Danny ChaiOur first date since Abby was born – to celebrate our 4th anniversary – was a romantic evening spent watching X-Men 3. No dinner, else we would have had to stay out too late. Such is life with an infant.
We both liked the movie a lot, surprisingly. I didn’t have much faith in Brett Ratner, and it wasn’t as thought provoking as the first two movies, but it was entertaining. I was actually a pretty big Marvel geek growing up. I read Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, Excalibur, some New Mutants, so for a while I was fairly well versed in the mutant world. Bought my comics from Comics Pendragon on Branham, or online at Mile High Comics or New England Comics, where I also got my acid free plastic covers and cardboard backings. You remember that Simpsons episode where they get Radioactive Man #1 and they sterilize tweezers before turning every page? That’s pretty much how I was like. Uh, no clue why I’m writing this. Just to say that I’m one of those dorks that looks for random mutants in the credits. Psylocke was in the movie! Cool! No one cares!
Jieun loved the movie because she thought it was about race issues, her favorite issue in the world, and our conversation topic for the rest of the evening. Magnified by what we saw at Verde – a group of middle-aged Caucasians sitting at a table right in the center of the place, surrounded by a sea of Asians. I was stunned to see them. So much so I wanted to take a picture. It was that jarring to see 40-something Caucasians having bubble tea in the midst of a sea of Asians. And I’m pretty sure a couple of them were having the taro tea. Just bold all around.
Anyway, regarding race, Jieun was saying how she asked a coworker if she was Dutch and she said, no, she’s Danish. We were talking about that, because Jieun wasn’t sure what the differences were – which were languages, which were ethnicities. I was pretty sure ethnicity wise, Danish meant from Denmark and Dutch from the Netherlands. Jieun thought the Netherlands was a group of countries. I was pretty sure the Netherlands meant a single country. But when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure the difference between the Netherlands and Holland. Are they the same? When I think of the Netherlands, I think of tulips and seawalls. When I think of Holland, I think of windmills. Why would I think of those separately?
As it turns out, Holland is technically a region in the Netherlands, but is frequently used to mean all of the Netherlands. The people of the Netherlands are Dutch. Yes, I’m ignorant.
My point is, even educated people are ignorant about some ethnic/race issues. There’s a famous story of someone I won’t name, but he’s a twin living in NYC, where he had dinner with a couple friends, one from Uganda and one from Nigeria. During the course of the meal it came out that he thought Uganda was the capital of Nigeria. Whoops. They were appalled and proceeded to share all the stereotypes of Ugandans vs. Nigerians.
OK, so most of us probably know Uganda and Nigeria are separate countries. But how many of us know the stereotypes of each? We’re all ignorant about something, so I say, let’s educate each other, but cut each other some slack also. So like, I’m not that bothered when people talking about Japan reference Kung-Fu. Or when people ask me if I’m North or South Korean. Let’s educate, but not freak out about it. We’re all ignorant about something.
Speaking of which, I’m completely ignorant about Ebonics. My thing is, I have no clue what is Ebonics proper and what’s just slang. Anyway, I recently came across a programming language based on Ebonics, and looking at it, I’m not sure whether it’s useful or offensive.