Koreans Are Beautiful But Chinese Are Not?!

Two and a half minutes on my hair. Do you think a Korean person would film a video with their hair looking like this? This Chinese TikToker says that when she wears makeup and is all glammed up, people assume she's Korean or Japanese. But when she's not wearing makeup, people assume she's Chinese. So David, we're here to talk about if this is Sinophobic in any way or if this is just simple-minded people basing it off what they see. Yeah, this went viral on TikTok. Let's play the video from TikToker CC. I got recognized as Korean or Japanese. If I just go out without makeup with my bare face, I got recognized as Chinese only. The creator said it's so true and it's just an example of Sinophobia that permeates in current society. I literally was on somebody's stream the other day to talk about this, but it is so true. I am Chinese and the person that I was talking with was Taiwanese, but, you know, ethnically Chinese. And we were talking about how it is not seen as attractive to be Chinese. Like the creator said, if you are East Asian and if you look pretty, then you will automatically be assumed to be Korean or Japanese. That goes to a whole different issue about Korean culture and Japanese culture just being like horrendously fetishized. But you'll see you never get assumed as being Chinese because there's this weird stigma that assumes that Chinese people cannot be attractive. Or when you think of an attractive East Asian person, like Chinese people just are never on the forefront of your mind, which is that now so more than ever, people seem to hate China. There is a ton of underlying Sinophobia. Everything that is considered good is automatically assumed to be Korean or Japanese when a lot of times the origin is from China. Y'all know the manga lashes that everyone's calling? That's from Xiaohongshu. That's a Douyin makeup style, which is a Chinese makeup look that was then repackaged into being Japanese. How a lot of Chinese makeup looks are actually called Korean makeup when it's not, or Chinese nail art being called Korean nails. There's a lot of underlying issues with all of Chinese culture that is considered cool being repackaged as Korean or Japanese. And as a Chinese person, it just like literally just sucks to see. Boom. I mean, she said a lot of a lot, right? She took it from the micro all the way to a macro societal, almost geopolitical level. I mean, she sort of did the analysis for us. Basically, a lot of people don't want to attribute anything cool, pop culturally in a youthful sense to China. Even if they invented manhua lashes or Douyin style makeup, they're getting attributed to Japan and Korea because they much, I guess, have a stronger branding for doing like cool youth culture or pretty girl stuff. Yeah. We're going to get into the comments section and we got our own takeaways. So stick around for this discussion and hit that like button right now. Real quick, though, I do think that this is messed up. I think especially when people are insisting that something is from another culture when it's not. However, I'm not going to lie. I do think it is kind of the nature of the Internet or the nature of TikTok. These little quick video platforms where pretty much people don't care about getting the information right. They really don't care. Like there's a lot of little wrong information on TikTok. Isn't it almost representative of just like the inner thoughts of somebody completely sort of not very formally educated in high school or something like that? Yeah, I'm telling you. Oh, yeah. Cool things are Japanese and Korean. Pretty things are Japanese and Korean. Cool and pretty things cannot possibly be from China because that place is like bad. Essentially, that's what CeCe was talking about. So even if the majority of cool things come from Japan and Korea, but 10 or 20 percent come from China, that 10 or 20 percent cannot. Exactly. And I think it's as simple as someone sees a video and says, oh, my gosh, look at this cool thing from Asia. Where is it from? I don't know. I think it's like Korea. Oh, yeah, it's Korean. So does it just come down to branding and imaging, almost like the reputation that different brands have in any sort of space? Like Apple's got a great reputation, but like Jaguar doesn't have the best reputation as a luxury brand. Exactly. For Jaguar to be considered cool again, which it was cool a while ago. But for them to be cool again, it would be a little bit tough. They got to do like kind of a marketing campaign. Also, before we get into the comments, I do want to say it's almost like I guess culturally, if you want to look at China as kind of like this bigger, older culture, you know, grandmother culture, older person who wants to be cool and hip, that's going to be harder for them than a younger person who wants to be cool and hip because they're young and they're still developing. So they're able to make adjustments. Grandma can't be cool. Oh, that's a grandma. It reminds me of that. Hello, fellow kids. How do you do, fellow kids? What? I feel like it's kind of like breaking people's archetype boxes, right? Because for the longest time, like you said, for legitimate and illegitimate reasons, China has been put in the ancient, like Wu Shapian, like Kung Fu mysticism, ancient civilizations come from China. But then modern pop cultural, urban, metropolitan, cool things that we relate to come from Japan and Korea. So it's almost like saying, you know what, man? Forest green's not cool. But like