Thursday, September 30, 2004
Beauty = Eurasian/FBC

Read the online version of Monday's TNP this morning and they were featuring another newcomer to the TV scene in Singapore,Alex Polstra,who's featured on the new Mediacorp 5 reality series(not another "reality" show again???!!!Goodness me,when will they ever get sick of doing reality and the horrible "Eye For A Guy" enough torture for the average viewer already?),Extreme Gourmet.First off,let me say this...enough of unscripted reality crap shows and give me some quality scripted shows instead,sitcoms or dramas or whatever.I can't stand all these reality shows anymore.Do we have to wait until Survivior:Antarctic to realise that we have run out of ideas and locations for such crap?Oh,Antarctic...they just might do it.Anyway,back to talking about Polstra.

Polstra,as the name suggests,is an Eurasian.Now look all around you,besides the Mandarin channels(because these angmohs cannot speak Mandarin to save their lives),where can you NOT find them?Like TVMedia,they are everywhere.It's horrible.It's like they are the only good looking people left in Singapore and all the other pure Chinese are crap lookers.Is that true?Take a walk down Orchard Road for 15 minutes and tell me your conclusion.And if those people on TV are not Eurasians,they are,tah dah,Foreign Born Chinese(FBCs,I coined the term myself because they are not all Americans...right???)actors or actresses.Actually this occurs not only in Singapore but in HK as well.

The Asian entertainment world seems obssessed in assuming some kind of pseudo-Caucasian beauty and Pan-Pacific look.It's either that or they got to be some hot-shot Asian American dude who comes back to the East to seek his "heritage" and explore opportunities here.And they get plenty.My Taiwanese friend,Jen,absolutely hates these ABCs who come back from the States to make a living here as superstars.She thinks they don't really care about Asia in particular and are here just to earn a buck.After all,they are still Americans actually.The list of such celebrities in the HK and S'pore entertainment scene is,of course,also long.Let's list down some of the names.

Th list of singers who are Americans and went back to Taiwan and HK to develope their careers include Coco Lee(the Chinese-American singer or slut who tried to break into US,failed and is now neither here nor there),Elva Hsiao,Evonne Hsu,David Tsao and Marchi.The list of actors in the HK entertainment includes Maggie Q(who still hasn't done anything and had to bare her boobs in the indie flop,Manhattan Midnight,to try to break back into the US market and still failed.Haha!) and Daniel Wu(getting better but still a piece of wood).Singapore?There is such a lrage number that it'd be difficult NOT being able to name one.Allan Wu,Steph Song(she's Aussie),Keagan Kang and the entire cast of Masters Of The Sea.Wait,that is so long ago eh...I think I must have left out a lot of names because I can't remember anybody right now.

Of the lot I mentioned,Maggie Q also happens to be Eurasian.Is top local model Rebecca Tan Eurasian too?How about Corrianne Adrienne(is that her name?)?Or the one-movie babe in the Nicholas Tse movie,Danielle(the one where Nicholas Tse and Stephen Fong are detectives in some paranormal police unit combating ghouls and they fight against some water and fire ghosts and all that rubbish.Thought the movie was titled "2002" or something like that.)?

I should really advocate equal opportunities for all I suppose but hey,I am no labour rights activist so I don't really care.I just think that,too often,our vision of beauty is shaped too much by what we see and read on the telly,magazines and all other kinds of media that we believe in what they wnat us to believe in.This includes the concept of beauty as well.Well,of course,I can't deny that those people I mentioned are good-looking buggers but surely,we can't blindly follow everything the media feeds us.It's not reality and it builds up some kind of standard that we expect of partners and potentials that is not usually realistic.

I can already feel my points deviating much from how I started the blog but pardon me because this damn thing was done over the period of four days so what I made set out to write from the start has now become slightly different from how I am developing it.While I was ranting about the avanlanche of Eurasian and FBC faces on our screens and our media in general,I am suddenly talking about the shaping of the public perception of beauty by the media.It's not totally disconnected.Now,we perceive the Pan-Pacific look to be the in-look.The type we are looking for so to speak.But hang on a second,you see that many Eurasians on the streets?We do see a lot of dyed blond hair on the streets of course but those people may be trying to affect an Eurasian look but seriously,they'd need the entire population to be blind not to see beyond the dyed streaks.Wah liao eh,this is some quite serious criticism man.

Ok ok,I better end my blog here because I am losing track of my direction.I think I got my points across?Right right right?Patronise me.