How to Eat a Banana
It’s strange how food can take you places.
We had a small family dinner at a Sichuan restaurant a while back. It was New Year’s Day, 2015. Bowls of piping-hot things drenched in chili oil laid in front of us, a steaming red array. My aunt told us about her time posted to Shanghai, bitterly cold in the winter, where such food was warm and welcome; here we were in Singapore, in an air-conditioned restaurant.
Now, I’d never been to China. I had the chance in 2009, in a school whose second campus was located in Beijing, to fly over for the December holidays. I’d refused, and returned the next year to stories of my classmates’ overseas shenanigans. I’d been mildly interested, but it was only five years later, at the tail end of 2014, that I’d become interested in my own heritage. I’d read about genealogies, how many white Americans could trace their histories to interesting (and occasionally embarrassing) conclusions, and I wondered if I could do the same.
My parents, when asked, told me that one of our relatives had indeed found our “ancestral village”, at least on our maternal side. It was rather remote and somewhat of a rural community, in the south of China. The idea of visiting sounded pretty alright, but there was one major problem.
In local slang, I’m a “香蕉” (xiang1 jiao1*), or “banana”. Yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I can’t really speak Mandarin, or any other Chinese language, for that matter. If you put me on a street in China, outside of the major cities, I’d probably get very, very lost. I wouldn’t be able to ask around for long-lost relatives, or find locals who might’ve known where my family used to live. I’d say it wasn’t for lack of trying, except it pretty much is.
From a young age, I learned to hate Chinese. I learned to hate every bi hua I was forced to memorise in kindergarten, the precise sequence of strokes to writing each Chinese character I deliberately forgot once it was no longer tested. I didn’t bother with mo xie, the Chinese equivalent of dictation where we’d have around ten or so minutes to write out, word-for-word, a short passage from one of our textbooks. It didn’t help that our moral education lessons, at least in the first three years of primary school, were in Chinese, or that our moral education and Chinese teachers were unfailingly stern and rigid. Chinese, and “Chinese culture” as I understood it from the lessons, was harsh and sacrificial; we learned that heroes died for the glory of their parents, their friends, their country, and there was always a really obvious moral to the story. I learned that teachers who spoke Chinese were harder to deal with, and more bad-tempered, than their mostly younger, English-speaking counterparts, even in subjects like Art or Music.
It became a badge of pride, among my friends and I, to not study for Chinese, and then in secondary school to do poorly in my own mother tongue. I was determined to drop the language as soon as possible, and with Higher Chinese it was enough to get a B4 at the O Levels and leave Chinese, with its moralising and its ridiculously structured assessments, behind.
At the same time, I tried to distance myself from “Chinese culture” by moving towards what I thought was its polar opposite: the West. At the age of five I declared myself English and “Christian”, believing God to be the Western version of Buddha. I became determined to improve my English in primary school; I read like I breathed, and I learned to write. I crammed what I thought was “Western”, watching “grown-up” movies with my parents, burning through Star Wars and reading classics I could barely understand (I attempted to read Crime and Punishment when I was 11, and only got through the first five pages, if that was any indication).
In secondary school I discovered a talent for writing and (after a workshop) a fondness for politically-charged drama, culminating in a series of terrible, anti-Chinese plays where the protagonist’s “Western” cousin comes back from the USA to save him. I distinctly recall one scene where the “Western” cousin upended a bowl of “ginseng soup” and stomped on the fake ginseng (red string, as the old me would’ve staged it) while screaming “ROOTS! ROOTS,” while the protagonist’s father, who represented Chinese culture, cowered under the table. The protagonist was by his cousin’s side, clapping. I wrote this at the age of 14.
While that play didn’t get staged, a second one, again featuring a “Western” cousin, was successfully entered in my school’s annual drama competition; this time, the “Western” cousin would return from the USA to hack the computer of the protagonist’s bully, threatening to wipe his hard drive if he didn’t stop. I’d cast myself in the role of the cousin, this time, but I didn’t feel satisfied, because I didn’t look the way I’d expected him to look. I’d put white powder in my hair, donned a Hard Rock Cafe snapback and actually bought a tattered-looking Levi’s shirt to wear. I had really weird ideas about what Americans, specifically white Americans, looked like; it wasn’t enough.
We had a series of local movies, subsequently made into a Chinese-language television drama, called I Not Stupid. I recall a scene from that series where a girl told her teacher, when asked, that she wanted to be an angmoh, a white person, so she wouldn’t have to take Chinese. That was me, for more than ten years.
You see, this is what happens when you spend every day immersed in media that doesn’t look like you. I played video games, mostly from the Star Wars universe, where the heroes were either aliens… or looked like nobody I knew.