mint green and lime green, those are modern types of green. But like forest green, that's like an old type of green from the ancient forest. I like green. I'm wearing a green shirt. Anyways, guys, let's get into the comments section. There's a lot of interesting takeaways here, David. Somebody said, no, for real. I'm not Asian, but I feel this so much. When you're black and pretty, people always assume you're mixed with something. And then somebody else said, yeah, the way they say it like a compliment is so revealing of actually what they think the hierarchy is in their mind. Yeah, there's a lot of confirmation bias out there. And for the most part, it takes a lot of energy for people to get their mind blown, right? People don't like being wrong. It's a lot more tiring for your brain to be wrong because you have to be like, oh, you know what? What I previously thought is not entirely true. Maybe I think it's still 40, 50% true, but it's actually not fully true. And that right there in your brain, that thing, that's very tiring. You're saying holding that space for that nuance and those exceptions or to, you know, you could just be wrong, but you want to say the world is this way and you don't want to spend a lot of time fleshing it out. Exactly, and I do want to say that this dynamic of attributing cooler, trendier things to a different group all the time happens with all large groups. Like I think I heard in India, it's kind of similar. Yeah, I heard if you're like a really pretty Bengali girl, nobody is going to come up to you in the daisy world and be like, oh, you're Bengali, right? Even though your parents are from Bangladesh, they're going to attribute your beauty to being like North Indian or something, right? Basically anything, the cooler, more famous group is going to get all the credit. Like, you know, if you see a blonde girl, oh, you're going to, she's Scandinavian or I don't know, maybe she could be Irish or whatever, like, you know, just like. It's almost like these groups here, like if you're a light-skinned Dominican person, people think you're Puerto Rican, right? Moving on, somebody said, yeah, there was just 150 comments from like pretty Asian girls or pretty Chinese girls verifying that what CeCe said was true. So it's saying that it's true that they get all these comments all the time. Yeah, and I guess, why do you think it's particularly relevant? Because I looked through 150 comments and they definitely all come from accounts because you know, they have their avatars, they can see their photo on TikTok. These are from like, very, these are pretty girls. Yeah, yeah. And I think that, again, especially a lot of people on the internet and you have to understand, especially commenters on TikTok, which I think this stuff does happen in real life, but it more happens on TikTok because TikTok is pulling from the globe. And guys, like a previous video, 60% of Netflix members across the globe watch Korean shows or TV shows. So think about it. All these members from across the world, they might've just seen a Korean show last week or they just watched Itaewon Class or whatever, or Attorney Woo or something. And then that's in their mind. Like, oh my gosh, like this person's pretty. They must look like, they must be Korean. And so I think the girls that want to be pretty or are pretty, they're more subject to this dynamic. It's almost like guys, Asian guys who play basketball, Andrew, we cared a lot more about Jeremy Lin than your average Asian, right? Because it's in your specific field where you feel underrated or you feel slighted because of group stereotypes. And this doesn't just happen to girls on TikTok though. When we lived in LA some years back, and I don't think it happens as much anymore, but when we first moved there like eight, nine years ago, we like, everybody thought that we were Korean. And especially even like people randomly that I would meet thought I was Korean. And I would tell them, we would tell them like, no, we're Chinese. And they'd be like, are you sure you're not Korean? I'd be like, our last name is Fung. Now I have to stop liking you guys. Yeah, no, but even some other Chinese people thought we were Korean, which I thought was weird because our last name is Fung and you've never met a Korean person with the last name Fung before. So it just kind of goes to show you confirmation bias. LA is very much the physical manifestation of TikTok though. Oh, let's keep it real. You're saying LA is TikTok. Let's keep it real. Somebody says, this is not just a TikTok thing. My own mom does this. When I dress up and do my makeup and I have fashionable clothing on, my mom tells me I look like a Ribbon Run or a Hangul Run. So how crazy is this? This is like within a family. Does this speak to like even people believing this about, maybe because there is some truthiness to it or whatever? I mean, I think that this is the part where you can't say it's necessarily Sinophobia because if your Chinese mom is saying it, really, what is she afraid and hate Chinese people? No, but what I do think she's saying is essentially like, yeah, you know, like Japanese people and Korean people, they have a certain style that I see. And you know, I don't really know. They try harder. Because it's true that what is modern Chinese style? I think it's still in development where if you think about a modern Korean or a modern Japanese style, it's very well-defined. Yeah, it's so well-defined and people always talk about it. And I think there are Chinese styles, but