Wednesday 5 January 2011

This is Asians for you

So embarrassingly enough I've started to watch youtube people, you know silly guys who talks about their lives with a helium voice kind of thing? Anyway, my brother have introduced me to a couple asian guy YouTubers and I actually find them pretty hilarious, especially when they talk about typical Asian things. Obviously everything is exaggerated but it's still oh-so very true. It has made me want to discuss all the weird things we asians do as well.

Let me start with our politeness. Not only does the Chinese language have 2 (at least what I know of) different ways of saying thank you (one for thanking someone who have helped you and the other to thank for something someone has given you), but showing respect to people older than you is probably as important as rice for us (if not more...). One of the most annoying thing especially when I was younger, is greeting people. For example when you go to someone's house you have to greet (say hi) everyone in the house, you don't simply say hello or good day, no you have to call them by a family word, like uncle, grandma and so on. Imagine going to a Chinese birthday party huh?! It gets weirder when the people you have to greet aren't actually your family but your friend's grandpa or uncle's cousin or something, how the hell do you greet them?

Chinese parents love to compare their children with friend's children. It's like "Mom, I scored an A- in maths" "What did Jessica get?"  It's sad really, why aren't we good enough huh? Some of the stuff I had to live with when I was younger was how a friend of mine (unfortunately, son to my parents' friends) got into this kind of fancy high school course and I didn't, I didn't hear the end of that until the end of my high school. I salute every chinese person who've undergone this in their childhood and still have somewhat of a selfconfidence.

Now to the absolute climax with parents' demands of their children. The infamous doctor dream. You can almost call it the "you-have-to-become-a-doctor" syndrome because that's how big it is. If your parents didn't want you to become a doctor (or a lawyer or an engineer) when you were younger you may not be a real Chinese. Is it because Chinese parents want to live their dreams through their children? Don't they ever think that....I don't know..that we have dreams of our own? Would that be possible?

Fast forward to 1:27 for the "You-have-to-become-a-doctor" syndrome.

1 comments:

Caroline said...

haha, sjukt sant! big like på det här inlägget.

när åker du tillbaka till london?