Disclaimer: I am Asian. This node discusses the reasons I tend to hang around non-Asians more, and why I dislike the current Asian youth culture. I don't hate other Asians. Also notice I only talk about Asian guys. I did not have enough time to deal with girls while I was there to learn about their culture, so I won't talk about it. Asian teenagers who grew up in the US seem to be unaffected by this.
I lived in Hong Kong for 9 years before I moved away to Sydney, Australia. If I did not, I wouldn't be writing this. I would have been assimilated into its horrid mass, homogeneous, and digustingly shallow and trendy.
You see, in recent years, youth in Asia have decided to generate their own confused culture. For examples, they turned to the West, namely USA. Everything was copied, in the process corrupted, from West to East. That includes music, clothing, culture, everything. They were not original or smart enough to derive their own culture from what they already have, so they plagarized. The transition from West to East messed up horribly and we ended up with the homogeneous Asian youth culture.
By far the worst is the overly macho attitude that has permeated the society. In Korean culture that has already existed for centuries and has only gotten worse. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, in the short periods of time I lived there, all the young guys were obssessed with macho. But what cracks me up is their definition of macho itself. It includes its previous definition of manliness, but it has been mixed liberally with doses of the correct clothing, the correct music, and the correct hairstyle. Only when you have those can you be truly a man in the eyes of your peers.
The music. I don't think most Asiatic languages fit very well into the Western music forms. Rap for example. It just doesn't work! The way the English language is spoken makes rap possible, but in Japanese, Chinese or Korean, no. They tried. It became popular due to its Westerness. It sounds horrible. You were "cool" if you listened to this type of music. I will not even try to delve into the crappiness of Cantopop. Think Backstreet Boys and worsen it by a factor of 10 and you get that.
You say, don't listen to it if you hate it. OK I don't. I avoid that music like the plague. So I was not "cool" and socially alienated. Assholes. Don't want their company anyways.
Clothing is a big one. Go to Hong Kong. You are liable to see guys dressed in skin tight pants (!!!) and shirts unzipped to their navels, also skin tight. I find that disgusting. Maybe there was a slight time-warp and they managed to plagarize American fashion in the 1970's.
Dress however you like. I don't care. I'll snicker a bit and walk away. But what pissed me off was their unwillingness to accept me socially because of my overly Westernized style of dress and my dislike of skin-tight clothing. Not that it mattered because I went to the US for college shortly afterwards.
This one is huge. Hair. It is very very important. You MUST have the most trendy hairstyle to be "cool". Anything else is not acceptable. Last time I was in Asia, it seemed to be the "hedgehog" style (as I like to call it). Spiked up to ridiculous levels.
Again, do whatever you want with your hair. Shave it, dye it, gel it, I don't care. I don't care too much about my hair. I brush it so it looks respectable and I am on my way. I don't spend 30 minutes every morning carefully dishevelling my hair so it looks cool. Ahhh the joys of non-conformity and its ridiculous consequences in shallow culture.
My older sister and I have discussed this at great lengths (she too was too Westernized for their tastes). We have come to a conclusion of why this ridiculous bullshit has occurred.
You see, the sense of macho has always been stronger in Asian cultures than Western cultures. Once Asian parents starting earning some money, the kids acquired time to develop their own cultures (I guess poor kids are too busy working or studying). In the fashion of teenage rebellion, they looked to the opposite of their current culture and found it in the good ol' USA. Hence began the twisting of culture.
What were little American kids likely to idolize (I wasn't one so I am taking guesses)? Sports heroes? Micheal Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Mark McGuire, etc. That is all good. Asian youths, however, tend to idolize singers and bands. The problem was that artists tend to dress and act more strangely than the normal population. Masses of Asian youth proceeded to attempt to copy them signers way of dress and hair, to disastrous results. We now have a homogeneous mass of fashion misfits. For the most laughable examples of this, go to Korea and look at the boy-bands there. You won't be able to stop laughing for a long long time.
Combine this with the sense of macho that has been warped to include trendiness as a large part of manliness, and you have your disgusting alienation of everyone who doesn't follow the lastest fashions and hairstyles. Screw them. They can all go to hell for all I care.
BTW, this is a theory of me and my sister's creation. If you have your own explanation of this phenomenon, feel free to post it here.