It’s good to reflect sometimes.
I myself am feeling a bit dull lately. I’m working so hard at both my place of work and for the party that I forget that life has more to offer than communist propaganda spreading lol. I need to go out and touch grass more often. Today, for example, started at 6 and ended at 23 after cleaning, working, cooking and having a meeting with the party. Currently decompressing with wine and Harry Styles.
How about you guys?
Yes, we are trained to discard people the second the out themselves as imperfect. We are all commodities under capitalism and socialization here is just another form of financial speculation, valuing assets and determining what to invest in and what is a “sinkhole.” It is anti social and psychopathic and it is subtly baked into nearly all social interactions. Guilt by association runs deep and if you are linked to a leper people assume you have the disease as well.
As someone who lives on the border of East and West, do you see less of this culturally within the Eastern mindset?
The difference is palpable. Not just between locals and newly-settled Mainlanders, but also between affluent, Island-side locals who tend to be more heavily westernized, and the more rural people in the New Territories - with the difference becoming more subtle in the New Towns and Kowloon.
What are some ways you have seen this palpable difference? It’s very interesting to me as someone who I feel like hasn’t really seriously talked to people outside of Western framework of thinking, and I want to believe in the idea that all people aren’t as rotten as they are here in the States.
I can’t give anecdotal examples without doxxing myself. Just the more nebulous stuff, like Mainlander fashion sense. It’s pretty wild. Some of them have terrible fashion sense and they don’t care. Westerners and Westernized Hong Kongers are too self-conscious to wear the kind of ensembles that some mainlanders don’t think twice about. (edit:) and just to clarify: they wear what they like, they don’t care what other people think, they live in a society that doesn’t castigate them for it. They’re happy.
Whenever I hear liberal friends comment on a Mainlander’s dress sense it pisses me off. Those same hypocrites will watch Western high school movies where the nerd/loser/outcast is portrayed as achieving some sort of triumph when they stop caring about other people’s judgement, when in reality in a liberal environment they’d get relentlessly bullied to the point of having their self-esteem damaged to a degree that they’d never recover from.