I was thinking about the really bad Sifu marketing kit that had this random assortment of objects that screamed orientalism (link goes to a tweet thread), and then of course Asian people pointing that out got hate mobbed on the bird app. And I was also thinking about the way the British Museum stole Yilin Wang's translations of Qiu Jin's poetry (link goes to a google doc summarising the situation), and then when asked to rectify the situation removed Qui Jin's poems from the exhibit altogether, rather than crediting and compensating the translator.
I think what both situations have in common is that it's fairly clear when some piece of media is about you but it's not actually for you.
Who was the Sifu marketing kit for? If you asked a random assortment of Chinese people what receiving that particular set of objects would be like, some folks would point out things like... Giving incense isn't done, because you're going to remind people of burning incense during funeral services. It's not quite on the level of the Godfather arranging a nocturnal delivery of a horse's head to your bed as a prognosticator of what happens to you if you don't comply, but it's giving off confusing or inauspicious vibes. Are you... Suggesting that the recipent is going to need incense because they're going to die soon and people will burn incense at their funeral, or because a family member of theirs is going to die and they'll need incense to burn at that funeral?
And what's with the carved chop? That's kind of weird too, because why would you have someone else's chop unless you were doing an identity fraud? Or they were medically mentally incapacitated in some way and you had power of attorney to sign documents on their behalf? Maybe it's like a marketing kit coming with someone else's social security number in it, or someone else's passport number. Just... Odd. And so on, and so forth for all the random things.
The collection of objects is contextually confusing, UNLESS it's meant to speak to people outside the culture who associate Chinese-ness with "exotic" items like incense, carved chops, feng shui coins, a Buddhist rosary, etc - all removed from specific, meaningful contexts within the culture, in order to give people from outside the culture vaguely "Eastern vibes".
Look, if you are disapora living in the West, you know this sort of thing very well from casual interactions with random white people. That link goes to a tweet by Wendy Xu on Twitter that reads:
Me: hi
Random white guy: my wife is Asian so I know that in your culture what you mean is hi, hello, how are you today, a greeting
Me: ok
Him: ...rice meditation Buddha dragons red paper lantern
"Rice meditation Buddha dragons red paper lantern" is just a random assortment of things that people from outside your culture associate with your culture, but who is that conversation for? It's someone talking at you, rather than with you, because you have become an abstraction as well - just a way for them to massage their ego about how much they know about your culture. It's not really for you, is it? You're mostly meant to be smiling and nodding along, and massaging their ego ("Oh, I see that you're not like those other white people! You have an Asian wife, and you know so much about my culture! My goodness, you might as well be one of us!" 🙄) But you're not actually meant to feel annoyed, or bored, or tokenised, or like maybe can you just be having a normal conversation where you aren't a prop in someone else's exploratory foray out of their own whiteness.
Similarly with the British Museum's exhibition, who was that for? Translations means bridging to people who don't read the language, so an outside audience. But also, you normally pay and credit a translator. Perhaps the assumption was that no one would recognise the translations as the work of a specific translator? Or even worse, seeing the translator's work as freely available, because the translation is written by a Chinese person, and Chinese people are less of note than say, translators from the West? In other words, is this the British Museum doing yet another instance of colonially helping themselves to the labour of people who aren't English, under the assumption that that makes you less of a person?
Whoever the audience is, it's not meant to be people who might recognise the work of the translator. It's certainly not meant to be for the translator. And removing the exhibit altogether also feels like making sure no one can enjoy the original poems at all. So at that point, it's not really for Chinese people or culture either, is it? Or you would make every effort to dialogue with the translator so you can arrive at a position where you can keep the exhibition up.
It was only really meant to be about Chinese poetry for non-Chinese people, so the moment the British Museum have to talk about difficult things with an actual Chinese person (like why they helped themselves to her work without asking first), everything breaks down, because again, it was not meant to be for Chinese people as persons (who need recognition for their work, and money to live on.) Just about our poetry, with the audience being non-Chinese people only.
Look, I get that cross-cultural stuff is not always easy. But if you want to do it in a way that includes the people from that culture in the intended audience, then you ask people from within the culture what they think, you listen to the feedback when you get it wrong, and you learn. I am relatively westernised for a Chinese person (that goes with coming from a former British colony, and being a third culture kid who spent some early years in more than one country.) Even I make unintended cultural mistakes within the culture I'm from! I've done the equivalent of gifting incense myself. When I was a kid, I surprised a fellow Singaporean school friend with the gift of a clock once, and then she explained to me that you don't do that because you're implying that the other person's life will end soon.
Of course I was mortified, and I apologised to her. She graciously accepted my apology. And I learned. I've certainly never given a clock to a fellow Chinese person again. 😂
I have never seen the studio that made Sifu acknowledge anything about how their marketing kit landed with Asians, or acknowledge how speaking up about the marketing kit saw those Asians drawing flack on social media. At the time they could have tweeted something like: "We got the marketing kit wrong. We apologise. We're going to take advice so we don't repeat that mistake. Please don't hassle people who are pointing that out." Like the way I apologised to my friend, I learned, and we moved on. It could have been like that. But that would be about valuing the relationship with the other party, and wanting to make sure you include them as you move forward.
So again, I conclude that that piece of media is about us, but it's not for us. We're not the intended audience.
And I really don't expect the British Museum to get a clue any time soon. The translator is running a fundraiser to support a legal claim of copyright infringement, which I think is again, because the British Museum doesn't really want to communicate on the issue. They just want to make it go away.
Basically, if you're making a thing, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on who your intended audience is. If the thing you're making includes drawing on cultures that aren't your own (because you're feeling "inspired" by other cultures, or whatever), there are going to be ways to try to make sure the thing is also inclusive of an audience from that culture. And if you get it wrong, you can still make an effort to do better.
Here's an example of when some TTRPG writers got it really badly wrong with Asian culture (link goes to a tweet thread). They mashed up a range of references from numerous distinct Asian cultures into an amorphous whole, and orientalised everything ("the mysteries of the Orient", "the unapproachable east"!), rather like "rice meditation Buddha dragons red paper lantern". They were called out on it, and then they actually wrote a pretty decent apology that included next steps. You can see how that landed relatively well (link is to another tweet thread).
TLDR: if you're making media and you get things wrong cross-culturally, it's possible to try to do better, but only if you're serious about making sure that the work you do next will be for that audience too, and not just about them.
