This post has content warnings for: more murmuring about race.
- he/they
It's a horrible day on the Internet, and you are a lovely geuse.
Adult - Plants-liking queer menace - Front-desk worker of a plural system - Unapologetic low-effort poster
✨ Cohost's #1 Sunkern Fan(tm) ✨
--
(fallen london stamps by @vagorsol)
System Website
feastingwithghosts.com/RONKA SHRINE
feastingwithghosts.com/c/Phosphor/You must log in to comment.
in reply to @bazelgeuse-apologist's post:
frankly, i feel like.......... idk this is coming as non-PoC so yknow, the usual twelve miles of disclaimers (plus the additional "im very ill so wordsing hard" disclaim), but idk
theres such a difference between "i want to bring people with me and enjoy this thing together with them and discuss it and bond with them over it" and like, someone completely unremoved from the culture just picking it up and going "this is mine now i think its neat :) " because that second one is such a pain (every time i see something online translate hiraeth as Just A Cool Aesthetic Word For Homesickness im sad and id wager 90% of peoples exposure to the word are those reductive "cool foreign word" posts on social media that miss half the nuance) but like
like, thats the issue, isnt it. people taking a thing and making it into some cool thing that they want to see. nobody cares that hiraeth is intrinsically tied to the erasure of welsh culture. that isnt very Aesthetic. that isnt Instagrammable. that isnt a fun thing to apply to your cute fandom ship. and the problem there is because theyve made this personal connection to a thing completely separate to the people involved, rather than like......... enjoying it as a way to connect to other people. the original culture and meaning is completely removed
the issue with cultural erasure and appropriation isnt "people touching other peoples things bad >:(" and it flattens the conversation so much when people act like it is. people always want their Discourse:tm: to have hard easy simple rules to follow but thats never how it works in reality...
JUST NODDING VERY STRONGLY AT ALL OF THIS, mochi words good
like I am reminded of how I am always eager to feed my pals Chinese food but once I read about some white people opening a "Chinese" restaurant to serve "healthier" "Chinese" "food" and I was SO MAD ABOUT IT
people who forget that its not chinese food as in Food From Chinese People and Culture but instead a singular "Chinese Food" in the same way you'd say "Party Food" or "Fried Food", an overarching category disconnected from its actual origins - and then based on that foundation, conflating the two types of category, resulting in just. the worst takes that arent even intentionally rude so much as just having completely Not Even Registered The Issue At All. somewhere adjacent to that tumblr post where someone was like "its not like theres a place called Spania where Spanish People live"
somewhere adjacent to that tumblr post where someone was like "its not like theres a place called Spania where Spanish People live"
oh my god were they serious
the original was an anon ask so unclear whether it was a serious post or not
tho as a bonus i ran into this other example while trying to find image so its also not an uncommon thing i guess
theres a nonzero amount of people who will just understand words as being The Thing They Know It As - in this case "Spanish" being "the Language Hispanic Folk Speak" (or some such) - and never actually make a connection past that point. I have to wonder how many people might hypothetically be surprised to learn that English comes from England because they just mentally file it as The USA Language and have never actually had reason to stop and think otherwise - though that one probably is less likely because I assume(?) USA teach that whole independence thing a lot.
and its like, idk, i feel like a lot of people will do this, its not like you're gonna sit and work out the etymology of words every time you read one. but it happens so frequently to like, culture stuff, i assume because if you have had little-to-no interaction with people from that culture then yeah, i guess your only experience with the word Chinese would be as an adjective in the same way you'd call something Spicy or Green - indicative of Things That Are That One Specific Way rather than an indicator of origin and culture
i didnt mean to write this many words oops
edit: puts images the right way around lmao
oh my GOD. these POSTS. I am so sorry about USians LMAO
And yeah, it's definitely like, somewhere any of us can slip up (me included. sometimes I have to remember that my friends are not European Americans) but some people SURE ARE JUST, REALLY CONFIDENT ABOUT IT HUH
GOD yeah the Lucky Lee's fiasco was. Sure was something
I mostly let it lie in the past now that it's not an extant thing anymore, but man. That was basically it - just a failure to consider that the "Chinese Food" the founders were familiar with from their takeout nights is a sliver of the broader palate. "Healthy" food is a fraught value judgment to begin with but even taking that off the table the claims they were making made no sense when applied to like, the home cooking my parents did, or the many other regional variants that exist in the world because like - China's a big fucking place with a lot of different environments and therefore an equal variety of food & agricultural practices! It came off to me as about as ludicrous as the "soyboy" anxieties from certain parts of the anglophone internet. I get a kick out of it as a Chinese trans man, but like. Those beliefs become so laughable when you actually have the context for the thing they're being projected on. You cannot credibly claim phytoestrogens will feminize you when East Asia has been eating tofu for centuries and cis men still exist there. Skill Issue.
You cannot credibly claim phytoestrogens will feminize you when East Asia has been eating tofu for centuries and cis men still exist there. Skill Issue.
