We Love Chinese Dramas. We Don't Love Being Called Intsik.
Chinese culture is everywhere in SEA — in our food, our phones, our streaming queues. But proximity doesn't erase casual racism.
Open any Southeast Asian's phone and you'll find traces of China. A Xiaomi in the hand. Shopee in the apps. A C-drama queued up for later. We grew up eating congee and siomai, watching kung fu films, celebrating Lunar New Year whether or not we're ethnically Chinese.
The economic and cultural presence is undeniable. Chinese investment built the malls we hang out in. TikTok — ByteDance's export — is where we waste hours. Genshin Impact is the game half your friends play. And when Netflix gets boring, iQIYI has 40 episodes of something with better costumes and worse subtitles.
But living this close to Chinese cultural exports doesn't mean we've worked out how we feel about China itself — or about Chinese people in our own countries.
There's affection, sure. The food is ours now. Hainanese chicken rice in Singapore. Pancit canton in Manila. Bak kut teh in Malaysia. These aren't foreign dishes anymore. They're home cooking, street food, comfort meals. We'll defend them online like they're ours — because in a lot of ways, they are.
And the shows? Addictive. The production budgets are massive. The romance tropes hit. You can sink into a historical drama and forget your landlord hasn't fixed the aircon. That's worth something.
But then there's the other side. The reflexive suspicion. The resentment when another coastal reclamation project gets fast-tracked with Chinese money. The jokes about debt traps that aren't entirely jokes. The fear that we're getting swallowed by someone else's expansion plan.
And closer to the ground: the casual racism that still hasn't died. "Intsik" in the Philippines. "Cina" in Indonesia. Words that get thrown around in arguments, in traffic, in group chats. Slurs dressed up as descriptions. It doesn't matter if you're third-generation and speak Tagalog at home — if you look Chinese, someone will make it your problem.
Chinese Filipinos, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Malaysians have been here for generations. They're not outsiders. But during every political fight, every economic downturn, every consulate dispute, the old suspicions come back. Loyalties get questioned. Belonging gets revoked on a whim.
We'll binge The Untamed and argue about which noodle spot is more authentic, but we haven't figured out how to separate culture from power, enjoyment from resentment, or long-term neighbours from rising superpowers.
Chinese culture is already woven into Southeast Asian life. That won't change. But until we deal with the racism baked into how we talk about Chinese people who've lived here forever, we're just consuming the stuff we like and pretending the rest doesn't exist.
