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#TataYoung #ladeezpop

จำได้หรือไม่ ทาทา ยัง คือคนไทยคนแรกที่ได้ขึ้นปก Time Magazine ฉบับเดือนเมษายน ปี 2001 เนื้อหาเกี่ยวกับประเด็น Eurasian Invasion รวมลูกครึ่งเอเชียที่มาแรง ร่วมกับนักแสดงชาว Hong Kong Maggie Q สมัยสาวๆ และ Indian VJ Asha Gill

เนื้อหาประกอบ บางส่วน :
Tata Young certainly knows how to let loose. Back in 1995, when she broke into Thailand's entertainment industry at the age of 15, the pert half-Thai, half-American singer was on the forefront of the Eurasian trend. Today, the majority of top Thai entertainers are luk kreung. Now 20, Young is the first Thai to sign a contract with a major U.S. label, Warner Brothers Records (owned by AOL Time Warner, parent company of Time), which she hopes will elevate her into the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera pantheon. Back at home, Young has to contend with a gaggle of luk kreung clones who mimic her brand of bubble-gum pop. The hottest act now is a septet called, less-than-imaginatively, Seven, and three out of seven are of mixed race.

The luk kreung crowd tend to hang tight, dining, drinking and dating together. "We understand each other," says Nicole Terio, one of the group. "It comes from knowing what it means to grow up between two cultures." But the luk kreung's close-knit community and Western-stoked confidence sometimes elicits grumbles from other Thais, who also resent their stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The ultimate blow came a few years back when Thailand sent a blue-eyed woman to the Miss World competition. Sirinya Winsiri, also known as Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American for the coveted Miss Thailand spot. "Luk kreung have made it very difficult for normal Thais to compete," gripes a Bangkok music mogul. "We should put more emphasis on developing real Thai talent." The Eurasians consider this unfair. "I was born in Bangkok," says Young. "I speak fluent Thai and I sing in Thai. When I meet Westerners, they say I'm more Thai than American." Channel V's Asha Gill senses the frustration: "A lot of Asians despise us because we get all the jobs, but if I've bothered to learn several languages and understand several cultures, why shouldn't I be employed for those skills?"

The jealous sniping angers many who suffered years of discrimination because of their mixed blood. Eurasian heritage once spoke not of a proud melding of two cultures but of a shameful confluence of colonizer and colonized, of marauding Western man and subjugated Eastern woman. Such was the case particularly in countries like the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, where American G.I.s left thousands of unwelcome offspring. In Vietnam, these children were dubbed bui doi, or the dust of life. "Being a bui doi means you are the child of a Vietnamese bar girl and an American soldier," says Henry Phan, an Amerasian tour guide in Ho Chi Minh City. "Here, in Vietnam, it is not a glamorous thing to be mixed." As a child in Bangkok during the early 1990s, Nicole Terio fended off rumors that her mother was a prostitute, even though her parents had met at a university in California. "I constantly have to defend them," she says, "and explain exactly where I come from."

Ever since Europe sailed to Asia in the 16th century, Eurasians have populated entrepots like Malacca, Macau and Goa. The white men who came in search of souls and spices left a generation of mixed-race offspring that, at the high point of empire building, was more than one-million strong. Today, in Malaysia's Strait of Malacca, 1,000 Eurasian fishermen, descendants of intrepid Portuguese traders, still speak an archaic dialect of Portuguese, practice the Catholic faith and carry surnames like De Silva and Da Costa. In Macau, 10,000 mixed-race Macanese serve as the backbone of the former colony's civil service and are known for their spicy fusion cuisine.

Despite their long traditions, though, Eurasians did not make the transition into the modern age easily. As colonies became nations, mixed-race children were inconvenient reminders of a Western-dominated past. So too were the next generation of Eurasians, the offspring of American soldiers in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, luk kreung were not allowed to become citizens until the early 1990s. In Hong Kong, many Eurasians have two names and shift their personalities to fit the color of the crowd in which they're mixing. Singer and actress Karen Mok, for example, grew up Karen Morris but used her Chinese name when she broke into the Canto-pop scene. "My Eurasian ancestors carried a lot of shame because they weren't one or the other," says Chinese-English performance artist Veronica Needa, whose play Face explores interracial issues. "Much of my legacy is that shame." Still, there's no question that Eurasians enjoy a higher profile today. "Every time I turn on the TV or look at an advertisement, there's a Eurasian," says Needa. "It's a validating experience to see people like me being celebrated."

But behind the billboards and the leading movie roles lurks a disturbing subtext. For Eurasians, acceptance is certainly welcome and long overdue. But what does it mean if Asia's role models actually look more Western than Eastern? How can the Orient emerge confident if what it glorifies is, in part, the Occident? "If you only looked at the media you would think we all looked indo except for the drivers, maids and comedians," says Dede Oetomo, an Indonesian sociologist at Airlangga University in Surabaya. "The media has created a new beauty standard."

Conforming to this new paradigm takes a lot of work. Lek, a pure Thai bar girl, charms the men at the Rainbow Bar in the sleaze quarters of Bangkok. Since arriving in the big city, she has methodically eradicated all connections to her rural Asian past. The first to go was her flat, northeastern nose. For $240, a doctor raised the bridge to give her a Western profile. Then, Lek laid out $1,200 for plumper, silicone-filled breasts. Now, the 22-year-old is saving to have her eyes made rounder. By the time she has finished her plastic surgery, Lek will have lost all traces of the classical Thai beauty that propelled her from a poor village to the brothels of Bangkok. But she is confident her new appearance will attract more customers. "I look more like a luk kreung, and that's more beautiful," she says.

A few blocks away from Rainbow Bar, a local pharmacy peddles eight brands of whitening cream, including Luk Kreung Snow White Skin. In Tokyo, where the Eurasian trend first kicked off more than three decades ago, loosening medical regulations have meant a proliferation of quick-fix surgery, like caucasian-style double eyelids and more pronounced noses. On Channel V and mtv, a whole host of veejays look ethnically mixed only because they've gone under the knife. "There's a real pressure here to look mixed," says one Asian veejay in Singapore. "Even though we're Asians broadcasting in Asia, we somehow still think that Western is better." That sentiment worries Asians and Eurasians. "More than anything, I'm proud to be Thai," says Willy McIntosh, a 30-year-old Thai-Scottish TV personality, who spent six months as a monk contemplating his role in society. "When I hear that people are dyeing their hair or putting in contacts to look like me, it scares me. The Thai tradition that I'm most proud of is disappearing."

In many Asian countries—Japan, Malaysia, Thailand—the Eurasian craze coincides with a resurgent nationalism. Those two seemingly contradictory trends are getting along just fine. "Face it, the West is never going to stop influencing Asia," says performance artist Needa. "But at the same time, the East will never cease to influence the West, either." In the 2000 U.S. census, nearly 7 million people identified themselves as multiracial, and 15% of births in California are of mixed heritage. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Oscar-winning kung fu flick, was more popular in Middle America than it was in the Middle Kingdom. In Hollywood, where Eurasian actors once were relegated to buck-toothed Oriental roles, the likes of Keanu Reeves, Dean Cain and Phoebe Cates play leading men and women, not just the token Asian. East and West have met, and the simple boxes we use for human compartmentalization are overflowing, mixing, blending. Not all of us can win four consecutive major golf titles, but we are, indeed, more like Tiger Woods with every passing generation.

cr. TIME / HANNAH BEECH
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