Then & Now | Ghost, foreign devil, cow stink – racial terms Chinese, others used for Europeans in Asia
- Chinese called white people ‘gweilo’ (ghost), or worse, and Eurasians ‘mixed species’. The latter had epithets for Europeans and Chinese too
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me!” was a trite riposte that – once upon a time – was taught to bullied children, in a misguided attempt to deflect deeply felt pain caused by unwanted personal labels. And being habitually referred to by names not of one’s own choice does hurt.
Some once-ubiquitous racial terms directed at certain ethnic groups, such as Chink (for Chinese), have now become unmentionable and – in some instances – unprintable: one immediately obvious epithet, formerly common parlance in North America, is the now literally life-changingly offensive “N word”.
For many of those whose world view is constructed from politically correct theoretical ideologies, racialist terminology is generally assumed – mistakenly – to be exclusively directed by “white people” against the rest.
Like most easy-to-digest metrics, nuance is lost in the process. But the opposite direction also contains many unattractive epithets.
Jap jung – literally “mixed species” – was formerly a common Cantonese term for Hong Kong’s Eurasian community. “Bastard” was another blunt and – it must be honestly admitted, not always unreasonable – label.
