It seems like literally every Chinese person I’ve talked to is absolutely delighted when a westerner is interested in Chinese culture. I remember being assigned a trip to a buffet for a high school Chinese class, and my atonal 你好 got about as much praise as a baby sputtering out “da-da” for the first time. I posted some calligraphy on 小红书 a couple days ago and I am getting gassed up for it.
You can say the most basic phrase in mandarin and completely screw it up both grammatically and pronunciation-wise and they’d absolutely love it and applaud you for it
Provided you’re white
Although the Chinese on XHS are actually quite annoyed at the waiguoren invasion right now
Although the Chinese on XHS are actually quite annoyed at the waiguoren invasion right now
My feed is mostly english speakers, but every post I saw to the effect of “gtfo this is a chinese space” was getting mocked by chinese people pointing out IP indicated it was posted from America.
I think it’s NIMBYism in a way. Sure, they like to talk to Laowai and like it when they do something Chinese, but they don’t really want them intruding on their social media network. The Great Firewall exists for a reason- Chinese culture and attitudes are vastly different to that of the west. There was a joke going around that watching Chinese short-form videos “is like tuning into interdimensional cable”
It seems like literally every Chinese person I’ve talked to is absolutely delighted when a westerner is interested in Chinese culture. I remember being assigned a trip to a buffet for a high school Chinese class, and my atonal 你好 got about as much praise as a baby sputtering out “da-da” for the first time. I posted some calligraphy on 小红书 a couple days ago and I am getting gassed up for it.
You can say the most basic phrase in mandarin and completely screw it up both grammatically and pronunciation-wise and they’d absolutely love it and applaud you for it
Provided you’re white
Although the Chinese on XHS are actually quite annoyed at the waiguoren invasion right now
My feed is mostly english speakers, but every post I saw to the effect of “gtfo this is a chinese space” was getting mocked by chinese people pointing out IP indicated it was posted from America.
This is a loud wake-up call that the internet is not reality.
I think it’s NIMBYism in a way. Sure, they like to talk to Laowai and like it when they do something Chinese, but they don’t really want them intruding on their social media network. The Great Firewall exists for a reason- Chinese culture and attitudes are vastly different to that of the west. There was a joke going around that watching Chinese short-form videos “is like tuning into interdimensional cable”