Category — 3 billion Asians

How dare you!

J and I have had the occasional domestic dispute over the past 12 years (ahem). And in the post-dust up analysis, we’ve both come to the conclusion that we’re both “highly strung”, though me more than him. And I’ll cop to that. The thing is, after speaking with a few other friends, it appears that an awful lot of Asian women are “highly strung”. Let’s have a look at that a little bit more closely.

What do we mean by the term? I’m just throwing out stuff that I’ve heard, and think about myself:

• a bit on the defensive side
• can get too focused on one thing
• exhibits insensitivity to others when they are perceived to be in her way
• easy to anger when perceived to be insulted/put down
• very ambitious
• tendency to jump to conclusions, usually to the detriment of her partner
• high expectations (sometimes too high) of her partner
• can be very money/status-focused
• very analytical

I hope you’re starting to get the picture. (And, just to repeat the implication in plainer text, men can be highly-strung too, but we’re not talking about them in this post.) Now, let me wander off a bit to an anecdote.

J was recently at a workshop where an engineer was giving a highly technical presentation. Because the workshop was quasi-public, there were a lot of people standing around watching. An acquaintance of J’s, being short, asked him to take a photo of the engineer because she (the photographer) couldn’t see over the crowd and she (the engineer) wanted to send some photos of her presenting her workshop to her parents.

Just as J finished relating the story to me, a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

“I bet she’s single,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes. We got into a conversation afterwards, and she told she she was. But how did you know?”

You know how you get an insight that takes many hops but coalesces in your mind in a heartbeat? That’s what happened here. I’ll try to explain it to you in fewer words than I used with J. Tell me what you think.

What is of absolutely no doubt in Asia — at the risk of descending into stereotype — is that education is important. You may find a parent who’s inordinately happy with their son for everything he buys for them because he’s a successful, let’s say, landscaper. But no matter how proud his parents are of him, there is always some niggle that they’d be prouder of him if he had a degree. And perhaps worked in an office instead. Or had workers who toiled on his behalf. In an office. Or school of some type.

Here’s the problem with the Asian female. One, they’re told that Education is Critical. “Nobody will love you if you’re stupid.” She gets lots of pats on the head when she tops the class in school, becomes prefect, snags a spot at a good university, and graduates, beaming out of the photo frame that sits proudly in her parents’ living room. So far, so good.

The next obvious thing is to get a job. And that’s where the problems start. You see, the young Asian female thinks that she worked so hard, studied so hard, to get somewhere in life. The young Asian female’s parents, however, have inexplicably changed their tune. From, “So why aren’t you getting first-class honours?” it becomes, “Isn’t it time you got married?”

Now, this will throw any reasonable human being for a loop. What?! Why did you ride me so hard if all you’re going to say when I’m 23 is, “When can I expect the grandchildren? I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

At this point, our young lady is caught in an unfortunate case of cognitive dissonance. Of course she doesn’t want to throw it all away just to play mother, especially not if she’s smart and knows she can climb the corporate ladder. So, instead of marrying, she says to herself: “I just have to make my parents proud of me. And once they realise how important it is that I make something of myself — as a person in my own right, rather than just as a wife or mother to someone else — they’ll understand and approve of me and then we can put this marriage nonsense to the side for the time being.”

I hope you can begin to get an inkling of where the young engineer is in this timeline? Caught in the throes of this mis-thinking, she’s well on the way to seeking approval by sending her parents tangible proof that people hang on her every word. That she is doing Something Meaningful. And it doesn’t involve a wedding ring. Pity it won’t work.

The fact is, it never works, and the nagging grows in scope and frequency. “You’re getting so old, lah. No man will want you soon.” “Why are you so smart? Men don’t like smart women.” “You’re too big for your boots, thinking you can get this promotion/start your own business. No wonder you can’t get married.”

