beware: chinaman
if you’ve been reading the news lately, you might have realized something: now is a pretty bad time to be mainland chinese.
i have family from mainland china, which makes me a mainland chinese abc. the past couple of days, and weeks, i’ve been feeling a little weird.
if you’re like me, you might have been feeling weird too. it’s hard to put a name on what the feeling is like — but if we are going to call a spade a spade, it feels weird to come from what may now be the most hated country on earth.
the coronavirus, of course. but also, other things — hong kong, xinjiang, huawei, the environment, human rights, etc etc etc. it sometimes feels like a bit of a neverending list of controversies. as that list grows, it’s become increasingly clear that being from mainland china just…isn’t a good thing to be right now. on social media i’ve seen a range of colourful comments made — disgusting, backwards, communist, evil — just another day on facebook.
but increasingly, i’ve started to feel something in my gut. that when i’m on public transit and people curl their lips in disgust at me, or make a deliberate move to switch seats — that when parents send letters into schools saying ‘keep your disgusting chinese kids away from mine’ — that when people say we are backwards and brainwashed and evil, and that maybe we deserved to die of this virus— that maybe this is about something a lot bigger than a virus.
if you’re a member of a visible minority, people have made stereotypes and judgements about you. it doesn’t matter whether you choose to believe that or not — it just is true.
when i was younger, i didn’t want to believe it. i truly wanted to buy into the idea that people were not being racist to me, because the idea of living in a racially equal society is super appealing to a 9 year old.
as i got older, i started to accept that there were some stereotypes people were going to have about me — but that the worst of all these stereotypes was the idea that all of my ‘kind’ were exactly alike.
many visible minorities experience this kind of baggage, but it appears especially prevalent among the chinese population, particularly given the recurring joke that all asians look and act the same.
i call this baggage: “being responsible for everything everyone in your ethnicity has ever done.”
i’ve never spent a day as a citizen or resident of the PRC. and yet, in the past few days, i’ve been asked why my ‘kind’ eat bats. or snakes. or dogs.
(i don’t. nobody in my family has. nobody that my family knows has.)
i’ve also been asked why my kind ‘invaded’ hong kong and are brainwashing citizens in xinjiang.
(i didn’t. i’m not responsible for the government of another country. i can’t speak to why other governments do things, any more than i can speak to why justin trudeau decided to do blackface years ago.)
i’ve been asked why my kind are okay with surveillance and censorship, or why we support huawei.
(we’re not. that’s why my parents and i immigrated to a country without surveillance and censorship.)
these things might seem kind of recent, but in reality, visible minorities get asked to answer for shit all the time. when people ask things like ‘why do black women get so mad all the time?’, they blame a collective for the select behaviour of a few, and disregard the potential roots of that anger. when people make statements like ‘jews control the media’, they erase and ignore the thousands of jews who are disenfranchised and distinctly do not control the media. when people ask things like, ‘why do all chinese do X? why do all chinese think Y?’ they make sweeping assumptions about a broad swathe of people.
i had an elementary school teacher who once told me that people were not born with the innate ability to hate — that human behaviour tended towards love. i think it might be more accurate to say that people are born lazy — and lazy people don’t like to think too hard.
china is a country of 1.4 billion people. it arguably is as diverse as an entire continent, in terms of culture, values, language, and belief. that diversity is hard to understand and process.
but for lazy people, who gives a shit, right? all asians look the same. all of them think the same. all of them hate freedoms and hong kong and america and eat weird animals. people don’t believe in stereotypes because they are hateful — they believe in stereotypes because they lack the effort to educate themselves out of it.
people judge me, assume what i think and believe and eat and say, because it’ easier to do that then like, idk, ask.
and you’re asking yourself: why the fuck do i need to hear this rant about stereotypes when we’re talking about the coronavirus?
the coronavirus, which began among a very small and isolated group of individuals, is just the most recent thing all mainland chinese people — truly, all 1.4 billion of them — now have to answer for. it is also, thanks media!, now the most convenient headline, and most publicly acceptable reason, to isolate, judge, and exclude chinese people. it’s become the new reason to hate on chinese people, because saying that you don’t like chinky eyes or weird accents has kind of fallen out of fashion.
who cares that not all chinese people eat bats? shit, that’s too hard to think about — let’s just say they all do. who cares that like, 3 people in canada have it, and you’re more likely to die from a car accident or the regular flu or freezing to death?
