There’s that R-word again

No, the other R-word. I don’t really care about Pas­tor Rony Tan and his idiocy — he’s of the same cloth, as far as I’m con­cerned, as the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor in the U.S. who once made his point against migrants from non-English speak­ing back­grounds by famously declar­ing that “if Eng­lish was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!”

I’m refer­ring to our nation’s obses­sion with race. I was rum­mag­ing through our per­sonal doc­u­ments last night because I was try­ing to get them organ­ised for Kai’s first pass­port application.

On his birth cer­tifi­cate I saw some­thing in Naomi’s details that made me chuckle and recall the lit­tle argu­ment I had with the lady reg­is­ter­ing our details for Kai’s birth certificate.

On the col­umn for Naomi’s “race” is printed “Japan­ese”. Which is alright I guess if you con­sider Japan­ese a “race”. The box next to that, “Dialect Group”, I had left blank when we filled out the form, and the lady clerk had pounced on the blank box with her pen and said, “you must fill in dialect group. What dialect group is your wife?”

She wouldn’t take “none” for an answer, and insisted that there had to be a dialect group for Naomi, whether she was Japan­ese or not. After around the 27th time I had said that I had no idea, the offi­cious but help­ful clerk looked at me like I was stu­pid and said, “ok, what lan­guage does she speak apart from Japan­ese? Japan­ese is her first lan­guage right? What else does she speak? Come on, I’m sure you know.”

And so, Kai’s birth cer­tifi­cate shows that his mother belongs to the “Eng­lish Dialect Group” of the Japan­ese Race.