Apart from skin colour, I have nothing in common with these Caucasians. To be honest, I have very little in common with the expatriates who live in Singapore either. For a start, most of the ang mohs that live here, particularly the ones from Britain, tend to come from the upper-middle classes.

Zhen decided he liked Robert, although the Englishman smiled too much. Perhaps this was the ang mo way. In China, if a man smiled too much he was considered effeminate, but Zhen noticed that Baba Tan was completely at ease with them and laughed and smiled more in their company than when he was with the Chinese.

Suyin recognized him immediately—the tall, uncomfortable-looking white man, the ang moh standing guard by the only unoccupied table in the cafe.

[H]e attracted the attention of a food vendor and pointed at a pot consisting of different cuts of meat stewed in a dark soy sauce broth, served with flat rice noodles on the side. The food vendors, or hawkers, smiled at each other beatifically while ladling out the hot soup and meat in a bowl. They were probably thinking something on the lines of, "The stupid angmoh doesn't know what he is about to eat!" Angmoh, literally meaning "red hair," is the Hokkien Chinese collective term for Caucasians.

With my kind of career and background, I have the best of both worlds. You can't tell me I'm that ang moh (Caucasian) who doesn't understand. I'm the Asian who's been through the same challenges, and I would show you how to overcome them.

"Ang moh" is still used today with an implicit sense of the cultural power ang mohs wield in postcolonial Singapore, whether we admit it anot.

Ang moh

Meaning

Noun