BUT THESE ARE JUST MINOR DETAILS

Somebody asked me why I tend to hang out in Chinatown so much, given that I am not Chinese, and very unlikely to pass for Chinese, ever.
It seemed peculiar to him.
Possibly even weird and obsessive.
A misguided eccentricity.


In truth, the answer is simple. Entirely aside from needing to leave the apartment on my days off after a certain time, so that the evidence of my smoking airs away before the non-smoking person with whom I share my digs returns from work, there's the recognizability factor.

All of the single Vegan moms, anti-vaxxers, pampered middle-class allergics, puritans, religious nuts, conspiracy theorists, gmo or chemtrail obsessed, tobacco-hating wheatgerm snarfing obnoxiously self-righteous and strident Berkeleyite pricks in Chinatown are clearly marked.

They are white, and speak fluent English.

Most of the people who are none of the above are also fairly easily recognized, by a Venn-diagrammatic overlap of two factors: they speak Cantonese, and / or they look Chinese. If there is a perfect match of those characteristics, we have lift-off. They'll happily tolerate me as long as I don't do anything obnoxiously white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dickhead; I'll get along well with whoever provided they don't pull any weird sh*t.

Not everyone who is English-speaking and white is like that.
But enough. Trust me. It's a preponderance.



You know, there are two fabulous words in Indo-Dutch.

Anstil, and Tingka.

The first means stuck-up, pissy attitude, whatever is her problem, and the second means pretentious, ooh just too damned precious, a completely self-centered set of expectations, and an easily bruised sense of entitlement, the poor dear.

Anstil is a characteristic, tingka is its manifestation.

While these are dreadfully common in Bay Area whites, and also crop-up among Chinese American female college graduates who didn't go to San Francisco State -- especially if they don't speak Cantonese -- they are comparatively rare among the people in C'town.




As I said, the answer is simple. It is filled with a certain amount of bile, and a whole bunch of concepts which are difficult for many modern Americans to comprehend, foreign ideas for most of them, but simple.

And I really enjoyed explaining it.




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