Human beings are born to learn to identify, to congregate and to discriminate. It's inside each individual's mind, of course it exists anywhere on Earth, including in this so-called Garden City.
I'm lucky to face the very very mild type of discrimination lol. 1st encounter was on my virgin international flight to Melbourne. I was sitting beside a local Australian and yeah we had some chit chat but too bad my listening and grasp of Australian accent was too poor(and still is) that he got a bit impatient and spoke to me using strings of English words instead of sentences>.< "I..rear....cows...very big....."blah blah, ugh but anyhow he was still nice, nothing nasty happened, just felt that I was being looked down by a caucasian~
On my very 1st day in Melbourne ie.18-2-2009, I was having my lunch at the KFC outlet opposite my rented apartment(Swanston/Grattan junction) when I heard the local Australian and his duno-how-old kid(probably 6-8 yrs old) murmuring and sniggering something like 'stinky asians...'Damn,should have scowled at them. Then everywhere i go, I'm always being mistaken as a China chinese >.< Went to the post office also, "Oh, where'd you want to send your parcel? China?" Argh, and the person in-charge that time was an Asian somemore. An Asian should be able to tell the difference between the way I speak English than how the mainland chinese do! (Caucasians are too proud and too ignorant to notice the difference in how we Asians speak English anyway until I tell them where I came from but still I don't think they give a damn)
Yeah right, my complexion is too fair and pale, and I don't speak those magnificent English, let alone seasoning it with local accent(maybe only with Malaysian accent). I can also feel that sometimes all those customer service staff or sales personnel are not as friendly as they are when dealing with caucasian customers. I thought I was just being too sensitive but well, some of my other friends here also share this same feeling lol.
I liked the moment when we all were in Mornington Peninsular. That time a local caucasian told us "Penguins over there" and Alex Ewe 'kek' the local accent "Oh really? We'll go there check it out!" hahaha,and he heard the woman whispered to her friends "Wow,that asian guy really knows English" LOL!
But there's still 1 ultra-sad moment that I can still vividly remember. That was when YiWern and I were at QV BigW. There's this 1 little chinese kid (5-7 yrs old?) fascinated with the display toy that he accidentally stepped on a local caucasian's foot. And the woman just got so mad that she shouted "OOOUUCH! That hurts, you stupid boy!"and stroked off. The kid's mum just managed to utter a sentence in Cantonese to her kid " you see, people just scolded you stupid.."Darn! C'mon, how painful could it be when a harmless little kid accidentally steps on your foot? Even if you are racially discriminative, you don't need to be so mean to a kid right? I felt so ashamed for that woman's sorry demeanour . Aikz~