D&D General (Anecdotal) conversations with Asian gamers on some problems they currently face in the D&D world of RPG gaming

[Bedrockgames]

Debates about freespeech and censorship are part of the controversy around the OA and WotC being pressured to remove it.

What principles should we take into account when deciding something is offensive and what to do about it?




Even some of your own posts have been moreorless about you asserting your right to freespeech to be as "gonzo" as you want, without caring if it offends other cultures. (I know you care to some degree, you worry about enough space to be playful and creative.)

At what point does "gonzo" become offensive "slander", for example?

My point is you arenow debating what the law in the US governing speech in the US ought to be (which is an interesting topic and one we disagree on strongly, but pretty far from keeping the conversation gaming related).

 

[Mercurius]

Even some of your own posts have been moreorless about you asserting your right to freespeech to be as "gonzo" as you want, without caring if it offends other cultures. (I know you care to some degree, you worry about enough space to be playful and creative.)

At what point does "gonzo" become offensive "slander", for example?

Just a nitpick. "Cultures" aren't offended, individuals are. It is an important distinction, especially when people commonly use phrase like "a black player in my group" and "imagine being an Asian-American."

Members of cultures aren't monolithic in their beliefs and by what they take offense to.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Settings books for RPG very commonly mention only one or two things about entire cities. The fact that they make a big deal about rice is normal RPG speak for here is a little fact to use in describing the area. They put a disclaimer at the front.

I am sure an asian in the USA would be annoyed at the use of rice as a main identifier, Japanese motorcycles are “rice burners”, as an example. I can easily see how panda-s1 findsa normal convention in these books to be personally insulting to him, even if no insult was intended. Even if I am sure he will agree that rice is super common and an important topic for the different peoples that eat it (I have been lectured very often about different types of rice in different countries in Asia because I am an ignorant white guy).

That is why I am not surprised that he and others like him are mad at it and don’t care if the same thing is being done over and over In other RPG setting books. I am sure he knows that rice is widely eaten in Asia, especially compared to other paces in the world (just like I know that noodles and dumplings are also damned common and almost never get focused on).

My Chinese family rarely eats rice and if they do it is in a porridge for breakfast. I have been taught the proper way to make dumplings and it was important to them over Chinese New Year that I stand and do it with them.

So I get both points of view.

 

[FireLance]

okay let's go back to an anecdotal conversation with an Asian about OA.
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anyone wanna defend this description of rice? anyone? if you want some insight there are large parts of "Shou Lung"/"T'u Lung" where rice is only secondary to wheat as far as staple grains go.

Well, to raise an anecdotal counterpoint, I do recall "ni chi fan le ma?" (translation: "Have you eaten rice already?") being used quite frequently as a greeting when I was younger. I don't hear it so often these days, I think because the younger generation: (a) tends to speak more English; and (b) are exposed to a greater variety of food and staples.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Well, to raise an anecdotal counterpoint, I do recall "ni chi fan le ma?" (translation: "Have you eaten rice already?") being used quite frequently as a greeting when I was younger. I don't hear it so often these days, I think because the younger generation: (a) tends to speak more English; and (b) are exposed to a greater variety of food and staples.

When I was taken Mandarin lessons, I was taught that it was an alternative greeting that I might hear. I think the writer just went overboard on the whole rice topic, and it is disturbing and a reminder about prejudice to some people.

And I never understood why Wei was hello for a phone call but Ni Hao is used in person.

 

[FireLance]

Also anecdotally, I do eat a lot of rice, but it could just be becuase I like rice and I'm pretty spoilt for choice in my country. Practically every major ethnic group has some kind of rice dish, whether it is Indian briyani, Malay nasi lemak (rice cooked in coconut milk) or, well, Chinese porridge, fried rice, chicken rice, glutinous rice, rice-based noodles, rice-based snacks, etc. In addition, there is Japanese sushi and donburi, Spanish paella and Italian risotto.

I do have to admit that I don't eat rice with every meal, but maybe half to two-thirds of the time? And I can imagine that the average person in a place and time with less exposure to other cultures would eat it more often.

 

[Cadence]

tl;dr - Chunks of the midwest seriously wouldn't have thought of the various things you could do with rice in the early 80s. The OA food section might have been aimed at them. An upscale Chinese restaurant in a city of 140k even felt the need to mention twice in a print ad that its customers shouldn't expect chop-suey!?

both of you missed the tone of the writing here. first of all, unpacking a greeting to describe the importance of rice? even a kindergartner can tell you "hello" in Mandarin in "ni hao". this is conflated by the fact that in some languages "rice" a word used colloquially to mean all food, even if you don't eat rice. this is a greeting someone might use in China, but just like anywhere there's a variety of greetings they use. but about tone, let's imagine if we wrote about

Presumably it was no more the only greeting there, than hello is the only greeting here. Reading it I only assumed they were trying to emphasize how central rice was. (Which, as you note, shouldn't have been true for the whole region).

