That’s right. Cibai. Non-Hokkien speakers might be scratching their heads as to why this is so shocking, but to put it bluntly, that’s like calling the application “Vagina” but with the much more offensive four-letter version. In Malaysia and Singapore at least, the word is often used as a catch-all swear word that replaces the f-word and other offensive terms like “bastard” and “dickhead”, and is rarely used in a literal way. As for this application, apparently the name stands for Class Invariants By Abstract Interpretation, and you can insert your own joke here about what “class invariant” means when it comes to female genitalia.

Needless to say, I immediately shared this link around to my Chinese-speaking friends and we were all extremely amused. Does this Microsoft developer know about this unfortunate meaning for the name of his application? I highly doubt it. But something tells me he’ll know about it soon enough.

This had me thinking. First of all, what the heck is he asking me to do? Eat rice? Do the peace sign? Giggle incessantly? What exactly is “doing something Asian”? Then I remembered to the first days of the dot-com era when I used to have an actual webcam, to display on my blog. Don’t ask me why; I was an innocent tech-curious girl who wanted to know what the hubbub was about. So I went to this random QuickCam site that was suggested with the software, and started to broadcast. Within minutes, if not seconds, I had people chatting me up with really crude pick-up lines. And almost all of them referred to me being Asian as one of the key points.

Of course, I’m not saying I’m unfamiliar with the idea of the Asian fetish. But it was still a shocking and surprising thing to someone who a) didn’t get a lot of flirtations in real life, and b) wasn’t used to being so readily stereotyped.

All of which led me to these questions: Do Asian women, just by the nature of being Asian, appear more submissive to people in general? Are we more coveted as sex objects compared to white women? The answers are probably “yes” but I would love to hear what people have to say about this, and what Asian women in particular have done to deal with this kind of stereotype.

PS. And yes, I know I was naive in expecting actual civility on the Internet with the webcam. My bad.

I was a little perplexed at this golden poop worship by the Japanese, and decided to do a little more searching around. According to this Japan Times article:

The product you saw is called Kin no Unko (The Golden Poo), a name that plays on the fact that the Japanese word for poop (unko) starts with the same “oon” sound as a completely unrelated word that means “luck.” Japanese enjoy this kind of pun — traditional storytelling is full of them — which may help explain why more than 2.5 million of the lucky little loads have sold in the last seven years.

And apparently, the golden poop phenomenon only came around in 1999, which isn’t that long ago. But as the article goes on to explain, “there is a long history of poo-related worship in Japan”:

“There are more gods in the Shinto religion than it is possible to count, and they reside just about everywhere, inhabiting natural things like trees, rocks and waterfalls,” he said. “Bodily functions are very important — think what a problem it would be if a person couldn’t defecate or urinate properly — so it’s natural that people worshipped deities linked to these functions.”

Despite myself, I had to laugh. I thought back to my childhood, and remembered a few Chinese cartoons and comic strips that clearly showed drawings of poop, and I wondered if this so-called “poop worship” is an East Asian thing in general. Maybe Asians are more accepting of bodily functions than more Westernized cultures?

Regardless, I have to admit that these tiny little shiny poop charms are kinda cute. Hey, they even have one in a catcher’s mitt! That said, I probably won’t want to have these things hanging from my cell phone. How about you?