Anonymous | nationality: Chinese | ethnicity: Other
“Yellow”.
Read through the examples [*provided with the questions],I think it is
less about whether Asians are all yellow, or in whichpart of the colour
spectrum do Asians fit in. Historically, as with othercategorisation on
people of colour, yellowness is probably as well awhite differentiation
between itself and the Other that occurred on a racialisedscientific
ground, through false objectivity. I believe yellownesswas a
sociocultural construct, and whiteness did not existbefore other
colours were invented. In the intersection betweenrace and gender,
“yellow” bodies are objectified and fetishised.
After/aside from the Eurocentric imaginary, yellowalso somehow
constructed our imaginings of self, of white, alsoof other POC. I
remember looking at my skin, trying hard to recognisea yellow tone
when I was little. I’m no longer sure why I did that,but I can remember
surrounded by the notion that we are yellow... In thecountry I grew up
in, yellow was more or less propagandised to builda collective national
identity. This kind of language generated agency onceit was
acknowledged and used by ourselves. However, withlittle change to its
original hierarchical intention, it also graduallyintroduces an
alternative narrative that’s, inevitably, still racist.
“Asian”.
I find this question especially puzzling for me haha.I’ll probably not
answer it, but try to understand why it’s difficultto answer.
It’s probably a question that can be answered in dictionaries.However,
the word itself is a mixture of varying meanings,even more so when
it’s in different contexts. As a defined land area,Asia is extremely
diverse in itself, hardly possible to be generalised.But it is not only a
geographical concept, or the idea of “geographicalconcept” is
questionable. In the place I came from, it has beenfrequently
compared with Europe, or “the West”, in a hierarchicalmanner. Asia was
an elsewhere. Like yellowness, the concept of Asiais also a construct in
history that belongs to a certain structure of naming.Some of these
given categorisations are taken in at different pointsin the histories,
some were redefined, used as tools against racismand colonialism.
I think I don’t know what Asia is. The word has beendefined by many
groups of people, in different times and differentcontexts. It’s hard to
talk about it in a general sense. I also don’t wantto choose anything
myself to define it here. Personally, I hope “Asian”could be a temporary
generalisation, that one can choose whether to standwith.
Ethnicity|part1. &Ethnicity|part2.
This question has been lingering in my mind for awhile. I’d imagine
something like an archive, and on my page it reads,“ethnicity: other”.
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