I never really thought about it, but I’d assume, that, like cats, their skin is the same colour as the hair.
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Aside from what the interviewees actually said, to which my responses are similar to what others have already posted – what an exceptionally likable group! I wanted to be friends with all of them, and wanted all of them to be friends with each other.
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My Chinese friends laugh and laugh… in China, they tell me, it’s totally socially acceptable to have these conversations:
groom: We want the wedding book to be very beautiful.
wedding photographer: Your fiance is very ugly, so that will cost extra.
groom: Well, how much extra for how much more beautiful?
Woman: Oh, look, here’s my sister!
Other woman: Which one is she?
Woman: The fat one.
Both the above conversations reported to me as absolutely real, but maybe they were just having fun with the roundeye from the Golden Mountain. Certainly Chinese peeps tell me they have to be far more polite conform to a different standard of what’s polite in the USA.
And, perhaps more importantly, nobody likes the bald statement that they are the same as everyone else that looks like them and nothing can possibly change that in anyone else’s eyes. It’s an attack and provokes the usual response that you’ll get if you attack someone, p’raps we can leave it at that.
Be careful with those cultural prejudices - Monkey, the ever-young Taoist White Ape Born of Stone, is a very important figure in Chinese literature - I have watched at least four movies about Monkey, and there are many many more, and I’ve read a fair bit of Monkey comics and stories, mostly derived from Journey to the West (Wikipedia says “西游记”). 
As I hear it used, anyone who codes but doesn’t understand systems is a code monkey, anyone who runs cables but doesn’t understand why the pairs are twisted in UTP is a wire monkey. But my Taiwanese friend A. Huang calls everybody monkey, which is occasionally a problem with people of color. 
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Well China is a huge country, and I am sure there are many differences in various regions. I don’t recall them talking about businesses or homes, but “public” areas. And it wasn’t trash they talked about, but just upkeep. Like paint or minor repairs.
Yeah…my comment lacks clarity. I didn’t mean to conflate the idea that there are unrealistic social expectations that aren’t related to race with cultural appropriation. And looking back, my examples in the first paragraph are basically about race and ethnicity anyway. So…shitty comment.
I definitely didn’t mean to suggest that the people interviewed in the video could be guilty of an attempt to appropriate “white culture.”
Thank you for the concise response.
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There is a Retsuko thread:
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Well, we all could just let you pronounce yourself Suitable Sayer of the Final Word, but I object to some things in what you said.
Who ever, really, flings at white people “the bald statement that they are the same as everyone else that looks like them and nothing can possibly change that in anyone else’s eyes”? And who ever, really, would mean anything near that statement as an “attack”?
Asking someone to own up to their racial privilege means that in certain contexts, to put it “baldly,” a white person IS like other white people – a person endowed, merely by dint of skin color, with certain advantages and so on that others can’t take for granted.
If a white person in such contexts doesn’t like hearing that (and believe it or not, some don’t mind hearing it), that’s likely because they’ve never been asked to consider it before, or because they have and they won’t admit it.
The problem is less that of pointing out white privilege, and more that of white people not wanting to hear about it, let alone to own up to it.
And if they hear the pointing out of white privilege as an “attack,” they’re just not hearing right.
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Watching this made me wonder how many places on Earth escaped that. On a vacation there, I was stunned at all the ads with no one Chinese in them. I couldn’t find a souvenir (t-shirt, glass, etc.) that wasn’t written in English. I mean, there was next to nothing in their own language. Everything was about the West.
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I think that spot’s already taken.
I’ll settle for reporting what I see and letting other people make their own decisions about what to believe - based on more than one viewpoint, I’ll hope.
I knew I should have just talked about Monkey, though; serves me right.
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Aww… it was just me looking for an opportunity to grind my axe. 
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Maybe you read about this a few years back. Fijiian beauty standards and self-esteem changed rapidly after exposure to western television.
"Becker oversaw a 1995-98 study that measured the effect of television on cultural norms. (Television was only catching on in Fiji in 1995. A decade before, even electricity was rare.)
The results were startling. In 1995, without television, girls in Fiji appeared to be free of the eating disorders common in the West. But by 1998, after just a few years of sexy soap operas and seductive commercials, 11.3 percent of adolescent girls reported they at least once had purged to lose weight.
By the glow of television, young girls in Fiji “got the idea they could resculpt their lives,” said Becker — but they also began to “think of themselves as poor and fat.”
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Holy crap. I wonder if this is reversible by replacing those images with ones reflecting the viewers’ own culture and realistic body types.
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[quote=“Medievalist, post:70, topic:122625, full:true”]
I think that spot’s already taken.
