Orientals
In one of my earlier posts I asked a question about the use of the word “Chinaman” to describe Chinese people.
Why is it acceptable to call someone from England an Englishman, or someone from Ireland an Irishman, but it’s racist to call someone from China a Chinaman?
A few weeks ago I was out on my usual weekend epidemic liver-destroying, life-shortening orgy of alcohol, and one of our group was an Indian. (Dot, not feather.) In the course of the conversation I, being American, referred to the Chinese using the term Asian. He said, “You know, we in India always find this funny. We think of ourselves as Asian.”
“How do you describe the Chinese?”
“Chinese and other eastern Asians are, to us, orientals.”
Now, think about this for a second. In the US, you would never hear someone refer to an Indian or a Kazakh as an Asian, but they most certainly are. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is generally considered the Ural Mountain range in Russia. By some definitions, the Middle East (with the exception of Egypt) is considered part of Asia. But you would certainly never hear anyone refer to an Arab as an Asian.
In the US the word “oriental” is considered racist, and thus the generic term “Asian” is used instead. But think about it, isn’t it more racist to use a term (Asian) which refers to so many diverse peoples together to simply describe one subset of that group (Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and other east-Asians)? In other words, in the current PC lexicon, “Asian” means “slanty-eyed.” If you don’t have slanty eyes you’re not an Asian.
The word “orient” simply means “east.” Thus an “oriental” is merely someone from the east. The opposite of orient is “occident.” There is (or at least used to be) an oil company called Occidental Drilling. By any standard, is this racist towards western people? Would any of you in the US or Europe be offended if someone called you an occidental?
I think the Indian way makes more sense. Asia is a massive place. “Orientals” is a far more logical term to use to describe East Asians, at least in terms of differentiating them from Kazakhs or Iranians or Pakistanis.
But then again, I’m not a stupid liberal pussy who gets offended by these things.
Update: I left the text below as follow-ups in the comments, but I thought they would make good additions to the main post itself.
Plus we must not forget the way you say “Chinese person” in Chinese, zhongguoren, which literally means “China Man.” (See the post from a couple of days ago.) When in a conversation with a Chinese they’ll often say something like, “I work for France company, and my boss is France man. My other boss is Germany man. There are no America man who work there.” In Chinese this sentence structure is perfectly correct, so it makes sense that they would speak English in this manner, by simply transliterating the words from one language to the other. Think of a Russian speaking English. “Is good, yes?” Even though this makes sense in English the sentence structure is Russian, because this is how the words transliterated from Russian to English.
Since people from other countries who learn English often speak using their native tongue’s sentence structure and syntax, it makes perfect sense that a Chinese immigrant would describe himself as a “China Man” since zhongguoren is how he would describe himself in Chinese. (He’d turn to someone and say “How do you say zhongguoren in English?” and his friend would reply “China Man.")
Meiguoren, which is how you say “American person” in Chinese, literally means “America Man.”
So by declaring “Chinaman” to be racist, we’re essentially saying that it’s racist to call someone a “Chinaman” in English, but if you refer to someone as a Chinaman in Chinese (zhongguoren) then that’s perfectly acceptable.
This is why I don’t understand stupid PC idiocy. It’s probably because most PC morons have no comprehension of the world outside their own little leftist enclaves, where all “Asians” have yellow skin and slanty eyes.
Also, many people here will refer to the French, for example, as “France man” though there is a specific term for it, “French.” (France is Faguo.) This is because the term for a French person, Faguoren, literally means “France man” and this is how the English-speaking Chinese will translate it into English. They don’t understand that there is an adjective related to the noun “France”, because there is no similar sentence structure in Chinese.
Remember, Chinese has no past or present tense, differentiations between masculine and feminine, none of that stuff. It’s very simplistic, and everything is spoken in very simple phrases—me go here, you no want, how can be, etc. So “China man” or “France man” or “America man” fits perfectly into the way that the Chinese speak, and when they translate this into English you get something which some unknown, intangible, incomprehensible left-wing politically correct politburo has determined to be racist, even though the term “Chinaman” is exactly how a Chinese would refer to himself, Zhongguoren.
