Congratulations to Wu Di for qualifying for the Australian Open!
And congratulations to the Chinese education system for its success in instilling in Tennis Player Wu the notion that no matter where a mainland Chinese person travels, everyone else is still the foreigner.
As Reuters reports, Wu was shocked that laowai in Australia would actually cheer someone from China, thereby causing Wu to suffer from cognitive dissonance and require counseling upon his return.
“I was shocked,” Wu, who was mobbed after the match by fans wearing his country’s red national flag, told reporters. “In domestic tournaments, it’s hard enough getting Chinese to cheer me on, let alone foreigners.
“But there were foreigners here telling me to ‘come on!’. That was the first time that’s happened, so I felt really happy to have that.”
(Okay, I made up that last part about counseling.)
Wu was also impressed by fans wearing the Chinese flag as superman capes, though these “fans” were presumably not paid to attend by the Chinese Embassy. (They are also not, strictly speaking, laowai, so let’s call them “overseas Chinese” for perpetuity until the day they return to the welcoming bosom of the sacred motherland.)
Wu lost 7-5 4-6 6-3 6-3 to Croatian Ivan Dodig.
Fortunately for China, Li Na, the other member of the Wuhan tennis clique, is still in the tournament. She gave Wu sage advice via a pre-bedtime (oooh-la-la) text: “Don’t think about tennis.”
However, she failed to advise him not to play Happy Farms till four in the morning, refrain from watching Japanese porn prior to taking the court and remove that damn smiley face vibration dampener from his racquet.
(Image Reuters)
China, Cultural competence 101, CE 2013 ca.:
- a good chinese always supports another chinese, no matter whether worthy or not; a bad chinese supports nobody, is hanjian; a chinese who does not support another chinese is hanjian, no matter how bad the latter is;
- foreigners hate the chinese, hope they fail; so you can count only on your people;
- the category of foreigner does not depend on where you are, but on how they look; you are always chinese, never the foreigner (except for them); they are always laowai.
It’s sad, but I can basically no longer be happy for any Chinese person to be successful in anything on the international stage because I know that back home, legions of young men are crowing about how they’ve won glory for the motherland.
C’mon buddy, don’t be a downer.
Ang Lee won accolades for that movie about the jumping and the crouching (really because it won an Oscar, not because it appealed to Chinese), but then disappeared off the map for the movie about not being able to quit (though he won an Oscar for it, the anti- work ethic bothered a lot of people).
It’s a swingin door, and Chinese home-boys in the motherland will just see whatevs they want to see. Meanwhile, you can be happy for some Chinese guy because he did a good job, and not have an reaction against what he may symbolize to somebody else.
Responding to the previous comment @name, that’s retarded! Lol. I support those who are worthy of support, have virtue and character which mainland Chinese frequently do not
I had many conversation with _young_ Chinese in which these assumptions emerge with a certain regularity. Of course I do not mean to generalise. But this funny notions must come from somewhere, perhaps from education, just like “our” notions of merit, virtue and character.
The Chinese concept of “foreigner” is based on skin colour. It can’t cope with such categories as China-born American; it assumes so-called ABCs are “really” Chinese; and it contradicts itself when ethnic minorities go abroad.
D’awwww.
But I’d like to note that Wu Di was playing against a Croate. Assuming most of the audience is Australian, you have to cheer for someone. And at the risk of sounding disloyal to my fellow North Americans and our friends in China, Australians in general are more enthusiastic about tennis people in my biased experience. If we were talking about basketball, I mean most Chinese people I know tend to root for the Lakers in the NBA despite not being from Los Angeles.
Also I want to point out there are teams Chinese people don’t support in general despite being the national team. The Chinese Olympic Soccer (Football) team. Even other Chinese athletes (even the gymnasts) made fun of them.
Chinese do watch and support the National Men’s Football team – they just hate themselves and shower for an hour afterwards.
There are like 1.3 billion foreigners in China, it’s insane.
Forget this tosser. Zheng Jie was fucking brilliant.
It was a great game to watch.