Fili’s world

What do you think the Asian stereotype is in Israel? how do Israelis perceive somebody Asian they see or meet in the streets of Jerusalem or Tel-Aviv?

Since I can’t use very good quantitive research methods, I’ll result to using my simple qualitative methods which are based on my acquaintance with my Asian friends and a my perception of the Israeli media.

My Chinese teacher Lin, who’s originally from China, likes to include a lot of stories about herself and her life in our classes. Here’s the 6th sentence of our last homework (class 5) -

6. 這個大學的警衛問我們的漢語老師：“你是誰？你需要不需要我幫你在哪家餐館找一份工作？”

My quick translation - 

A guard at the entrance to the university asked my Chinese teacher : "And you are… ?! Do you want me to help you find work at some restaurant?

(a quick background note - this is about Israel which has very tight security just about everywhere, and that includes guards and metal detectors in the university entrance). Discussing this with Lin before, I’m sure this isn’t a joke.

Most Asians in Israel are foreign workers from Thailand, the Philippines and China that do all kinds of jobs that most Israelis don’t want to do - construction, elderly-care, house-cleaning, agriculture, and stirring up fried-vegetables in Asian fastfood places. As a result, there’s a strong stereotype about Asians and so my Asian friends, who have great jobs or are MA students at the university, are being approached by Israelis who offer them to do house-cleaning or stir-frying. It makes me sad to hear those kind of stories, even though my Asian friends find those amusing.

Israel has a very popular satire show called "It’s a wonderful country" or "Eretz Nehederet", and a nice thing about this show is that they put some of the popular scenes up on the web for anybody to watch. This show is always among the top 3 on the ratings list, and has turned into somewhat of a cult-show. I did a very quick review of all the seasons posted on the web to see if any of them include references to Asians and found 3 :

• A flick about a famous ex-model-businesswoman Pnina Rosenblaum and her Philippine house-maid.
• A flick about an Israeli travel show called Masa Olami (meaning - world travel) joking about the host exploring the sex scene in Thailand.
• A flick about how much Israeli families suffer when their Asian foreign workers are deported.

Israelis/Jews in Taiwan and China have the problem of being referred to by the stereotype of "very good at making money", which might be annoying but could be much worse when considering other countries’ attitude. As for Taiwanese and Chinese in Israel - I’m a bit worried.