Colour My World

I know I posted once with the same title. Heck, the food for thought will be similar too. However, now that I'm considered a minority in a foreign country, the context of this thought process is somewhat different for me.

For those who forgot, the post was about how colours brighten up the world. So roses are red and morning glories are ... uhh... purple? In that same sense, there are caucasians, there are chinese, there are indians and there are malays. Does that make the world a bad place because only one race can live here? No, that will simply make the world a more boring (and totally dreadful) place.

However, now that I'm on exchange in Sweden, I'm surrounded by caucasians everywhere. While Lund university accepts over a hundred exchange students every semester, the bulk of students are Europeans. It doesn't bother me that much to be a chinese in a land of caucasians. If they don't make a fuss, I won't either. Unfortunately, I have heard of some who do make a fuss.

Although I didn't experience these situations myself, it's enough to remind me that I'm a minority here. When Stan walked into his Swedish Orientation class the first day of lessons, many of the seats were already taken by the other students, most of them European. When he asked around if he could sit beside each of them, they claimed that they were saving their seats for their friends. However, many of them turned out to have strangers sitting beside them later on. The only difference was that the strangers were white-skinned, whereas Stan is a Singaporean Chinese.

When Tee walked past the pizza shop in front of the train station, the people working in the shop started chanting, "Chink, chink, chink...". There wasn't anyone in the shop, and no one else was walking near Tee, which leads to the reasonable conclusion that they were chanting to him.

This might sound disturbing. Here we have a world that is shrinking as Globalisation takes its course. Here we have a first world country with a high standard of living, where a simple meal costs 3 times as much as in Singapore. Here we have a country so conscious about the environment that they sort their rubbish into recyclables and boycott bottled water because of the waste it generates.

And also here, you hear stories about skin colour still being an issue.

I was out with my mentor group yesterday and we were talking about how some places in Europe aren't so safe if you're a different colour from the locals. Gangsters will beat you up and steal your money. However, everyone in that conversation circle we had agreed that skin colour is such a petty thing to squabble over. That people should never be judged by their skin colour. One of the people pointed out that while most people will willingly agree to that, there will always be some people who continue to discriminate. As I quote: There will always be some people who are sick in their minds who will continue to do that.

As a response, another person said, well, we're the lucky ones in our respective countries; to be able to get into university, to be able to go on exchange in a foreign land.

We're indeed the lucky ones. And we're also the ones who will have to propogate our belief that skin colour should never be an issue. -Jimmy