pantsfarm

I’m just collecting some quotes I’ve read recently on the differences between the two.

from portrait of an LBX

Speaking of laowai, that’s the other word that gets our goat. Laowai — along with dialectical equivalents: lowei, waigolo, gueilo, etc. — means “foreigner,” but it is the slang way of saying it compared with the proper term waiguoren (compare the word “Paki” for “Pakistani” or the French slang “ricain”, semi-derogatory shortening of the formal demonym “américain”). Just about every Chinese in the country will shout this out from either pure stupefaction at seeing us or just to let everybody know what’s coming through town (imagine the scene from Blazing Saddles when the town drunk is screaming, “the new sheriff’s a ni**er!”). I’ve tried explaining to countless Chinese why we don’t like it when people shout laowai out in front of our faces. We know we’re different, that we come from somewhere else, that our eyes and noses and hair and whatever other parts don’t look like theirs — we know all of that very, very well, and when we’re trying to initiate contact with a new person, the last thing we want is for them to turn to their buddies laughing and say “laowai” as though a stray dog had just started talking. Every time I explain why this irks us, they just give me blank faces and say, “but that’s just the word we use for you… we don’t mean anything by it.” I suppose they, coming from one of the world’s most insular societies, have absolutely no idea what this must feel like, and rationally this shouldn’t be a problem for smart people like Andy and me. But hearing it thirty times a day, in addition to all the other stupid jeers, just really wears us thin, especially when we’re tired or in a bad mood (see above). I do suppose that if you went back a hundred years, before there was any idea of political correctness or courtesy for people who look *different*, and asked even an educated, open-minded man in the American South why he used the word, “ni**er” to refer to black people, he probably would have responded, “well, that’s just the word we use for ‘em… we don’t mean nothin’ by it.” Maybe when my grandkids come to China, things will be different. Until then, we grind our teeth and bear it.

from a thread on the something awful forums

uick question, how does everyone feel about this word? I personally got no issue with it in the slightest and use it to refer to myself or other foreigners all the time. However, in recent months I’ve met more and more people (usually Chinese-literate-just-outta-college kids) who feel all offended by it.

One girl I work with (Actually the same one I mentioned earlier about the IN AMERICA WE DO IT THIS WAY thing) was all pissed when she heard our place’s boss boasting(?) to some dude about how she had about 30 “laowais” working for her. She was all, “Why doesn’t she just use “外国人!” I personally see laowai as a more colloquial but more or less un-pejorative term for 外国人.

I’m not personally offended by it, my friends refer to me as a laowai. My boss, who lived in Beijing for a number of years seems to think it’s offensive though. He prefers wàiguó rén. I think maybe in bigger cities it has generated a negative connotation but here in a relatively remote southern boom town, where foreigners have rarely been seen before, laowai seems like the defacto term and I don’t take offense. Maybe it’s like a black/African American thing?

That’s pretty much my feeling on it. Laowai has pejorative connotations but when most people use it I don’t think they mean to include those.

Of course, China isn’t that far along with the whole “racism is bad” thing and you do probably run into more people using it in a nasty or superior way, and there’s a little bit of difference (probably superiority) built into the way Chinese people talk about race anyway (white people, black people, red people, yellow TYPE people…) so maybe it’s a little worse than “black / African American” but this is all pretty nebulous anyway and really if I had to choose I’d say go ahead and keep calling me a chalkie just stop doing the farmer blow on the sidewalk in front of my apartment and I’ll call it even.

as for the laowai thing… yea, i went through a phase where i didn’t like it, but meh, bitch all you want its never going to change… might as well embrace it.

From a chat where I asked about differences:

老外 is more 口语
外国人 is more formal
Also
老外 is probably used to refer to white people
外国人 is more neutural
neutral

Also, I just asked on quora.

Watching the status updates of my distant friend’s lives fly by I started wondering about how tastes change. I saw a few people I know going back to the places they went to college and from there one or two mentioned how they’d gone back to their old haunts.

It reminded me a bit of this time a friend of a friend came to visit Beijing and we were at dinner and I discovered that he had just finished law school at my alma mater in Chicago. We got to talking about the places to hang out in Hyde Park and it struck me how we had some very different experiences.

While I was in Hyde Park, there were a few restaurants that I went to a number of times and whie I don’t think I would have said they were amazing places, weren’t bad food. But since leaving Chicago, or hell, since getting out of Hyde Park more in later years, I’ve realized that a lot of the places I’d eat at repeatedly were actually kind of awful. Convenient and good enough, but otherwise wholly unremarkable if not actually remarkably gross.

So when I see people go back to their school and say how they’ve eaten at one of their old haunts and how great it is, it makes me wonder if they just had much better food around their school, or if they haven’t since expanded their definition of great food since finishing college. For me there’s not much I would go out of my way to have in Hyde Park. While the 55th street may have been where I have eaten the largest amount of Thai food in my life by volume, it is certainly overrepresented relative to how good it is.

Of course, it’s not just the food. It’s the place as much as the food for a nostalgic visitor. In fact, upon thinking back, I am probably guilty of having made these same kinds of status updates myself. Shortly after moving to China, I did go back to Hyde Park and I probably ate all the same crappy things and thought so highly of the experience because of all the good things I associate with the places I ate, all the things besides the food.

Some of the attention I used to put towards this blog I think has been diverted recently by those more micro- oriented sites Twitter and Tumblr (@rstadler and Tweedhouse respectively).

That said, far and away most of my idle internet cycles have been ploughed into Quora lately (my profile being here).

I was watching (well, not really watching so much as looking at the gamecast while simultaneously listening to an audio stream, video streams were just too crappy) for the NBA finals today and while looking for more commentary found some of these images which I was quite amused by.

Most people in the office seem to be rooting for the Lakers. Kobe is pretty famous here in China and I wonder if they are largely just rooting for him?

I also learned today that in the many encounters the Celtics and the Lakers have had in the NBA finals, something like 11 times, the Celtics have won 9 of them. I didn’t realize that head to head the numbers were so lopsided. Both teams have racked up an impressive number of championships though.

I’m finally beginning to feel recovered from the havok being unleashed upon my sleep schedule by the World Cup. Games at 2:30 AM are especially difficult for me to watch because I don’t like staying awake straight through to 4:30 in the morning, but I also can’t really bring myself to go to sleep early enough to feel good about waking up for a 2:30 game.

Luckily so far the only 2:30 games I’ve been really anxious to see have fallen on days where I didn’t have work the next day, and so, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a really entertaining experience to be in a bar at 3 in the morning surrounded by equally enthused people chanting USA. It’s even more fun, I think, when the other half of the bar is English and has much more creative cheers only to get drowned out by an even louder round of U!S!A! Thankfully, the experience was a pretty fun feel rather than one of unveiled hostility or contempt. I was standing next to this Brit and he had the good humor to answer some of my rooted-in-ignorance questions (mostly about the lineups of both teams since I really don’t know anything).

I’ve started reading The Goal Post since I can’t be bothered to go out and find commentary myself, I’m relying on their “Best of AM/PM” digests to keep me somewhat informed. So far so good, I guess.

GOOO USA! (ps thx Green)