Miss,
I believe that’s the result of a liberal arts education. So much time is spent searching for and attacking generalisations that this is inserted as a way of warding off accusations of imperialism and dead white men-ism.
And sometimes it’s there to genuinely show humility in one’s opinions.
or sometimes it’s there to prevent a Kidneyfailure.
Some posters have a hard time remembering that one person posting their experiences is just one person posting their experiences; they seem to need reminding that she isn’t actually speaking for one billion Chinese people.
Indeed; my (Chinese) wife often says that she (or another woman) is too fat because you can’t see her collar bones clearly.
When I do this, it’s because I’ve seen so many times people get all, “Who made you the Queen of Facts? What gives you the right to declare the irrefutable truth about the world?” Jeez, no one and nothing. I thought the usual disclaimers were implied and understood. When I say something like “Minnesota is full of hillbillies” or “The color orange looks bad on most people,” I’m not going to give you a goddamn citation, and I don’t need a lecture on how some people like the way orange colored shirts look on others. And it’s not just me; I see this happen with a lot of people on here so sometimes, for the sake of peace, I just include the (highly redundant) disclaimers.
Anyway, hijack over. Carry on. I have nothing to add here, except that the hippo thing is hilarious.
MOL,
You’re right. After I posted, I saw Even had gotten shit from other posters about her posts on China.
I concur: hijack over, hippos funny.
Glory, do you remember what the other animals were?
That word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
This was about 10 years ago! I vaguely recall that my size (HIPPOS) were the largest size available. I definitely remember bluebirds (cartoony bluebirds) on one of the packages. My memory says the other packages were cute animals, I kind of remember a bunny (maybe a squirrel). There were a row of packages, maybe 5 total?
I spent some time in Japan as well and I remember one of the Japanese ladies I worked with talking about food/weight issues. I remember she said that the right number of rice balls to eat for lunch was 3. If you ate 2, everyone would ask if you were dieting. If you ate 4, people would tell you to your face you would get fat.
evensven has been attacked numerous times, and even pitted, because certain poster(s) felt her portrayal of China was inaccurate
Eh guys, I think the situation is pretty happily resolved, and I think it was done with pretty positive feelings all around so I hate to bring it up more.
I am white, my wife is Indonesian/ Dutch, grew up in Indonesia and moved to America as an adult. She and her Asian female friends are obsessed with being as pale as possible, thin, and dressing very well. The cultural differences between my wife and I are a source of entertainment and attraction for both of us. As an example, she is 5’ 4" tall and 116lbs as of this morning. She is constantly telling me she is fat, with me saying no, you look healthy, fit and sexy to my eyes.
5’ 4", 116lbs, and on the scale every morning. She is not overweight.
Actually, “too fat” is an exaggeration. But having visible collar bones is definitely something she notices and thinks is attractive (to my eternal perplexity).
If we want some numbers, this site gives the average height of women in China as 5’.08" in 2002. At 87 pounds, that’s a BMI of 16, which is considered underweight.
It also mentions that the height of people changes every 2-3 decades, and that number will be obsolete soon. I suspect this “ideal” is based on older, shorter, average height, when 40kg might have been slim, but perhaps not clinically underweight for that nation.
Isn’t a big flaw of the BMI that it controls for height by dividing the weight by the square of the height whereas volume increase by the cube?
This would mean that it wouldn’t be reliable for populations that are significantly taller or shorter (like Asians) than the population on which the BMI is based.
For example, a 6’ tall person with a BMI of 22 (mid range) would weigh 162 lbs which seems quite light.
Nobody told me there was going to be math.
If it makes it easier for those reading at home to understand, think of China conceptually like Western Europe but with more mutually unintelligible languages and more people. There are some things one can generalize with a reasonably straight face, and an awful lot one can’t. It’s also usually a lot more accurate to extrapolate from a tier 1 city to another tier 1 city, or from Sichuan countryside to Hubei countryside, etc. Extrapolating from Sichuan countryside to Shanghai makes as much sense as saying conservative bible belt small agricultural town in Arkansas is an accurate indicator for San Francisco.
For example, it’s common fact that Chinese eat rice. However, generally speaking, this is only true in the Southern half of China. Northern China is a wheat based culture. There are exceptions such as the Tibetans who are buckwheat/barley cultivators, the Yi whose staple is potatoes, etc.
This is why you often get people “qualifying” their China perspective and ancedotal experience. My experience with mainly tier 1 cities, Shanghaiese friends and family, multinationals and leading Chinese corporations in China included only rare exceptions that were ultra obsessed with thinness and weight. They were there but really stood out as the exception. By the standards of the previous one-step-away-from-starvation generation, the 20 somethings of today are much bigger (but would still be considered petite or skinny by American standards).
The BMI is useless for the purposes it’s being used for these days and is full of flaws. What stands out the most to me is that the data the equation is based on was taken from the weights and measurements of armies. Western European soldiers in the mid-1800s have so little in common with the vast majority of people on the planet today.
Like an awful lot of people I run into on the internet, I’m one of the otherwise ‘healthy’ (by all the usual markers) people with a BMI pretty far outside the acceptable range- I havea bit less than 20% body fat and I have some nice muscles, but that isn’t reflected when you divide my body weight by the square of my height.
I haven’t seen anyone mention yet that in many Asian countries including India, a BMI of 23 has been set as the cut-off for ‘overweight’, rather than 25 as it is in America (and Europe?), due to the smaller frames of most Asian people and their higher proportion of body fat at lower weights. However their cut-off for ‘underweight’ is still 18.5.
She’s been criticised before for not putting enough of a disclaimer. It’s similar to the reason why so many of my posts have an “in Spain” thrown in, I’ve been yelled at for not giving the location.
It used to be that women with “moon-like” faces were considered beautiful, both in Korea and China. I remember learning in history class about one of China’s most famous courtesans, and how by modern standards she would be considered chubby and not that attractive. If you look at old Korean paintings, the woman there are curvier than what would be considered attractive now.
I’m not sure when the transition took place. I imagine Westernization may have something to do with it.