
The Canadian-born writer gets off to a lively start, detailing the use of
the word gweilo in Hong Kong, offering new historical insights into the
linguistic variations of the word. Gweilo, or foreign devil, a term used to
describe non-Chinese, both blacks and whites. Hong Kong, as befitting its
internationalism, shows racism towards citizens from India, Pakistan,
Nepal, Muslims, Africa, and even Californian Chinese due their tans.
The story of the hospital death of Harinder Veriah, a young ethnic Indian
woman, reminds sadly that even dark skin alone may be an endangerment.
Prolonged litigation by her husband Martin Jacques proved that racism
resulted in second-rate medical treatment. This fortunate couple had
education, intelligence and social standing. None of that protected them.
Juxtaposed with this story is a concise reference to the Indian men who
died defending the Chinese people of Hong Kong. British, Canadian,
Pakistanis, and local Chinese: the Battle of Hong Kong, December 1941,
involved specifically the 7th Rajput Regiment and the 2nd Battalion, 14th
Punjab Regiment.
Gabriels literary roots are in poetry, and she writes succinctly the story
of how others from the British Commonwealth came to Hong Kong to fight
and die, defending a city that now sees those same Pakistanis and Indians
as lesser beings due to their complexions.
Pakistanis now their own isolating word, Ah Cha! A Hong Kong social
services worker, serving at a drop-in centre for those in need, confided in a
candid talk with another Cantonese worker, that in my veins is Chinese
blood, and to serve these black skinned people, that I can't do!'.
Gabriel sees the repeating points in Western racism echoing in Asian
racism: the use of nasty words, the ridicule of the physical appearance of
The Other, the belief that the victim of racism, has either lower intelligence
or inferior moral character to the superior practitioner of racism.
A striking and unique feature of Asian racism is the use of the
inflammatory nostril stuffing hand gesture. Gabriel records she has
witnessed this herself several times in Asia. The racist blocks her nose
when she encounters a person that she deems of inferior race. There is no
reason for this gesture, as the victim does not smell.
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 Harmony, a young fashion model, travelled in 2016 on the Hong Kong
MTR, with her mother. They sat beside a Chinese woman, who
immediately upon seeing a black woman blocked both her nostrils, as
though to say, You stink. The alert black, took out her smart phone, and
alerted the entire world via Facebook as to this grotesque infringement of
human dignity. Young Asians, including many good Hong Kong people,
reached out to reassure her of their support and respect for her activism.
Gabriel received confirmation that others witnessed this provocative
insult, and also reported seeing it elsewhere in Asia.

South Korea: Teacher Stalking 24/7

A flurry of stories from South Korea in 2010 described the stalking and
harassment of both black and white English teachers by an Anti-English
Spectrum leader called Yie Eun-woong. He commanded an AES network
of thousands of volunteers, whose original motivation was rage at inter-
racial dating between foreign men and Korean females.
The parents of school children or staff at a school supplied names and
addresses of teachers considered suspect to Yie Eun-woong. Cars sat
outside the mens homes all night. No time limits extended as to the
surveillance, as the proof had yet to be found.
Gabriel discovered a root cause of the mens rage, a website with lewd
descriptions of how to bed and discard Korean girls. The comments were
over-the-top and quite focussed as to the easiness with which females could
be found: Treated like kings by Korean girls who want to learn English
and enjoy free sex. There is nothing good about Korea except that its
easy to sleep with the women and make money. "In two years I slept with
20 Korean women." First get them hot and then don't answer the phone.
Racism and sexuality connected. A serious race war commenced, with
the national teachers association for foreign teachers ATEK naming AES
to be as a racist hate group. The lustful writings of a few foreigners did not
justify the death threats claimed by the president of ATEK. A central
Internet forum of the Korean male activists claimed:
1. Foreign men, black and white, endangered Korean women by
spreading AIDS through rape or forced sex.
2. Foreign teachers target very young females, including children.
3. Foreign teachers denounced on publicity posters as black pigs.
4. Pseudo-scientific pictures of the brains of foreign men, teachers,
explaining their greater drive to be sexual predators
The hysteria resulting made it clear that all foreigners were suspect. AIDS
as a disease was thrown into the media reports. In Canada, Australia, or
the United States such racism would result in litigation. Yet in South Korea,
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the AES received state awards from the National Police Service, for
exposing foreign crime; the racists also receive invitations to meet with
senior government officials.
Classic Racism, as described by Gabriel. The sexuality, the hygiene, the
intelligence and the moral character of The Other all linked.

