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  • HyperHam 9:50 am on July 4, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: assholes, BBC, grrr internet, , racists   

    Mixed Race, or why I am about to curse a great deal 

    I was visiting a Guardian article about Takeaway (which had been reviewed on this blog and my hubby’s main blog), and came across a comment from someone calling themselves BBCZeitgeist.  (BBC in this context means British Born Chinese).  My hubby being a BBC, and my son being half BBC, I went to go check it out.

    Big mistake.

    At this point in the blog those of you with sensitive constitutions or who have children who are of reading age and are near the screen may want to just skip this entry.  I won’t feel bad at all, it’s better for you this way.

     

    …

     

     

    Last chance, folks.

     

     

    …

     

    WHAT THE FUCKITY FUCK FUCKING FUCKNESS IS WRONG WITH THIS PERSON?!?!?!  Apparently I had baby Alex because I am a “Mixed race Chinese baby fetisher”, but that’s okay, because Monkey (as a Western Raised BBC’s Born to Foreign Raised Parents – a level 3 on this idiot’s Hierachy of ‘Chineseness’) only had Alex because apparently he is a self hating BBCer who wishes to create a “Hegemonic Western Cultural Assimilation”.

     

    Let’s get one thing straight, BBCZeitgeist.  I married my husband because I loved him, not because I wished to bear a cute baby.  He married me because he loved me, not because he felt some need to piss off generations of ancestors.  When we ‘met’, it was online – I didn’t see a photo of him till well into our emailing back and forth.  I met the person, not the skin tone.  Our baby may not be of ‘Pure Blood’, as you so proudly go on about, but he will be loved for the amazing child that he is – biologically Asian and Caucasian, culturally Chinese, British, and American.  You write that “It is puzzling as to why mixed race are ‘considered’ part of the British Chinese community.”  Frankly, I don’t give a fuck whether you consider him part of ‘your’ community.  His grandparents, proud HK immigrants, do.  They sing to him in the songs of their youth, they speak to him lovingly in Hakka, they showed him off proudly at his Full Moon Dinner just as if he had been ‘pure’.  They see themselves in him.  They see their heritage in him.  He is of their bloodline.  He is their grandchild.  That is all that matters to me.

    BBCZeitgeist, you are a flat out racist, no better than the EDL in the UK Stormfront in the US, or any other racial group that claims that ‘breeding’ within groups creates a “multi-generational cultricide, genocide and linguicide”. The only thing you are missing is a white hood and a burning cross.  You seem to think that the inclusion of my (apparently inferior) white blood suddenly excludes my husband’s entire heritage.  Heritage is not connected to the racial line – ask any kid who was born into a military family and can speak the language of the locals in whatever base they lived at better than their own.  You don’t speak as to whether ‘pure Chinese babies’ are born into happy, loving families, you are only concerned that they aren’t muddied with other races.  THAT IS STRAIGHT UP RACISM, FUCKO.

    Our child will know the Chinese language as well as English.  He will understand Chinese holidays as well as American-specific ones.  He will be a child of the Earth, no better and certainly no worse than someone whose parents happen to have the same facial features or country on their passport.  My child will be proudly Chinese.  He will be proudly British.  He will be proudly American.  And I will be proudly his mother.  Monkey will be proudly his father.

     

    My mother and father in law have been staying with us for the week, and I asked them point blank what they thought Alex was.  My MIL translated what I was saying to my FIL, who thought for a moment and then said in English,

     

    “Chinese.  White.  Mix.  Grandson.”

     

    That just about sums it up.

     

    Fuckwad.

     

    • Nikky Wu 3:28 am on October 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply

      I'm so glad I found this…the similarities in thought are astounding! I came across that same article not half an hour ago, because I myself am a caucasian American–with the standard ambiguous melting pot background that comes from that, and my husband is Chinese (and, I actually call him Monkey as a nickname since we first started dating…just saying, this post blew my mind! haha) and we are about to have a little boy of our own. I couldn't believe how offensive the BBCZeitgeist article was…and even worse, how most of the comments under it were in SUPPORT of his horrific ramblings…Good to know someone out there felt the same way as me after reading it. My husband and I love each other, both sets of our parents already love our baby, and our child will grow up in a home that respects BOTH of his cultures. He will be in no way inferior to anyone else. And the part that really shocked me in his article is when he said:" It gets worse. Statistically, according to 2001 census, mixed race are more likely to marry inter racially than any other race, its not uncommon for their partner also to be mixed race like themselves but not necessarily the same mix nor Mixed race Chinese." WTF? LIke being a multi-cultural human being is a bad thing. That guy is a douchenozzle and he can go blow himself (to put it nicely).

      • HyperHam 6:15 am on October 8, 2011 Permalink | Reply

        Girl, preach on. Yeah, that dude is, to put it very mildly, a cock knob of epic proportions. You have love, your child will know nothing but love, that is ALL that matters. My hubby read it and said it sounds like someone who came here with English not as their primary language, and is trying to make up for it by \’sounding\’ smart. What BBCZ doesn\’t realize is…IF I HAD ALL THE SHITS IN SHITDOM, I STILL WOULD NOT GIVE TWO ABOUT WHAT HE THINKS. 🙂

        I will say, keep reading for my misadventures in being mistaken for the child\’s nanny, or adoptive mother. Prepare yourself now, and you will be fine. And congrats on the wonderful new addition!!!