for example, like if some East Asian guy is wearing like Supreme and Off-White all together with like Off-White Jordans, then people are probably gonna assume he's Chinese because that's what Chinese people are known for doing. You're saying the modern Fob and Ferrari stereotype is known for Logomania. Yeah, I'm going to LVMH shareholder meeting. And then I go to get hot pot. It's a stereotype. Somebody said when I was in high school in LA, this boy said I was so lucky to look Korean because even though I'm Chinese, I was so lucky to look Korean. Then he apologized to me a few years later. This is true. Like we said, LA is very much the manifestation, but it kind of varies on like which city you're in, right? Like, but yeah, I think there's a global stereotype. Somebody said when you are in South Korea, if you're looking disheveled or out of sorts one day, you people, your friends will tell you, oh, you look Chinese today. Yeah, I've heard this from Koreans out here. They told us that they do say that. But is it true that Chinese, maybe probably in a macro sense in their culture and or narrative wise, they spend less time on lookism or caring about their looks? I would say so. I would, but to be more specific, I think the average Chinese person spends less time thinking about their visual appearance than maybe the average Korean and Japanese person. That's not outrageous to think. Right, right, right. Okay, let's be honest. We know a lot. And I think that's why, because Chinese is a huge group with a lot of different types of people and, you know, different economic classes. Yeah, I think the economic development is decades behind Japan and then Korea. Again, even Chinese Americans, like Chinese have, for example, high poverty rate in New York City. So of course, not every Chinese person you meet in New York is going to be spending a lot of time on their looks because they're low income. For sure. So it's just, but everybody's just in their mind trying to make the average of everything. Somebody said, I'm from Southeast Asia. In my country, people know Chinese faces, but choose to compliment pretty people as looking like K-pop stars or you don't look Chinese. Yeah. I've heard it. And man, somebody said soft power is OP. Ultimately, I mean, this answers all the questions from the previous thread, right? Yeah. But I think what I want to point out is that soft power is important for the people because it can inspire people to change themselves. So what I think happened is that K-pop and K-dramas and the Korean culture gets really trendy, but now they have a lot of different role models for Koreans to look up to and dress like and look like. So now all the guys, if you want to have that K-pop look, got the curtain bang split down the middle, you know, with the wavy hair. You sort of dress like, what's his name? The dude from La La Land. Ryan Gosling. Ryan Gosling, yeah. I noticed that you dress like that and you get the curtain bangs. Kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. But is soft power truly like a tsunami? You know how like no one person can fight against a tsunami because tsunamis, they just come from the ocean. Yeah, because I think soft power means that you're kind of trending and taking over media and you're in people's minds and whatever is the quickest thing in people's minds they're going to go to. It's kind of like decades ago, David, or even still pretty recently, everybody thought everybody was Chinese. Everybody thought every Asian looking person, whether you were East Asian or even Southeast Asian looking, if you looked kind of Asian, like, you know, with the eyes. Right, because we had an Ilocano friend growing up that got called Chinese because literally people didn't have another word for just like that look. Yeah. What look? That one! Right, and then everybody, like the Koreans probably spent so many years with like, you know what? I'm kind of sick of being called Chinese when I'm not Chinese. So what we're going to do is spend a lot of money and start this marketing campaign and create all this great content so that we can be Korean. Somebody said not to derail from your point, but this is the same for Southeast Asian people as in being told, at least you look East Asian. Yeah, I mean, I think I see this whole discussion going on on TikTok right now. It's a little bit not fully this discussion, but it's almost like a Southeast Asian, East Asian split. Yeah, but you know, growing up in the Seattle area, like if you looked Filipino, that was considered cool because Filipinos were the swaggy Asians. So for us, if someone thought we were Filipino or looked like, oh, you guys dress in real Filipino or like, oh, are you guys Filipino? I would have thought that was cool. No, that was tight growing up. I mean, because it was just, it's so mattered, your fluency in urban culture and hip hop and basketball and like getting lineups, people wearing wave caps and stuff, even though they were Asian. Because somebody said, yeah, it's interesting where I grew up pretty for Asians was associated with being Filipino and tanner skin. Yeah, it really depends on which fishbowl you grow up in. But obviously, Andrew, we're talking about the trend of the last, what, eight years? It's probably trended more towards the Korean look for sure. And away from that, like Lian V or like, you know, Swagapino, Brian Puspo's look. Somebody said, oh my God, I've been saying this, Sinophobia also extends beyond lookism. Any good traditional holiday is being erased of his Chinese