Six years ago, I was at the Royal British Museum in London. My family and I had spent three days enthralled by the many cultural exhibits ranging from the Egyptian and Babylonian, to African and French. Among all the pillaged goods that the museum showed, my family and I finally made our way to the Chinese exhibit. As my parents and I looked on at the display, I felt a deep sense of disconnectedness that further encouraged my compounding disinterest for the many artifacts that were on show. My parents, captivated by the relics of old talked amongst themselves as I sat on a bench inside the exhibit trying to come to terms with my apathy for my supposedly, own culture.
As I sat, the revelation slowly unraveled in front me. The reason I was experiencing the apathy for my own cultural artifacts was because of the chasm that stood between my own personal ethnicity that contrasted with my upbringing. I looked around the exhibit from my seated position and saw Chinese characters that were muted to me; I read the names of famous Chinese dynasties that had no resonance with me. The room was shouting remnants of my cultural past that I could not hear. It was then that that the full realization of my contrasting nature between who I am and whom I look like became apparent to me.
I remembered in my formative years how I wanted to be like everybody else in my elementary school – white with white parents. While I brought such strange lunch items like fried rice to school, I would envy the Caucasian kids as they had their standardized sandwiches and juice boxes. It wasn’t so much that their sandwiches were that much more tastier, it was just the mere fact that their normalized lunch kits were just that, normal. The Caucasian kids did not have to answer to questions that helped further distinguish the difference between them and I. It was this questioning that taught me that the difference between my peers and I would be an ongoing narrative that would characterize how I would be perceived and what roles that perception would allow me to take on.
Back at the bench I was sitting on at the British Museum, a familiar word that I had previously forgotten floated back into my head. Its political and personal connotations characterized what I felt to be a very fitting description of who I was at that moment. I learnt that word as a little child when my grandfather was furious at the Caucasian folks that he had to deal with at his work. It was a word of anger that spoke to the struggles that the Chinese immigrants had to endure as a result of interacting with the established white folks of North America. The word was Gwei Lo.
The Cantonese term, Gwei Lo, has a deep-seated political context. Before it’s return to Mainland China in 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony that came as a result of China’s loss of the Opium War. As a result of the civil unrest and the deferred pride of the local Hong Kong residents, the term Gwei Lo was coined to describe the White-Devil invaders – the British colonists - who had taken their land. Gwei Lo was used to describe the colonizers, but most importantly, the term is used to describe the white colonizers of the British Empire.
Embedded in its political frame, the term is used as a perlocutionary act to provoke the British invaders and to harness the collective anger of the localized Chinese citizens of Hong Kong. As the term was an agreed upon descriptive term of the British invaders, the word was thus used as a rallying cry that characterized anyone of British or European descent. Through that frame, the white settlers were then generalized as devilish invaders that sought to take the livelihoods of Hong Kong’s native citizens.
On a personal level, I too have had the term Gwei Lo placed on me by other Chinese citizens of Hong Kong as a way to further distinguish them from my less authentically Chinese upbringing. I remember when I would mix English with Chinese words in my interactions with relatives, thus creating my language – Chinglish. That lingual cocktail is a mere calling card for someone to be named a Gwei Lo. Although that term was used on me to characterize the obvious differences I had with the authentically Chinese people, the term was also used to characterize the fissure I had within myself of never being able to be accepted by neither cultural group.
That perlocutionary act of calling someone who is ethnically Chinese speaks to the many permutations of that term and how that term can be used to place other Chinese people on the varying degrees of the Chinese spectrum. It is this chasm between the more authentically Chinese people and my own character that allows me to be seen as someone different by the very people who are suppose to be the same as me. My Western influenced mannerisms compiled with my Western upbringing is what stands as the granite gate that prohibits me from fully understanding my culture. As a result, this figurative gate places me further along the negative degrees of the Chinese spectrum.
Maybe I am a Gwei Lo. As the Gwei Lo’s were viewed as invaders, maybe I too, as a result of my Western upbringing, am viewed as an invader of the pureness of the Chinese race. Through trying to come to terms with this cultural bipolar disparity, it is comforting to know that at the very least, there is a term that I can a feel a belonging to. Situated between the two cultural facets of myself is the term Gwei Lo that serves to be a bridge between cultural gulf. As for now, even though I am not fully a Gwei Lo, the term will be used as a temporary bridge until the full integration of my Chinese and Western self takes place.
Although derogatory in nature, there is, as Lakoff puts it, a struggle to redefine old terms to fit in with modern society. The reappropriation of the term is already begun as many ethnically Chinese, but culturally Western teenagers are readapting this term to fit in with their mashed-up narratives. The term is embedded into our narratives as a story that starts in two opposing forces, but ends up in the creation of one new entity.
It is this struggle that defines me. As I sat on the bench at the British Museum, it was the realization that this internal struggle, one that I thought I had conquered in my formative years, was one that still going on and will continue to go on. This struggle to redefine the Gwei Lo term and the greater struggle of having to find a compromise between the Chinese face I have and the Western brain I have attained is thus my narrative that has yet to find a resolution.
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