KUALA LUMPUR: I pig out on Grab rides on a daily basis, but during the first days of the Year of the Boar last week (as this little piggy dejectedly trotted to and from work), my normally reticent drivers engaged me in surprising small talk that had me tickled porcine pink.
Perhaps kung fu-kicked by loneliness brought about by the Klang Valley’s post-apocalyptically-barren roads, each driver genially prodded me on my preparations for the Chinese New Year and where I was planning to let loose when the fireworks begin terrorising household pets, and lions and dragons start to twerk.
The thing is, I’m about as Chinese as Tandoori Chicken, or Benedict Cumberbatch. I do not look Chinese – my skin tone is chain smoker’s teeth brown; my eyes lack epicanthic folds and are not slanted (traits I’ve always fancied, in the way Sir Mix-A-Lot digs big butts); and I’m on the hirsute side by ONE arm hair. Also, unlike everyone else in the world, I’m not even sure what my Chinese zodiac animal is (the unicorn, maybe?)
Despite my utter un-Chineseness, I unhesitatingly confirmed my Grab drivers’ wildly off-target assumptions about my race and cultural heritage, and gamely played along. I was brazen in my ham-my humbuggery, and garnished my stir-fried oral biography with brilliantly bullsh*t details.
On two occasions, my drivers even chummily peppered their speech with Mandarin and Cantonese phrases and I – a galactic alien to both tongues – impressively held my own, nodding with authority or chuckling knowingly in lieu of verbal responses, to both my drivers’ seeming approval (I just hope I didn’t agree to a murder).
Each ride ended with the angpao I didn’t know I needed – a Happy Chinese New Year wish, which left me smiling like I’d just unbound my throbbing lotus feet.
Of course, there were brief moments during my flirtations with fraudulence when I was bitch-slapped by my conscience, which was rolling its eyes with exasperation. But I thought, ‘eh’ – and likened myself to a knock-off luxury wristwatch from Petaling Street, eagerly purchased by a tourist who doesn’t notice anything off about his new ‘Roleks’.
I’ve always rapturously enjoyed being mistaken for someone of another race and from another culture – especially in Malaysia, where racial identity seems to be central to everything (I won’t touch the politics of this with 10-foot chopsticks, so I’ll hurriedly take a different tangent now). I’ll just say that not being easily pegged racially is liberating, and it happens to me beyond just during private hire car rides.
So the big, Great Wall of China question is, if I don’t look like a person of Chinese descent, why do people frequently develop five-minute cataracts and mistake me for one? (Actually, I’ve been mistaken for other races too – including, quite preposterously, Japanese and Korean).
After a series of misracialisations (a new SJW-coined term I’ve embraced) I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because of the way I dress.
What is my sartorial style? I draw inspiration from party confetti, tornado victims and people whose clothes’ labels feature Braille wording. Mine is a look I would describe as unconventional, with a touch of whimsy (others would characterise it as circus-y, and a dose of Martian). On Halloween, I dress as myself. As a result, one look at me and many take me for 1) An insane asylum escapee and 2) NOT MALAY.
As many Malaysians (of all races) harbour bamboo-rigid, stereotypical notions of what a Malay man dresses like, they automatically mentally eliminate me, upon sight, from categorisation in this demographic, and consider other possibilities. (Hey, no skin off MY nose!).
So that’s the way the mooncake crumbles – and I’ve accepted it. Confucius say: They see me rollin’, they hatin’.
Mind you, it hasn’t all been sh*ts and giggles for me – the reverse side of my occasional racial miscategorisation has led to episodes when I wished I knew tai chi. No, wait… karate.
Disclaimer: A rambling humblebrag about being an unfairly treated world traveller follows: In Shanghai, I was once viciously howled at by a furious cleaning woman, who I am convinced would have given me a pass had she known I was a foreign tourist, not a local. In Hong Kong, people speak to me in Cantonese, and I just smile at them, like I’m SPECIAL. In Toronto, as I waited at a traffic light, a group of teenage boys in a passing convertible started jeering at me, but their terms of endearment petered out when they couldn’t decide if I was an Amerindian Latino, a First Nations Canadian, a Pacific Islander, a North East Asian or a South East Asian. I almost felt sorry for them. (I’m a gook, guys!)
Or maybe I just have bad feng shui – everywhere on earth. It doesn’t matter. As long as I am gifted unearned festive wishes by confused strangers now and again, I’m good.
Gong Xi Faux Chai, everyone!
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times