Recently, there is a word about Chinese looks, which is "squinting".
The so-called squinting eyes, written in English, slanty eyes, at first glance will think of it as a neutral word, right? But when we see the racists in Europe and the United States, making special moves against us, muttering this word in their mouths, I am afraid that no one will think that this is a word with good intentions for Chinese.
For a long time, in Europe and the United States and other regions where "white supremacy" doctrine is rampant, the shape of Chinese eyes has been a manifestation of the oppression of the Chinese community. This is especially true in the United States, where Chinese were drawn with small eyes by arrogant whites— "slanty eyes." This is typical of wanton, xenophobic, discriminatory behavior against Chinese.
The birth of "squinting eyes" is closely related to the aesthetic of "Orientalism". In the last century, the Palestinian-American scholar Said proposed the concept of "Orientalism". He believes that the East in the eyes of Western artists is not the real East, but the East imagined, exaggerated and distorted by Westerners, and is the stereotype of Westerners to Easterners, with the purpose of "describing, teaching, colonizing, and dominating" the East.
In modern times, the pace of aggression by Western colonialists has gradually deepened, and they have established the stereotype of "backwardness," "barbarism," and "uncivilized" in the East represented by China, and then magnificently beautified the acts of destruction, plunder, and slaughter as "bringing civilization to the East" and "civilizing the East." They created the depraved, lascivious, ruthless, hypocritical and cunning leader of the Eastern criminal group "Fu Manchu", as the most representative Chinese image of the literary and artistic circles at that time. "Fu Manchu" and the "Yellow Peril" he represented (that is, preaching that the Easterners were "yellow-skinned demons" and bringing calamities to the West) became a wonderful excuse for the Western invaders to whitewash themselves.
So, in the writing of Western colonizers at that time, Chinese "should" be presented to the world in what form?
Mr. Zhou Ning's books, one published in 2006, "Distant Heavenly Dynasties: A Study of the Image of China in the West", and the other is "China in the World: A Study of the Image of China Outside the Region", published in 2007, show us how white people viewed and described the appearance of Chinese in the late 19th century.
"Chinese is a 'pig-eyed' people who have no interest, are unnatural and uncivilized, and you can laugh at them."
This passage comes from the American missionary Wei Sanwei's "General Theory of China", published in 1847.
Yes, in the eyes of Westerners, your "squinting eyes", more accurately defined as "pig's eye", Chinese in their view, is a pig's eye and a pig's eye people.
A song published on April 10, 1858, in the British magazine "Clumsy", "Cantonese Ballads" sang:
"John Yankee... Corrupt the world, everyone is finished. Oh, my cruel Chineseman, oh, my stubborn Chineseman... With pig's eyes and a long tail..."
Such "fairy tales" are not special to the United Kingdom, and the United States also has a similar nursery rhyme:
"The Chinese pig, the Chineseman, sitting on a railroad track, came a white man and cut off his tail..."
We can also ask Westerners to paint a standard portrait of the "Chinese beauty" in their minds. It just so happens that the British lawyer Söll, in his book "China and the Chinese" published in 1849, left a historical freeze for us today.
"The beauties of the Chinese Are all yellow and gray skin (coated with some white powder), high cheekbones, tiny pig eyes, two eyebrows stiffly across the flat nose, dragged into an oval shape, dry hair smeared with stinky baked lard, flattened to the top of the head, twisted into a high knot, inserted with silver steps, or jade hairpins, and sometimes a small cabbage-sized artificial flower."
Please pay attention to this "tiny pig's eye", the original text is "small piggish-looking eyes", the so-called "squinting eyes", in the eyes of Westerners is "pig's eye".
The squinting shape of the tail of the eye is very similar to that of children with "Down syndrome". This is a disease caused by congenital chromosomal abnormalities, the patient's IQ is lower than normal people, and now it is a necessary screening item for pregnancy tests, and in 1866, the British doctor John Langton Don, who first discovered the case of the disease, identified it as a racial degeneration of dementia, called "Mongolian species", also known as "congenital stupidity". Because he believes that the patient's face is generally wider than normal, the nose bridge is low and flat, and the eyes are small and upturned, resembling a yellow person, after that, white supremacists have identified Down syndrome as a sign of the "inferiority" of yellow people, and the hands are pulled up and the eye tips are picked up.
Regrettably, even more than seventy years after the founding of New China, the people of the whole country have made concerted efforts to change the appearance of China's poverty and weakness in those years, and China's international status has been unprecedentedly enhanced, but the impression of "backwardness," "barbarism," and "uncivilization" erected by the aggressors at that time has not dissipated in the minds of some people; on the contrary, they have become more and more enthusiastic about "self-Orientalization," and have tried their best to dwarf and vilify themselves; in the name of "pluralism," they have catered to the unchanging old tastes of Westerners for hundreds of years, begging Westerners to give them "international." A place in the cultural circle.
