Re: Asian-ness (was Re: "Whiteness" Re: Obseneties)

On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, Jonathan Chang wrote:

> In a message dated 2000:09:01 2:38:19 PM, yl112@CORNELL.EDU writes:
>
> >Actually, I *have* seen Asian-people-brought-up-partly-in-parents'-Asian-
> >culture-and-partly-in-American-culture identify themselves as
> >"Asian-Americans," not as a color thing, but as a cultural thing.  Many
> >people with Asian parents and American citizenship who are my age have
> >this cultural clash problem; we deal with it all the time and are sort
> >of
> >caught in a neither-fish-nor-fowl situation.  I don't know that the term
> >is all that "accurate," but as a cultural identification doubtless some
> >people find it helpful.
>
>     My Father, a bittersweet product of the British Colony of Malaya,
> emphactically speaks of these kinds of Asians:
>
>     - "bloody old wogs" => American translation, damn tradition-bound Wiley
> Oriental Gentlemen
>
>     - "FOBs" => Fresh Off the Boat, a la wet-behind-th'-ears naive awe-struck
> tourists, immigrants, newcomers, etc.
>
>     - "ABCs" (interchangeable with "Banana") => American Born Chinese
>
>     -"banana" => utterly Americanized Asians (in the tragic sense of "they
> have lost their marbles and their heritage and gone too gung ho on American
> values of the lowest common denominator")
<laugh>  A term used at my HS (and doubtless other places; a friend from
Stuyvesant HS in NY reported it) is "twinkie": yellow on the outside,
white on the inside.

YHL