Yellow On Yellow Racism: Half-Asians, Mixed Marriages

HAPA is a word coined in Hawaii to describe children of mixed race.
Other useful abbreviations are WFAM, white father and Asian mother.
AMWM, Asian father and white mother. A leading spokesman for the
HAPA movement who blogs under the name Eurasian Tiger quotes
statistics that children of WFAM have a high rate of mental illness.
The book analyses the story of half-Asian Elliot Rodgers, the mass
murderer who killed several Chinese students in California, as well as other
white students. He was raised primarily by a Chinese grandmother, then a
Chinese mother, after she divorced her white film director husband.
Rodgers loathed both white girls and Chinese youth in his vehemently
racist writings. Yet the facile American media first blamed his killings on
White Privilege because he was an indulged child of Hollywood affluence.
As one anecdote is insufficient proof of theories on race, Eurasian Tiger,
with his fresh voice on racism, catalogues many other supportive stories at
his blogs.
Eurasian Tiger also gloomily predicts there will be more violent crimes
committed by sons of such pairings, repeatedly told by their Asian mothers
that their half-Asian brand of maleness is secondary. We have only to do
Google Searches to see the flood of data on this topic.
It is irrational and plentiful.
Blogs of Asian American women who demean Asian men: the vitriolic
nature of these writings by women sometimes overwhelms. Some Netizens
wonder if its white men who hate Chinese people. A blog called I Hate
Asian Men: Yeah, you heard it from me, I hate those Asian men and I hope
they die, and I am a Chinese woman. Chinese men are absolutely the worst
scums of the earths and all Chinese women are sick of them.
The most correct and neutral assessment of such writings is that whoever
the author is, male or female, white or Asian, they require psychological
help.
If a white man wrote like this about black men, or a German wrote like
this about Jews, no intelligent reader would laugh it off, as harmless self-
expression. Much of the anti-Asian male writing expresses the same
prejudices that Jews and blacks have received.
They are wrong just because of having been born Asian males. Their
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looks, their faces, their sexuality, their physicality. Jews were said to have
big hooked noses, not true. Blacks to have kinky hair, and wider noses, not
true of many American blacks. Both Jewish men and American blacks
were seen as sexually menacing, sexual threats to the purity of Gentile and
white women, justifying mob violence by racists.
While Gabriels book occasionally repeats some news stories, her writing
most refreshes when she makes these historical connections, bringing them
into the Asian dialogue of today, with her own philosophical perspective,
raised in a world peace family, in a tolerant nation such as Canada.
A more moderate viewpoint from the blog I Refuse to Ever Date an Asian
Man, tends to blame all of Chinese culture, rather than just the poor males.
I refuse to ever date an Asian man. A third blog by a Shanghai University
student who wrote a notorious article on why she sought a white man in
marriage receives line-by-line analysis by Gabriel.
The nave young woman imagines white men romancing her with glasses
of champagne while she reclines in bubble baths. This student goes farther
in her attack than the physicality of Chinese men. Ambitious and bright,
she diminishes even their brains and moral characters.
Successful men in the New China only got rich by luck and shady deals.
The young men at university are stupid as well, because they live in a
country where they do not have the same freedoms as Western boys enjoy.
The letters in translation from Chinese bloggers dazzle with their snappy
wit. One man suggests gang-attack by dogs, then given to Japan. Another
more moderate man curses her for her cruelty to the parents and ancestors
who funded her education. Even white men and white women join in, in
seeing the self-loathing as racist. Freud would have a field day with this,
writes one ex-pat. Gold-digger is a common insight, in the buttering up for
Green Card marriage. The happily married wife of an ex-pat teacher
wonders why students revere white men, when they have men of their own.
Even Westerners see that many Chinese men are industrious, and
responsible to many family members. Respectful to their parents and
ancestors. The loathing of race seems so extreme in some of these blogs is
it themselves they loathe? Is it themselves they are talking about?
Is this racism when it is within the same race? Gabriel wonders, yet the
emerging half-Asian voices on the Internet claiming the WMAF as the
Default International Couple, with their vocal children, require listening to.

