Ang Mo signing off, soon

Seemingly many Asian cultures have their own special term coined for foreigners often specifically targeting Westerners. Japanese have a racial epithet for outsiders called gaijin while in China it is laowai (or gweilo in Cantonese) whereas in Thailand it is farang. The Singaporean equivalent would be Ang Mo (红毛). While these terms may not have originated from derogatory nature, there is a pretty strong connotation of exclusiveness (ie. us vs. the outsiders) and depending on the context the term can also be used with intentionally offensive undertone.

Ang Mo literally means "red haired" and the etymology can be pretty easily guessed. The first usages of the term date back to 16th and 17th century in the Fujian province in China with Hokkien speakers (which is still the prevalent dialect in Singapore) and it was referring to the Portuguese and Dutch people most probably for apparent reasons.

This particular Ang Mo is about to let go his honorable title very soon. For the past 2 years I have been clearly in minority. According to the most recently published demographics I would belong to the ethnic group called Others, which represent only 3,3 percentage of the total population. For the record, I have not really had any issues whatsoever about belonging to the minority over here. Perhaps I do have a gnawing suspicion that my landlord did squeeze every last penny from the Ang Mo expat when reviewing what fixing needs to be done in the apartment before the hand over. But then again Chinese businessmen tend to have the penny squeezing reputation no matter the customer ethnicity.

Within a week I will be disappearing back into the majority. In the wake of World War II European countries shy away from tracking the ethnicity of their population like they do very transparently in Singapore. However I will be back in the 89,33 percentage of the people who speak Finnish as their mother tongue. The 3 other biggest language groups after Finnish are Swedish, Russian and Estonian (in that order), thus I am probably not far off when estimating that as a Caucasian I belong to the 97% of the population.

After all this time living in Singapore I would still proudly consider myself a proper Ang Mo rather than a true Singaporean. See what I mean by looking at this Wah Banana clip below: