Who creates the anxiety of "squinting"?

"Chinese belong to the white people, only some southern provinces, all of them have darker skin tones due to their proximity to the tropics. ...... Their eyes are small, black, oval and protruding outwards, and both the eyes and eyebrows are higher on the outside than on the inside. These are the words written by Matteo Ricci, a Western missionary who came to China in the Ming Dynasty.

Matteo Ricci lived in China for 28 years, translated the first six volumes of the Geometric Origins into Chinese (co-translated with Xu Guangqi), produced China's first world map, the Kunyu Map of All Nations, and translated the Four Books into Latin, making him a great ferryman between Eastern and Western civilizations.

Ricci has no prejudice against Chinese, but records such as "their eyes are small" and "whether it is eyes or eyebrows, the outside is higher than the inside" became the beginning of the stereotype of Chinese "squinting" in the West. Recently, netizens found that in a brand advertisement 2 years ago, female models were suspected of catering to the impression of the board at this moment, causing controversy.

"Squinting" is a translation of Slant-eye (also written Slit-eyes, Squint), which means "squinty eye", and the English dictionary also recognizes discrimination. The more vicious version is Ching Chong Eyes, which Americans used to denounce Chinese tone to Chinese. When basketball star Yao Ming first arrived at the MLB, O'Neal used Ching Chong to call Yao Ming, causing an uproar in public opinion.

The term "squinting" is more popular in the West, and whether it is malicious or not depends on the specific context and cannot be generalized. It is worth noting that the "squinting" anxiety is spreading, and more than 100,000 people in China currently undergo double eyelid surgery every year.

The "squinting eyes" on the face are easy to remove, and the "squinting eyes" in the heart are difficult to go.

The volume of "Fan Lady Figure" is transmitted to Tang Zhoufang

The Terracotta Warriors have no shortage of double eyelids

The so-called "squinting eyes" generally refers to a single eyelid.

In 1795, the German ethnographer Blumenbach proposed that 90% of the Mongol population was single eyelid, so purebred yellows should be single eyelids, and the others were of mixed blood.

Blumenbach was a white supremacist who was attracted to the skull of a woman from the Caucasus and thought it was a ruler for caucasians, and created the "Caucasian race". In fact, in today's Mongolian population, 55% of the genes are related to the brown race, 28.7% are from the yellow race, and the northern Han people are 77% from the yellow race (yellow people, brown people are customary names, contrary to the definition of scientific research, here from the custom).

The double eyelid rate in southern China is 86% and that of northerners is 52% (only in some areas, not a comprehensive survey). It can be seen that more than half of the Chinese is not "squinting".

However, in terms of traditional aesthetics, Chinese more recognized women's slender, supple eyes, such as "water scissors eyes mist cut clothes, when the song is beautiful spring glow" "bright eyes cross autumn water, hand spring drunk", the Qing Dynasty famous artist Li Yu said in "Idle Love": "(Woman) thin and long, the disposition must be soft, the eyes are thick and large, the heart must be fierce, the eyes are good and black and white, will be more intelligent." But men with "thick eyebrows and big eyes" have always been considered "hero statues."

Qing Dynasty Ren Xiong's "Lady Leisure Map"

Some netizens said that the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shi Huang are all single eyelids, indicating that the "pure-bred Han People" are all single eyelids. This is a vain statement, one is that the terracotta warriors have no lack of double eyelids, but the eastern and western sculpture techniques are different, the double eyelids in the terracotta warriors are mostly expressed in the form of paintings, or carved with lines, which do not look obvious; second, the terracotta warriors are mostly Qin people, and the Central Plains countries believe that the Qin state "does not ally with the Chinese princes, Yi Di meets it", and the appearance of the Qin people is not the standard face at that time.

The Macartneys and the like poured a lot of sewage

Most Chinese are double eyelids, why do Westerners think that Chinese are "squinting"?

On the one hand, it may have been influenced by classical Chinese painting. Guo Chaoxu pointed out in "Shaping human body beauty": "In the Ming and Qing dynasties, the characters are goose egg faces, Dan phoenix eyes, three inches of golden lotus, and ten fingers of fiber. "In ancient paintings, male figures were sometimes single eyelids and sometimes double eyelids, but the basic formula of female figures was single eyelids.

On the other hand, in 1793, the British Macartney's failed visit to China, and after returning to China, he launched a large number of works that defiled China, and the French sociologist Alain Perefe said: "They (referring to the Macartney and the like) did their best to destroy this idealized China of the Enlightenment era... China's image has since dimmed. ”

Previously, many paintings praising China had been published in Europe, and out of curiosity, they often painted Chinese as "squinting eyes". Under the smear of Macartney and others, "squinting eyes" became a negative image.

Whether it was the previous "China fever" or the later "China black", it did not attract the attention of the Chinese people at that time. The famous scholar Said said: "When Westerners talk about the East, The Orientals are not present, and the emergence of Orientalism is precisely due to the absence of Oriental culture and the distorted impression." It wasn't until the 1930s, when Chinese learned that there had been a "Macartney coming to China" incident in history, and only then did they know that Westerners thought that Chinese were "squinting."

In 1913, the British novelist Sachs Romer's "The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu" was published, a best-selling, the book created an insulting image of Fu Manchu, and in the following 47 years, Romer wrote 13 Fu Manchu novels, which were put on the screen, the social impact was huge, and "squinting" became the stereotype of Westerners on Chinese.

Give Fu Manchu a "matching" design

Romer had never been to China, he was standing in London's Lemhouse district to see China. Around the time of World War I, many Chinese sailors lived there.

Born poor, Romer was convinced that his mother's drunken nonsense, after thinking that he was a famous general, had nowhere to pin his cynicism, so he wrote: "Of course, not all Chinese living in Lemhaus are criminals. But it is undeniable that most of the Chinese who have come here from thousands of miles have a compulsive reason, and they do not know any means of livelihood except for crime. ”

Romer's Fu Manchu "looks like a cat", and Westerners believe that cats have Dan phoenix eyes (that is, curved eyes). Fu Manchu's series of novels soothed the anxiety of American society at that time- according to the scholar Chang Jiang Hook Shen, from the 1870s onwards, there was a "wave of anti-Chinese movement" in the United States, and in 1871 alone, the public killing of Chinese people disclosed by the American media reached more than 200 times, so that there was a saying in English: "Have the opportunity of the Chinese Yankees." "It means utter despair.

In 1882, the United States enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first ever law to prohibit specific ethnic groups from entering the United States.

American society urgently needs to legalize its own atrocities, and Fu Manchu fully caters to this need: he is proficient in high technology, engages in the "white slave trade" through terrorist organizations, and often kills people with poisonous snakes, poisonous mushrooms, poisonous spiders, and so on.

In order to "match" Fu Manchu, Romer also designed two oriental female figures: one is a tool person who died of martyrdom after falling in love with a white man, and the other is the "Dragon Lady" who killed the other's wife in order to possess a white man.

In Fu Manchu's films, orientals are always "squinting", and Fu Manchu's "oriental elements" are more intense, in addition to "squinting eyes", there are also large teeth, long braids, thick lips, long nails and so on.

American doctors take advantage of the opportunity to make money

Under the clamor of "squinting eyes" in the West, the Chinese people gradually lost their composure and began to pay attention to Western-style beauty.

In 1878, the front page of the "Declaration" had "On the Seed Skin", which introduced the "skin grafting" in Western beauty, which was close to ZhiWei: "The present Western woman uses a machine to peel off her skin, as for removing half of her scalp, and peeling the ear skin and dough skin together, then there are too many peels, and it cannot be replenished and its potential is also so." And the medicine is planted alone with new skins, planting as many as twelve thousand grains, and one person's skin is insufficient, and it is re-recruited from others. ”

The "Declaration" once recorded that the "Paris House" performed skin-pulling surgery for the old woman, but gave it a cool comment: "The husband and groom, their hearts may not be obscene, but people or because of their beauty and fornication, is nothing more than adultery." ”

In 1910, the American female doctor Ji Linghan went to Shanghai and brought plastic and cosmetic surgery, known as "men become beautiful teenagers, and women become beautiful women". She spent money to advertise in the "Declaration", using the tone of a female patient over 40 years old, saying that after the operation, the freckles had disappeared, the wrinkles had disappeared, and she looked like she was 20 years old. To "All the officials and big merchants, the maidens of the broad compradors, and the spoiled concubines will ask many people to cultivate and govern." At first, everyone was only two or three hundred gold, and later to more than a thousand gold, and Ji Linghan was a big profit."

Wang Kangnian, a representative figure of the late Qing Restoration Faction, once wrote: "The Wen youdu branch (the qing dynasty institution in charge of financial affairs, established in 1906, equivalent to the later Ministry of Finance) came with his concubines to remove the number of pockmarks on his face, 450 gold of Gisso. The clerk said, 'I don't need this yet.' 'Later reduced to two hundred and fifty gold. Ji Linghan seized on the problem of inequality between men and women in China at that time and created business opportunities for himself.

