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Racial hatreds plague all Asian nations, which present a vast, graduated racial spectrum, from the blonde ethnic Russians of bleak Sinkiang through the anthracite Tamils of India and Ceylon, whose daughters were of such black velvety loveliness that in World War II lonely American servicemen were wont to sigh, "I'd walk a mile for a Tamil." Now a new G.I. generation is entranced by Saigon's graceful Cochinchinoises but is surprised to find Asian girls just as sensitive to racial nuances as the snobbiest New Orleans debutante.
Asians save their sharpest prejudices for their own minorities, including Burma's harried Indians, Japan's Koreans and —throughout Southeast Asia—the overseas Chinese. Sixteen million Chinese live outside China, and everywhere their prosperity, diligence and clannishness arouse jealousy. Often they are accused of disloyalty to their host countries. Indonesians have stripped rich "slit-eyes" of their holdings, and Chinese in Laos are scornfully called "Mao Tse-tung." International airlines make sure that no Chinese stewardesses work on their flights to India.
Many Asian countries have not yet absorbed backward peoples in their midst. Marauding tribesmen inspire almost psychotic fear in Pakistani officers; India has been plagued with demands for self-determination by her half-civilized Nagas. Aboriginal tribes like Viet Nam's montagnards have virtually no voice in their central governments, occasionally take up arms in protest; they are now more loyal to the newly arrived American Special Forces advisers, who arm and pay them, than to the Saigon regime.
Burdens of History
To Asia's burden of religious, linguistic and racial antagonism is added the weight of history. New grievances as well as old goad Asians to seek what Calcutta Philosopher Abu Sayeed Ayub calls "the appeasement of the ghosts of our ancestors by slaughtering members of another community." Conquerors have come and gone across Asia, sowing rancor as they marched. For generations after the Burmese raped Siam, Thai women wore crewcuts to avoid being hauled off by the hair. During World War II, brutality by the Japanese earned them loathing throughout Asia; until recently, any Japanese who toured the Philippines risked getting a balisong (switchblade) between his ribs.