By me! Bwahahahaha! (joking)
I’m not familiar with this film, but doesn’t it look like the mythological protagonist has been made into a light-skinned blonde, maybe to make the idea of a monkey-as-hero more palatable? Then to make a suitably high-contrast villain, they put demon horns on a regular-looking dude.
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I think you’re reading American concepts into it. He looks like a monkey. He’s always looked that way, depictions vary but he’s mostly been white or golden haired for a thousand years, as far as I know… although I’m far from being a Chinese legend expert, so I’d accept (well documented) corrections.
I believe the other guy in the picture is the Bull Demon, one of the Kings of Hell. A supernatural being much like Monkey himself, his appearance is subject to change - but the Bull Demon’s true form is a white bull as I recall.
Here, he and Monkey are in their most humanized forms, which they favor as it lets them wear magic armor and use magic weapons that were made for humans, and have intimate relations with human women.
But Monkey is literally a monkey, although he was born from an egg of stone, is invulnerable, can wield the impossibly heavy gold-bound iron staff he stole from the Eastern Dragon (which may be the staff of the Yellow Emperor - the Dragon didn’t know where it came from) and every one of his hairs has a magic power. When he transforms into other creatures he always ends up looking kind of monkeyish, often because he fails to transform his tail or because he’s excessively hairy.
EDIT: Trying to confirm my memories of Monkey as being specifically a white gibbon or macaque, I found this interesting paper about the Indian and Chinese monkey deities, trying to derive the origin of the latter in a mishmash of indigenous Taoist traditions revering white monkeys and Hindu tales of Hanuman.
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I felt that, too, but I think there’s a sort of universal human nature at play here. Within the white spectrum, we Americans will hire an English spokesperson to lend our project more gravitas. Many Americans of all races will shop for Jewish lawyers or Indian doctors preferentially.
The white-skin-is-prettier thing seems bizarre but think about how Afro-Americans have popularized sporting blond hair over the last decade or so. It doesn’t read as a self-loathing, I-want-to-look-white thing to me; it’s just a fashion trend, or rather we’re all culturally in a place where free expression is less stigmatized across-the-board? The Japanese have made-up the geisha and kabuki players with white faces since presumably before contact with Westerners. Traditionally, Western aristocracy intentionally cultivated the palest white skin they could because a tan was for farmers; now the reverse is often true, some whites go to unhealthy lengths to cultivate a dark, tan skin. So I’m hopeful that the man at the end of the video is right, new standards of beauty and all that.
OTOH, Western colonialism and cultural exports are totally a thing as well, I don’t mean to downplay that.
This is particularly depressing. But the above factors seem to be at least a partial explanation. One hopes, anyway.
The Chinese person-on-the-street perception of white folks was more positive than I would have thought. I assumed it would be some good and a majority of “they’re different but whatevs” or outright dislike. I think Simonize is right
That, and being qualified and desirable enough to pass through the Chinese state immigration filter is presumably keeping our numerous ignorant, lazy, and venal white folks from making an impact on the Chinese public.
I’m glad for these videos, since traditional news items (the seeming cultural embrace of social credit for one recent example) seem isolating. All the people in the video seem like people I would totally chill with. I also found this Chinese hip hop album a while ago and I really like it.
https://clyp.it/fulapadx
(all reference to them on youtube has been scrubbed, did the crew willingly abandon that platform or maybe did the party object to the content I wonder?)
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Ah. Now that I’ve done a quick google search for monkeys in China, I can confirm that monkeys sometimes look hilarious and giant pandas still look goth (I’m not sure why that image showed up, maybe google’s spies). I may have lost track of what was important in these threads. So many blonde monkeys. That was it. Is it the weekend yet?
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This is what he looked like in the TV show I saw as a kid:
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It is worth considering that there is more than just beauty standards within western entertainment. All of the stereotypes and predjudices (race, sex, stature) of mainstream television are also being exported and impressed upon viewers.
For example, Fijian people began to associate fat with laziness in addition to ugliness, where it had once been considered attractive. One interviewee said this:
“It makes me feel good because I am thin and I can do every work in the family at home, unlike fat people who are always getting lazy and feel like relaxing all the time,” (Becker, 547).
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Once on holiday in Malaysia, we took this tourist boat with an Indian family and an Italian family. The Indian man complemented the Italian husband on his wife’s ample body fat.
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There was also all the fuss about how Disney depicted the god Maui (Polynesian rather than Melanesian, I know) as “fat” in the film Moana:
Where I come from, that’s not “fat”, that’s “built like a brick shithouse”.
(My granddad had a belly a bit like that. He used to get me to punch him in it. It was like punching a wall.)
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