My Blog

You know you’re Asian when…

Your mother has a short-haired, curly perm

Your dad is some sort of engineer

Your parents still tried to get you into places half-price saying you were 12 when you were really 15

You ask your parents help on one math problem and 2 hours later they’re still lecturing

You have a 40 lb. bag of rice in your pantry

You shop 99 ranch

Everyone thinks you’re “Chinese” no matter what part of Asia your ancestors were from

You’ve had a bowl haircut at one point in your life

Your parents enjoy comparing you to their friends’ kids

You’ve had to sit through karaoke videos with scantily clad, ugly Asian women attempting to dance and walk around a temple, forest, or library

Your parents say, “Don’t forget your heritage”

You drive mostly Japanese cars.

You’ve learned to keep bargaining even if the prices are rock bottom

You’ve had to eat parts of animals they don’t even put in hot dogs

At least once, you’ve started a joke with “Confucius say….”

You know what bok choy is

You’ve gotten little red envelopes around February

Piles of shoes tend to make it hard to open the front, back, and closet doors

You hear (your name + eee (optional) + yah!) every time someone calls you (e.g. Jean - ee - yah! or Mary - yah!)

You have no eyelashes

Idiot people try to impress you with pathetic imitation

Asian languages, like the ever-so-popular: ching chong woo bok chi, etc..

Your parents say leaving rice in your bowl is a sin

The Bio lectures on marine life (seaweed, sea cucumbers, octopii) was last night’s dinner

Your ancestors 1000 generations back invented the back scratcher

At least one family member wears black wire/plastic frame glasses

Your parents hover over your tired, caffeine-drugged body at 12 midnight to say, “In Korea (or other native country), we studied even more.”

Your parents expect you’ll be best friends with any one off the street in any given area as long as they are Asian

An Asian woman comes on campus and people ask: “Is that your mother?” Well then, “Is it your sister?”

Your relatives’ houses smell like incense, mothballs or both

Your parents say, “Calculus? I took Calculus in 8th grade!”

Everyone thinks you’re good at math

Your parents’ vocabulary is filled with “ai-yahs, and Wah’s”

You like $1.75 movies

You like $1.50 movies even more

Your aunts and uncles bring you back adorable clothing from Asia with fuzzy bunnies, vinyl ducks, and English words that make no sense, in great colors like yellow, pink, magenta, orange, and the ever popular lime green

Your parents insist you marry within your race

You never order chop suey, sweet and sour pork, or any other imitation of oriental food

You either really, really want to go to UCI or really, really want to stay away from it

Your parents have never kissed you

Your parents have never kissed each other

You learned about the birds and the bees from someone other than your parents

“You want a stereo?! When I was your age, I didn’t even have shoes!!”

People see a bunch of scribbles on a chopstick and ask you to translate

You have to call just about all your parent’s friends “Auntie and Uncle”

You have 12+ aunts and uncles

At expensive restaurants, you order a delicious glass of water for your beverage and NEVER order dessert

Your parents simply cut the green/black part off the bread and say “Eat anyway. It’s still good.”

The vast majority of the people related to you wear glasses. Thick glasses.

You will most likely be taller than your parents

Your parents have either make you play the piano, the violin, or both

You get nothing if you do well in school, but crapped on if you don’t

When going to other people’s houses, you always have to bring a gift

Your dad still pulls his socks up to his knees, you know, the ones with the blue and pink stripes at the top

Your family owns a tennis racquet, golf clubs, or both

Your family always cheers for the Asian athlete on TV (i.e. Michael Chan)

The furniture in your house never matches the wallpaper, the carpet, the decorations, or any of the rest of the furniture

You have rocks, sticks, leaves, and strange-smelling, unknown substances in your pantry for use as medicine

You own a rice cooker or two

You buy soy sauce by the gallon

Your family owns butcher knives bigger than your head

Your parents tell you about how long it took for them to get to school, how horrible the weather was in their native country, and how much they still appreciated going

Your parents buy you clothes and shoes many sizes too big so you can “grow into it” and wear it for years to come.

IF THIS SOUNDS LIKE YOUR FAMILY, WELCOME TO THE BIGGEST ASIAN GROUP ON FACEBOOK (hopefully…).

———————————–

The following is from a British journalist stationed in the Philippines.
His observations are so hilarious!!!! This was written in 1999.

Matter of Taste
By Matthew Sutherland

I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider
myself in most respects well assimilated. However, there is one key
step on the road to full assimilation, which I have yet to take, and
that’s to eat BALUT.

The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and
ask them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there
will be no turning back.

BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is
a fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of
newspaper, much like English fish and chips,
by street vendors usually after dark, presumably so you can’t see how
gross it is. It’s meant to be an aphrodisiac, although I can’t imagine
anything more likely to dispel sexual desire than crunching on a
partially formed baby duck swimming in noxious fluid. The embryo in the
egg comes in varying stages of development, but basically it is not
considered macho to eat one without fully discernable feathers, beak,
and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best. Others prefer just
to drink the so-called ’soup’, the vile, pungent liquid that surrounds
the aforementioned feathery fetus…excuse me;

I have to go and throw up now. I’ll be back in a minute.

Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.
They eat at least eight times a day.
These eight official meals are called, in order: breakfast, snacks,
lunch, merienda, merienda ceyna, dinner, bedtime snacks and
no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn’t-count.
The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes from the open packet that sits on every desktop.

