Re: CHAT: various infotaining natlang tidbits

In a message dated 2000/06/15 01:48:16 AM, Romilly wrote:

>Going offtopic a bit, in the Javanese/Balinese shadow-puppet plays, the good
>guys are always quite small, make restrained & elegant gestures; monsters
>and bad guys are BIG, fat or muscular, with lots of body hair.
    Incidently, hardcore Cantonese see European-types as being similarly
monstrous - not just cuz of body hair, facial hair, large size/girth, & body
odour (due to eating horrendous amounts of red meat) but because of old
long-held historical memories of the Opium War days (1839-1898, arguably it
never ended till Hong Kong was returned to the "ancestorland" of China in
1997).
    It is common to hear Cantonese speakers to sardonically call
EuroAmericans _bok qwai_ <white demon(s)> & African-Americans _hok gwai_
<black demons> ... IMHO these are not racist/ethnocentric terms, as the
Cantonese tend to say it more out of a "not again/here we go again" sort of
feeling & with the general attitude that "barbarians can't help
themselves/barbarians will always be barbarians" ( "...though these
barbarians sometimes are highly amusing and intriguing, *hehe*, always be
alert to their basic tendencies.").
    My friend Ian Yin from Hong Kong jokingly thinks that the reason why
"White folk" have always been highly aggressive & imperialistic is that it is
cuz "they lived in caves longer than most other peoples... Naturally, too
longtime in caves cowerin' at everything under the sun drive 'em stircrazy...
Finally they come out rarin' to go, wanna takeover the whole bleedin' world."
(Ian is part British himself, so there ;P~)

    zHANg