Photo from Google
A seemingly innocuous article about Suri (Tom Cruise + Katie Holmes' baby) in the Life! section of yesterday's broadsheet (Baby Blues, page 8) caught my eye. It wasn't because the family had gone public. I wonder how much Vanity Fair paid the Cruises for those shots of the family? The antics of Hollywood celebrities are about as predictable as the weather.
Anyway what got my attention was the way which the report was slanted. The rags are all commenting about how "Asian" Suri looks. An excerpt from the report: "Somewhere in the gene pool of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, some Asian influence has crept in," it said, refering to the child's "delicate, almond-shaped eyes, the milky, pale-ish skin tone, the striking mane of dark, dark hair".
Does anyone even have a firm grasp on the concept of being Asian? If you were to ask anyone in Asia, you'd probably get as many opinions as there are Asians. In the UK when someone uses the term "Asian" he or she most probably means a person from the Indian sub-continent. To the Americans, being Asian means someone from the Far East, for example China, Korea or Japan. To some others, people from the Middle East are Asians.
Being Asian is something which cannot be understood easily. There is no cookie cutter that produces a nicely defined Asian identity. It is easy to fall into prejudice when dealing with something or someone alien. For example, people with Down's Syndrome were known as Mongoloids and the condition was called Mongolism. These terms came about because an English physician thought that people with Down's Syndrome looked like Mongolians and Mongolians suffered from arrested development.
We are still working towards an age of enlightenment.
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