Strangers who greet you on the street with ‘sambal bij?’. Or berate yourself for ‘dirty corona slit-eye’ and shout that you have to go back to ‘your own country with its bat-eaters’. The documentary came out this week Hanky panky goodbye. In it, actress Roosmarijn Wind, adopted from South Korea, addresses the underexposed problem of anti-Asian racism. About one million people of Asian descent live in the Netherlands; the suffering of this group remained under the radar for a long time. Pete Wu, journalist and bestselling author The Banana Generationknows why: “Asians are often seen as a ‘model minority’ who work hard, adapt and say nothing.”
The experiences of Asian Dutch people with discrimination about appearance and origin are extremely painful. And confrontational. Like the nursery rhyme Hanky Panky Shanghai, which was invariably sung in class on Wind’s birthday. The so-called Chinese variant of Happy Birthday. In addition, while singing non-existent Chinese-sounding words, children engage in stereotypical behaviors, such as pulling their eyes into slits or folding their hands together while bending like a paring knife. For many children of Asian descent a traumatic memory.
‘Have you also had to deal with racism?’ I ask my former colleague Xu.
“Unfortunately, yes,” she replies. ‘Almost my whole life, but since corona it has gotten worse.’ There is an awkward silence. Why have I never asked her about that before, but my Moroccan and Turkish colleagues did? “And they didn’t just sing that song then.” Xu tells how her 7-year-old daughter came home from school crying one day. “Mom, I don’t want to be a goofy Chinese with slanting eyes,” the girl sobbed. “I just want to be, like all children.” That day became Hanky Panky Shanghai sung. The girl hadn’t learned a letter for the rest of the day. The teacher had noticed nothing of her discomfort. “Ah,” she said when Xu called her after school to discuss the incident. ‘It wasn’t meant to be discriminatory at all, was it? Just a funny, harmless nursery rhyme.’
It is precisely because it seems like an innocent nursery rhyme, while it stems from persistent and racist stereotypes, that it is so serious, argues interest group Asian Raisins. “It normalizes anti-Asian racism in the classroom and our society.” Asian Raisins launched a campaign against the song this week, including a teaching package for teachers.
Will it convince people? I hope so. According to the Social and Cultural Planning Office, although more than 25 percent of the population experiences discrimination, at the same time almost 75 percent believe that this is said very quickly. Xu understands that. ‘If you belong to the group that does not experience exclusion, you often do not see the discrimination. Unless you consciously look for it.’
With some shame I think of the teaching materials at school in which there is hardly a person of color to be found. Or school tv-films with texts about slit eyes. Did I write to only one method maker? In fact, three years ago, the first day at my multicultural internship school, a birthday boy stood on a chair in the middle of the class, around him the cheerfully singing and gesturing class. happy Birthdayfirst in English, then Moroccan and finally: Hanky Panky Shanghai. I remember thinking, how fun to work with all those different versions of happy Birthday to do justice to the multicultural character of the classroom. How blind can a person be.