Yellow Peril by Tze Ming Mok

王先生(还是黄先生)! 跟我来! 你让我问几个重要得问题: 我们香蕉人会不会用汉字blog? 如果一个香蕉人的blog用汉字, 她还是香蕉人吗? 那么,如果没人看一个香蕉人的用汉字得blog,它还是一个blog吗? Are you following me here? Just nod and smile.

If you can't read the above, never fear. Any fearfulness and uncertainty I may have caused among the non-Chinese Public Address readership will be nicely offset by Chinese people laughing their asses off at my low level of literacy. Keith, I'm waiting for you to 给我看the汉字 for 'you got served!'

Here's a translation.

Mr Ng! Come with me! You spur me to ask some important questions: Are we bananas capable of using Chinese to blog? If a banana uses Chinese to blog, is she still a banana? If no-one reads a blog written in Chinese by a banana, is it still a blog?

Bananas? What? Is she talking some foreign language? Ok then: 'Banana', (like 'Bounty Bar') is something I've always considered a derogatory term, and one restricted in usage to within our own ethnicity - and not in a fun way, like Chigger or Fob or anything else riding lower down on the classic 'What kind of Asian are you' jokesheet. (And I don't know what kind of Asian you are if you haven't seen that jokesheet)

'White on the inside' could, I suppose, be meant as a compliment in certain circles. But when I've seen my fellow local-born invaders admit to being a banana, it's done with an ineffable sadness, an air of defeat. Meanwhile, our first ever Chinese Identity conference, coming up in early June - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Banana - is taking a more cavalier approach to the word. I was signed up as a speaker before the conference's rather unfortunate name-change. It was originally titled 'Going Bananas' (still the name of the website), which signalled that we weren't all bananas, at least not yet. But hell, now it looks like they're branding the lot of us. Hey everybody, we're yellow! Humorously shaped! Slippery, hairless skin! Don't tread on me now, you'll be in for a... whoopsie!

Quibbles aside, it'll be a blast - and maybe even very important. Well, you know, for us Chinks. We're living in an eerie time of firsts - events like this inspire the sensation of flying in a plane for the first time to the 祖国, except these are excursions inward into new layers of this country, right here. Hopefully they'll put some actual Chinese characters on the conference website and publicity material... I mean, for god's sake, what kind of Asians are these people?

a) Centre for the Houston Rockets? b) director of the House of Flying Daggers? Or c) the cute Chinese guy who sells the Herald at the corner of K'Rd and Pitt St? Most importantly, what does he think of the John Tamihere affair?

Yao and I chatted this morning as he took a break from his busy regimen of NBA training/muse-swapping/newspaper-holding.

'What do you think about all this?' I asked, gesturing to the front page.
'I don't really care about politics.'
'Don't you have an opinion about it? You sell this stuff every morning - you read it right?'
'Yeah, sure. But I think it's all pretty dumb. There's too much democracy here; people can say whatever idiotic thing they want.'

I have to paraphrase the rest of Yao's fine explication of comparative politics. Why?
a) The Chinese Embassy may be reading?
b) My Mandarin isn't so hot? Or
c) I didn't take notes because Yao had me in hysterics by frequently exclaiming that New Zealand politicians 'look like idiots!' and are 'so stupid!'?

Our Shanghai man on the street thought politics in China was less embarrassing, because there is less democracy and more agreement. It's hard to argue - democracy is pretty damn embarrassing. There are serious drawbacks to living in one-party states, but at least you get to be properly afraid of your government, rather than just shamed-out by them in front of international students who sell you the paper.

Which of these things are embarrassing yet still worth doing?
a) Talking to cute guys in a language you're no longer fluent in?
b) Finding out that someone, somewhere, has once referred to you as a 'frontbum'?
c) Parliamentary democracy?

With the Motherland erupting in its usual fury over Japanese history-books, I stormed up to the Queen Street Japanese busker and demanded immediate reparations in the form of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’.

‘Sorry, I don’t do that song anymore. I’ll practise it for next week.’

See what I mean? The war just keeps going. How much more of this can we take? Ryoji, Ryoji, don't you remember the time I helped you fight off the homeless guy who wanted you moved on from his bus-stop in 1998?

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Japan. We Huaren should just take a deep breath and let them get over the death of the bassist from Guitar Wolf. I know it'll take me a while.

And it gets worse. Look, even if Japanese history never tells the full story about the Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, nor rehabilitates Iris Chang , the Japanese people still don't deserve the psychological violence and humiliation being visited upon them by Gwen Stefani.

I think we've all suffered enough.