Oh Canada! A Tolerant Childhood

The autobiographical chapter on Canada explains early motivation for

global concerns. The author was the eldest daughter of a world peace
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activist, who spoke at international conferences on nuclear disarmament.
Her father, an original Ban the Bomber, also worked at the national
airlines. The family travelled extensively on their Air Canada travel
passes, and also experienced other cultures by intermarriage. Though her
grandparents were British origin, the extended family also includes First
Nations and Cantonese relatives.
She tells of learning about racist bias in her childhood in Canada, in
which two groups, both Caucasian, were condescended to. The French
people mostly resident in the province of Quebec. And the First Nations
people, the original inhabitants of North America. Though such racism is
not clearly racism, as it is practiced within the same race.
She perceived that the group patronized is seen as The Other. Several
types of insults and slights are applied. The Other may been as less
intelligent. With a worse moral character. With lower standards of
hygiene. Or just uglier, born with an inferior physical appearance. She
notes that Jews in Nazi Europe were drawn with exaggerated hooked noses,
and blacks in the Southern United States with oversized lips, and eye
whites.
And as a Canadian, Gabriel disassociates herself from recent self-
accusations in American academic writings that all white people are born
to White Privilege, and owe an endless debt, simply because of the skin that
they were born with. She writes of White Guilt at length in the chapter on
Christian Guilt.
She wonders why some nations are more scrupulous in their legal
concerns for racist issues, while others remain a more stubborn attachment
to dated ideas such as Blood Purity, a strong philosophical influence still in
both Japan and Korea, while having the realism to admit Asian Racism is
an impossibly large topic.

Christian Guilt
The chapter on Christian Guilt explores the recent bias in the Western
media and universities that holds whites accountable for all racial
prejudice. The untruth that slavery began with Christianity and the
United States of America receives sharp attention. Any quick search at
Google reveals many nations practiced this heinous crime against other
nations.
Why are the penalties for expressing racism in Western democracies
sometimes draconian, while an equal amount of racism in Asia escapes any
punishment at all? Because Asian countries have been poorer? Third
World and developing countries? Is it collective guilt that the West once
did better? Yet that is only a recent historical development. Members of
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the Ku Klux Klan or Hitler Youth did not escape condemnation when they
came from impoverished families.
Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and Japan all practiced real slavery, not
only indentured servitude. China once bought and sold black slaves
imported from Africa by Arab traders, a little known fact. The slaves were
romanticized in folk stories, and given magical powers. Ironically, these
black slaves lived in Guangdong Province, the geographical area where
thousands of African traders still live and complain of some bias, while
welcoming the financial opportunities of the booming nation.
Those whites who claim Asians are less responsible for their racism
should consider history. Imagine instead a flourishing and wealthy Asia,
buying and selling black slaves from Africa, just as the Americans bought
and sold them over 150 years ago.
Is evil ever forgotten? Does it go away? Does blaming ourselves as whites
exonerate others? Will these things happen again? What will stop that? Is
the evil in our legal structures? Is it in our DNA?
We must move beyond the repetitious to new ideas.

Yellow Racism, Why Is It Tolerated?

Much agreement can be found that Asian racism exists, and at
worrisome levels. Is it as bad as racism in the West, and if it is, then why is
it denied?
Collective guilt for the bloody history of the colonizing nations of Europe
and Great Britain on the Asian continent? Efficient legal structures in
countries such as Canada which bring media attention and government
action concerning complaints of racial bias? Internal concerns in Asian
countries such as civil war or poverty that demand immediate compassion,
than the complaint of someone who is overlooked by a taxi cab driver due
to the colour of his skin?
A Chinese journalist from Singapore, Stephanie Tan, wrote in The
Spectator in 2014 of the inaccuracies of calling contemporary British a
racist people, remembering life in Asia. Most trenchant of all, an entire
kaleidoscope of words exist to refer to foreigners, more often than not whites:
farang in Thailand, gaijin in Japan, mat salleh in Malaysia, gweilo in Hong
Kong. In the latter, gwei means ghost taken literally, it means a white
person is not fully human. Tan added, that only ethnic Chinese may call
themselves, ren. Ren means person, criticizing the fact that only Chinese
exist as real people in their language.
These words root themselves in Asian history, a forgotten history that
even features the importation of black slaves to Guangdong Province
hundreds of years ago.
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 Superiority is more than implied in the use of such language. It is
repeated over and over again, in the ears of young children. It is not
innocent, and can be exaggerated with tone of voice, or a slight twist to the
corners of the mouth.
Yet sometimes the same citizens who agree correctly that words such as
nigger, or Chink, or Jap, are shockingly insulting, in Western countries,
excuse and forgive with a smile, these racist slurs used by Asians. Why is
that?
Gabriel closes her book with no definite answers, only a sincere and
compassionate desire that the dialogue on Yellow Racism, As Large As
White Racism begins.