the coronavirus is just the latest and greatest excuse to exclude and degrade chinese people. and it’s not the only one. 15 years ago it was SARS. a couple of years ago ebola was that reason, for african people, or zika for latinos.
give it a year, watch — in a year people will have a new reason to hate us. lazy people always find new excuses. (and they’ll still say we eat bats. like wtf.)
the coronavirus is just…one thing. rewind time six months and i was getting asked why i supported the breakdown of society in hong kong — before anyone even took the time to ask my thoughts on it. rewind further and i was asked why i would even bother return to china to visit family, given what a desolate and backwards society it was. like, the coronavirus is one chapter in a book titled ‘reasons why people don’t like you’ — it’s a book i’ve come to know well. and it’s such a shitty book to have to read, over and over.
we can lie to ourselves all we want that health is some objective thing — “no, it’s genuinely for my safety!”, they say, as they make obvious moves to distance themselves from you, or write hateful letters to school boards. but we kind of know that’s not true. we know that when the HIV scare happened in the 80s, the majority of people weren’t so much scared of the HIV, as they were of the gay people who carried it.
repetition breeds repetition. we start calling people disgusting so often that we kind of stop checking whether those people are sick in the first place, and just decide it’s better if chinese people aren’t around altogether. it’s a pretty gray line between ‘i should stay away from sick chinese people’ to ‘i should stay away from chinese people.’
right now is a bad time to be mainland chinese, but to be honest, i’m not sure there ever was a great time. if there’s anything i’ve realized in 20+ years of living as a very visible minority, it’s that people will find any excuse — whether it’s a phone company, protests in another country, or a disease that’s only infected two people in your province — to dislike you.
i’m a visible minority, so i’ve accepted with some degree of reluctance that i’m going to get shit for the way i look my entire life. i’ve always known racism against asian people exists, and in particular mainland chinese people (i think my favourite insult so far has been being called ‘uncivilized’ and ‘cave people’ in comparison to people from hong kong). after a lifetime the racism gets kind of drilled into you, and you learn to live with it, like some throbbing migraine that never really goes away.
because i’d accepted that, i hesitated a long time before writing on this subject. i kind of debated not doing it, largely because i was scared of the response i was going to get. i was scared that people were going to say that i was downplaying a public health scare, or defending the PRC, or make any other number of character judgements about me. but in seeing the vitriol on social media, i felt i had to say something.
it’s one thing to say that i eat dogs or am a communist. sure, like, fucking whatever. but it’s another thing to say that people from my homeland deserve to die. i draw a very distinct line right there.
do you know how people die from the coronavirus? let me paint a picture from you: if you contract the virus and die, you don’t spontaneously combust. you will probably die of pneumonia — and if you die of pneumonia, that probably means you die spitting up fluid, choking. it means you might die of a fever, shivering in bed, surrounding by faceless doctors wearing masks and plastic. it more than likely means you don’t get to die with your family by your side.
or, because wuhan is currently short on beds and masks, you might just die in your own home, or waiting in line for a $120 face mask at the drugstore.
the majority of coronavirus victims will be the elderly and infants — people’s grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings, and children. my family is included in that group. the majority of patients will die painful and lonely deaths. and if you’re the kind of person who wishes that sort of a death on people because you don’t like what foods they eat, what language they speak, or what government they live under, maybe you have bigger issues to worry about.
a lot of people have mixed opinions on china. and that is okay. i have grown up my whole life having people tell me that me, and ‘my kind’, are disgusting, and lesser, and backwards. this type of response usually fascinates me because it tends to come from people who don’t know chinese people, or china, very well. and in the same way that i don’t allow literal fake news to bother me, i don’t allow people’s misguided opinions to make me feel bad. i fully believe that the only way to drive out darkness is light, and that me engaging in arguments will not solve racism — that ‘showing’ and not ‘telling’ tends to be the right answer.
but sometimes telling is kind of effective.
i’m not asking that everyone like me.
but i am saying that health paranoia and xenophobia often look really similar. that dehumanizing the sick and dehumanizing those who ‘resemble’ the sick run a really close risk of happening. that ‘disgusting’ isn’t really ever an okay word to use about a human being. let’s do our best to leave health scares to the professionals.
finally, to my fellow mainlanders: you’re not alone. that the feelings of isolation and discomfort you may have felt are not invalid. you’re not dehumanized because of a virus that started in your country, or because of the actions a government took, or any of the other dozens of reasons people come up with. that you have just as much of a right to take the subway or go outside and feel safe in your community as the next person. it’s your world, too.