You specifically focused on rice vs. wheat in your post as the problem. I was trying to find out how much more you thought was awful. I brought it up suspecting that it might be as well. But, I was surprised that some variation of the greeting was/is apparently used in several different countries according to google.

seriously, the way that paragraph is written makes it sound like Americans never heard of rice before. or that it has a multitude of uses.

Rice is used in a multitude of ways. It is boiled and served with butter. It is puffed, sweetened and prepared by pouring over it with milk. It is cooked in a broth and served in a side dish. Left over rice is mixed with vegetables in a dish called stir fried rice, that's similar to the kind you may be familiar with because Chinese people have been living in America and Canada for nigh over a goddamn century.

I'm wondering if there were a bunch of folks in the non-biggest-city midwestern US in the 1970s and early 1980s who didn't have Americanized cuisines of a bunch of different countries served at home (second largest city in Illinois at the time for me, 70 miles from Chicago, pop around 140k). In my family we had potatoes or instant rice or pasta as a starch, along with a meat and a vegetables, four or five nights a week, maybe a casserole, tacos, or burgers the others, and all of them with an iceberg lettuce salad. And when we ate out once a month it wasn't very adventuresome. I remember a lot of Pizza/Italian, a German sausage place, Bishop's Buffet, a family restaurant, and maybe Red Lobster once a year. If you time machined back to the early 1980s to ask middle-school me to name an Asian food, I'm not sure I could have named anything besides Chop Suey. I think we might have had that at home once in a while. :-/ That might have been typical. Googling up a restaurant ad from 1980 (for a restaurant that is still there) the first line is "It's not a Chinese chop-suey restaurant" and it later notes "Don't expect to have egg-foo-yung and chop-suey". I'm not sure if I had been to a Chinese restaurant by 1985 or not. By the end of the decade it was a very different story.

I'm wondering if that's the audience they had in mind writing the half page about food. One that literally wouldn't have thought of doing that with rice or have known what tofu was. One that needed to be told not to expect chop-suey.

Anyway, that doesn't make the book unproblematic today! And it's certainly not a good thing that the book would have led us to think everyone in SE Asia ate rice at every meal and numerous other simplifications.

also I'm tired of doing the heavy lifting as the only Asian person in this echo chamber.

I'm sorry it has been so exhausting. Thank you for fielding as many questions as you did!!

 

[Panda-s1]

Well, to raise an anecdotal counterpoint, I do recall "ni chi fan le ma?" (translation: "Have you eaten rice already?") being used quite frequently as a greeting when I was younger. I don't hear it so often these days, I think because the younger generation: (a) tends to speak more English; and (b) are exposed to a greater variety of food and staples.

I mean I said I already know that, and this was something I was taught in high school when I took Mandarin as well. but the issue here is "fan". 饭 is also used to mean just food. that's not to say rice isn't important, but it's just a language thing. in Spanish "papas" means potatoes, but for kids (and to kids) in Latin America it also just means food. my own Mexican grandma would tell me and my siblings "here's papas" and whatnot (I can't exactly remember). it's not like potatoes aren't important in Latin American cuisine, it's just that's how language is.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Also anecdotally, I do eat a lot of rice, but it could just be becuase I like rice and I'm pretty spoilt for choice in my country. Practically every major ethnic group has some kind of rice dish, whether it is Indian briyani, Malay nasi lemak (rice cooked in coconut milk) or, well, Chinese porridge, fried rice, chicken rice, glutinous rice, rice-based noodles, rice-based snacks, etc. In addition, there is Japanese sushi and donburi, Spanish paella and Italian risotto.

I do have to admit that I don't eat rice with every meal, but maybe half to two-thirds of the time? And I can imagine that the average person in a place and time with less exposure to other cultures would eat it more often.

I made myself laksa 2 nights ago because I missed it and found a good paste in the local Asian market (Ranch 99). After living in Singapore I really miss a lot of the food from there. And happy Election Day.

 

[Maxperson]

Death threats are one kind of hateful speech.

Agree.

Death threats harm the humanity of the target.

No they don't. My humanity is completely unaffected by any threats out there. The person making the threats might be considered to have harmed his humanity, but mine isn't affected at all.

Death threats deny the target the right to speak. (Death threats deny the target the right to live.)

And that's just flat out wrong. If you threaten my life, my right to speak is unaffected. I can still speak if and when I want to. The second part is even more wrong. My right to live stays regardless of anything you or anyone else does short of actually killing me.

When you talk like this, you're the one trying to take away my rights by getting me to buy into the belief that might rights are gone under these circumstances. I'm not going to surrender my rights to you or anyone making any kind of threat towards me.