Chinese "Exoticism"

[shibole]

I haven't really heard or read much use of the term "orientals" in a long time. But yea, you get the feeling from reading some stuff that everyone in China goes around thinking about their 'qi' and wondering how the harmony between heaven and earth is doing today, while checking the integrity of their bad feng-shui countermeasures for balance and harmony.

foreign visitors to China don't see locals as individual people, they see them as a huge, homogeneous mass of Chinese people.

Yea, I agree that people in the west also seem to get fed this stuff that makes it sound like all Asians are some sort of alien hive mind race or something. Whenever I hear something about Asian people "thinking as a group" or something I ask them what the heck they're talking about.

But then again, Chinese who has never been to the West have some pretty crazy ideas about what real life in the U.S. is like, too!

Yea, for example I think my sister-in-law thought that the average person in the US frequently went out to watch porno movies at your average major movie theater.

An interesting phenomena that is taking place in other Asian countries is how foreigner's interest in things that were tossed into the "exotic, antiquated, irrational" trash bin as outdated is bringing back the local people's interest.

I haven't really noticed that, but I do get this attitude from people if I ask them about something like 篆刻 (Chinese seals) like "Why do you care about that? That's Chinese!" as though nobody but Chinese people would ever be interested in "Chinese" things.

[shibole]

Heh, speaking of "ancient and mysterious" I just noticed that Unicode contains codepoints for the 八卦 (eight trigrams, usually associated in the west with "Yi Jing"):

☰ ☱ ☲ ☳ ☴ ☵ ☶ ☷

I suppose it was only fair since Unicode has ☿♀♁♂♃♄♅♆♇♈♉♊♋♌♍♎♏♐♑ ♒♓

Actually the "64 hexagrams" have Unicode codepoints but they don't exist in MS Arial Unicode or pretty much any other font (aw...)