Met for dinner on Friday with a visiting friend and her "good friend" from China. I've heard about her screaming matches with some of his family members who believe that Singapore belongs to China. Not a fan but on account of our friendship, I agreed to dinner with them.
Unsurprisingly, his chauvinistic remarks irritated the hell out of me.
First, he said that there was no need for women to undertake an MBA because unlike men, they have no use for the networking relations because their goals in life is family and maybe career whereas for men, it's only career. Doesn't help, as he said and I've heard elsewhere, that some women in China go for an MBA course with the sole purpose of getting a rich husband.
I told him that he was too sweeping and unfair ("一竹竿打翻一船人") with this view and he admitted that, but still stuck to his opinion. Fine, we can all differ in opinions based on different life encounters.
But what really got me all riled up is his claim that all Chinese in Singapore and everywhere else outside of China belong to China. We are Chinese Chinese because our ancestors came from China, even though our parents were born and raised in Singapore.
Didn't want to get into a fight over dinner, although I kept wondering why on earth I was sitting there listening to that shit. There are two aspects to his view -- nationality and race, and I find both ridiculous!
The current PRC was established in 1949. Chinese national, in the strictest sense, refers to the citizens of the established nation from 1949. By then, my grandparents and parents were in Singapore. My mum was yet to be born and my dad, born in Singapore, was just a toddler. So were the parents of many Singaporeans. And this is the only timeframe that we should be looking at, simply because before this milestone, China was a different place with a different regime.
If we choose to trace the roots beyond our parents to grandparents and before, then all I can say that they were residents of a war-torn era in the 1910s to 1940s, with China split among different warlords. If we went beyond that to the Qing dynasty, then sure, our ancestors came from somewhere in the mainland. But why stop here? Why not go back to the Ming dynasty, Qin dynasty, or maybe even before Qin Shi Huang to 7 states period or even before that to 5000 years ago? Question is, where in time do we stop and how do you justify the stop? With a few thousand years between, can I say that my ancestors came from Xiamen? No, I cannot. I do not know where they were before they landed in Xiamen, and where before that, and before, and before they were.
So, in that case, let's bring in the Koreans, Japanese and anyone vaguely Chinese looking. Do we all come from the same root despite speaking different languages? Or maybe Laos, Cambodia too? How about Dai tribe in Yunnan which has a closer cultural tie to the Thais than Chinese? Or any of the other 50 tribes in Yunnan. Or even Tibetans who look more like red Indians and the Australian oborigines than Chinese -- why do they claim that they are Chinese? Do we all originate from the legendary Peking man? And if yes, how can anyone say that the Peking man is Chinese when China did not yet exist? In fact, some say that the Chinese could have originated from the Africans. So there, if we're tracing the root, then let's go all the way and say that we may be Africans or who knows what.
As a race, this is an open question with no answer as historians and scientists continue to search for the truth; hence, his view cannot hold. As a nationality, his opinion is made more ridiculous by the fact that we belong to different countries. If anything, I'd say that we were first colonized Malayans, then independent Singaporeans. Nowhere in history did China come into play in this part of the world, apart from the occasional ambassadors.
I am me. I am willing to allow my identity to be defined by where I was born and raised, simply because that is the only root-related aspect that is relevant. Everything else is not.
It is a ridiculously narrow minded view that he has. And the sad thing is, he is not alone although I am consoled that I have met many Chinese nationals who do not think as he does.
Labels: hmmm
