Bizcuits: …But names will never hurt me

Leanda Lee

Along with their Chinese generational names carefully crafted by the Chinese side of our family, we were going give our daughter the western name Lily (thereby Lili Li); after all, Lilian was my grandmother’s name. And the boy was going to be Bruce. No, not really but they are both good Chinese influenced jokes and a great way to tease the kids. It’s bad enough that Lea got Lee as a surname. We each bear our burdens, and decades on I’m still dealing with that one.
Our family collects names. We have a list that’s been growing since the mid-80s. It’s simply a list somewhere on a computer that gets transferred with the thousands of files each time we upgrade our devices. It’s not a list of just any name but started with unique and unusual western names used by mostly Cantonese speakers, mainly people from Hong Kong. That was before we came to Macau and now Macau names are added to the list. These are names that give us a chuckle because they sound funny to native English speakers and we’ve dined on this topic for years in a good humoured way.
Now, a few weeks ago a little competition was posted on a social media page to see who could come up with the funniest western name used by Chinese people. For a while this was amusing and amazing. The range of objects that people would call themselves left many people shaking their heads in wonder with all sorts of explanations as to why. What would bring people to call themselves Tangent, Fantasy, Lazy or Silent Echo? Over time we get use to the names of fruit or the seasons. Months of the year come in and out of fashion with eras even in the west. Fanny is OK in Australia but brings on mirth in the US. Dick, short for Richard, presents a similar cross-cultural response.
All was fine and fun until someone took umbrage. I braced myself for the social media barrage that was to ensue when people express offense and then accused offenders take offense at the offense that wasn’t intended as offense to begin with. Then came the personal attacks and stereotyping of “you westerners”. I stood back, I asked myself if this little bit of harmless fun was really so harmless.
So, racism. I had a hard time reconciling the labelling of this activity as a manifestation of racism and the actors as racist. Somehow we excuse a blond telling a tall blond joke and don’t call her sexist. An Irishman gets away with telling an Irish joke and a New Zealander telling a sheep joke (don’t ask), and aboriginal actors can pump out black humour. So what makes it racist when someone presumably on the outside does the same?
When one is labelled provocateur and perhaps viewed by the accuser as being in a position of power, one is not supposed to jest. How was it that the subjects of the joke were deemed powerless and in need of protection? Per virtue of perceived inferiority of ethnicity, education, age, gender, wealth or political standing so that they had no voice? Such interpretation is too ponderous, patronising and surely far from the minds of the participants that day. Oh, the dangers of humour.
This bit of community banter provoked such an intensifying vitriol that the accuser was extinguished (or removed himself) from the group. Such a pity, but the right to speak comes with responsibilities and consequences as recent lessons have taught us.
Humour, tolerance and free speech don’t always enjoy happy commune. We know this as barely a month earlier the Charlie Hebdo incident and global commentary on satire, values, conflicting belief systems and perceptions raised these issues all too well in our consciousness. Raised them but obviously not concretely enough. Learning lessons from history is an abstract art and perhaps the reason why we often don’t.