You’re never far from food in the Philippines. If you doubt this,
next time you’re driving home from work, try this game. See how long
you can drive without seeing food and I don’t mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic selling nuts or candy. I bet it’s less than one minute.

Here are some other things I’ve noticed about food in the Philippines:
Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice - even breakfast. In the UK,
I could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it’s impossible to
drink without eating.
A bottle of San Miguel just isn’t the same without gambas or beef tapa.
Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house without
baon (food in small container) and a container of something cold to
drink. You might as well ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants
on.
And lastly, where I come from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and fork. You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.

One really nice thing about Filipino food
culture is that people always ask you to SHARE their food. In my
office, if you catch anyone attacking their baon, they will always go,
“Sir! KAIN TAYO!” (”Let’s eat!”). This confused me, until I realized
that they didn’t actually expect me to sit down and start munching on
their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite response is something like,
“No thanks, I just ate.” But the principle is sound -if you have food
on your plate, you are expected to share it, however hungry you are,
with those who may be even hungrier. I think that’s great!
In fact, this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos
use “Have you eaten yet?” (”KUMAIN KA NA?”) as a general greeting,
irrespective of time of day or location.

Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull compared to other Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: Spicy dishes like Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked with coconut
milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it’s hard to beat the
sheer wanton, cholesterolic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON de
leche (roast pig) feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of
animal fat on a stick, and cook until crisp.
Mmm, mmm…you can actually feel your arteries constricting with each successive mouthful.

I also share one key Pinoy trait —a sweet tooth. I am thus the only
foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet
burgers, sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes to put jam on his pizza. Try it!

It’s the weird food you want to avoid. In addition to duck fetus in
the half-shell, items to avoid in the Philippines include pig’s blood soup
(DINUGUAN); bull’s testicle soup, the strangely-named “SOUP NUMBER
FIVE” (I dread to think what numbers one through four are); and the
ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and it’s equally stinky
sister, PATIS.
Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even
risk arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like
Australia and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you
can smell from more than 100 paces.
Then there’s the small matter of the purple ice cream. I have never been able to get my brain around eating purple food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me cold.
And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG KAMBING (goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)…

The Filipino, of course, has a well-developed sense of food.
Here’s a typical Pinoy food joke: “I’m on a seafood diet. “What’s a seafood diet?” “When I see food, I eat it!”

Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals — the feet, the head, the
guts, etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty
names, like
“ADIDAS” (chicken’s feet);
“KURBATA” (either just chicken’s neck, or”neck and thigh” as in “neck-tie”);
“WALKMAN” (pigs ears);
“PAL” (chicken wings);
“HELMET” (chicken head);
“IUD” (chicken>intestines), and
“BETAMAX” (video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood).
Yum, yum. Bon appetit.

“A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches”– (Proverbs 22:1)

WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of
the first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has
provided a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.

The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that
everyone here has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom,
we have nicknames in kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we
tend, I am glad to say, to lose them.

The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both
girls and boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard as
overbearingly cutesy for anyone over about five. Fifty-five-year-olds
colleague put it.

Where I come from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy
would be beaten to death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never
make it to adulthood. So, probably, would girls with names like Babes,
Lovely, Precious, Peachy or Apples. Yuk, ech ech.

Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.

Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call
“door-bell names”. These are nicknames that sound like -well,
doorbells. There are >millions>of them.> >> > Bing,
Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more common. They can be, and
frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like combinations such as
Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even our newly appointed
chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None of these doorbell names
exist where I come from, and hence sound unusually amusing to my
untutored foreign ear.

Someone once told me that one of the Bings, when asked why he was
called Bing, replied, “because my brother is called Bong”. Faultless
logic.

Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come
from “dong” is a slang word for well; perhaps “talong” is the best
Tagalog equivalent.

Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
encountered people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or
Ning-Ning. The secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one:
Leck-Leck.

Such names are then frequently further refined by using the
“squared” symbol, as in Len2 or Mai2. This had me very confused for a
while.

Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming
their children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the
same letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.

More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of
assonance or rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names
get worse the more kids there are-best to be born early or you could
end up being a Baboy).

Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts
(Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip).

The main advantage of such combinations is that they look great
painted across your trunk if you’re a cab driver. That’s another thing
I’d never seen before coming to Manila — taxis with the driver’s kids’
names on the trunk.

Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the
phenomenon of the “composite” name. This includes names like Jejomar
(for Jesus, Joseph and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda (for Luzon,
Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That’s a bit like me being
called something like “Engscowani” (for England, Scotland, Wales and
Northern Ireland). Between you and me, I’m glad I’m not.

And how could I forget to mention the fabulous concept of the
randomly inserted letter ‘h’. Quite what this device is supposed to
achieve, I have not yet figured out, but I think it is designed to give
a touch of class to an otherwise only averagely weird name. It results
in creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how about
Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?

How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with
names like John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where
imagination and exoticism rule the world of names.

Even the towns here have weird names; my favorite is the
unbelievably named town of Sexmoan (ironically close to Olongapo and
Angeles). Where else in the world could that really be true?

Where else in the world could the head of the Church really be called Cardinal Sin?

Where else but the Philippines!

Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.