Happy if You Died

So those curse posts turned out to be true all along.

Classy lady.  So that's the upper class, huh?  No wonder the Cultural Revolution wanted to get rid of them.  Oh, she's got a point, but she also wants to toss six year old kids in the bay for the sharks.  Really, between Confucians and Cultural Revolution types, or for that matter modern "everything for me" nouveau riche Chinese capitalists, I don't know which house to wish a pox on most (I'm not a big fan of capitalism in general, but new converts to anything tend to bring out its worst; they haven't yet noticed that whatever-it-is isn't the key to the whole universe).

 

Aside from that, there's nothing much new happening in this conversation.  And your positions depress and chill me.  So I'd like to wind this down.  I'd say "end it here" but in my experience these things often require a coda or two.

No, that is not what I said at all. Traditionally, we are taught for everything to be done for the benefit of the society as a whole, but as I stated, modern mainland Chinese are uneducated and have a "me-first" mentality. That is why mainland Chinese now behave terribly in any situation. People from HK, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan are generally still taught to suppress individuality for collectivity even in the modern day due to following Confucian principles historically from China before the Communist revolution. What people from the west generally don't understand is that the Cultural Revolution completely ruined traditional Chinese principles due to the intellectuals either being killed off or having to flee to other countries. It's why we generally consider most people from mainland China now to have no moral compass nor any idea of how to behave in social situations. Here's an interesting video of one of the few remaining upper class from China ranting about how terribly people are brought up now: https://youtu.be/b30L_XlLWKE

 

Regarding the 'main event', I actually had nothing to say regarding your quote because I went back and read it and he first asked her why she was using them incorrectly, and then tried to teach her the correct form before saying what you quoted. I don't think it has anything to do with class, but proper education, whether it's by parents or school. I thought what he said in that quote was unnecessarily harsh, but originally she was the one who showed her own laziness by not saying that she noticed she was doing it wrong but didn't want to put in the effort to break the habit. It would actually be more insulting if he had mentioned that her parents did not teach her properly rather than her school, as we are generally taught from an early age by our parents how to use chopsticks properly and family-related insults are taken much more seriously than any other. So I guess you could say that overall, I do think what he said was fine. I think the one thing I would have to nitpick about it is that there was no need for him to tell her to fix it immediately and then get angry and insult her when she failed. People are supposed to fail. That's how we learn.

 

Secondarily, I never said it was the benefit of being able to use both hands. If you actually read all of what I wrote and not skimmed over it, I said it would be useful if they were left-handed to be able to eat right-handed in a crowded environment, such as when I would be taking them to visit HK. I never said anything about being able to use their other hand. Teaching my right-handed children to eat left-handed would be counterproductive if we went to anywhere crowded as they would end up having to use their right hand anyway. The anecdote about being able to use both hands - 1 for eating and 1 for writing - was simply an anecdote that I thought was rather interesting because it allowed my friend to do something that most people are unable to do. You are just making assumptions of things I never actually wrote nor intended.

 

I think if you go back and carefully read the comments I've written as well as the comic once again without assuming things from a snap judgment, you may see things slightly differently.

So you're telling me that, because of the huge population density, for most crowd behaviour it is essential for Asians to act according to me-first principles which reduce efficiency, but when it comes to bullying people who are different it is essential for Asians to act collectively for group benefit.  So the rule is, if everyone would benefit from the collective approach, it should be done individually, but if the collective approach has little impact on anyone except the people who are different and have a solution imposed on them, it must be done collectively on their backs rather than letting them arrive at their own individual solutions.  Clearly this is the best of all possible (Asian) worlds and there is no reason for anything to ever be done differently.

As to how you plan to raise your left-handed children . . . you claim that, although you don't live in a high-population-density place now, the benefits of using chopsticks in one hand leaving the dominant hand free would lead you to teach all your children to use chopsticks right-handed.  If you were not a hypocrite, you would be planning to raise your right-handed children to use chopsticks left-handed, to gain that same benefit.  But you aren't.  So you're full of it--it's just a thin skin of justifications for enforcing conformity to your handedness or perhaps mindless tradition.  I am certainly very glad I am not a left-handed kid being raised by you. 

This shit isn't theoretical to me as a left-handed guy.  In a very small way it's kind of like someone was saying "Well, to improve social harmony it's OK to bleach minorities' skins white.  Why won't you listen to my plausible justifications for this?"