And the young woman keeps on thinking that if only everything looked a bit more sparkly, a bit more meaningful, then things would come good. After all, her parents were serious when they said her education was important. She has more examples than she can poke a stick at to prove that point. So if she can’t sway them from their one-track marriage mind now, it must mean she hasn’t proven the worth of her education — of herself — to them hard enough.

And that’s how it begins. She must be perfect. Her boyfriend must be perfect. Her apartment/house must be perfect. Her car must be perfect. Her wardrobe must be perfect. And, as I’ve said before, because the parents have completely and utterly changed their tune, it never is. The problem is not with her, it’s with them. And, because she’s Asian, that’s a verboten thought because, from Turkey to Taiwan, the authority figure in the family is Always Right.

I am of the firm opinion that one of the biggest obstacles to female empowerment in Asia are the parents. I have seen too many worthwhile lives descend into some kind of obsessive-compulsive tail-chasing because the parents have now summarily decided that they want grandchildren and bugger what it means for their daughters. Marriages have been destroyed through the kind of desperate, serial approval seeking that starts with a conceded ceremony and continues from there till the day somebody drops. For the sake of sanity, it’s got to stop but, short of just waiting for all the ignorant old farts to die out, I’m not sure how.

Following on from Wednesday’s post on a recent party incident, I would hate for anyone to think I’m deliberately targetting old white guys for my ire. Let’s go … hmmmmm, how about … South Korea! Via the New York Times.

Ah, South Korea. They of the full-contact democracy, stratospheric education ratings, unimaginable broadband penetration, one of the largest concentrations of land mines in the world (the meat from animals that go grazing in the DMZ along the North/South border, and are blown to shrapnel as a result, are then sold to Indian Muslim restaurants in Malaysia for turning into mutton curry … just fyi), and wonderful wonderful barbeque and kimchi. My favourite movie of the year (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) comes from Korea. As a result of all this, I’ve often wanted to visit Korea. But then I read something like this:

On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them. The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

South Korea is a case (yes, another one) of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It likes the part of globalisation that means people enter the country to do work that nobody else wants to do, or pay the government to study there, but it doesn’t like the bit about having to actually deal with those people as fellow human beings. But, as with most things, some are more equal than others:

Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

I think it goes without saying that we’re talking about a white German here rather than, say, a naturalised German of Turkish origin, nyuk nyuk. ‘Cos if you’re brown, here’s what you can expect from fellow Asians:

For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

I have to admit, the idea of always having a train seat to myself is tempting, but I wonder if it’s worth the surrounding angst? Let’s be blunt. The East Asians are obsessed with skin colour — Chinese, Korean, Japanese. Even the most bigoted Westerner envies a nice tan, but not so for millions of Pacific Rim residents … and Chinese Singaporeans. And it doesn’t stop there. The Koreans hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Chinese hate the Koreans. Good Gods, most people from the rest of the world can hardly tell the groups apart and, with the way the winds of history — and population drift — have been going for the past few millennia, I doubt there are many utterly pure-blood Chinese, Koreans or Japanese around anyway!

In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination … urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

If it ever did.

My current hypothesis is this. The discrimination of skin colour in Asia can, I believe, be traced back to manual labour. That is, if you were a peasant then, by definition, you spent more time out in the sun, working your skinny arse off. Spend more time out in the sun and your skin becomes darker. Ergo, darker skin == cultureless, brainless peasant. On the other hand, don’t spend any time out in the sun, concern yourself with scholarly duties — or nothing at all — under a roof all day, and your skin remains lily-white. That, of course, has to mean that you don’t have to slog outside, either because of your education or wealth. Ergo, whiter skin == educated, rich, aristo type.

It sounds too moronic, too simplistic, to be true, but nothing I’ve come across in decades of pondering this question leads to any other conclusion robust enough to encompass almost an entire continent. I’m open to alternate suggestions, if anyone has one, honest.