I watched a lot of James Bond films, and read the Ian Fleming books behind them. James Bond, the big white man, tramping all over the world in his country’s service while charming women, was my childhood hero, alongside other prime Hollywood specimens of traditional white masculinity. I may or may not have had very bad taste in films, and certainly terrible taste in heroes.
Every character in almost every game, film, show and book I encountered, in short was white. Even when there were women of colour, almost every man (in most cases the hero) was white. I previously talked about how seeing mainly white heroes in the media made me long for their whiteness. I wanted to distance myself from my Chinese-ness, and in the same way I began to hate myself. I could tear the culture out of me, I could ape the ways of the West and the white man, but I could never actually be white. Noah Cho put it pretty well in his piece on feeling undesirable, as a half-Korean man:
When I look in the mirror, I do not see someone that I understand to be handsome by Western standards. I look mostly Asian, and like so many other heterosexual Asian males before me, I have internalized a lifetime of believing that my features, my face, my skin tone, in tandem, make me unattractive and undesirable.
I am certainly not the first heterosexual Asian male to arrive at this realization, and I do not doubt I will be the last. I know where my insecurities originated. I know that a lifetime of being a pop-culture nerd has placed me at the center of a media universe that has repeatedly sent me the message that a male that looks like me is incapable of dating anyone that doesn’t.
I learned, pretty early in secondary school, that heterosexual male attractiveness in Singapore was often beholden to white Western norms. We’d set our standards with the traditionally masculine cis white male body as the “normal”, and everything else as abnormal. I was short (and still am, at 1.55m/5'2"). I didn’t have the bone structure of a white person, and instead developed a barrel-like body, exacerbated by my height and my clothing choices of oversized shirts and baggy jeans. My face was average, nothing like the striking attractiveness of the lucky boys who, though fully Chinese, had features close to the white “ideal”; I have a big nose, large ears, asymmetrical eyes, thick lips and a hard-to-control complexion. My hair was a puffy, uncooperative mushroom, rounding out my then-chubby face.
I hated my features back then. I still go through periods where I hate them, occasionally. I had, and still have, major confidence issues with people I’m interested in, and on bad days it got to the point where I wished I’d been born a white man. Not one of the unattractive white men (ungodly specimens whom I’ve learned in the past two years are more common than I’d thought), but the ones I looked to as my anchors, the heroes pulling me towards whiteness and the West. I associated my features, along with the rest of my Chinese heritage, with being the small, shy person I was, and the whiteness of the men I looked up to with bravery and confidence.
It’s fucked up, how I wanted so badly to be white, but there’s evidence this love of the West, this distancing of ourselves from ourselves, isn’t just my problem. “Dating coaches” have sprung up in Singapore, offering to turn Asian men into their more aggressive, masculine and presumably attractive Western counterparts. Singaporeans put Lucy, where pretty white saviour Scarlett Johansson murders her way through waves of East Asians, at the top of the box office for two weekends. We’ll watch anything with a white, Western star, while our own local films lag sadly behind in revenue, views and production values. We’ll read Harry Potter and The Hunger Games for fun and study Victorian literature in class while the local shelves of our own BooksActually remain uncombed. We love London and Paris and New York City, and we don’t show the same love to our own, the corners of Singapore besides the Dragon Playground and the cemeteries we hold up as evidence of our history. Our liberals often want to move us towards their utopian version of the West, and our conservatives increasingly take direction from theirs.
Let’s face it. We’re most of us in love with the West. We love its ideals, and its people, and its myriad books and films and things, because it’s different, but not in a bad way (not like the rest of Asia). We’ve been carpet-bombed from all angles by English-language media from Hollywood and elsewhere, showing us the glory of being white and in the West, and consciously or not we’re eating it up. We can’t be white, and we can’t run hard enough to push our little island to the continents of Europe or North America, but oh boy, we can sure as hell try.
Me, I’m not going to run any more.
Part of a famous Chinese tongue-twister goes, “吃葡萄, 不吐葡萄皮” (chi1 pu2 tao3, bu4 tu4 pu2 tao2 pi2*). Literally translated, it means “they eat grapes, but do not spit out the skin”.
我决定要 (wo3 jue2 ding4 yao4, “I’ve decided to”) 吃香蕉, 不吐香蕉皮.
I’m going to explore what it really means to be a Singaporean/Malaysian Chinese in the diaspora. Maybe I’ll take Chinese lessons. Maybe I’ll book a flight back to the village my ancestors came from. Maybe I’ll take a lot more selfies, and be proud of these Chinese features I was born with.
Maybe I’ll even eat a bit more Sichuan food.
*The preceding sentence is in Hanyu Pinyin, or Romanised Chinese. The numbers at the end of each word indicate the tone it should be read in.
Robert Liow is an ethnic Chinese person living in Singapore. He had to go to the toilet twice after eating at the Sichuan restaurant, but it was worth it.
