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IT WORKS; IT WORKS: THANK YOU KA
It is really great. You have worked very hard. Thank you.
It is really good to have a history.
One of the threads deals with terminology - oriental, asian, etc.
I am uncomfortable with all of them. I am also uncomfortable with terms
like "Vietnamese-Australian", "Vietnamese-American", etc. The first
part, the "Vietnamese" part, does not have the same quality of meaning
as the second part - "Australian" or "American". The first is
essentially a qualifier that somehow restricts the second - which is
nationality. Its use should therefore be avoided, I think. It becomes
as silly as saying "Boy-scout-American". If someone chooses to have
affiliations within the country in which they live, then that ought not
to qualify their right to belong and to share in the mainstream. Maybe
this is all a sort of political correctness gone wrong.
"Where are you from" ought to mean what it says. I am from Melbourne.
This is where I am. If you want to ask (and I'll bet most people won't)
:what is my ethnicity - then that is a different question. If you ask I
will answer.
For us in Australia, "oriental" is a nonsense. It means "from the East"
I guess. And Asia is to our north and maybe East. "Asian" is equally
uninstructive - India, Pakistan, Philipines, Mongolia?
On the other side of the coin, terms like "westerner", "white", "tay
phuong", want to lump an awful lot of people into one convenient
category.
Maybe this is an insurmountable linguistic problem. Perhaps also it is
a smoke screen that hides prejudices of one form or another. Perhaps
the individual is more important than the terminology. Certainly, and
others have made this point here, the love of one person for another,
ought to beyond such petty and uninformative pidgeon-holing.
Mike
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