I’d segue into other racial groups here, but I wanted to concentrate on the Koreans in this post. So, holiday there? I don’t think so. I know what you’ll say: “But, Kaz, you can’t just refuse to visit a country because of some incidents of stupidity!” And I’d just tell you how utterly sick and tired I am of having to pay to put up with even the probability of this kind of behaviour, year in and year out, and having to subject my children to it, and how about a frickin’ break, OKAY??!!

(Oh, am I out of valerian already? That bottle went quick.)

You’re after a happy ending, aren’t you? How about this?

What was different this time, however, was that, once … [the incident with Hahn and Hussain] … was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

Will it work? I say no. There is too much embedded racism already at play in Asian society. Literally millennia of it. So, you see, it’s not just a Western problem. It’s a problem for all of us.

ADDITIONAL: And, when I say it’s a problem for all of us, I include myself as well. My taking offence at the assumption that I was the servant of the house, for example (ref. last post). Upon reflection, one reason I felt such anger was because I consider myself superior to the average servant. There, I said it. So, being lumped in the same category with a domestic worker was deeply insulting to me. This is despite the fact that I know that many, for example, Filipino women who are tertiary qualified are driven to domestic servitude overseas due solely to their country’s woeful economic, short-sighted and rapacious policies. And, in any case, there but for an accident of birth, goes I. This is a demon I’m going to have to wrestle with myself. I just hope I win.

ADDITIONAL THE SECOND: How about I lighten things up next week? I actually have * shock * horror * writing news and I’ll see about putting up an update on mini bull terrier and general vandal, Sausage.

Have you heard of the Singapore Taxi Driver’s blog? It’s written by a Stanford graduate who went to Singapore to work in the burgeoning biotech education/industry that Singers seems to have the hots for. Absolute details are sketchy, but it appears that Mingjie Cai ran foul of some governmental politicking and got kicked out of his job. He is now a taxi-driver.

Singapore is aghast. An experienced scientist in a hot field (and a Stanford graduate, no less), working as a…a…taxi driver??!! The thud you may have heard was the sound of every Asian parent in the city-state fainting where they stood.

Then, no sooner do we get over this when I read about the millions (yes, you read that right) of University graduates in China that are not only unemployed but, where they can scrape a position somewhere, earning less money than the (mostly unskilled) migrant workers that move from province to province.

My first thought, upon reading that article was, I wonder if the Chinese are going to give the Indians a run for their money? According to the Asia Times, 6.1 million graduates (most of them postgrads) entered the mainland Chinese job market over the northern summer, with most of them holding majors in computer science, law and accounting. Will we see an Oriental Infosys? Satyam? Wipro? Price Waterhouse?

My second thought was sympathy with the parents of these children, who’ve spent (often) their life savings to pay for their child’s education. Throughout Asia, education trumps all (in China, education has been the shining beacon throughout several millennia of history), so to find that your daughter/son cannot get a job even as a nanny because “employers are said to prefer peasant girls with experience instead of English-speaking graduates in business administration” is a heavy and bitter blow indeed.

I blame the Chinese government myself. It’s wanted to have its cake and eat it too. That is, have a tightly-controlled, totalitarian government, ostensibly under communist rule, but still reap the heady delights of neoliberal capitalist economics. Don’t these guys even listen to their own propaganda? I can’t believe, for example, that some individuals — using only publicly available information — were able to insulate themselves from the current economic crisis, but the most populous nation on Earth, with literally millions of geniuses floating about, was happy enough to make hay while the sun shone, and thus completely disregard the rumbling portents regarding their own citizens. (But really, since when did any Asian country care about its own citizens?)

And, really, it’s not as though the Chinese government didn’t see it coming. From Asia Times again:

The oversupply of college graduates started in 1999 when Chinese leaders decided to counter some of the effects of the Asian financial crisis by boosting university enrollments. They had hoped that a generation of well-heeled educated urbanites would boost domestic consumption and help reduce China’s dependence on exports.

