Hi, this is really random but I really like and respect your critiques on media I saw a post you reblogged a while ago that got me wondering what you think of white people using chinese characters (or really any other pictographic language) as tattoos? I just know someone that got a tattoo in mandarin saying she wants to "create a thousand different meanings" similar to a tattoo her grandfather had in a foreign language and made up different meaning every time he asked. Is that appropriation?
i wouldnât say getting Chinese tattoos (or tattoos in a foreign language) is in and of itself appropriation, but it does come from exotification and orientalism, which are all parts of othering that white people partake in. obviously there are exceptions - if a name or place is personally important to you, then no, itâs not exotification, but just tattooing foreign language that they canât read on their bodies for the sake of it being foreign definitely is.
thisisnotchina has been over this before, but Exotic Chinese Tattoos are a larger part of Western neo-imperialistic othering, where white people see China (along with other non-Western countries, although in different ways) as obviously something mysterious and exotic - itâs different, itâs weird, itâs pretty, but its beauty is there to be cherry-picked and gawked at and used for decoration, but the people who created it are not worth the respect. The same attitude is applied to the language when you use it to decorate your body without actually caring about the actual meaning of the language it self.
in the case you mentioned, itâs highly disrespectful because itâs obvious that the white people in question obviously donât even care for the language - theyâre literally using it an accessory. i mean, a thousand different meanings?? it basically assumes that anyone who asks donât know any better anyway, so they can get away with pulling out some bullshit answer.
Iâm not impressed by white people with hanzi tattoos in general, but at least in most cases they give the language some dignity by getting a specific word because âit looks coolerâ. But getting some random hanzi tattooed on their body for the explicit reason that itâs foreign, so that they can purposefully disregard the original meaning is basically the equivalent of going âCHING-CHANG-CHONGâ in a high-pitched shriek and calling it Chinese.
