Casual racism or laziness? Or just excessive pedantry?
Cory Doctorow has a new novel out! It’s called For The Win, and as is his usual wont, he’s put it up on his web page for people to download at will. Which is, of course, exactly what I did.
And then I was almost immediately ejected from the book, through the petard of carefully establishing that a bunch of characters are speaking Mandarin to one another, and then having one of them say, “Oh, here comes the gweilo.”
Two things wrong with that spring immediately to mind. The first thing wrong with it is that it’s apparently a spelling that’s been through at least one iteration of someone who doesn’t know Chinese looking up “a Chinese derogatory term for a foreigner”, and pronouncing the resulting “gwailo” through their monolingual English filter. Hence ending up as “gweilo”, which if this were a linguistics paper, would have an asterisk after it to indicate its non-word-ness. That’s just not the pronunciation of the word. Just ask someone from Hong Kong.
The other thing is that, even if that’s what he came up with, it’s a Cantonese word. That would be like asserting that gringo is a word that the French use to talk about foreigners. Cantonese is a different language from Mandarin, with its own grammar, vocabulary and all that stuff.
As a bonus, he went on to carefully explain that the word meant “foreign devil”, which is nonsense. It actually means “foreign ghost”, and refers to the pale ghost-like skin that Europeans tend to sport. It ain’t a polite term, but its literal meaning is considerably less diabolical than people think it is.
This leads me to wonder: is this just a case of being lazy (asking some guy what a derogatory Chinese term for foreigner is and accepting the first answer that comes by) or casual racism (assuming that all of those yellow people speak the same lingo, and hey, Chinese is Chinese)? If the former, I would certainly expect better from someone so proud of being a member of The Internet. If the latter—I am very disappoint. I would expect better from a Torontonian.
Why?