 

As a side note that should really be the main event, this is rather a tangent.  Originally you were making claims about the behaviour of the asshole character to the woman using her chopsticks in a not-properly-upper-class manner being perfectly OK.  Handedness was an extra you added in which happened to hit my buttons hard; the girl wasn't using her chopsticks left-handed.  But I notice you grew silent about that around the time I quoted back what the guy actually said.  Still thinking he's just fine?

With regards to why Chinese are terrible at being efficient, I have to agree. We Hong Kongers are constantly frustrated at how mainlanders behave. They never follow rules and constantly cause chaos, but much of it is from lack of education due to the sudden explosion of wealth for people from rural villages, where it didn't matter. When you grow up in a crowded environment and you aren't pushing your way in front, everything suddenly takes forever. In China, if you leave any space between you and the person in front, someone will inevitably cut in front of you and jostle for more space so they can get ahead. You can't leave room for people to "get by" because someone else is going to stand there and cut in line. It's a learned behavior which similarly applies to elevators. They've learned that if you don't rush and push your way into the elevator first, you'll have to wait for the next one.

 

Your comment about the elevator is actually rather ironic, since you're thinking of efficacy of the group as a whole being more important than the individual's time saved, but you are arguing for individuals to be allowed to do what feels more natural for them at the same time. It also shows that you've never actually had to live in crowded conditions, as people seem to have a much more generous idea of personal space in the west than what I'm used to. I've been asked to wait for the next elevator multiple times in different places in the US and Canada despite there being easily enough space for me if everyone just stood closer together. There's a reason that even Japan, which is somewhat less crowded, has a specific job at the train station called a pusher, whose job is literally to pack people in closer in the train carriage so that more can fit. In China, they don't need to pay someone for that as everyone is willing to squeeze in as long as they can get on. We are accustomed to standing crushed together like sardines, crotch to butt, while in the west, it's practically unheard of. People here don't want to be within one foot of a stranger. Regardless, it's the same behavior that causes people to try to get ahead when driving instead of doing a zipper merge when going from two lanes to one, despite the zipper merge being proven to be the most efficient. Queuing in an orderly fashion requires either educating the masses on proper behavior from an early age(which you seem to dislike), or paying people to organize the queue like the TSA at American airports. It's all part of classic game theory. If left to their own devices, people will always choose the option that will likely benefit themselves the most, rather than what's better for the group as a whole.

 

All in all, neither full individualism nor full collectivism is good for people. The only difference is where the boundary of tolerance lies on that line. Westerners lean more towards individualism, and Asians lean more towards collectivism. It's unlikely either of us will be able to convince the other that our view is correct as we've been shaped by our own experiences in life. I happen to think it's still a good idea and will be teaching my children to eat with chopsticks in their right hand even if they are left handed as they will find it useful in crowded areas. By the way, it's not that we've never actually tried it. I never actually thought about handedness in chopsticks until I met my friend in high school. He was the one that told me about it because I saw him eating and writing at the same time. He grew up in another part of Hong Kong that was nearly as crowded and used to eat with his left hand as a child, but was always corrected by his mother and he never understood why until they went out to eat and he was constantly "dueling" with his neighbor when using his left hand, so he used his right hand from then on, even after moving to America.

Presumably you've never actually tried it the other way, so how do you--or any of the people browbeaten into following the convention--know if it would take up any more space?  You don't.  It's like how over here they used to claim that people couldn't be allowed to write with their left hands because they would smear the ink as they wrote (fountain pens).  Except lefties in real life used numerous adaptations in their writing technique to avoid that happening (and still do when using calligraphy pens).  So the establishment were ultimately prevailed upon to sod off on that as on many other pieces of authoritarian BS.

And incidentally, if that "Oh, and it's so great for lefties because they can use their dominant hand for something while they're eating" was of any significance, they would have standardized on everyone using their off hand so right-handers could reap the wonderful benefits.  Did they do that?  No.  Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.

Also, hate to tell you but it's pretty obvious to me that social conventions in many Asian places are bizarrely far from optimized for crowded conditions.  The Japanese are pretty good at it, but Chinese?  Obnoxiously awful.  The university I work at is full of foreign students from Asia.  They don't know how to queue, they stand around taking up as much space as possible in crowded bottlenecks instead of positioning so people can get by, they step into the elevator before the people inside can get out, they generally operate on an "every man for himself" basis which degrades overall efficiency of flow.  It actually weirds me out when I realize that Canadians of all people, denizens of a very low-population-density country, are significantly better at making crowds work than our Chinese students.  Given the behaviour I see, I'm really not that prepared to assume any supposed Asian adaptation to harmonious life in crowded conditions has a damn thing to do with the stated motivation.