Hurrah for the Yellow Peril.

When I was a boy there was still a fair amount of prejudice applied to foreigners and all things foreign. Older generations still remembered the days of Empire, you see, when Britain was Top Country and everything to the south and east of Europe our footstool. In particular, I remember there being two notable characteristics which were said to apply to the Chinese:

1. They were clever, but in a sneaky sort of way. We Brits regarded ourselves as having the monopoly on honourable cleverness; anybody who didn’t play cricket, but who had, nevertheless, to be acknowledged as clever, could only be sneakily clever. That’s the imperialist attitude at work.

2. They were inscrutable, which I suppose fits neatly with being sneaky. The game of poker – in which inscrutability is deemed a laudable attribute – was never highly regarded here. We were more inclined towards honest, open pursuits like charades, polo, and shooting big animals.

So, the first of those can be dismissed as merely silly, but the second warrants a note.

I’ve been watching an awful lot of Chinese people on YouTube lately – in films, music videos, dance productions and so on – and I have to say that I haven’t noticed the slightest hint of inscrutability. What I have noticed is that the Chinese appear to be rather more subtle in the way they express emotion than we westerners. And it’s a characteristic which this old, post-colonial Brit finds both fetching and effective.