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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 17th, 2023

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  • I’m clearly approaching this from the point of view of language as a means to communicate and connect with people, while you see language as something that has to bring you clear benefits. I went to the trouble of writing a whole ass paragraph about how Chinese is not a single country language and there are several countries worth of people outside the firewall using it. Of course no other language under the sun will ever compare to English in terms of practical usefulness, but it’s as good as it’s going to be for a second language, up there with French and Spanish maybe. You don’t have to assume everyone who disagrees is offended.


  • People forget, but China itself has a population of 1.4 billion people. That’s at least 4 times the population of the US, you never run out of people to talk to in Chinese. Not to mention, there is also Taiwan and Hong Kong, and several countries around Asia that host significantly large racially Chinese diaspora, such as Malaysia or Singapore. I’m not talking about recent Chinese immigrants, but people who have been living there for generations and have never stepped foot in China.

    Language is for communicating with people, it’s a rather narrow view to only see the business use for languages. If anyone wants to pick up a second language, Chinese is as good as it’s going to get. You aren’t limited to 1.4 billion communists to talk to with your Chinese skills, try a Taiwanese or Chinese Malaysian or smth.



  • Pretty sure you aren’t discussing in good faith, but let me add that local Asians like me, aren’t the least bit offended by being called “rice eaters”. I do in fact eat rice almost everyday because I enjoy it. A majority of my countrymen enjoy rice too. It’s also cheap and infinitely customisable, exactly as implied by ricing. I will genuinely be pleased if people in other countries enjoyed our rice dishes.

    Again, if you aren’t going to engage me in good faith, just kindly ignore. I will still stand by my point that this is a global platform, and everyone else shouldn’t have to tiptoe around the “rice” term just because Americans can’t treat Asian Americans decently. You guys generated all this baggage on the name of our staple food, maybe you guys should fix it back home first.



  • For the sake of the American asian diaspora minorities again?

    This reminds me of attacking those girls for wearing a kimono or cheongsam to a prom. The Japanese and Chinese living in Japan and China certainly don’t have an issue. It’s the Japanese/Chinese American minority community who has built their identity around it, and feels threatened by the use of their traditional clothing. Fine, the prom is in America, it’s an American problem in an American space, the local diaspora have a say there.

    Unixporn on lemmy.ml isn’t American(or any one country) though, clearly there are a variety of people from every corner of the globe here. This place is positively cosmopolitan. I don’t see a reason why the “rice” term still has to be protected despite being a global platform. Just like it’s fine for any tourist to rent a kimono in Japan, it should be fine to use rice as a term here. Unless this platform were to officially become Amerian(or any other country like Fedd.it etc), this problem shouldn’t exist. I’m an rice eating asian myself, I’ll be glad if people were to associate rice with customization.

    The Asian American community should keep in mind that the internet isn’t always an American space by default. I don’t think they should be gatekeeping everything Asian on a global platform.