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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

[anonymous]

how do you think most people see you? i've always thought of you as being very english. maybe white british people have a different perspective. but i think you're far more english than chinese. i don't think you're any more chinese than i am scottish.

cam

[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

[anonymous]

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...