Stereo-typing: 1 (London)

I once had an evening class student called Rob, who was in his twenties at the time, slim, with the sweetest little-boy smile and a gentle manner, and dark-skinned (being of Jamaican Indian parentage).

He is an international-class kungfu referee, and we used to have animated conversations about kungfu moves and training sessions in our post-lesson pub sessions.

One day, he nodded off on a very late train back home to Luton.  

At some point, he felt a tap on his shoulder.  Even in his dozy state, his kungfu training made him react instinctively.  When he opened his eyes next, he saw that he’d floored the man, who was lying in the aisle, saying, “Hey, man, I was only trying to inspect your ticket!”

The only other people in his carriage — a young white couple — then quickly moved away to another carriage.  

(London, early 1990s)

Stereo-typing: 2 (London)

Rob was refereeing a kungfu competition in Wapping, in the docklands of London, and invited me along to watch.

I got there late — as the docklands area was a bit of an alien territory in those days — so everyone was standing to attention, waiting for the signal for the competition to begin.  Rob and his two fellow male referees — both his disciples — were already seated on the stage set up for the judges.

When he spotted me, Rob waved me up to the stage, indicating the spare chair he’d reserved for me — next to him!

As I crossed the huge gym hall, and walked up to the stage to take the seat next to the three male referees (one black, two white), the whole hall went silent, with all eyes following my progress with awed reverence.  They must’ve thought I was the chief referee, being the only Oriental (and therefore the most likely person for kungfu!), and were probably also most impressed as I’m female!

(London, early 1990s)

Stereo-typing: 3 (London)

Another evening class ex-student of mine is a Gambian called Victor.  

Victor is very friendly and sociable, but he is very dark-skinned and has a tribal-ritual type of scar across each cheek, which makes him look a bit menacing.  Sure enough, he was cast as a baddie in a Jackie Chan movie (or two??)!

American ex-student Jason told me he was walking down Chinatown’s Gerrard Street one day when he caught sight of, ahead of him, a Chinese couple holding a young child, with a black man standing opposite them, apparently in a conversation with them.  As Jason got closer, he heard fluent Cantonese, but the Chinese man’s lips were not moving!  The fluent Cantonese was coming out of the black man’s mouth!  The black man was Victor.

Victor teaches kungfu and Cantonese.

(London, 1980s)

How to discipline the customers: 2 (London)

Customers often use the menus as place mats, which means they’re either ruined (if they’re the one-sheet paper menus) or we have to wipe them down (if they’re the harder, cardboard type) to get rid of sticky dried-up alcohol or food stains.  Either way, it’s a wasteful practice: un-ecological and un-ergonomic, not to mention uneconomical.

Professional etiquette prevents me from telling them that the menus are not place mats — let alone telling them off for leaving sticky marks on them and making extra work for us — so I try as much as possible to subtly raise their awareness by saying, when I approach a table with plates of food: “Let me clear some space for you.  Can you hand me the menus, please?  Now, that’s much better, isn’t it?”

Last week, I delivered food to a group of four men in their 40s at Table 14.  One of them, when asked to hand me the menu, said, “It’s OK.  I’d like to keep it here.”  I took the opportunity to sneak my message in, “Well, menus are not really place mats,” but he insisted he’d like to leave it there — this exchange was all done in a civil manner, by the way.  I let my eyes linger on the menu for a few seconds before putting his food down on the menu-turned-place-mat, then looked dolefully at the plate of food sitting on the menu before I walked away.

A few minutes later, when I went back to them for the routine check-back (for quality of food, in case there are complaints), I saw that the menu had gone from under his plate.  I said, with my usual good-customer-service bright smile, “Oh!  You’ve lost your place mat!”

He said, with a contrite look, pointing at the menu now sitting on the chair beside him, “You looked so unhappy about it, so I thought I should remove it.  I’m so sorry.  Will you forgive me?” 

Haha, the trick worked!!  I was very touched all the same.

(London, 2019)

How to discipline the customers: 1 (London)

One of the two elderly ladies at a table had left her small rucksack on the floor in the aisle.  I asked her if she could move it out of harm’s way, explaining that I’d tripped over someone’s rucksack strap a while back, incurring a fortnight of lost earnings as a result of the injury.  

This is what I’ve taken to doing — requesting and explaining to the customers — not only to avoid another accident but also to make them more aware of the consequences of their leaving their bags lying around with us moving in between the tables delivering heavy plates of hot food and collecting empty glasses.

The owner of the rucksack picked it up, thumped it down heavily under her table, and said in a gruff voice, “NOW you WON’T trip over it!!”