history, like Chinese Lunar New Year. Yeah, I mean, I see a lot of people want to push for Lunar New Year. And this is more macro point that she gets to, right? Because she kind of brings it up initially talking about looks and fashion and makeup and just being good looking. She translates it and says everything good out of East Asia gets attributed to Japan and Korea and everything bad out of East Asia gets attributed to China. Yeah, I would essentially not everybody does this. Smarter people are more nuanced. I would essentially agree with this. Well, I think it's tough because if you look up the term Chinese or China in Google search in the news, what's going to come up? Negative news. 80, 90% negative. Yeah, about Chinese or China or whatever. So I think the word Chinese is very loaded. And I think it's loaded in a way that not all terms are, especially in the Western world. Right. And people never came up with multiple terms like Sino or anything. Literally, they use Chinese and China for like nine different. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like saying like Imperial Japan has its own connotation, but Japanese has its entirely different connotation. So I guess is there like is there another term for like Chinese culture? That is cool. Like instead of Chinese New Year. Oh, that's from China and China's bad. I don't know if it's called a Sino, Sino New Year or a new year or the Chinese culture New Year, you know, cultural Chinese New Year. That sounds a little bit better. Yeah, this went to another TikTok comment from a white girl that said it doesn't help that the only prevalent media coverage is in regards to the government and the people get lost in the background of it. Yeah, she that was a good point. Um, yeah. Do you think it's the geopolitics or it's people growing up and they went to Chinatown growing up and Chinatowns are dope in their own way, but they're not dope in a modern way? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that they yeah, I mean, they're older. I mean, they're just like 100 years old and they were. Yeah, they're built out of survival, too. So there's some comments saying like, oh, no, doyen girls are so pretty, but no one has access to that content. I do think that's part of it. First of all, no one's saying that they're that they've never seen a pretty Chinese girl, pretty Chinese person, pretty a good looking Chinese boy. You know what I mean? Like, right, because Lucy Liu or may not win or whatever mainstream media. Yeah, I mean, even a lot of these like girls on Instagram or something, they're actually Chinese. But I think it's it's also partially like I don't know if it's true or not, but a lot of them do take on a Korean look or they just take on the Korean style. So let's say you're Chinese, but you take on a Korean style and then people think you're Korean. Is that fully wrong? No, but I think she was also talking about more of that bad girl motorcycle, like quasi goth look that some of the girls on doyen do that's considered like a hot bad girl. That's definitely from mainland China. And then she's saying that they CeCe was saying that they don't get credit for it. But, you know, like we said, this is within the TikTok high schoolization microcosm. I do think it happens in real life. Somebody said that everybody I know thinks that Bobo is from Japan because they just would assume that Japan would create Bobo and not like a Chinese speaking country. Obviously, it's from Taichung, Taiwan. What do you think about that? Like even people taking Bobo away because they're like, I like Bobo. I don't want to say that. Well, I mean, yeah, I guess technically Bobo is not from mainland China, right? It's from Taiwan. And Taiwan is a little bit Japanese influenced. So I don't know if that's where they're getting it from. But obviously Bobo is very much a Chinese cultural thing. Somebody said when I was growing up, Japan was considered cool and funky. China was still weird and sucked. And Korea didn't even exist. I would say, honestly, this was even true of like 15 years ago. People literally did not know what Korea was. Outside of LA or around parts with a lot of Koreans. I would say this, man, Korea, they came out the gate with great content and branding, man. Because when people started hearing about Korea, they were ready. They had the K-pop stars lined up. They had the factories going. They were training everybody. And now, look, within the age of media content, Netflix, TikTok, they're killing it. And shout out to them because they put in work. Koreans put in the work. They got on the same page. Everybody took different roles in the system and he got the all pistons firing. Look at my hair. Look at my hair, David. David, look at my hair. How many minutes do you think I spent on it? Yeah, two minutes. Two minutes. I spent two and a half minutes on my hair. Do you think a Korean person would film a video with their hair looking like this? Honestly, from what I've seen on YouTube, no. They probably spend 20, closer to 25 minutes. At least 10 minutes. So maybe I'm not trying. I mean, let's be honest. There is fundamentally a difference in culture, right? And not only that, we're in the economic timeline and just cultural priorities. You know, cultures that are very tight knit and they ping a lot, they care a lot about what each other think. Chinese culture is gigantic. It's 1.4 billion people globally. We don't even care what other Chinese people think about us, to be honest. It's not even like one tribe that's