Focus On Asia, I Mean Really Focus: A Guide for White People

The double edged sword of racism, on the one hand I'm sure the views I'm about to express will belittle the many peoples of Asia who don't read my blog by suggesting their aspirations to affluence have been largely shaped through superficial observation of the west and developed nations and are thus inherantly flawed. On the other hand the people who should be really offended are white people, who don't think about things in general and are just plain stupid in the condescending view they often adopt.

Anyway disclaimers aside let me begin, walking around the CBD the mix is roughly 50% International Uni-Students predominantly from Asian nationalities and 50% everybody else. It's the sort of site that once beheld by my grandmother would prompt the unnecessary need for her to incorectly and inflamatorily remark 'Asian's are taking over Australia'.

Australia is Asia. Europeans are the only people to formally overtake it in the form of invasion. Until some Asian nation has us declared legally part of the fauna, there's no need to get bitter.

Alas when I behold this site I think "Man, if these girls actually just wore price tags attached to their clothes it would still seem okay to me." it was a funny thought to have and I made note of it. It was later it came to make sense, and that was that these women of the CBD looked like walking store mannequins. They were literally following the fashion literature so precisely that what was tricking my brain out was this: My brain is so used to associating these images with brand + price descriptions eg. 'katie wears GJ top $45, pants by Poopoo $175 and slippers from Nordick $70' that upon seeing these people walking around actually dressed in such coordinated fashion that my mind of its own will starts looking for the price tags.

This fortuitously was just another data point on my 'things about white people I am learning too late' study that started in Japan.
In Japan you might be walking along a path in a Kyoto temple admiring the cherry blossoms or autumn maple leaves like you are supposed to you dumb fuck and you stumble on a step and catch yourself on an exquisite bamboo railing.
The moment you touch the railing though your brain sends you an impulse that says 'woah, something isn't right here!' and you look again and notice the bamboo railing has infact been made out of concrete.

Fucking concrete! This isn't the only 'crazy' Japanese thing you'll come across. You my white friend might also grin and shake your head at the catastrophic overpass conglomeration down town. The 14 old dudes and ladies that escort you like a heavyweight champ around unnecessary roadworks. Potato on a pizza! Don't these quaint Japanese know it's supposed to be pineapple?

This experience though it is an experience and one often had by the western tourist is all too common. But there's a trick that I can say with certainty works in Japan, and I'm fairly certain works in China too. What you've got to do when guffawing into your hoodie sleeve on the Tokyo Metro at the business men reading cartoon pornography is imagine that the Japanese are "people".

Suddenly the craziness melts away and a lot of this stuff actually can be comprehended not as "crazy" but infact as "insidious". Except for the Potato pizza, that is just plain crazy, carbs on carbs. But making everything out of concrete is not because the 'quaint backwards monkey' you are used to viewing the progenators of the worlds second largest economy and equal cultural crown jewell to Italy as have a particular affinity and love of concrete. It's because their government is completely powerless against a beauracracy that siphons off public savings into overpriced kickback contracts to their mates to make excess amounts of concrete.
The pornography on the trains is a huge social problem that often reflects a very unhappy marriage behind it. The 14 roadworks safety escort committee members are infact hidden unemployment in a crippled struggling economy.

You see if you just imagine that these asians are people with the same feelings, hopes and desires as 'real people' as you might put it you start to see the problems for what they are. If you saw your best friends dad reading hard-core sadomasachistic pornography on the train home you'd probably just be outraged and disgusted and never want to eat dinner there again.
If you saw your grandmother waving people past a crack in the pavement with a baton you'd think the government was really pushing the envelope this time and probably storm town hall.

This is how to view Asian (and all cultures) equally, if you were in the Netherlands and just imagined those old dudes riding the length of the country (small country though it is) on a sunny Sunday as your dad you'd probably be really impressed. And if you imagined all the alternative energy sources in place over there as in place over here you'd probably be amazed to be living in some Utopia that could never be realised.

So too, you can head to China now. Now instead of remarking on how great it is the 'quaint backwards monkey people' can now eat McDonalds, Drink Coffee at Starbucks, Drive German Cars to the traffic jam and wear Nike shoes, you can instead remark on what horrible deceptive consolation prizes these are for people deprived of clean drinking water, representative government, rule of law, sanitation, public transport, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of association, right to fair trial, parkland, freedom from slavery, labour unions, collective bargaining, accessible higher education, scientific method determined medicine, universal health care, freedom of movement, private lives, road safety and of course stand up comedians.

It saddens me that the same old argument that because people can buy expensive things from well known brands they are better off than someone who can drink water from a tap without being hospitalized (or left to be picked apart by dogs in the street).
Largely, commentators who go and say how much better it is now that Asian's can get into credit card debt on consumer durables is to the old days under Mao aren't helping. They need to say 'things are superficially better, the Chinese now have retail therepy whereas before they had no treatment at all.'

Now I think you're ready white people to try this technique I call "Asian's are human beings too" out. Head to the CBD and walk around concentrating intensely on imagining that Asian people are people just like you.

What I realised is that unsurprisingly the dress sense and consumption behaviours by universal standards indicate a lack of maturity that is sad rather than enviable. 21 year old girls dressing up in stilletto heels and plastered in cosmetics whilst wearing some psuedo weave poncho over elaborate stockings and a large dangly necklace and diamond earings to walk around the CBD isn't elegant. It's exactly what you'd expect a 12 year old girl unleashed in 40 year old mummy's closet to pick out.

Guys dressing up like homeboys that are 22 is actually what was cool when between ages 12-16. Then if you were cool you just stopped trying, and thus stopped buying. Kung Fu Hustle, Kung Fu Dunk, Shaolin Soccer? These are the movies of morons. The Disneyesque 'High School Musical' equivalents of the orient. If you imagined watching them yourselfs you'd probably be dissapointed that the movies where a lot of colourful sparkle whilst tackling almost no issues or themes and resulted in being a complete conformist waste of time.

That said it's not all bad. Take Yuseke for example. When he turned up to basketball and I pictured him as a 'person' it turned out that he was far far cooler than anybody I've ever met. He had Iverson and Skip to My Loo basketball jerseys that were falling apart, outdoing my own pathetic Hakeem and Shaq circa Orlando Magic singlets (old school yes, worn in no).

So that's my tip white people for living in a globalised society. You have to imagine everyone now as people on equal footing. The ovarian lottery that says a human life has different value dependant on which state boundaries you are in is antiquated. Japanese women are as entitled to non-abusive respectful, romantic and loving relationships as any other women on earth. Chinese people are just as entitled to all the social reforms that build a robust society as all the developed nations trying to push 'capitalist' anti-human reforms now.

The sad thing some of you might reflect, is that it seems so painfully obvious that Asian's are people. That people are in fact people, and governed by the same powerful emotions and instincts the world over. You might think me condescending in saying that such a practice of 'seeing' is necessary, a thought exercise to elevate foreing people in the white persons process of evaluation? Well sadly my experience is that our 'education' in history, flag bashing national holidays and so fourth have lead us to believe that national boundaries are somehow genetic. And this has been going on for some time.

To take this one out here's George Orwell:

But is it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like "native" and "Chinaman"?