If there was NO racism in Singapore there would be no Racial Harmony campaigns every so many years here
.......
Anyway, we have to accept that there is racism everywhere, and it is not going away, but with understanding of other races livestyles etc we can come to a level where we can live together with respect....actually, here in Singapore it is not that bad compared to Europe now.
However, I had a very bad incident in 1994 in Singapore: I went to visit a modern farm owned by a retired (chinese) Colonel (so he says), and it was getting dark, then a group of Indian women walked by his farm far away, and he says "the black rats are coming out".
I don't know why he called them that, perhaps he had some unpleasant experience before, but there is no excuse
to blame a whole group for the actions of a few?
Well, I quickly left the place, and never wanted to met this guy, but I still met him again a year later in my Institute where he was trying to get some collaboration done....
To perhaps answer your question: why chinese are the least interested into mixed marriage, perhaps it is because of the almost obsessive behaviour that we have to keep our (chinese ) names and heritage, so blame it to our old traditions.......and probably there is also some 'superiority' feeling in it perhaps for some ignorant people.
To go further into it: you know that chinese in the past (and perhaps now still, and maybe also for other races) consider that when a woman marries, she becomes part of her husbands family? She doesn't carry her own family name anymore.....this also leads to gender discrimination at birth (look at Korea and China). People don't know that genetically, sisters and brothers carry (almost) exactly the same genetic background from their families, and it is just our (society) choice of follwing the fathers family name that created all this troubles for girls......in some societies in Sumatra people follow the mothers family name (matriarchal)
My personal view is that people think in 'boxes': we are this and that, and others are not so they don't belong to us, we forget that we are all human beings and baiscally the same (ok, apart from gender lah!)......
When I look back into the past, the first chinese Foreign Talents people who came here in the 19th century to work (almost like slaves) couldn't find chinese brides, so they married into the locals (Malay)......more intermarriage then!
Hong Sien
