I once went to Turkey with a group of friends, mostly Chinese Malaysian, and we went for one of those cheesy tourist things they have, where they make you sit at a little table with a flag on it indicating your nationality, and they serve you dinner, and there is cultural dancing and stuff. At one point they started playing all the traditional/folk songs of all the different nationalities present, and had the audience sing the songs; they did Rasa Sayang for us, which everybody, and I mean everybody, in Malaysia knows -- but not my extremely Chinese friends, apparently. *face-palm*
Anyway there was one PRC person in the audience, and they played 月亮代表我的心 for her benefit, whereupon the two girls who had totally and embarrassingly failed to sing Rasa Sayang perked up and started singing along. So we kind of redeemed our reputation? Conclusion: we looked like losers; the Chinese diaspora is great; blah blah uncomfortable racial/political undertones.
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Haven't even looked at the rest of the post yet, but
Fri, Oct. 5th, 2007 03:49 pm (UTC)I once went to Turkey with a group of friends, mostly Chinese Malaysian, and we went for one of those cheesy tourist things they have, where they make you sit at a little table with a flag on it indicating your nationality, and they serve you dinner, and there is cultural dancing and stuff. At one point they started playing all the traditional/folk songs of all the different nationalities present, and had the audience sing the songs; they did Rasa Sayang for us, which everybody, and I mean everybody, in Malaysia knows -- but not my extremely Chinese friends, apparently. *face-palm*
Anyway there was one PRC person in the audience, and they played 月亮代表我的心 for her benefit, whereupon the two girls who had totally and embarrassingly failed to sing Rasa Sayang perked up and started singing along. So we kind of redeemed our reputation? Conclusion: we looked like losers; the Chinese diaspora is great; blah blah uncomfortable racial/political undertones.
*downloads!*