“Hey, Pfffffffffff, Come Over Here!”

Everyone has preconceptions about other societies, and I’m pioneering at least one culture at ALA; for the first time in my life, I stand out as an Asian. (At Exeter, I was more like a motif in the gigantic Eastern wallpaper that coated the entire school.) And in Africa, political correctness is still in its infancy…or maybe its father is still trying to get a date. So unsurprisingly, I’ve been subject to a broad spectrum of poorly thought out stereotypes.

When I first got here, I was asked, pretty much non-stop, if I could do Kungfu. Then I was forced onto my house table tennis team on the grounds that my countrymen were naturally gifted. But all things considered, those two examples were tame. Little did I know just how wide the flood gates could open.



The other day, a girl asked if I could see when I was laughing (because my eyes get smaller). Just exactly how would the entire continent of Asia function if that were true?? The streets of Tokyo and Beijing would be in utter chaos and littered with the debris of thousands of joke-triggered car crashes. It wouldn’t just be impolite to laugh at life and death matters; laughter would be a life and death matter. There would be no comedy TV in Korea, only comedy radio, and criminals who wanted to conceal their identity could just tickle you. Worst of all, hapless pedestrians would hear something funny, and then walk blindly into other people, trip over rubbish bins, and fall down manholes. It would basically be like having a population with a 100% epilepsy rate.



But even that assumption paled in comparison to this following one. After all, my eyes do get very small when I laugh. Yesterday, five different people asked me whether it’s true that in China, they name their children by dropping something on the floor and then using whatever noise it makes. I’m not a champion of political correctness, but I was pretty shocked that so many of my friends could believe some 1.4 billion people had names without a meaning. Funnily, Abdulraman mistook my incredulity for confusion and gave me a demonstration. So now if I’m ever stuck for ideas, I’ll know to drop a plastic cup on a wooden table and name my daughter “Pok Pok”.

On the other hand, imagine that I didn’t use those materials. Imagine that I used a metal bowl on stone tiling; my daughter would be called Tongtong. That would be alright because that’s actually my cousin’s nickname. Now what if I didn’t happen to be sitting near anything hard at all? My child would be forever cursed by the chance coincidence that I was sitting near a moldy beanbag during her official naming ceremony. She would be called “ch”. She and her older brother, pfffffffffff (silk pillow on shag carpet), would be ridiculed, miserable, and very difficult to call to dinner. “HEY ch AND pfffffffffff, DINNER IS SERVED!!” I like onomatopoeia, but it’s not a practical way to name children.



In the end, I was able to set my companions straight, although no one seemed to get just how absurd the whole idea was. I then went on to explain what a hotdog was because we were eating them for dinner. Occasionally I step out of my role as Asian to become the resident American when Julia and Gaciru aren’t there.

“That’s called a hotdog in the US, Seidou”
“Horrog?”
“No, hot-dog. Comme chien chaud.”
“hot. DOG? This is dog???”
“No it’s just a name! It’s not really a dog. It’s a normal sausage.”
“Oh. It’s awful.”
“Try ketchup; the stuff was invented to put on hotdogs.”
“Don’t they eat dogs in China?”
“Yes, in some places, that’s true.”
“And cats.”
“Again, yes…but not everywhere.”
“Hm. Hey! Some people in China eat live rats, did you know that Liam?”

That doesn’t even deserve to be ridiculed.