I told colleague Jennifer about this.  She said, “What I do is to deliberately walk into their bags, then go innocently, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that!’.”  When I first started at the Baker Street branch, I did use to purposely accidentally trip over outstretched legs and feet, just to raise their awareness, but I’m now six years older and don’t have the physical dexterity nor the confidence to do a fake trip.

(London, 2019)

Missed photo-op moments (Mexico and London)

A British woman on holiday in Mexico sent this:

QUOTE 

Mexico, 20 Feb

Was looking at this ice cream seller from my balcony yesterday when an ambulance screeched to a halt alongside and the driver and co-worker leapt out and bought themselves an ice cream.  They stood chatting for a moment or two, then the back doors of the ambulance opened and the patient limped out... and demanded an ice cream as well!

UNQUOTE

In the mid-80s, I was walking along Seven Sisters Road one evening.  In an alleyway, past a McDonalds, was a parked police van crammed full of policemen, all sucking on a milkshake each!  

(Mexico, 2010; London, 1986)

A narrow escape (Taiwan)

When I got the job with Conoco Taiwan, my father asked around trying to find someone who could put me up in Taiwan — I was only* 21, so the family was a bit concerned about me having to fend for myself all alone in a foreign country.  (*By Oriental standards, in those days anyway, 21 is young, especially if it’s a single female.)  

He eventually found a distant relative who had a factory in Taiwan making suitcases and bags.  The arrangement turned out to be sharing a flat with his female employee and her brother, who also worked for him.  The distant relative said they were from the south and he was not paying them a lot of money, so the least he could do was to give them rent-free accommodation

My mother warned me before I left that she thought the female employee was more than a mere member of staff, and that I should keep an eye out for trouble, because this distant relative was married.  A few months later, I got news from home that his father had found out about the affair so I might be accused of snitching on him; in any case, the father might fly out to Taipei to have it out with the woman, so I should move out to avoid getting embroiled.

One of Conoco Taiwan’s three radio operators, Ken, said his friend had a spare room going in the family home as his younger sister had gone to America.  I duly turned up one day after work, with our Accounting Assistant Peggy kindly tagging along to help, to inspect the room and meet the friend’s parents.  The older brother and wife were also present, which I thought might’ve been a coincidence: that they were just on a routine visit.

As they were my colleague Ken’s friends, I couldn’t just ask to go straight upstairs to look at the room without the ritual small talk first.  So, there I was, sat in an armchair, with the five of them positioned opposite me on sofas and armchairs.

Questions were asked:  “How long have you been in Taipei?”,  “What kind of work do you do?”, “What kind of company is it?”, “How old are you?”, “Do you have any siblings?”

All very standard questions the Chinese pose, often during the first meeting.  It’s a cultural practice to establish the relative positions between the two parties, i.e., who’s more senior in age and professional/social status, so that they can address each other appropriately, especially when it comes to respect language (cf. French vous and tu).  One doesn’t want to look silly using respect language on, say, a road sweeper if one was a managing director of a big company.

Throughout the questioning, the senior members of the family (i.e., except Ken’s friend, the younger son) would nod and smile at my answers approvingly, saying things like, “How clever and capable you are!”, “So young and you’ve already been sent abroad to work!”

All of this was to be expected, because such is the Chinese perspective: a young female, aged 21, being accepted by an international oil company for a post abroad, must be very clever and, therefore, most admirable.  

What made me feel that all was not what it seemed on the surface, however, was the married brother laughing heartily and interjecting with, “You’re from Singapore, which is a long way away, yet here we are meeting each other.  Hahahahaha!  Such is fate!  Hahahahaha!  有缘千里来相会 yǒu yuán qiān lǐ lái xiāng huì!”  He kept repeating this phrase whilst laughing and looking meaningfully at his younger brother.

有缘千里来相会 yǒu yuán qiān lǐ lái xiāng huì is a common Chinese saying, which sort of translates as: "Fate has brought [the two parties] together, in spite of the distance."  It can be for describing two parties hitting it off in a platonic relationship, but is also often used to describe two people getting together in a romantic relationship.

Once the penny dropped, I decided to bring the interview to a close, and asked to see the room (which was just like a store room, not made up for a lodger to move in at all), then made some excuse (that it was getting late) and took my leave.  

On the way out, Peggy said, “They were not looking for a lodger!  They were looking for a daughter-in-law!  You had a narrow escape there!”

(Taiwan, 1975)

Chinese men with curly hair (Singapore / China)

I grew up hearing grown-ups refer to Chinese men with curly hair as “untrustworthy”.  