  • HyperHam 2:09 pm on June 15, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: BBC, , reviews, takeaway, theatre   

    Monkey and I went to see Takeaway last n… 

    Monkey and I went to see Takeaway last night, at the Royal Theatre Stratford East.  On paper, the show should have been at least decent.  The writers are a faculty member from Tisch NYC and a graduate with titles and awards.  The cast have done stints on television and West End (from BBC to The Lion King, for goodness’ sakes).  As far as foundations go, this should have been a no brainer.

     

    Ugh.

     

    Let me get the technical elements out of the way, bullet style.

    • Tighten it the hell up.  Seriously.  A dramatic play can get away with being 2.5 hours long.  A light-hearted musical cannot.
    • Decide if you are going to have a female best friend or guy buddy in addition to the love triangle.  Both is overkill.
    • Cut the funeral scene ENTIRELY.  It does nothing to advance the plot, and considering the rest of the show was so damn farsical, I honestly could not tell till the end of the scene if it was a flashback or dream sequence.
    • If you are going to do fast patter lines, E-NUN-CI-ATE.  For reference, listen to “Another Hundred People” from Company.  It’s bad enough I have to get past the heavy East London accents, don’t shoot yourself in the foot twice by slogging through the lines all mumble-mouthed.
    • Get rid of the Guardian Angel character – you could do the same scene by moving the Eddie/Widow Chu scene a bit further back to the same effect.
    • Decide what you want to be, a boutique musical or a public musical.  A boutique musical is a musical that plays very specifically to a subsection of society.  Think “Menopause the Musical”.  It won’t play Broadway, but it can strongly tour.  A public musical is something that can sit in a house for a month to 5 years (Broadway, theatre districts, etc), and tour (Cats, Les Mis, Lend Me a Tenor).  In this draft, it CANNOT be a public musical.  But as far as a boutique musical goes…well…that leads us to the non technical critique.

    The premise of the show is relatively simple:  A son of immigrants feels lost, and wants to find his way in the world.  This is not a difficult concept to put across to the audience.  I have said it before, but it needs saying again:  Just because I haven’t gone through the exact situation on the stage doesn’t mean I can’t empathize with what I see.  I have never seen 17th century French patriots on-line for Les Mis.  I have never seen a queue of felines at TKTS to get half price tickets for Cats.  People see these shows over and over because they see a part of themselves in the characters.  I want to root for the characters on stage – I want them to succeed.  But the people I saw on stage weren’t…people.  That sounds awful, but it’s true.  They were caricatures.  There was the browbeaten son versus the overachieving father (who, to be fair, seemed to be the most grounded and accessible of characters).  There was the militant ‘yellow power’ freedom fighter and then African princess with ‘yellow fever’ (I hate that term so fucking much).  There was the other-race best friend and the latent gay buddy.  And of course, there was the HK expat Dragon Lady and the off-the-boat immigrant, whose only solo consisted of singing ‘Ching Chong Ching Chong’ over and over.  I didn’t want to root for these people; I wanted to shake a few of them.

    Past the characters, it doesn’t get much better.  There was a convoluted plot with no real resolution, tertiary characters that did nothing to advance the story, and a completely wasted finale.  There were scenes of utter boredom (the duet between the boys was a yawner), scenes of embarrassment (clothed simulated sex within the first 10 minutes), and scenes which made absolutely no damn sense (the bloody funeral scene).  In fact, there was only one really good exchange in the entire play.  Widow Chu and Eddie are alone in the takeaway, and Widow calls out Eddie on his dislike of her.  She says:

    Edmond…There is something your generation never understand about the older generation.  You always say you a trapped between two world; the western and traditional.  You think you friend is the western and your parent is the traditional.  Never think: we are over here, too.  Also trapped between the two world.  Your father and me, we are brought up with one set of values, but here, everything changed.  Worse than you, we cannot even speak the language well.  Barely understand each other.  Barely can read the package in the supermarket.  Is not just lonely in the heart.  Is lonely in the being.

    That exchange was the one and only true moment.  It touched me, it pulled my heart.  While I am not the daughter of immigrants, I *understood* Widow’s pain.  I *felt* it.  If the rest of the play had stayed true to that monologue, it would have been a blockbuster.  Instead, it was as if the writers decided to throw every cliche about British born Chinese at the wall and hoped that enough would stick to make a coherent play.  It’s sad.  It’s a waste.

    I don’t mind ‘shock’ or ‘offensive’ plays (Avenue Q or Book of Mormon).  I don’t mind time and place specific plays (Flower Drum Song or Show Boat).  I don’t mind over the top silly plot plays (Spamalot, Priscilla Queen of the Desert).  But Takeaway hasn’t yet figured out what it wants to be, and in straddling the fence, it fails on all counts.  For what it’s worth, I think the show is salvageable.  They need to go through it from start to finish with a fine toothed comb and think at all times “Does this reflect what Widow Chu says?”, and if it doesn’t, trash it.  I bet if they do, they will chop an hour off the show and come out with a clean, light-hearted and feel good musical.  If not…well, I doubt we’ll hear from it again.

    Last night before we went to sleep I apologized to Monkey for the night.  He said it was okay, he wasn’t expecting it to be great, or even very good. He had apparently resigned himself to the fact that he would never see himself accurately represented on stage or screen; that is so sad to me.  I hope one day he actually gets to see himself on-stage without cringing.  I hope one day Baby Alex will get to see himself accurately portrayed.  Till then, we have Takeaway.

    Ugh.

     

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