superborb | (no subject)

I feel Some Kind of Way whenever I encounter really rigid views of Chinese culture. Twitter forces one to start adding unnecessary caveats and apologies in advance and I want to resist that impulse, but really, sometimes you need to caveat your instincts, especially if you don't have any actual evidence backing them up?

Like, yeah, your first instinct might be that Confucianism is patriarchal and so there can't be any female sect leaders in wuxia, but that's simply not true? Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please. My first instinct personally upon encountering that "disrespectful to Confucianism" (sigh, as if culture were static) narrative was that it seemed incorrect.

And then I went searching for receipts, which @douqi7s provided (from Jin Yong, since this is @douqi7s):
1. Lin Chaoying and Xiaolongnv in Return of the Condor Heroes
2. Abbess Miejue and the entirety of the E'mei sect in Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre
3. Abbess Dingxian and the entirety of the Hengshan sect in Smiling Proud Wanderer

Anyway, this seemed egregiously wrong, but even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented. I had the previous post on how heterogeneous practices can be in time, but even more trivial things. In the last episode of Delicious Romance, there's single word name use, so that's unusual, but it's not THE END OF THE WORLD TABOO like fandom sometimes makes it sound. (Definitely unusual though.) People are soooo strict about name taboo, but my grandpa named my dad with one of the characters in his name and if he had a girl, he was going to use the other character. (Also definitely unusual.)

I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.

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From:

branchandroot

I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules

Ding, ding, ding! *makes a bulls-eye gesture* The tendency is not helped by the fact that, in recent Western genre fiction, the ‘static rules’ approach is a common one in world-building. In a general way, I think the tendency of genre fiction to encourage people to envision different worlds is a good one, but when that’s someone’s major template for dealing with cultural difference, the limitations of it start to show very badly.

And I think this is also part of the regrettable effect where people who have very limited experience of $thing generalize the first example of $thing they encounter as the origin/source/authoritative edition of $thing.

From:

superborb

Right, and I do hope that exposure to more versions of $thing helps! To see the variety if nothing else.

And maybe the pushback against static rules in genre fiction will also help.

From:

trobadora

Thank you so much for this post! ♥

For basically any social rule that exists, there will be someone somewhere breaking it. Telling people not to break these rules if they don't understand them well enough to know what breaking them means (whether it's just kind of weird or, say, super offensive) makes sense! But "this can never ever be broken" is just ... not how people work.

From:

superborb

Wuxia's modern roots are also like, radical-for-its-time, so it's especially odd in that context!

From:

bonibaru

Interesting timing on this post, earlier today I was listening to Martha Wells and Kate Elliott about worldbuilding in sff fiction and how to many authors fall into the trap of making everything heterogenous (i.e. monoculture) and treating cultures like they are insular and fixed. They both mentioned things along similar lines as your thoughts.

From:

superborb

Ooh, yeah, I did see that around!

From:

adevyish

there’s also pretty big gaps between different regional cultures? i’ve seen joke polls about whether some random behaviour is 北方 or 南方! and historically, class was also a factor in whether or not your family had certain traditions.

(this generally doesn’t affect me, except when i am trying to figure out exactly what food i’m supposed to make for any given festival because there’s like three different sets of food based on who i’m asking. and i’m only asking people whose families are originally from two neighbouring provinces.)

i was always under the impression name taboo was more of a full-name thing than a partial name thing, given generational names? (lol, speaking of traditions, exactly one quarter side of my family even has a generational name poem and no one uses it!)

re: confucianism specifically, i always kind of thought that it was later confucianism revival that was more strictly patriarchal than og confucianism. and there was always exceptions based on your family or class or whatever, given e.g. the tang/song poets we know about.

From:

superborb

Yeah! And honestly like, stuff can be even more hyperlocal-- even within Shanghainese, familial terms differ.

I've seen it used to explain (correctly!) why naming your children after the older generation isn't a usually a thing. And then of course people take it to the extreme...

Aww, I always thought generational name poems were kind of cute. My family doesn't have one though.

From:

chestnut_pod

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there -- yep, all differently from one other! Like cultures throughout time and space, who change, rule-break, rule-bend, syncretize, schism, and have their mavericks. It seems even more aggravating if people assume that the past is not a foreign country and should be slapped on top of the equally diverse present.

