Just Saying | Is ‘gweilo’ really a racist word? Hong Kong just can’t decide
Yonden Lhatoo shakes his head at the on-again, off-again debate over the use of the word that is obviously racist in its roots, but has become benign due to widespread acceptance among Caucasians themselves
Here we go again. The same old question that Hong Kong can never give a straight answer to after all these years: is it acceptable to use the word gweilo for Caucasian people, or anyone who’s not Chinese for that matter?
The latest catalyst for this on-again, off-again debate is the case of a British man who has filed a discrimination lawsuit against a construction contractor he worked for, citing what he called a “general underlying hostility towards non-Chinese employees”, who were referred to as “gweilo in a derogatory sense”.
The offending Cantonese term literally translates as “ghost man”, the pejorative intent harking back to the unpolitically correct days when passive-aggressive natives perceived those pale Europeans who colonised Hong Kong as being ghostlike foreign devils.
There’s no denying the xenophobic roots of the word, but the fact is, it’s now used so widely and commonly in this city that most of those pesky foreign devils don’t take it as a racist epithet.
Now, of course, that can change depending on the situation as well as the tone and delivery of the term, and it can be used as a disparaging descriptor.
But where do you draw the line? Some of you might remember the controversy back in 1998, when, during a debate in the legislature about attacks on the local currency, veteran politician James Tien Pei-chun referred to international speculators as gweilo.
The thing is, two decades later, not a single Caucasian colleague I’ve asked in my office feels unduly offended by the word. Many of them see no problem in regularly using it to describe themselves.