Racism and prejudice

To the scriptwriters of Monster Hunter, it was a simple pun on words, some light-hearted dialogue between two American soldiers.  But to Chinese cinemagoers, these two short lines were a major insult, their translation causing such public outrage that within 24 hours of the film’s release, it was pulled from Chinese cinemas. “What knees are these?” jokes an Asian soldier to a white soldier.   “Chi-knees,” he responds. What the film company failed to realize was that the Chinese subtitles changed the hard-to-translate pun to “there is gold underneath my knees” – a reference to a proverb that means men do not kneel or submit easily.  The backlash to the fantasy action movie was swift as outra

For Marie-Louisa Awolaja, a British-Nigerian, life in Hong Kong often means she is highly visible as a Black woman, yet simultaneously invisible. “I was surprised at how invisible I was, in a way,” she said. “I expect to be stared at on this side of the world. People don’t necessarily, especially locals, they just carry on – most of the stares you get are from mainland [Chinese] tourists. But when it comes to service, it becomes more evident. They sometimes just don’t acknowledge you. It’s as if you don’t exist.” Her voice is one of many shared on HomeGrown, a new podcast she co-created with fellow British-Nigerian Folahan Sowole as a guide to the Black expat experience in Hong Kong.  It in

After two years of investigation, the US Department of Justice on Thursday accused Yale University of illegally discriminating against Asian-American and white undergraduate applicants through its admission policies. In a letter to Yale’s lawyers, the Justice Department threatened a civil lawsuit unless the Connecticut-based private university agreed not to use “race or national origin” in its upcoming 2020-21 undergraduate admissions cycle. It gave Yale until August 27 to comply. The accusation is the latest attack by the Trump administration on affirmative action policies designed to increase access to higher education for systematically marginalized groups, such as black applicants. “If

After a 2017 rap show got a generation of China’s youth hooked on hip hop, the musical genre has created dozens of Chinese stars and, along with them, billions of streaming views. But despite their enthusiasm for a culture that originated in the African-American community, Chinese hip-hop stars and their legions of fans have largely stayed silent on the Black Lives Matter movement, which has swept across the world after the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in Minneapolis. Canadian-Chinese hip-hop star Kris Wu has made no comments on the anti-racism protests to his 50.9 million social media followers on Weibo and 7.3 million on Instagram. GAI, a rapping competition winner

After two years of living in Beijing, Jesse Bowens-Xu was tired, annoyed and ready to go home. The daughter of an African-American father and Chinese mother, she had gone to China to study and connect with her heritage. However, her skin color became a source of day-to-day frustration and prejudice. When applying for part-time teaching jobs to support her studies, the message she got was: “unmarketable to Chinese parents,” she said. This despite being a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and completing a master’s degree at the prestigious Peking University in Beijing. Locals running up to snap photos made her feel “like an animal in the zoo,” she said. About two years after

Police in Vancouver say the man suspected of targeting Asian women wearing face masks in a racist incident on a bus has died of an apparent drug overdose. The death was announced on Wednesday, a day after Metro Vancouver Transit Police had asked the public for help in identifying the suspect in the April 15 incident. “The suspect was a 48-year-old man from Vancouver with no fixed address who was well known to police,” Constable Mike Yake said. “We learned that the suspect had passed away from an apparent drug overdose approximately one week after this incident.” Yake thanked the media and the public for their help in identifying the man believed to have been involved in what he called a “di

According to Metro Vancouver Transit Police, the unidentified man boarded a downtown bus on April 15 – then immediately turned his attention to two Asian women, both wearing face masks. “Go back to your country; that’s where it all started,” he told the pair, according to a police request for public assistance issued on Tuesday.  Police say the man then attacked a third woman who came to the pair’s defense, kicking her, wrestling her to the floor of the bus and ripping out a clump of hair. Three days before that attack, a different man was captured on surveillance footage strolling through Vancouver. He veers towards a small Asian woman wearing a hoodie. She glances up before the man punche

A mixed-race contestant on a Chinese singing competition show has been targeted with racial abuse as the treatment of African people living in the country comes under increased scrutiny. Winnie Zhong Feifei, who was born in Liaoning province to a Chinese mother and Congolese father, was recently revealed as a contestant on the singing competition show Produce Camp 2020, a spin-off of the famed South Korean K-pop reality show Produce 101.  Since the announcement, Zhong has had to deal with a storm of derogatory comments on Chinese social media due to her African heritage. In comments left on Zhong’s Weibo account, some netizens have used the transliterated Chinese characters for the derogato

Yue Qu did not expect to be spending the end of his first year of college alone in his room on a deserted campus in California. But he had little choice. Despite booking several tickets home to Chengdu, in southwest China, the flights kept getting canceled as China and other countries imposed air travel restrictions amid the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. “I have two tickets for May, but I’m not confident that those flights will run. There’s no reason for me to be here, and it’s a stressful experience staying here all alone,” he said. Yue is among the roughly 350,000 Chinese students studying at US colleges and universities, the largest group of foreign students in the country. It is not clea

McDonald’s China has apologized after a branch introduced a ban on black customers, just as Africans are complaining of being targeted for enforcement action in China’s fight against the coronavirus. Over the weekend, a video circulating online showed a Chinese staff member at a McDonald’s restaurant showing a sign banning black people from entering.  “We've been informed from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant,” says the notice, written in English. “For the sake of your health, consciously notify the local police for medical isolation, please understand the inconvenience caused.” Again, for those who still doubt that Black people and particularly #AfricansinChina ar