I saw this movie a few years after I visited Singapore. I recalled seeing a book of the same title, but I never looked into it. I didn’t even watch the movie previews. I got free tickets to the movie, so I really watching something with zero idea on what would happened. While the plot was a cute little rom-com storyline, I was wondering how non Chinese/Chinese-diasporans would feel about it since a number of people think Asian=only Chinese. Singapore has 3 main ethnic groups Chinese Malay and Indian (Tamil specifically I think) and mixtures of the three I imagine, but the movie never portrayed that blend.
A saw a post on Facebook by a Singaporean of Tamil descent pointing that out and how the only time there were Indian-Singaporeans, they were the “scary” guards that scared the main characters.
But to go back to your main point, it’s crazy how “Asian” has such a monolithic view when you can find all types of looks there. I live in Taiwan, and most people assume everyone “looks Chinese” however since moving here I learned that there’s an aboriginal population that are of an austronesian ethnicity that lived here before people from China came here.
Prior to the “new world” nations being “discovered” and the creation of moder borders, most people really just identified with their tribe or ethnicity. Race as we know of today is a new made-up phenomenon that has a lot of inconsistencies and varies from place to place. Like in the US, a person who one black parent and one parent of another race can be considered black. The same is true for any other biracial mixture, they’re generally the considered the same as the darker parent. In other new world countries, that’s a separate category unless they look more like race than the other.
One of my college friend’s is from New Zealand. She is of Samoan descent. I was surprised to hear that she considers herself black.
Depending on you ask, there are really only 4 races (Negroid, Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Australoid). Given the amount of migrating, mixing, colonization and enslavement that happened around the world, we’re all a percentage of these 4 things and society tried to create all of the weird social constructs classify these mixtures, which are typically done in ways they make zero sense and now people constantly confuse nationality, ethnicity race and geo-cultural origins, the US demographics census is a perfect example of that.
White: a race that would describe ethnic European descendants, but includes non-black Middle Easterners and North Africans for some weird reason.
African American: an ethnicity that describes descendants of enslaved Africans (from south of the Sahara) in the US
Asian: people from the largest continent but only South Asia and everything east of that.
Hispanic/Latino: people of the Western Hemisphere that speak Spanish or Portuguese or comes from people who do…..yet French is also a Latin language but Haitians, Louisiana Creoles, Quebecois, and people of France’s western terrorities aren’t considered Latino.
Pacific Islander: original settlers of a geographical region that don’t all look the same.
