Asian, Smasian

There's more to just being an "Asian" nowadays. Ever since the process of globalisation started making its way across the 7 continents, being multilingual is no longer something special. Nowadays, it takes more than being born of a certain race to be considered an "Asian" by society.

The three main stereotypical (and racist) representatives of the Asian race are the Japanese, the Koreans and the Chinese. That is, when ever people think of "Asian", they are generally referring to these races. When three big races coexist alongside each other in their fight for their positions in the world, cultures and backgrounds will eventually mix. Our interaction with each other has led to a complete disregard of racial and language boundaries. It's common practice to hear a Chinese suddenly belt out a Japanese or Korean song, and for Koreans or Japanese to speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Good news for the multilingual new generations - your future will be secure socially, internationally and most probably professionally. Bad news for the old monoglots or bilingual generation - you will have no idea what we are talking about. Haha...

Ahem. Sorry for that digression. (turns page)

The main point is, nowadays, to be considered truly Asian, one has to master the language of more than two Asian cultures. It is no longer enough to understand just Mandarin or just Japanese - further advancement in friendship bonding among Asian teenagers will be bared from you forever. And if you are an Asian yourself, woe be you should you fail to even understand one "Asian" language for you will be given the term "banana" and hence be left out of all conversations concerning drama and music. And teenage Asian girls being what they are, majority of our conversations will be focused on Asian drama and music.

Actually, majority of our conversations are about whatever topic comes to mind, which is usually a whole heap of airy, non-earth shattering matters. A great example would be this wearisomely verbose post concerning what it means to be "Asian".

Then there are the few of us who can't even master one Asian language, let alone two or three. People like us bring the definition of "multilingual" to a whole other level - we frequently switch between two or more languages in one sentence when our knowledge of a certain language fails in practice. Perhaps I should come up with a new category - Asians pretending to be "Asians"...that doesn't even make sense. An even better idea would be to do away with the whole idea of class differentiation completely and hence reduce this blog post into a bunch of meaningless words. As I have said before, globalisation has lead to constant interaction between different races, which has resulted in the blurring racial boundaries.

How I ramble on. Thank you.

Cheers!
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