Enrollment rose quickly, from 3% of college-age students in the 1980s to 20% today. The trend coincided with a very public effort by Beijing to begin a process of retooling its manufacture-driven economy into a high-knowledge economy.

But even when the economy was booming and creating more jobs, Beijing was struggling to find employment for its growing number of diploma holders [my emphasis --ksa]….

The global financial crisis, with its hiring freezes and credit crunch that choked enterprises’ expansion, made a bad situation only worse.

It may have made a bad situation worse, but it isn’t as though China is a company with shareholders. It’s an entire country that doesn’t need to answer to whiny little investors, can bravely follow long-term strategies and can afford to take the kind of losses that a public company can’t (unless you’re a Wall Street bank, of course, in which case, please continue with business as usual). Still, this flagrant blindness to ten years of increasing reality is unsettling. We’re used to the United States thinking in such a fashion. But China as well? The mind boggles.

Just to add lemon juice and salt to the paper cut, Smug Bastard Yi Weimin, China’s Human Resources & Social Security Minister, allegedly said:

It is high time that young diploma holders lowered their expectations and began to see the potential of many once neglected but well-paid jobs, he told the media. “As a result of the crisis, there will be a change in values for our graduates,” Yi said.

A “change in values”, do you like that? Like the way he shifted the blame from cock-eyed government policy to the individual? For China, in particular, it’s a downright arrogant way of telling the entire population to throw five thousand years of culture out the window. Just like that! :: clicks fingers :: And thus another Asian government screws over its own people.

Taking a personal and meta view of this strange turn of events, this has dire implications for parents such as J and I, trying to chart a future for our children. If an education isn’t good enough to land a solid job any more, what’s left? As the world ages, an obvious employment niche is in elderly care. (When was the last time you met an unemployed nurse?) But that means sheer pragmatism, at a time when our children are thinking of becoming — not nurses or doctors, but — astronauts, robotics engineers, archeologists or research chemists. That’s a whole different kettle of pink slips. I’m happy to support their fantasies but wonder if we’re ever going to get back to a time of clever invention, unbridled optimism and boundless energy. Or if we’ll be doomed, as parents, to see their dreams dashed on the sharp rocks of reality. I know which I think is more likely. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you see that large syndication button off to the side? Feel free to subscribe. Thank you and have a great weekend!

As an Asian, as you may have gathered, I yearn for a time when Asians will grow into the vast human potential that awaits them. That sounds patronising, but isn’t. Even with Asian countries that can trace their history back centuries or even millennia, the modern picture of such countries have been ones of poverty, social strife and warfare.  If we use the concept of a country, such as the sort you or I would prefer to live in, as inclusion of the populace in the decision-making of a particular government, then it’s sad to realise that India has the claim of being “the oldest democracy in Asia” at only about 60+ years and counting. Not very long at all.

I’ve spoken before about the economic might (and rising ascendancy) of the continent, and that is something of which there is no doubt. However, when it comes to creativity and innovation (a “culture of iconoclasm”, if you will) then I suffer nothing but abject depression over Asia’s trenchant rejection of the one thing that can actually propel itself into the kind of envy-producing prominence that has been the hallmark of Western civilisations for centuries. Absolute, sheer-to-goodness, original, satirical, self-reflective creativity.

I’ve started this series of blogs because this is something that I feel has to be confronted and discussed by Asians. I’m not saying that everything is going to be well thought out because I’m only groping for understanding myself. And, who knows, I may even end up reversing my own position on some things down the track. What I think will remain inviolate, though, is the central premise that the Culture of Iconoclasm is stifled throughout Asia and that, more than foreign investment, more than manufacturing figures, such repression will lead to Asia being a second-rate continent for as long as it clings to its outdated concepts of not rocking the boat.

I’m trying to get permission from someone to include some of their work into a future blog on this line of thinking, so stay tuned.