[鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]

(He/Him/佢/他)
美籍華人 Chinese American

Native Speaker of:
粵語/廣東話 Cantonese
国语/普通话 Mandarin
台山話 Taishanese

alts: @WongKaKui@piefed.social

光復香港，時代革命。
Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times.

  • 142 Posts
  • 2.17K Comments
Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: June 23rd, 2025
  • [鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]@sh.itjust.workstoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Getting too expensive
    4·
    8 hours ago

    I mean, I’m not alone, I read a lot of users on reddit Asian communities that also said their parents “joked” about the same thing. I think its some weird cultural thing… Asians, I’m talking about Chinese specifically, tend to just be blunt about everything and joke about everything, like… if you watch enough media of Western vs Chinese Media (which, I know, TV shows is not an accurate representation of life), you notice the differences in how people talk differently.

    My extended family members (they’re from Hong Kong, we’re from Mainland) is also very blunt about things, so its not exactly unique to my parents. Like… I have no idea what a western family dynamic is really like… but from what I can gather on watching TV and movies, there’s like a different “vibe” to it.

    It’s seen as toxic in a western family, but in a Chinese family, that’s just a harmless joke.

    My mom also called me “肥仔“ (“fatty”?) which… by the tone of her voice, it’s supposed to be endearing in a way… like how you call a big/overweight cat a “chonker”, but its gets annoying after a while since that’s not exactly positive attribute since like she’s just say I’m fat and need to lose weight like every so often… apparantly this is a normal thing… in the Asian “overton window” of parenting.

    My mom also joked and called me “二公子” (second son [of a noble]) as if we are nobility or something, like I think that’s implying that I’m too “needy” like a spoiled child or something… she said it with a positive tone as if its supposed to be endearing… but it feels kinda passive aggressive and sarcastic… like didn’t they give me a name (well actually I think that’s the paternal grandparents that had the most say in choosing our names), like I have a name, a legal name passed down by my ancestors… that just doesn’t exist? lmao… literally just one syllable (first character/syllable of the name can be omitted since my brother shame the same character), its literally easier to use my actual name than these weird joke nicknames that, I dont exactly hate per se, like I don’t feel offended or like sad, but its very annoying is what I mean.

    I think sometime during my teenage years, I just started “rebeling” and called my parents by their real names… and that’s like a big no-no in Chinese culture, you are never supposed to use their real names, you are only supposed to call older relative by their relationship to you. So you can’t call an older brother by their name, but they can call you by your name…

    I hated it.

    So I just started using “死■” to refer to my older brother ([character for death] + [the last character of his given name, which I’ll redact for privacy reasons]). I did that ever since I was a kid and learned the death character. We fought a lot.

    Wall of Text on Chinese names

    For context: Chinese name are like (I’m gonna use English letters in place of the actual characters, like pretend this is algebra or soemthing):

    So, your name looks something like:

    Say: The letter F represents your family name, your brother would have ZA as their name, then you’d have ZB, both of you share the Z character, so you just refer to them by their other character that’s unique to yourself. Your father would have like XW for their name.

    So im summary, your father would have the characters FXW, your brother would have FZA, you’d have FZB, also the AB characters can actually form one word together.

    So using 死 and their Chinese character that is in this example represented by the letter A, is how my older brother and I just curse at each other, by insulting the name.

    Anyways, enough rambling about Chinese Names

    As I got older, I even started calling my parents by their names, I mean… never use the death character on my parents, but I did just call them by their given names, sometimes their full names. At first, they got mad (they were also unhappy about me calling my older brother by his name, but this is next level of “crossing the line”), but then I just use the “This is 'Murica” excuse, and I read on the news that white kids call their parents on first name basis anyways, so I just kept doing that and they kinda just accepted it.

    I don’t do that all the time, but when I really wanna piss them off, I’ll use their real names. xD, fuck tradition

  • [鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]@sh.itjust.workstoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•When, if ever, was the last physical altercation you've had/been in?
    5·
    19 hours ago

    High School, Self Defence, got arrested. School administration sided against me and call the cops. I was 17. School district then tried to expel me, but failed. Charges eventually got dropped. I ended up just hating school and authority¹, I just took the GED, I got high scores on it without studying (I mean it aint hard, just basically highschool speedrun via a test that takes like a few hours in total time, I know the stuff already). USA btw.

    (¹I mean, who doesn’t hate authority, that’s like American tradition, lol)

    I have to thank my mother for becoming a citizen and therefore I automatically derived citizenship (under the Child Citizenship Act), so I already had citizenship several years prior to this incident. I can’t imagine the alternate-timeline of the possibility of being deported for a stupid school fight (I mean it’s a hypothetical worst-case scenario, not sure if that would actually happen in practice for something that small, but then-again this was during trump term 1 so… 🤷‍♂️ anything could happen).

    My Mandarin skills are like… 2nd grade level last time I’ve been in school in China, if I got deported, not sure I’d survive in that society, especially in this scenario, I’d be separated from my family that are probably gonna stay in the US and I probably get left behind.

    Hypothetical alternate timelines always hurts my brain just thinking about them…

    I think I had a few fights in like elementary school, I was always the one getting bullied for some reason… always on the defence, I never even provoked a fight. What the fuck is this life.