Eshin Direct

Bye Bye Gweilo Diaries

The Gweilo Diaries looks like it is out for the count as the domain name has been bought by a domain prospector. Good riddance. Let’s hope the cockroach stays dead.

White is Beautiful

Spirit Fingers has a great post about the lack of Asian talent in some Hong Kong’s ad campaigns. She’s written it in her usual humourous style but it does have some serious social implications. During my time in advertising, I had some concern about the increased use of Eurasian and Western talent in Asian advertising campaigns to signify aspirationally beautiful people. It leverages the less scrupulous side of the industry by creating an aspirational image that some people cannot physically attain. Whitening products are leading the charge on this front. The constant bombardment of porcelain white skin as both healthy and visually appealing, through the use of Western, Eurasian and typically North Asian phenotypes, might suggest to darker Asian people that they are inferior to the portrayed ideal and (wait for it), whitening products will bring you closer to that ideal. And thus the purchase-marketing cycle continues, locking in the unfortunate victim with the appropriate sense of humility and inferiority.

And so it is in varying degrees in various advertising campaigns. The perception that white is more beautiful, and dangerously, more healthy, is being added to that other misconception that white is more affluent. Various Chinese women I know have expressed a desire to find a Western male because they’re under the misguided assumption that Eurasian will always breed handsome and stunning children. Sure, advertising campaigns have helped sell us on idea that all Eurasian talent is jaw-dropping, but not all children of mixed heritage can look forward to gracing the covers of the glossies.

Perhaps there are still some colonial hang-overs that need to be addressed before full integration into the globalised hegemony happens.

Sieg Heil to American Hypocrisy

Harry’s Nazi stunt was a pretty stupid thing to do although in a context of a “bad taste” themed party, it could be almost be explained away. But watching Larry King Live, I find it amusing to see the Americans jump onto the lynch mob for Harry. If anything, Harry’s stunt has served as a reminder that the younger generation are forgetting the atrocity that was World War II.

But if the Americans want to start throwing stones at the British Royal family for their insensitivity about forgetting the horrors that the Nazis perpetrated, then perhaps they should take a closer look at themselves. The Nazis were masters of detention without trial, war crimes including torture and humiliation, advancement of genetic rationalism, media propoganda, secret police, and documenting and tracking percieved outsiders who might pose a threat.

Wearing the uniform of the Nazi party was bad but living the ethos of what the Nazis did is more of a sacrilege. An American frat party once ran a Vietnam night where guys were expected to turn up in uniform and the girls were meant to dress up as hookers. What was sad about that was that evidently the Americans haven’t learned from their mistakes from the last time they lost a war.

Digital Music Collection

I finally finished burning my entire CD collection onto my PowerBook and for good measure, I included my parents extensive range of classical music. Think twice before embarking on the quest to digitalize about two decades worth of CD purchasing. It took me about two weeks to do.

But it’s worth it. 7427 songs, 21 days and 27.50 GB’s later and I’m a happy bunny. And thankfully, my folks purchased a 40GB iPod so that I can back it up for which they’ll enjoy the smooth touch/click access to my family’s music combined music collection.

Whiskas Catfood Racist to Chinese

I wasn’t going to blog about the Whiskas TV commercial that features a Chinese girl that speaks in an obvious Chinaman accent. I wasn’t going to bore you about my paranoid delusions that Whiskas is waging cultural warfare on how Whiskas (Western) is superior to some unknown Chinese brand (Eastern, duh). But then I saw the second TVC in this ad campaign, and well, you’ll have to be subject to me taking apart Whiskas.

In the first TVC, a Chinese girl hands her gweilo lover a pack of Chinese cat food to feed the cat, who obviously only loves Whiskas. The boyfriend, knowing better, empties out the pack of Chinese catfood into the bin and then pours Whiskas crapfood into the pack, which he subsequently feeds to the cat. The girlfriend comes back and in her best Chinagirl accents says “Oooo, cat love Chinese catfood!”. The outtake from that TV ad is that cats know the difference between Whiskas and something else.

Evidently the creative team that was behind that TVC doesn’t know the difference between Chinese and Japanese. The first mistake being that the “Chinese catfood” looks more Japanese in nature. But the biggest mistake is that this cutesy girl image belongs closer to the Japanese stereotype than the Chinese stereotype, if anything. I’ve never come across any Chinese girls in London and Hong Kong, nor any mainland Chinese girls that have ever looked so stupidly cutesy.

But then again, none of the Japanese girls I know sound or behave like that either.

But the creative team should be able to tell the difference. In the second TVC, the rice-fevered boyfriend asks an Asian shop assistant where the Whiskas is. Obviously, the Asian guy is lazy and says something about all the catfood being the same. We all knew that Asians are lazy, right? Anyway, boyfriend ends up buying the mediocre catfood and lo-and-behold the cat doesn’t take to it. Cats, again, apparently know the difference.

So it’s nice for the creative team to spin the lie that cats can tell the difference, let alone give a damn, when they themselves can’t tell the difference between the subtleties of different Asian mannerisms. This is being as diplomatic as I can be. The truth is that these two TVC’s perpetuate the Asian stereotypes that circulate about Asians in the Western world, both of which are derogatory. Perhaps the creative team has some personal vendetta against Asian folk? Or maybe Whiskas feels the need to alienate its Asian audience or prepare European audiences for the inevitable China expansion into the catfood market.