The Ugly Chinaman Last week a friend gave me a translated copy of the late Chinese essayist Bo Yangs () speech--The

Ugly Chinaman ()--delivered at the Iowa University in the U.S. a quarter of a century ago. Instinctively what came to my mind was the current squabbles surrounding the MCA, Malaysias main Chinese partner in the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition government. Are the guys in MCA the ugly Chinamen in Malaysian politics? This, indeed, is a terrible and dangerous question even if asked in the privacy of ones mind. Over lunch, my colleagues were arguing animatedly about the future of MCA and the Chinese community. I couldnt help asking: What has the MCA done or not done for the sake of the Chinese over the past 50 years that has made a real difference in Malaysia? There was a momentarily shocked silence. I didnt dared ask my next question in such polite company. In his speech which was published the following year in 1985 as a book together with his other essays and translated into English in 1992, Bo Yang asserted boldly, Chinese people are the same everywhere. For many years I've contemplated writing a book called The Ugly Chinaman. When the novel The Ugly American was published in the United States, the US State Department chose it as a guide to policy making. But when the Japanese ambassador to Argentina published a book called The Ugly Japanese, he was immediately recalled from his post. This is a good example of the gap that separates the East and the West. In China, for sure, things would be much worse. If I wrote a book called The Ugly Chinaman, you would soon be delivering me my meals in jail, he said then, perhaps prophetically. Bo Yang, who was born in mainland China and whose real name was Guo Yidong, was no stranger to trouble. He said then, I have spent the last thirty years in Taiwan, the first ten writing fiction, the second ten writing essays and the last ten in jail (because of a cartoon he used the China Daily News), quite a nice balance, I would say. His The Ugly Chinaman was banned in China until 2000. Some of the things he said in his long essay caught my attention. For instance, he claimed Chinese people are notorious for quarrelling and squabbling among themselves. His other observations are:

Chinese people squabble among themselves in every situation, since their bodies lack those cells that enable most human beings to get along with each other. Chinese people can easily come up with enough reasons for why they don't cooperate with each other to fill a book. Chinese people simply don't understand the importance of cooperation. But if you tell a Chinaman he doesn't understand, he will sit down and write a book just for you entitled The Importance of Cooperation. It takes a Chinese betray a Chinese only a Chinese would have a good reason to frame or slander another Chinese. The tendency towards internecine struggle has spawned another insidious phenomenon: an utter reluctance to admit mistakes. How many of you have ever heard a Chinese admit that he or she has made an effort? Chinese people are highly reluctant to admit their errors, and can produce a myriad of reasons to cover their mistakes. There's an old adage: 'Contemplate your faults behind closed doors'. Whose faults? The guy's next door, of course! Chinese people don't admit their mistakes because somewhere during their long evolution they lost the knack of it. Of course, we can disavow our mistakes, but that won't make them disappear. To cover their mistakes, Chinese people go well out of their way and even commit additional mistakes, merely to cover their initial blunders. Modem Chinese have become increasingly narrow-minded and closed off from the rest of the world because of their inability to admit their mistakes and their predilection for bragging, lying and slander. It reminds me that the Chinese people's present state of ugliness is due to our own ignorance of the fact that we are ugly. Some may want to dismiss Bo Yangs essay as stereotype, but there is some universal truth that we are ugly after all, Chinamen or otherwise. Perhaps, we should consider the lyrics of the soul gospel made popular by Elvis Presley: Take a look at yourself and you can look at others diff'rently.

By Bob Teoh