Thanks for coming.
If you are just joining us, you can still read all of my adventures in China on my old blog here.
This new blog is going to be about exploring one of the most Chinese places on earth outside of China — Vancouver, British Columbia. I’ll let you know what I find.
Speaking Chinese makes it a lot easier to explore Chinese Vancouver, but that’s not really what matters most. Let me explain why.
During the 2011 spring festival television gala, Canadian actor and comedian Mark Rowswell came onstage with host Liu Gang. Rowswell is famous for being one of the few white, Chinese speaking personalities on Chinese television.
As they entered, the crowd burst into wild applause.
“Do you know why they’re clapping for you?” Liu asked.
“I guess it’s because I’ve got some foreign flair¹” Rowswell replied with a grin.
“It’s because you speak Chinese so well,” Liu said.
Liu was, of course, entirely wrong. The audience did not cheer for Rowswell because he spoke Chinese well. There were dozens of performers who spoke Chinese better than Rowswell but got half the applause. They clapped because he spoke Chinese and was also white.
I have the same thought when acquaintances tell me, “Oh, in this day and age it’s such a great advantage to speak Chinese.”
Well, no. There are well over a billion people on this earth who speak Chinese. Hundreds of thousands live in Vancouver. Everyone and his dog speaks Chinese. It’s an advantage to speak Chinese and not to be Chinese.
That’s my goal — to explore Chinese Vancouver from the perspective of an outsider. There are a hundred thousand people in this city who speak better Chinese than I do. But because I grew up in an utterly non-Chinese world, I know what interests people like me. To me, everything is fresh and new and unexplored.
My expertise is ignorance.
¹”是不是因为我有点儿洋气.” Rowswell is making a pun based on a word that now means “stylish” but the root of which means “foreign.”