AN: This blog is quite a bit more serious than my previous ones, but please don’t immediately be turned off by it. Besides, it’s not like I haven’t warned you- I HAVE said on my profile that I would dig deeper if I was up for it. So here you are! Whether you like it or not, I’m going to talk about China.

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Melamine in milk, cancerous toothpaste, hair-ties made from used condoms, barber shops’ hair residue conjured into soy sauce, polished moldy rice, Sudan red in duck eggs… China’s reputation reeks these recent days.

This is how the world perceives Chinese people today: a squatting, unhygienic, phlegm-choked, fake clad, obnoxious generation designed, it seems, for the sole purpose of posing health and economic threat to the world. We look at these people we call ‘mainlanders’ and more often than less, we look at them with disdain and disgust. How is it that this mammoth race that takes up a fifth of our world’s population should ironically mean so little in our eyes?

Perhaps there is an explanation for this.

China is rife with corruption, incidents of human rights oppression, media censorship or lack of freedom of press… It is renowned for possessing its own set of moral values: to quote a famous missionary, “copy right means the right to copy in China”. As Hong Kongers, we even have the exclusive privilege of witnessing the vivid contrast between the two peoples separated only by a border known as Lo Wu. Take what happened the other day, I was innocently strolling along the streets of Causeway Bay when I encountered a rather disquieting sight of a mother blasting dialectal mandarin at her husband while dangling her toddler over a manhole, who was blissfully jetting deep yellow liquid out of his unconcealed penis. To my utter horror, the excited mother would distractedly jerk her poor child back and forth while talking, causing the urine to spray shamelessly onto the pavement, where a 5-metre-radius and a group of incensed passers-by consequently formed.

The point of this is blog is not to further disparage the Chinese population. It is to shine a light on another perspective- compassion. Centuries of imperialist oppression and decades of revolutionary abuse has taken its toll on the country. The rudeness and impertinence that is so extensive in China today is not a novel emergence. In other words, there’s a history behind the actions of the Chinese people today, and instead of anger, condescension or discrimination, I think we all could do with a little more sympathy. After all, we DO get all our fake cheap clothes and DVDs from China- it’s only fair that we respect them in turn. Yes, there’s pride and prejudice in all of us that’s extremely hard to shake off, but it’s sad that people should look down on others, and as much as what the mainlanders do may be infuriating, impossibly rude and admittedly, very gross, I feel challenged to try to be more understanding of their actions. Mind you, I’m really not your most patriotic Stakanovite (high five to fellow historians!) here- I’ve definitely had my fair share of complaining about the mainlanders in Hong Kong- but I guess I just wanted to talk about China. Yeah.

So there you have it! My (supposedly) least pointless blog by far. By the way, I’ve also decided that I will alliterate all my blog titles from now on. Whoopee?