Jason Wordie – the SCMP columnist who courted much controversy last week with his scathing comment piece on Hong Kong’s “expat brats” – has defended his “observations”.
While Wordie, who has lived in Hong Kong for 30 years, admits his commentary on “third culture kids” and their “emotionally shallow […] chillingly utilitarian attitude” is “stereotypical”, he maintains that he has been around enough Hongkongers to accurately discern “character ‘types’”.
But if you’re a relatively young potential expat brat, don’t worry. It seems Wordie was probably only referring to your folks.
He insists he was “talking about an earlier generation of children born to expatriates in Hong Kong, the sort that were sent away to boarding school at an early age before returning to the territory”.
Besides from the very obvious wide berth given to any kind of apology, the follow-up piece makes it pretty clear that neither Wordie nor the SCMP have many regrets about the offending article.
Wordie admits that in his 15 years of writing historical-themed columns for the newspaper, his work has never been so widely read and discussed.
He claims comments, which came in from all over the world, “ranged from mortified outrage to full and frank agreement”.
“These interpretations clearly touched an extremely raw nerve, and many readers, unfortunately, took what was intended to be general social-history commentary as a very contemporary, direct personal parallel, either to themselves (as adult “expat brats”) or their children,” he writes.
Finally, Wordie used the contrasting characters of Ariel and Caliban from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” to prove he acknowledges Hong Kong’s “expat brats” have both good and bad qualities.
“Most well-adjusted adult ‘third culture kids’ would agree.” he writes.
Does that make you feel better? If not, join the #expatbratproblems Twitter moan.
Photo: istolethetv via flickr
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OPINION: A Lesson in Expat-Bashing, or #expatbratproblems
Hongkongers tell us their #ExpatBratProblems in response to offending SCMP article
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