This is presumably because (i) Chinese hair is biologically straight by default, so anything else would be a deliberate decision on the owner’s part, and (ii) only women are allowed the vanity of having their hair permed, thus making men who dare to flout the conventions and have the audacity to perm their hair too shady.

We even have a word for it in my dialect (潮州 Cháozhōu / Teochew):  “kek mor” (曲毛 / “curly hair”).  “Kek mor” applied to any Chinese man would mean:  “Doesn't he look ridiculous?!?”, “And he thinks he looks so handsome!”, “He’s up to no good / too vain to be trusted”.

One of the developments in a mainland Chinese TV drama serial, aired in 2010 but set in 1985, features the high-school daughter being befriended by a group of three youths.  They’d be what is now called NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) in Britain, hanging around all day long.  The synopsis calls them 痞子 (pǐzi / ruffian, lout).

Sure enough, the leader of the gang sports a mop of curly hair!

PS:  I’ve been using the synopsis of the 36 episodes of the TV serial as teaching material.  When I mentioned this “curly hair = shady, dodgy” stereotyping to my Malaysian Chinese student, who is some 30 years younger than I, she confirmed that it is still a prevalent practice, saying Singapore TV dramas often, if not always, depict a slippery character by giving him curly hair.

Update 180219:  My nephew in Singapore confirms that even to this day (the 21st century), they are still “perceived as baddies and/or [men with] BAD TASTE.  And not just in [the] Singapore context.  The guys with curly hair on Korean dramas are usually portrayed as baddies or brainless twerps or baddies that are brainless.”

(Singapore, 1960s and 21st century; China, 1985 and 2010)

China’s neighbourhood committees (China)

Mainland China has urban Neighbourhood Committees (居委会 jūwěihuì / residents committee; = 居民委员会 jūmín wěiyuánhuì = 社区居民委员会 shèqū jūmín wěiyuánhuì). 

An evening student of mine, Englishman Ben, was in Shanghai on a TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) course.  He didn’t know any Chinese at the time.

One day, the bus was taking ages to come, so he decided to get an ice lolly.  He’d just finished the ice lolly when the bus arrived.  He couldn’t see any rubbish bins around, so, not wishing to miss the bus after having waited such a long time, he placed the stick at the base of a tree, thinking it was biodegradable, therefore would rot down in time.

As soon as he turned round to board the bus, he heard a shout, emanating from an old lady a few feet away.  Ben didn’t need to know any Chinese to get the message as she was pointing at him, then at the ice lolly stick under the tree, then back at him again.  He thought, “Well, I’m getting on the bus anyway — I'm not going to let it go after having waited for so long for it,” and embarked.  The old lady followed him up the bus, still berating him loudly, pointing out of the window at the base of the tree, then back at him.  All eyes on the bus were focused on him. 

Ben decided to move further along the bus to get away from her, but she, too, moved down the bus, pursuing him relentlessly with her angry volley.  

Eventually, Ben had to get off the bus after just one stop to get away from the very public naming and shaming.

(China, late 1980s)

It’s the principle of it, not the money (London)

It always gets my goat, and I begrudge them even one penny, if I think someone is out to cheat me, or if they try to imply by their demeanour that I am being mean or petty.  One must certainly not encourage such outrageous behaviour from a restaurant or shop, because you’re supporting their business, after all, with your patronage.

A few years ago, I was waiting at a bus stop in my neighbourhood when I spotted a new Chinese supermarket next to it.  Went in to check it out, as it’d be good to try and buy local.  Got a packet of Malaysian-produced groundnuts, with a marked up price of 99p.  Paid with a pound coin, but the shop assistant didn’t make a move to get the change.  Said to her, “I thought it says 99p on the shelf?”  She said with a sneer, “It’s only one penny[’s change].”  I gave the packet back to her, asked for my money back, and never went there again.  A few months later, I saw that they’d closed down, and thought with Schadenfreude glee, “Ha!  Serves you right.”

There’s a shop on Harrow Road selling Oriental and Filipino food (rice, noodles, sauces, snacks), run by Pakistanis.  They are always polite and friendly, and I try to shop there whenever I’m in the neighbourhood, although it's a long way to lug all the stuff home.

One day, I was looking at some (uncooked) poppadums on the shelf.  One of the staff walking past, a Pakistani young man, said to me, pointing at the top packet, “These are broken.  Take a fresh packet.”  Because of his attitude, I deliberately picked up the packet of broken poppadums, thanked him warmly, and said, “It’s OK, I don’t mind.  You need to sell them or you’ll lose money.”

(London, 2009)