2009 has arrived, though this isn't really considered the arrival of a new year to around a third of the world's population. It's not New Year until the year of the rat ends and the year of the ox begins, which is on the 25th January this year, since it's dictated by the lunar calendar. So one new year has arrived, and another is still to come, and there's a lot for me to look forward to this year - including my wedding to (cue dramatic music) a Chinese girl.
A while ago I was once sitting in a coffee shop minding my own business, dealing with my usual heavy schedule of procrastination, when a couple of Chinese people sitting within earshot at the next table asked me a few questions. It seems that one of them spoke English, and was giving the other an English lesson, and they wanted to clarify the meaning of a couple of words. No problem, they seemed friendly enough, so I happily obliged.
A short while later my girlfriend came to join me; The conversation of the couple that I had politely helped earlier quickly changed topic. They started to talk about attitudes towards interracial relationships, which seemed fairly natural, and not in itself offensive. But then the English-speaker specifically asked her friend what he thought about Chinese and non-Chinese being together. His response, while screwing up his face in a very visual display of revulsion: "It's disgusting - it's like putting a lion and a tiger together". What a delightful man.
Since it was very obvious that my girlfriend and I could overhear every word of their conversation, and considering that I'd been friendly to them just a short time earlier, I think I should've been offended by this comment. However, this seems to be a fairly typical attitude of the older generation (in this context, by 'older' I mean about 25 and above) towards interracial relationships in China. This is in stark contrast to many younger people in China. (As an aside, a random Chinese girl once contacted me through Skype to discuss the possibility of having a "mixed baby", since that was her ultimate goal in life!)
But of course, we got the last laugh: Everyone knows that crossing lions and tigers leads to ligers and tigrons, which are bred for their skills in magic, and are pretty much Napoleon Dynamite's favourite animals.
As a half-white, half-Asian person, I can personally testify that my skills in magic are totally kickass.
ReplyDeleteBtw I thought it was called a "tigon" rather than a "tigron". Although tigron does sound pretty awesome, kinda like Voltron but more tigery.