Man, those pandas are gonna buy so much mascara now…
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The standard of young, thin, and caucasian for feminine beauty is an export from the West, where all women, including women of color, are judged by that metric.
“It is water”, to borrow from David Foster Wallace.
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While I have not watched more than a dozen or so of these, I do find these two guys glimpses into China interesting. One is an American, and one is a South African and both live and work in China and have Chinese wives. So they offer an interesting look at the compare and contrast of differences. Yes the titles are pretty click baity at times, but the discussion the two have with one another is usually pretty interesting. Note they can get pretty frank about how things are there. They both love China, but they don’t sugar coat the realities there.
For the motorcyclists here, they do most/many of their videos while tooling around China on cycles. So I am sure some of you will find that interesting.
Just a few anecdotes I found interesting:
No matter where you were born, if you are Chinese you are Chinese. So say a person with Chinese parents was born in the US, they would be more or less treated as if they were born in China.
This has some down sides, as you can be a native born English speaker, but if you are Chinese and want to teach English in China, they won’t hire you. They would rather hire even a white Ukrainian with a horrible accent over a fluent, person of Chinese decent who has English as a first language.
No one up keeps “public” areas. Temples, outsides of apartment buildings, and other similar areas are just left to rot. You might have the outside of your apt complex crumbling and looking like a set from Mad Max, but you go inside of an apt and everything is new and immaculate. It is basically a “not my problem” sort of mentality.
It is one of those channels I check out from time to time and usually leave feeling I learned something new.
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It’s likely true. We’ve seen it with our own kid. You’re doing a reasonable job parenting if your kid saves all of his/her most nightmarish behaviors for mom and dad.
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if you shaved a chimpanzee, he would have white skin.
More seriously, I think making simian comparisons might be a nearly culturally universal way to call a person sub-human.
As a white person, calling me a monkey is not something I consider super offensive. As I don’t take it to mean that I’m sub-human, but I take it to mean that I am unskilled, foolish, or stupid. (not great either).
I think most people working the white monkey jobs admit the job is kind of baloney, and dressing up a suit for one of these jobs probably feels a bit like you’re an organ grinder’s monkey dancing around for tips.
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Wait… they aren’t goth already?
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I was struck by that too… I suspect that people that are willing to upend their life and move to a foreign country are hard working, and that being a minority is going to tend to make one polite.
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One of these things is not like the others…
This is the exact opposite of the West. The vast majority trying to attain the appearance of the few, rather than the minorities trying to attain the appearance of the (shrinking) majority.
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Well, no one told ME about it. Explains why they are always so damned apathetic, though.
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At a guess, this is more of a lingering remnant from Communism rather than an element of traditional Asian culture.
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Also, red pandas are metal heads… it is known…
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This makes me wonder, could anything be said about whiteness or white people that you would consider super offensive?
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Tell a white person that they have privilege, and that it contributed to them getting a college degree and having nice things. That usually upsets them. Nobody likes the implication that their status was not something earned.
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A friend of mine that is big into ballroom dancing is offended by the “white people can’t dance,” stereotype. Enough that he was angered when I jokingly tried to blame my lack of rhythm on my whiteness.
There used to be a piece of equipment at work about which I used to say “We understand this at the trained monkey level.” We knew what steps to perform and in what order to get it to operate, but we had no idea whatsoever what they were doing. 15 years later I almost think that I could still turn it on. "turn the knob to LDU, hit initiate, and run the tape through. turn the switch to OPR, and then back to LDX, hit initiate, and run the tape through…etc etc.
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Nope. It’s not all about race or skin color. Like I said, people chase an idea of perfect beauty that is not attainable. Most women in the U.S. aren’t blonde, blue-eyed, or built like a Barbie doll. And most men over 50 in the U.S. don’t have sleek, evenly colored hair absent of gray.
EDIT: Also, white people appropriate all kinds of stuff from minorities because they think that it will make them cooler or more attractive. It’s more of a culture d’jour thing than the omnipresent “white people are more beautiful” thing in this video, though. And, rightly, people outside of that culture of appropriation are far less forgiving of it.
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Thanks for the examples, but none of them strike me as super offensive. More like mosquito bites.
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Huh…that also makes sense. Giant pandas are sad because red pandas are obviously much cooler than them. That, and sizeism. I’d be pretty sad if people always called me “large Oo_oO” or some such thing.
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Since they brought beauty standards up in the video, I do remember ADVChina saying that, in general, if you are are 4 or 5 in Europe or America, you will be an 8 or 9 in China.
Conversely, you may feel a Chinese person you are attracted to is a solid 8 or 9, but the rest of China may see them more as a 4 or 5. It is sort of what you are used to and that societies beauty standards differing.
They didn’t really say their guess as to why… but probably has some bearing? They gave an example of a wall in a temple falling down into a pile of bricks and it just sat there.
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They are both the product of white supremacy and colonialism.
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