Posts tagged with "Chinese culture"

The Alcohol Culture In Hong Kong

Oddly enough, Pabst Blue Ribbon is one of the cheap­er beers here and Budweiser is one of the more expen­sive. Drinking is sim­ply not part of the cul­ture here, so no one checks for ID since there’s no age lim­it. There’s a lot of smok­ing though, most­ly for image. People walk around with cig­a­rettes hang­ing out their mouths, and just have one every now and then, instead of need­ing cig­a­rette breaks every hour.

The Fun Of Second Languages

It’s always a delight to hear an old­er Chinese per­son say some­thing in English with­out accent. However, hear­ing an old­er Caucasian per­son speak Cantonese with­out accent it’s com­plete­ly fuck­ing scary cause it’s like OMG THEY ARE INFILTRATING AND THEY KNOW WHAT WE ARE SAYING QUICK PRETEND LIKE YOU DON’T NOTICE AND SAY THEY HAVE NICE TEETH. I use the word “old­er” because nowa­days it’s not uncom­mon for peo­ple to speak more than one lan­guage flu­ent­ly, where­as at my par­ents age the edu­ca­tion for such things was­n’t the norm.

Museums Of Hong Kong

Went to the Hong Kong Museum of History, and learned that Hong Kong peo­ple suck at fight­ing. Out of the two wars we were in, we won zero and lost two. First was against those damn British in 1839, tak­ing Hong Kong from China so they could have free trade of their soul­less opi­um. Then there was the Japanese inva­sion in the ear­ly 1940’s which made Hong Kong a liv­ing hell for almost every­one there, although one could say that the Brits were respon­si­ble for defend­ing one of their colonies. I can sort of see what the return to China has done to the exhibits in the sub­tle hints of pro­pa­gan­da found in the lat­er gal­leries.

Also went to the Honk Kong Science Museum, which is a com­plete rip-off of the Ontario Science Centre (or is it the oth­er way around?), from the exper­i­ments to the inter­ac­tive con­trap­tions. I had actu­al­ly seen almost all of the HKMS already just from my younger vis­its to the OSC, and most of it was exact­ly the same. I won­der if there was a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort with Ontario to cre­ate a stan­dard­ized sci­ence muse­um.

Family From B.C.

My aunt and uncle hap­pened to be in town from B.C. yes­ter­day, so they took me out to din­ner and brought their son along. I don’t believe I had met any of them before, although they all seemed famil­iar. A dif­fi­cul­ty I have with the Chinese cul­ture is the fact that every­one is called aunt or uncle if they’re old­er, even if they’ve just been met. Our actu­al rel­a­tives (the aunts and uncles relat­ed by blood), how­ev­er, have a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent name sys­tem, most­ly based on rank and which side of the fam­i­ly they are from. The prob­lem ends up being the fact that I have no idea what the names of these peo­ple are, since we don’t append a first name to “aunt” or “uncle”, and I ran into that spe­cif­ic prob­lem yes­ter­day. I was able to go the entire din­ner with­out hav­ing to call any of them by name though, so I escaped with my igno­rance in igno­rance.

Occidental Fetish

When I think of the Chinese cul­ture, a very spe­cif­ic image comes into my head, of a father dom­i­nat­ed fam­i­ly, par­ents who don’t know their chil­dren, and closed-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als.

I think my upbring­ing has exposed me to such a one-sided aspect of Chinese life. Almost every Chinese fam­i­ly I’ve met is like this. It would­n’t be so bad if I saw the kids as grow­ing up and sur­pass­ing such lim­it­ed indi­vid­u­al­ism. And yet most of the Chinese peo­ple my age just seem to be falling into the same child­ish mind­set, a prod­uct of parental (mis)guidance, in my hum­ble opin­ion.

It almost makes me sick.

When I read about Chinese his­to­ry, I’m fas­ci­nat­ed about how wis­dom is held in such rev­er­ence, and how schol­ars are so respect­ed. The same virtues seem to hold for Chinese peo­ple today, except that they don’t tru­ly under­stand why aca­d­e­mics are impor­tant, or why one should learn an instru­ment.

I wish I did­n’t have such a lim­it­ed view of a cul­ture with such great his­to­ry. I wish I could be exposed to an amaz­ing Chinese fam­i­ly. I wish some­thing could change my view.

All of this has cre­at­ed such a dis­taste of Asian look­ing girls in me. It’s as if my mind makes an unfair asso­ci­a­tion.

I’m stuck.