cohesive. Anyway, moving on to the last comment, somebody said, I don't think us Americans realize how badly dehumanized Chinese people were and how that affects who we perceive as beautiful. Yeah. I do think that, yeah, like, I don't know. I'm not saying that, like, you know, anytime there's something crazy, a crazy statement like that, like Chinese people are dehumanized, I think there's a reason pizza and that pizza is made up of different slices. Some of those slices may even be Chinese people's own fault. Yeah. But certainly not all of the slices. Yeah. I would say this, guys, moving on to our takeaways and ending up this video, I would say, you know, for the Chinese people who care about this, it's unfortunate. And obviously... You're saying especially in a pop cultural cool TikTok high school. We've experienced some level of this, but obviously I think it's even stronger on a platform like TikTok. Or for females. Yeah, especially if you're a female or you're a pretty guy or a good looking guy, whatever, and you're trying to play that influencer game. Yo, I remember, this is crazy, Andrew. There was a Chinese YouTuber named Jeffrey Fever who like seven years ago made a really viral video talking about why he, when he told people that he was Chinese, everybody would always be super disappointed that he wasn't a cool Asian. Yeah. I think it's because, and I'll say this, the branding of the word Chinese, like I said before, super loaded, man. So I don't know if we need to come up with additional terms, culturally Chinese, whatever. I don't know if we can, but because China and what happens in Asia and happens in China is going to affect how people view Chinese people even on TikTok. Right. Even Chinese Americans. So the news of China being about to go to war with America or China's trying to do this, China's trying to do that, that is going to, and in an odd way, and it's unfortunate, still going to affect people's minds of how they view a Chinese girl on TikTok. And they're like, well, China's like the evil one. So, and they started, you know, the pandemic. So how can this girl that's so pretty be Chinese? It's impossible. Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that CeCe said something about it. I think that this has been going on for maybe like 10 years, at least, if not longer. Yeah. You know what I mean? So it's like- If it wasn't Korean, it was Japanese back then. You know what I mean? Right. Growing up, if we were dressed in some cool outfit, like matching jumpsuits or had spent a lot of time on our hair, you know, what would you look more Japanese? We even made jokes like that. We used to make some jokes like that. Japanese used to be super fly, man. When they had the hip hop magazines, oh my goodness. It's the style, fashion, media, soft power. But yeah. I mean, ultimately, what can people do to combat this, man? I think that she's good for calling it out, but I would say it's like, if forest green- So, so everybody's like, okay, I see all these types of greens, but forest green's not cool. Mint green and lime green are cool, but forest green's not cool. Everybody who's forest green gotta do cool stuff and then let everybody know they're forest green, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that you do, it does help to do cultural content. And I think that when you, I'm not saying, I don't know what everybody's content is, but if you're just there to look pretty, then of course, you're having people look at you and judge your visual appearance. That's what your whole TikTok page is about. I'm not saying Cece's page is about this, but I'm saying, if you're an influence who just does fashion, of course, people are going to judge you on your fashion. Now, if we, if you make cultural videos or if you talk about being Chinese or you do these things that point things out like that, like observations, then you're actually, like, you're doing the real work is what I'm saying. Right. There was a video by this YouTuber, Aini, who also made like a 20-minute video. I just think at the end of the day, right, you have to do good things and let people know you're Chinese and be proud of it. You don't have to dump down on anybody else. It's not about saying, oh, Chinese is better than Korean or Koreans better than this. Just, you just say, hey, proudly, hey, I'm Chinese, guys. My parents are from China. That's it. Yeah. And that's all you need to say. Yeah. What do you think about the parents being like, why do you care so much about being cool? Who cares? You know, that's like a whole nother discussion. You know, being cool, just... Well, it means a lot in America, to be fair, in the Western world in general. It just does a lot for your life, man. All right, guys. So please let us know in the comments down below. Have you experienced this personally? Have, uh... Do you agree with CC? Because I'm not gonna lie, I've read like 700 comments and nobody disagreed with her. Yeah. Well, I think there's, you know, a lot more to unpack. And at the end of the day, you know, you just do good things. You look good, appear good and do good things and be cool. And you just tell people who you are. And you know what? If you want this to put some extra wind behind your sales, then I say that that's the right way to let it fuel you. Well, you got a mission now if this is how you feel. So everybody let us know in the comments down below what you think. Hit that like button. Check out other episodes of the Hop Out Boys. Thank you for watching. Until next time, we out. Peace.