Teaching Children To Hate Foreigners

[Shadowdh]

Addressing the original topic, could the term guailo refer to pale skin as well as the crappy relations visited by history? 鬼 also means ghost as well as devil... ghosts are usually (in the west at least and this may be different in the east, please tell me if so) pale...

As to the other... I agree with Muyongshi... if you live in a place then follow the customs/laws of that place...

[atitarev]

Muyongshi, you misunderstood me. I totally agree that foreigners should learn, or at least try to learn the language where they live a long period.

Actually, in Japan they are about to introduce stricter laws (if they haven't done it yet) about foreigner and the Japanese language, which is not very popular with "gaijin". Imagine this happened in China?

I meant in my comment that kids need to learn their native language first before they learn the language of the country, even if they do it differently, parents need to make sure that kids learn their own language. If you lived in China, would you want your kids know Chinese but no English? Probably not such a big issue for Anglophones, as English can be learned anywhere but speakers of other languages have to put a lot of effort in to preserve their native tongue with children.

This has nothing to do with the original incident of this topic. People do these sort of things and it's not nice to abuse someone when another person doesn't understand. Because of these people, others can get suspicious that if you speak a foreign language, you say bad things about others. Everyone's entitled to speak their own language, only they need to be respectful of other people, even if they think they will not be understood.

[Shadowdh]

Atitarev... they did something in NZ a while back about immigrants needing a certain level of english... however I think your idea of native language differs from mine a bit... ie if the child is born in a country of immigrant parents (ie they have moved their permanently) then he/she is a native of that country so should learn the language of the country his/her parents chose to live in...

[adrianlondon]

In order to become a citizen of the UK you now need to pass a "citizenship test" and an English language test.

As far as I'm aware, foreigners never become citizens of China, one simply arrives as a tourist, or studies, or does some kind of sponsored job. In the UK there's no language requirement for those who are simply on holiday (or who are sponsored to come here) and it would be unenforcable.

Unless one is to compare like with like (complaining about English teachers in China who don't learn Chinese, for example - well, the govervment won't give them citizenship and they simply keep getting short-term visas), comparisons are meaningless.

[Shadowdh]

Thats true Adrian... even myself, from NZ originally, speaks english fluently and knows the UK better than most of my UK friends still has to sit that test and buy the book so I can sit the test to get UK citizenship...

[BrandeX]

This was a hot topic... back in 2004 (last post before bump lol)

[Jacob]

Well recently, I was visiting some friends of my dear and beloved Chinese girlfiend.

The friends were a recently immigrated couple that just arrived in Montréal, Canada.

They had one nice, albeit a bit energetic son. That child had many children's book, all of them from mainland China.

Quite happy to find some litterature I could at least partially understand, I started looking through the page of one of them.

Some page were about a story of mice eating cheese, some about a talking train but my attention got attracted real soon to a page where I saw depicted, a WW2 era Japanese officier with a sword menacing some children.

But what really attracted my attention was the use of the term 日本鬼子 (Riben guizi). Dumbfounded, I asked the couple if they really teached to the little kid the term guizi, and apparently they had no problem about that. I always thought that the term guizi, meaning demon or ghost, was a grownup term that could be read in text like the True story of Ah Q, or maybe in some radical nationalists discussion.

Is that kind of terminology acceptable in children's book? Hell, when I was a young boy, I never heard about the war, let alone read about it in children's book calling the germans Krauts or whatnot.

Oh well, at least I know when my girlfriend call me guizi, that only means I didn't do the dishes

[Shadowdh]

When I was a kid (70s and early 80s) they had these comic books called Commando and had all sorts of stories that were all set in the war and the word kraut came up alot... along with killing as many germans as they could... was pretty normal then, would be hugely hammered by the pc brigade now though...

[Lu]

It's funny, now I would strongly object to using such hating language in kids' books, but when I was a kid there was (still is, I think) a big WWII genre in children's books, where words like 'moffen' (德國鬼子, pretty much) were used a lot. That was the main thing about Germans that I learned as a child, that they were the bad guys in the second world war. I don't know how much influence such a thing has on a larger scale, but for myself I rather like Germans now.

[zozzen]

It was so cute. A little boy was walking with his mom and his mom told him in Chinese that he should never act like a stupid Gweilo (that would be me).

that's so touching. a bonding moment between mother and son.

so is it ok to teach you children these things? is this Chinese tradition?

oh, that's pity. Perhaps the mom generalized the behavior of a stupid gweilo and falsely assumed that every gweilo is so silly like this.

Her response is : "It's western tradition to be stupid like you. "

Your response is "Is it Chinese tradition to be blah blah blah ?"

Hm.. to have a rhetorical question or not here isn't important. Both are funny.

[outcast]

lazy students

Maybe they do have a point about this, and many of us westerners don't do much to prove them wrong.

[crazy-meiguoren]

This topic brings to mind something that happened to me just yesterday on the streets of Taipei, when an ethnically Chinese man stopped and said to me "you get outta here".

A few years ago, while on the bus in Seattle, an elderly Japanese man was walking down the aisle, with a very mean, hateful demeanor, was saying to the passengers, "You American". Since this guy was clearly looking for trouble, I decided to avoid confrontation and avoid my usual sarcasm ("If you don't like Americans, you're in the wrong country"). Like the rest of the passengers, I avoided eye contact - this guy was not one to risk agitating. Fortunately, the bus driver kicked him off the bus before we got onto the freeway, where we would have been stuck with him all the way across the lake. Although I would have laughed if he got kicked off in the burbs. He would have had to pay a two-zone fare to get back into the city... at peak time...

[rezaf]

Racism is what makes an expat's life interesting. I like it when it happens but it doesn't happen so often over here. It has only happened once for me in China. I was shopping a few days ago and I heard two Chinese talking about me(mocking Arabs, they thought that I was an Arab). The cashier also joined their discussion but didn't say anything against me(Arabs). When I spoke to her in Chinese she was a little bit embarrassed.

And by the way I have a xiangsheng performance next week. I have read quite a few children xiangshengs and the word 洋鬼子 came up a few times.