The standard of beauty is indeed not uniform. But ironically, the Western cultural circles that put "pluralistic aesthetics" on their lips, the way they look at Chinese, and the interpretation of "oriental beauty" are always so cookie-cutter, compared with the "Orientalism" of centuries ago, the arrogance and ignorance of the momentum is so consistent.
The "elite" group of Western literary and artistic circles simply and rudely portrays the world outside themselves as clowns with oil painted faces and sensationalism in circuss called "pluralism", while they themselves are condescending, posing as the "audience" and "judges" of circus performances. The arrogant Western world, how to understand the "beauty of the East"?
What is Oriental Beauty? During the Wei and Jin dynasties, women's faces resembled goose eggs as beautiful, plump and beautiful; the five sui and Tang dynasties were beautiful with plumpness, narrow cheeks and plump cheeks; since the Ming and Qing dynasties, emaciated as beauty, small and exquisite melon face is quite cute. Whether it is willow eyebrow apricot eyes, or phoenix eyes moth eyebrows, picturesque eyebrows, exquisite faces, are unique expressions of "oriental beauty" in different historical backgrounds.
Yet art never exists in isolation. Behind the definition of "what is beauty", hidden is the struggle for the right to speak on the international stage. Although eastern beauty has thousands of postures, under the right to speak under the control of the West, eastern beauty can only have a curious and alienating expression of "orientalism"; it can only deliberately pursue abruptness and violation of time and space in the name of "art"; it can only satisfy the imagination of the pretentious Western "elites" who are "enlightened and civilized" with a face that is very different from reality. The Western literary and art circles, which regard "pluralistic aesthetics" as the standard, monopolize the aesthetic interpretation of the entire Eastern world, forcing others to identify with their imaginary so-called "oriental beauty", even if the slogan of "pluralism" is shouted to the heavens, it cannot hide the hypocritical heart.
Today, we have completely shaken off the backwardness of centuries ago, and our national self-confidence is at an all-time high. Today's Chinese have long been unwilling to become "Fu Manchu" and "primitive man" who have been vilified in the Western literary and art circles, and have the Chinese of aesthetic self-consciousness; they must challenge the hegemony of Western public opinion on the international stage and take the power of interpretation of "Oriental Beauty" in our own hands.
Over the past hundred years, although the vicissitudes of the sea and the passage of time have changed, it has always been the "Orientalists" and "self-Orientalists" who have made sophistry to cover their ears and steal bells for their own distortions and prejudices. They turn a blind eye to the naked racial discrimination and malicious metaphors behind the "Orientalist" aesthetic, and simplify the concept of insulting Cultural Symbols that have been conventional in the Western world for centuries to "Chinese single eyelids and small eyes", and even distort the "squinting" action that the Western world has to admit to be a sign of serious racism today into the so-called "traditional Oriental aesthetic".
Yet the eyes of the people are shining. The above-mentioned groups have made themselves clever, and tried to beat up a rake by going online and engaging in "enlargement," giving Chinese who did not accept the stereotype of "Orientalism" imposed by the Western literary and art circles, and all of them were punctured by the big hat of "inferiority and conservatism" and "blind misleading the country." The rational rebuttals of netizens were punctured one by one. Oriental beauty can be varied, but it is impossible to charm the "Orientalists"; the method of creation can be grounded, but it is impossible to ground the house!
At the opening ceremony of the Eleventh National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Literary Circles and the Tenth National Congress of the China Writers Association, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out that life is the people, and the people are life. The people are real, realistic, and simple, and we cannot use fictitious images to make up the people, we cannot ridicule the people with a ridiculous attitude, and still less can we use ugly brushstrokes to vilify the people. Wider than the "squinting" eye spacing is the gap between the aesthetics of "Orientalism" and the oriental beauty created by the laborers who have taken root in the land of China since ancient times; what is even more unbearable than the "high-level face" is the group that is keen on "self-orientalization", like ghouls, who plan the ghosts of colonizers from the ruins of history and enshrine racist values as treasures of the "civilized world"!
Beauty and ugliness are not wrong, but good and evil are. It is not clear that beauty and ugliness can still be corrected through the study of the day after tomorrow, but if we substitute ourselves into the position of the Western colonizers centuries ago, vainly try to become the "civilized people" and "enlightened people" of the East, reverse black and white, and distort the facts, we are bound to be spurned by the people!
Source: Central Committee of the Communist Youth League