Growing up Gweilo

As I scroll back through our blog, I realize that there are major gaps in our accounting of our adventures and misadventures in Hong Kong. There are things I should have filled you in on long ago. One of those basic things that I learned about the first week I was here but that I never posted about is the term gweilo.

From gringo (Mexico) to giajin (Japan), almost everywhere you go in the world, the locals are going to have a term for you, you tall white foreign devil. Hong Kong is no exception.

Gweilo literally means ghost man. Historically it has not been a nice term, on par with some of the more egregious racial epithets that come to mind. But over the years, gweilo has lost much of its derogatory meaning. In fact, there are large segments of the mostly younger generation of non-Chinese Hong Kongers who have embraced the term.

I have never had a Chinese person refer to me as gweilo to my face and I have never overheard the word used in my presence. But the word is freely used in the ex-pat community –at least in the circles we run in. In fact, there is a book out there written years ago by a Hong Konger of European decent called “Growing Up Gweilo” that chronicles his youth in Hong Kong in the 1960s.

The four of us? We’ve embraced the term. We try to be a little discrete in public, because we don’t want to appear to be a family of uncouth . . . well, gweilo. But in our household, we use it self-referentially all the time –usually when commenting on our ignorance or one of our recent blunders.

But apparently, the term gweilo hasn’t totally lost its edge, because the few times that I have used it in front of my students, it has raised a few eyebrows.

I’m going to have to be more culturally sensitive.

Bad, gweilo.

-Jack