And tell me if I'm off-piste here, but I also had a thought re: discussions of Ashkenazi culture I've seen along the same lines, like, "You can't have a female sage/your FMC wouldn't have been that highly educated/no one would transgress niddah, and it's disrespectful to show these things because it's not true to history." And I always think a) just exactly what you've said up there, that people have always had a wide variety of behaviors, and b) which members of this culture exactly are you "respecting" when you use the Ur Shtetl (itself something of a mirage) as your yardstick for "good" representations? Okay, maybe the Rebbe is turning in his grave at the thought of your character crossing the mechitza, but fuck the mechitza! It's sexist and patriarchal, and isn't it more interesting to see what can you do to highlight the flexibility and differences within a setting, and the way people exercised their agency, instead of cleaving to this extremely rigid image you've made for yourself?

In any case, I'm sorry you've been seeing bad discourse objectifying Chinese culture(s). Thanks for making this post.

From:

superborb

Yeah, that's so true too -- and I feel like 'good representation' is such a trap, artistically and otherwise. What does it even mean, really.

From:

momijizukamori

I do think a certain amount of it comes from like, people looking for hard-and-fast rules so they Don't Fuck It Up/have people coming at them for 'fucking it up' (legit have seen someone in Guardian fandom getting comments that a certain honorific wouldn't have been used in the 'in the past' segment and it's ahistoric etc etc when.... that's the honorific used for that character, in the show).

But also, sometimes people are just Wrong On The Internet.

From:

superborb

Feeling that blindly Obeying the Rules gives one a pass from thinking harder, I guess.

Edited Date: 2022-05-23 16:30 (UTC)

From:

momijizukamori

Yeah pretty much, enhanced by the combo of 'if I follow The Rules I can't be racist'/'if I see someone not following The Rules they are racist and I can harrass them'

From:

nnozomi

Thank you for writing this up. It reminds me of (I'm sorry these are such academic-type examples), the advice I used to give the kids I taught--if one of the answer options on your test includes the words "always" or "never," it's probably the wrong answer, because most things don't work that way. Also of the proverbial music theory student who learns that parallel fifths are bad and says "Oh! Debussy wrote parallel fifths! Debussy sucks! Now I know!".

even those things that are commonly known to be correct are more flexible than generally presented.
Yes. As you say, knowing the context (place, time, language, ...) well enough to judge what rules can be bent is not easy, and many people give up and just cling to the rules, or haven't yet realized that rules can be bendable in the right setting. (I think I do this myself in language learning, but I try not to inflict it on anyone else...).

...as always I don't have much useful to say, but I appreciate the food for thought.

From:

superborb

I find it hard to resist the lure of language prescriptivism for this reason, hah. Then again, there's a difference between a mistake and a deliberate choice.

From:

lirazel

Things are sexist enough without adding MORE sexism please.

People are so bad about this, both cross-culturally and cross-chronology (by which I mean people are always assuming that people in the past were more sexist/racist/homophobic/religious/whatever than they might actually be. The past is not a monolith!). It's so frustrating!

I guess I just feel like fandom sometimes treats Chinese culture like a fantasy setting where there are static unchanging rules, but it encompasses so many people over so much time. And people have instinctive feelings over what feels right, which is very valid, but sometimes their instinct is setting up rigid rules that are either way too rigid or simply wrong.

Very well said!

From:

superborb

Yeah! And the forms of sexism and pushback against sexism also took forms that are different shapes from our modern western forms!

From:

lirazel

YES!!!!!

From:

laleia

On the name taboo, when my cousin and her husband were trying to think of Chinese names for their baby (they are both 1.5 gen, immigrated when they were children), I (2nd gen) suggested that she gave use one of the characters in her name and she said no because of the name taboo and I remember being surprised because I'd never heard of the name taboo (I guess I've never been in a position to name anyone and also my parents don't care about things like that) and I'd thought of the idea because some characters in a cdrama I just watched had done it ...

From:

superborb

I sometimes cite a cdrama for some practice and later think if that's really admissible lolol. But it does mean someone didn't find it too weird to put in a show with a wide audience!