ACTUALLY LAUGHING OUT LOUD
Skill issue indeed!!
if phytoestrogens feminized you id be seeing a lot more transfem tofu memes and thats how you know its not accurate
Lord but it's so, so funny to dunk on that particular meme with other trans Asians. You think the transfems wouldn't have become Buddhist vegetarians if an exclusively soy protein intake worked that way? Big lmao
this all just reminded me that today I was reading the web page for a "soy sauce alternative" and the ingredients are just "vegetable protein from soybeans and water".
THAT'S JUST FUCKING SOY SAUCE.
To respond to the post a bit more generally after my brief dip into salt. Yeah, this is something I also feel pretty intently. My Chinese identity is something that is very important to me, and something that I have a lot of love for, and I have a strong drive to share it both in the nerdy "here is this thing I think is really cool and I want to show the entire world" way and in the "hey this is something that is important to me and you knowing this is therefore also important so you know me and know what my world looks like" way.
There can be an over-correction from white folks, where their anxiety around race and non-white cultures will manifest in the social justice way of "oh my god i'm going to fuck it up" and then never interacting at all. When the point is for these things to be able to coexist as equal, neutral facets of the world. A Taiwanese friend of mine back in the 20teens would talk about sometimes preferring to talk to the slightly out-of-touch older white men, because even if the ways they tried to interface with your culture were clumsy, they were still trying, rather than the hot stove avoidance you could get from a particularly anxious millennial. I don't know that I take her perspective exactly, but I could see what she meant. It's not that I don't want people to notice or consider my Chinese-ness, it's that sometimes the way people interact with it is rancid and sours the experience. Like, the way sometimes you can be telling someone about your life story and you abruptly realize they're prying in the way of an anthropologist or a reality show watcher. You're not a person anymore, you're a curiosity, an object of study, a source of entertainment. I've had people I've refused to share those parts with eventually, because they would not stop being objectifying or weird. That didn't stop me from trying with other people, just. Some people do not respect the social contract of Not Being A Dick, and if they can't abide by the rules to treat me well, they fail the price of admission.
I have more thoughts but my partner is asking me Very Politely to go to bed, so those will have to wait until tomorrow
Wrote a whole dang essay in here before realizing I was not conveying the point I wanted to, rip. I wanted to talk about ways of enabling sharing, not more critique. Though I may make a lil post about that later, dunno yet.
A thing a friend shared with me once, that I think really encapsulated the difference between like, someone interacting with your culture in a way that feels Othering and someone engaging in a way that fulfills you both. He was talking about the way Maori people will ask "where are you from?" Which like, that's a question that's been centered a lot in discourse around Asian folks and eternal foreigner status and whatnot. I'll admit that I've sometimes reacted with too much hostility to someone asking me that question, or something similar, because I was too primed for bad faith. (Apologies to the old lady at the library volunteer org, I was a jumpy-ass high schooler.) But like, the way he described it, the emphasis was on asking you for your context - the place you are from is part of you, that reciprocal relationship is important, and therefore knowing it is important to knowing you, and talking about it imbues both of you with mana. And like, yeah! That's how I feel talking about Chinese shit with my friends and loved ones! It's life-giving, it's something I enjoy and something that helps me feel more myself.
Whereas like, the Othering version of the question is like. "What kind of ethnic are you" with an undercurrent of "but you're not Really from here" even when you do have a relationship to this country you grew up in, and it is more home than the country of origin. And like, ultimately the goal is to have more instances of sharing that are like the former, instead of the latter. Instead of placing especial emphasis on your Asian-ness as something that alienates you from each other, or a basis for reading assumptions onto you, it's a reaching for mutual understanding. Orientalism gums up the works, by alienating these cultural touchstones from the people who originated them, by alienating you from yourself via external projection and assumptions, by alienating you and your culture from being treated as equals. It gets in the way of a truly mutual exchange and sharing of experience, that gives back to you and the people you're sharing with. That alienation has to be addressed or dealt with, otherwise the sharing is no longer possible - it has been obstructed.
...and now I just really badly want to have braised pork. Dammit
the lotus seed ones are my favourite too... when does mooncake season start again we should get more of those this year :Q
i know there's a lot of serious discussion about this stuff going on in this thread and i agree with the chatter already made a lot. but instead of continuing it, i wanted to remind u you much i appreciate u burying me in ur favourite foods. because some of them are my favourites now too
One day we will get to meet (meat?) in meatspace and eat delicious food together. T_T We still want deep-fried ghost with you, and what you describe sounds really fun!
Obviously it's not the same, but sometimes I feel this way about multi stuff. I feel like I'm bringing people into my weird little world, and if they choose to be voyeuristic creeps about it, well, to the best of my ability, I can do my damnedest to make it Not My Problem. Obviously sometimes they MAKE it my problem, because ableism, and I can't avoid that, but... I don't want their small-mindedness to make me shut myself into this tiny armored box, you know? Because I've seen SUCCESS in sharing with others, a lot of folks have told me, "Hey, I had never seen this before, and just seeing you eat food and walk around and do normal human things really helped me understand." And if that makes the world just a little less hard for the multis after me... I want to keep doing that.
(That I've had the positive response I have even in my tentative attempts to grasp and explain plural racism is encouraging, even if it's scary! Clearly these are conversations that need to happen, though I always feel woefully lacking to the task.)