Rice Porridge
What do you know about my culture? How can you claim you know?
Have you slept on a wooden board, five children in one room? Have you woken up at 6am in the morning for an hour's travel to school? Have you been woken up by your older sibling so you won't be late, while your parents are too exhausted to wake you up?
Have you celebrated the New Year with all of your schoolmates, knowing that everyone all over the country was doing the same thing, a whole day of singing, dancing, performances, and exchange of golden, meaningful fruit, along with candy wrapped up in red and gold? Have you walked in the supermarkets, seeing everything drenched in red and gold, hanging dried sausages made from fatty pork and wine drapped like bunches of stiff straight bananas?
Have you walked down the shops, eaten at a table outside by the road, and eaten from a bowl, thick and clay and white, handpainted with flowers and cockerals, scooping soup out with cheap melamine spoons, large and wide, flat based at the bottom of the bowl when you're done?
Have you grown up with rice as your sustenance, the main carbohydrate? Have you eaten porridge made with rice? Have you grown up knowing of someone who'd had a lack of food, and the porridge getting thinner and thinner, full of water, and still felt full?
Have you grown up hearing the cooks in marketplaces yell in various dialects, the same ones your family speaks? Did you celebrate the DragonBoat festival, the mid-Autumn festival, seeing various types of mooncake, have them melt against your tongue, blackbean paste thick and sweet?
Have you been told stories by your parents, of the scholar, the poet, the patriot, the official who'd spoken against the Emperor, and in punishment banished, and in protest committed suicide in the raging river? Have you been told that the people who heard, wrapped rice into thick leaves, sticky and large, and thrown into the water for the fishes, to keep them from the official's body and all who could were out in their boats trawling the water for his corpse?
Have you watched operas with characters in painted faces, the colours and styles with meaning that your family told you about? Have you watched TV adaptations of The Three Smiles, have you watched drama serials of the Emperor who went among the commoners unknown and unseen? Have you seen comedic parodies of The Eight Immortals? Have you seen the sequel to The Journey To The West?
Or have you only read of it?
Have you only thought that kungfu was cool? Have you no roots with anything of this at all, and thought that Asian girls were cuter? Have the only celebrations you attended involved performances while you sat back, and made fun of the emcee's strong accent? Have you thought the clothes, the culture, the celebrations, the martial arts, fascinating, but told the Asian walking down the street to go home? Have you harboured annoyed thoughts at the family who are sitting at a table, and taking up three chairs? Have you thought angry thoughts about them for their accents? Have you assumed that anyone with a face different from yours, hair different from yours, eyes different from yours, be unable to speak English at all?
Have you?
In response to the latest furor about writing POC in fiction, about race in casting of media, and things that have happened personally. Whether this can come under 're-myth', I don't know.