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[blue_mai]

the other week i was listening to a show on the radio about punk and ska and its context, including some bits about the Anti-Nazi League, and Rock Against Racism. i think the trade unions of the 60s and 70s and the punk youth-culture thing were really important in making the social culture we live in now. i'm going to try and read up more on it.

Comments

[blue_mai]

a lot of it depends on context - growing up in nearly-all-white-english town, people saw me as foreign. i used to get a lot of comments about my eyes and nose when i was a kid but i didn't mind, since there weren't many of us around. and i and pretty much any other chinese or japanese kid were always assumed to be related. here in london however i'm way more english than most people i meet. i'm chinese too though - i spoke chinese til i went to school, my parents spoke chinese to each other after that, we ate rice everyday... remember i didn't go on holiday to the norfolk broads or brighton, or even europe much, pretty much every year we went to visit relatives in singapore or malaysia, and my older relatives didn't speak english. there's a lot of englishness i lack from home, i can't really put my finger on it well, but i would notice it when i went to friends' houses. so i guess my family and home raised me chinese, but the town raised me english. i think i've become more english as i've got older too (did i tell you about the wierdness with my eyes?). but of course i never thought about it when i was little - i remember being absolutely stumped when i got the inevitable teasing in primary school for being chinese. i hadn't really considered it before, and i wasn't sure whether to loudly proclaim my chinese-ness or my english-ness...
did you read that obituary? it's pretty interesting. sounds like he was a right piece of work when he was younger.

[blue_mai]

i think race and racism are different things in england. canada's not racism free by any stretch. but generally very tolerant. nobody noticed race at school. not till high school. then it was mostly macho posturing. i had more trouble with the skins than any of the black dudes ever had.

yeah, read it. must've been a pretty charismatic guy.

[blue_mai]

it's pretty good here. i only got teased once or twice, just kids teasing anything different (like height, fattness, hair colour, accent etc etc), really pretty harmless, no conviction in it.
i've just started to read about the USA, since so much of the internet stuff comes out of there. it's crazy, really a different country. racism there seems incredible, just depressing...

[blue_mai]

yeah, it's pretty brutal. i don't know what's wrong with america. but i figure we'll hit those depths eventually as well. it's the way of the world.

i think what i meant by "england is different", though, is that england has "english" people. we don't have "canadians", so to speak (native canadians, of course, but they are definitely a minority.). we've always been a big mash-up of immigrants. of course, so has australia, and there's quite a bit of heavy racist activity down there...

[blue_mai]

oh yeah, i didn't answer that more directly because.. well - how scottish are you? i don't really know.

[blue_mai]

i was raised pretty freakin' scottish. though much of that has apparently died with the grandparents. i personally couldn't care less about my heritage.