The Hello Brigade

Got hit by The Hello Brigade again today.  That's when a group of young people in Taiwan, Mainland China or South Korea (from my own considerable personal experience) see a white foreign person like myself, from a distance and start shouting, "HELLO!" again and again and again and again!

Usually, when this kind of thing happens, I'm clear over on the other side of the street, and it's actually extremely embarrassing to be subjected to bizarre group-centric behavior like that.  Because, you see, I cannot win, of course.  In Taiwan, if I said, "hello," back immediately (or at all), the group of juveniles would laugh wildly, and start looking at each other with the most delighted expressions on their faces, as if to say, "We made the monkey talk!"

What?  This all doesn't sound like loads of proving you're not a "racist" fun?  Well, just try getting into a tiny elevator with 6 Asian juveniles, and they all start screaming, "HELLO!" at you!  Again and again and again and again and again and AGAIN!  Believe me, that floor you're going to simply does NOT get there fast enough.  And these are usually not little kids, whom I get along with well, as a general rule.  They're usually junior high or high school aged juveniles, and it's often really hard to decide if there isn't more than a little bald face PASSIVE AGGRESSION in their invasive "greetings."

So today, I had to keep going back indoors to get the kids to STOP shouting "HELLO!" at me from way, way across the street.  No dice.  The doors downstairs to our business are glass, so they naturally kept looking inside and continued to chime, "HELLO! HELLO! HELLO!"  Finally, I just stuck my head out, raised an angry index finger into the air and shouted back, "ONCE!   Saying 'HELLO!' ONCE is ENOUGH! Okay?"  I was of course met with shocked looks.  Yep.  It's so mystifying how those white foreigners can sometimes be so aggressive.   Hmm....

Are All "Monkeys" "Racist?"

Life is sometimes awfully (and I do mean awfully) interesting as a white American male, just trying to make a living teaching English in South Korea.  Case in point: So there I was just the other day, trying to teach junior high school aged Korean kids about the material we are currently on in our textbook.  A textbook which I didn't write, mind you.  It's just one of the many ESL/EFL English texts designed to teach kids all over the world to speak English as a second or foreign language.

Anyhow... so the topic was about Native American "Dreamcatchers."  You know, the traditional native contraption that is made by adding feathers and other adornments to a circular hoop of some type.  As the book explains, it's supposed to catch your "unhappy dreams."  Well, the kids didn't quite seem to be getting the point of the topic, so I started to do what every good CONVERSATIONAL English Teacher ('cause ESL teachers around the world are seldom required to teach grammar), and I asked them, "Okay, so what's a native?"

"North!"  "North people!"   "North, not South people!"  Of course, on a peninsula that is fiercely divided along the 38th parallel, one would expect to hear South Koreans try to describe their neighbors up north as being more primitive than themselves.  And sorry to inform anyone not already in the know, but this particular hot and spicy peninsula has been divided before in Korean history, long before us Americans could be blamed for the current division.  In fact, there were three major warring kingdoms on this peninsula, long before the United States was even so much as a glimmer in the eyes of our feuding British and French forebears.

So anyway... I was like, "No!  The word 'native' does NOT mean a group of people who are from the north of anywhere.   It's any group of people who were in a place FIRST.  For example," I continued, "Native Americans often call themselves 'First Nations People.'"   But then... the kids continued to try to characterize what 'a native' is by repeatedly shouting, "MONKEY!"

Now... as a Caucasian American citizen (of 100% European ancestry) who was born and raised in a country where everybody is SCARED TO DEATH to be labeled "a racist," I simply HAD to put a stop to all this "monkey" talk!   I mean... RIGHT?   So I asked, "Why do you guys keep talking about monkeys?"

They all contributed to the following rationale: "Monkeys, monkeys, monkeys, little by little, and then... PEOPLE!"

So I'm like... WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS, THE SAINTS, AND ALL THE PROPHETS, ARE YOU KIDS TALKING ABOUT?   Turned out that they thought that the native peoples of places like America, Australia and Africa are more... primitive, shall we say... and are therefore somewhat closer to our Darwinian hominid ancestors.  So, "Monkeys!"

Then, naturally, I was really in for a hay ride to WHITE TEACHER HELL!  So... I FRANTICALLY Googled images of Native Americans, put them up on the big screen, and asked image by image, "Is he/she Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Native American?"

"Chinese!"  "Indian?"  "No!  Japanese!  It is a Japanese!"  "NO!  Korean!  It is a Korean!"

"Uh... no kids.  ALL the pictures are of Native Americans.   EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM IS A NATIVE AMERICAN.  So, you see, they are much more closely related to you than they are to me.  In fact, they are your COUSINS!"  Now, remember, this was only a 40 minute class, so I naturally had no time to go into the whole Bering Strait land bridge thing, but I sincerely hoped at that point, that I had expanded their minds just a bit.   'Cause... it's not like I'm trying to be "racist" or anything.  In fact, this entire crap storm all got started because I was trying to elicit a simple answer for what the word "native" means.

Hell!  I even rolled up my long sleeves and showed 'em my Robin William-esque hairy forearms!  And I asked them, "Am I a monkey?"  Thank God, "NO!" was the resounding reply.  Well, that was nice of them, of course, but we really needed to get back to Native Americans, so I had the Herculean task of steering the errant mental ship of our class back to NATIVE AMERICAN DREAMCATCHERS and ONLY dreamcatchers.  But of course, before I could do that, they started to fixate on the heavy bone structure of some Native Americans in the Googled images.

"Yes, they sometimes have bigger bones than people of a European background like myself do," but JESUS H. Christ, kids, don't FIXATE on their physical appearance, PLEASE!   Here's the deal, "They've got black or very dark brown hair.  YOU'VE got black or very dark hair.   They have epicanthic folds in their eyelids.  YOU ALSO HAVE EYES LIKE THAT!  They often have a higher BMI (body mass index) than I and many other Europeans and European Americans do.  Many of you also have heavier bones and bigger faces, on average, than many people of European descent."

DEAD END!

Ya see... all the black haired people (THE MOST COMMON HAIR COLOR ON EARTH, BY FAR) are all "unique" and "special," and they're ALL totally unrelated, apparently!  And some are were even divinely conceived by the mighty goddess Amaterasu herself.  Or... so I'm told.   And the Chinese are unique and special too, apparently, and have nothing really in common with Amaterasu's people (the Japanese), whom they think should all be slaughtered like dogs for historical indiscretions.

But what do I know, right?  I'm just a hairy armed white American male.

See also:
http://thethreewisemonkeys.com/2010/11/15/image-obsession-in-korea/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-americans-lived-on-bering-land-bridge-for-thousands-of-years/
http://www.ancient.eu/Amaterasu/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/shinto/history/nationalism_1.shtml
http://jalopnik.com/5944170/all-japanese-must-be-killed-proclaims-sign-allegedly-in-front-of-chinese-audi-dealership
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/opinion/why-china-resents-japan-and-us.html?_r=0