Mao’s head lost in translation

A few weeks ago, a joke that Victoria University student magazine Salient made at the expense of those who consider ‘The Chinese’ to be ‘a threat’ (along with penguins, two-toed sloths and the apes from Planet of the Apes), was misinterpreted as a joke made at the expense of Chinese people. Trivial stuff, one would think, that would blow over once irony in English language humour was explained. But the situation was exacerbated by Massey University rag Chaff putting Chairman Mao’s head on a woman’s body, which required postmodernism in English language humour to be explained. This of course proved largely impossible.

Paddling in the communication channel between these supposedly separate worlds, former Salient News Editor and 1.5 generation migrant Keith Ng waded across to the international students by posting a Chinese explanation of the Salient joke on their favourite Chinese language website SkyKiwi. He was slammed by posters on the site who, judging by vocabulary and political sophistication, were teenage nationalist wingnuts. Lincoln Tan has recently been similarly bitchslapped online for writing about Chinese student prostitutes in the white media. With Lincoln now writing a weekly Herald column, is the gulf I wrote about last week widening between ‘mainstreamed’ Chinese journalists and those excluded populations they are meant to be ‘representing’?

In his first column last week, Lincoln wrote of his surprise and alarm at some of the extreme feedback he has been receiving from angry Chinese nationals. But we shouldn’t stereotype Mainland Chinese based on the angriest posts on websites, or the types of people who write Letters to the Editor every day. If Lincoln has been surprised at the vitriolic responses to his writing, that’s because he’s never had a blog. The natural comparison group for people who post rabid political comments on websites of all languages, are angry talkback callers.

However, SkyKiwi is not an ideological weblog or a right-wing shock-jock. It’s New Zealand’s most popular Chinese web portal, hosting news, forums and commercial content in jianti – the short form Chinese used by Mainlanders and Singaporeans. Its comment threads are open to all opinions with minimal site-moderation, and for many readers (76% of whom are tertiary students), it’s a fresh experience in freedom of speech. The angries are not representative of Mainland Chinese people overall, nor even of all the people who post on the site itself. Wingnuts spew paranoia alongside readers who are embarrassed by the wingnuts. On the thread for Keith Ng’s Salient explanation, some people got the joke. Others were embarrassed that in all this chauvinistic talk of our grand civilisation, that Mainland Chinese people can still be so insecure that they can’t laugh at trivia or open up to foreign culture. The same contradictions were apparent on the Chaff Mao-head thread.

In these cases, the angriest young men quickly moved beyond who was the target of the jokes or whether the jokes were funny, and on to a cathartic venting about racism in New Zealand, and the passion many young Mainlanders have for Mao and the Ancient Glory of China as symbols that give them pride amid feelings of powerlessness in this lickspittle country.

Displacing resentment of real marginalisation onto nonsense, conspiracy theories and urban myths, is a serious social phenomenon. The classic example is the fate of the US clothing line ‘Troop’, an urban sportswear label with a hint of commando-chic. Most popular with African-Americans in the 1990s, the company was hit by a rumour that it was owned by the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK were supposedly exploiting minorities’ desires to feel powerful and militant while perpetuating their economic oppression, ‘Troop’ was apparently an acronym for ‘To Rule Over Our Oppressed People’, and the message ‘thank you niggers for making us rich’ was purportedly sewn into the linings. Despite the nonsensical idea that the KKK would refer to Blacks as “our oppressed people”, the label went bankrupt. Given the ideologies driving multinational corporations and consumer culture, you could argue that the conspiracy was generally true – just not specifically true.

One SkyKiwi reader observed cynically that ‘just joking’ is the standard media defence against accusations of racism – ‘Cheeky Darkie’ anyone? Perhaps it’s reasonable for people to maintain a position of skepticism when they don’t have the tools to judge the context. It also isn’t bad for the ‘mainstream’ to know that this level of distrust doesn’t come out of thin air. Just because they’re paranoid, doesn’t mean you’re never out to get them

END