In 1932, Shishuanghu, who had returned from his studies in Japan, founded the Shi's Beauty Hospital in Shanghai, which could do rhinoplasty, double eyelid cutting, etc., and by 1936, it had grown to 5 hospitals.

Celebrities have led to a wave of plastic surgery

According to scholar Tang Jia in "Made of Beauty", Xu Tianren was an early celebrity who underwent double eyelid cutting, before she acted in "Sunrise", just when Guohua Company had a new film that might find her as the heroine, she asked Yang Shuyin of Shanghai Ciguang Eye Hospital to cut her double eyelids. Yang Shuyin is one of the earliest eye specialists in China, and has published China's first monograph on eye beauty, "New Therapy for Eye Plastic Surgery". He also solemnly did plastic surgery for opera actor Wu Suqiu and movie male stars.

After the actress Wang Hanlun made enough money from the movie "The Revenge of the Lady", she studied beauty with the forensic doctor Li Zhaodeshi, and later opened the Wang Hanlun Beauty Salon. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was still believed that "destroying the remains of parents to gain mercy by fighting for flattery, both filial piety and adultery, ranking first among all evils and carrying back the hundred good." "But Wang Hanlun often told customers that in France, both men, women and children often go to beauty salons." If she doesn't look good for a few days, she will look down on people, saying that she does not pay attention to hygiene, loses her personality, and does not have her share in banquets and all social interactions."

The famous actor Bai Yang went to Shanghai to join the star company, and the first thing he did was to "repair the facial shortcomings, the concave nose bridge, convex lips, and facial freckles were all modified", "cut the eyelids, repaired the tip of the nose, and Bai Yang sacrificed two pieces of plump flesh".

Qian Zhongshu wrote about a celebrity figure, Mrs. Li in "Cats": "Mrs. Li has been dissatisfied with her appearance since she was a child: the skin is not white, and the eyelids are not double... Mr. Lee proposed to her, and she offered many conditions, the eighteenth of which was a honeymoon trip to Japan. Once in Japan, she went to the hospital to modify her eyelids, and deepened the wine on her left cheek. ”

Some people have single eyelids in the early years, and later become double eyelids, not necessarily surgery. Studies have said that many people have single eyelids in the early stages and naturally grow into double eyelids after middle age.

Yao Ming's treatment deserves praise

Eyelids are determined by dominant genes, but both parents have double eyelids, and children may also have single eyelids. The cause of single eyelids is still a mystery, and some pseudoscience claims that single eyelids are fat and can cope with tropical, desert and Arctic environments, but in cold Finland, Sweden and other places, as well as desert areas, single eyelids are rare.

In 1998, Disney launched the cartoon "Mulan", which still represents Chinese beauty with thin eyebrows, Dan phoenix eyes and thick lips, which was rated as the first Asian american figure of the year by the American "Asian American Magazine", reinforcing the stereotype of Chinese in Europe and the United States.

According to the scholar Li Oulun in the "Study of chinese female model stereotypes in the current international fashion culture", the image of Mulan and the Chinese actress Huang Liushuang was juxtaposed for Europeans and Americans to identify, and the result was that Mulan was more like Chinese up to 4.203 points (5 points), and the image of Huang Liushuang was only 2.984 points.

Under this misunderstanding, the Western modeling industry pursues the "Chinese eye", and the model Lu Yan has become popular, which has inspired more Chinese models to "orientalize" themselves according to Western standards. In fact, in addition to "squinting eyes", "oriental styles" such as dragon and phoenix patterns, Peking opera elements, and red lanterns are mostly derived from Western misreading, but they are often presented in an exaggerated way by the Chinese.

"Squinting" is a product of cultural colonization, at the cost of double eyelid surgery becoming the most common plastic surgery in East Asia, with a market value of nearly 900 billion yuan. Every graduation season, girls often cut their double eyelids together, because this will increase the success rate of 70%.

In foreign children's books and children's stories, it is often called Chinese "squinting", many Westerners do not know that there is discrimination, and even used to joke and express intimacy, there is no need to be impatient, calmly explain clearly. Just as Yao Ming learned that O'Neill really did not know that Ching Chong was a racist word, he tolerated it, which may be more conducive to maintaining national dignity, after all, communication and goodwill are positive energy. (Editor-in-charge: Shen Feng)