This is too good to keep to myself, so let me share it with you. In Guiyang when I was working on my laptop in our hotel room Yokelin often put away her book on the horrible Nanjing atrocities -- it
really affected her, reading the stuff -- and watched CCTV instead. One night she exclaimed, "Come see what they are advertising!" I stopped working and looked. It was an amazing ad. A guy dressed like a medico showed some pills and did a lot of talking -- this guy is white, but they dubbed his yakking in Putonghua -- with an impressive laboratory in the background. Then the scene shifted to a miserable-looking Chinese girl of about 20. A medico, Chinese this time, put a tape around this girl and measured her chest -- bustline,so to speak -- and what do you know, not in metric but in imperial inches! It showed 28". Then a sequence of videos showing her taking the pills daily, and at the end of that the medico returns and measures her again -- it is 34" this time!
The price of the pills for a 2 week course? 370 yuan, about a week's wage for the average worker, so its about dollar for dollar. Another ad, for the same pill, in a different channel of CCTV, showed the lucky girl getting married after a miserable time earlier on when her chest was like a landing strip.
Another kind of ad is about skin whitening creams, not quite as expensive as bust expansion pills, but bad enough. Now, the model used in this ad is not dark-skinned, in fact I did not see the point
in advertising this in south-western China where the girls were so fair that many looked anemic -- not a heap of sunshine in these parts. It was explained tome by Fangzhen (the HK prof) that pale skin was a Chinese (female) obsession, and merely being fair is not enough. He put it more crudely than that -- he said the Chinese were among the most racist in the world as far as skin color was concerned. In marriage partners for their children, they prefer in descending order: Han people (Chinese); then the neighbors who look Han (Koreans, Japanese,Vietnamese, the Chinese minorities); then equally, fair-skinned south-east Asians and white people; then northern Indians (fairer, you see), then the others who are almost unmentionable. The idea that one's child would marry an African is completely unimaginable, outside any Chinese ontology. Today, with the economic dominance of the white nations, it has become acceptable to have white sons-and daughters-in-law, almost as good as Han. As you go eastwards in south China, the girls become darker (more sun). This correlates well with the common belief that girls in south western China are prettier -- I think because they are fairer. I heard a prof in Guizhou (west) say in jest that whenever married men from Guangzhou (east) come to Guizhou and see the girls there, they always regret marrying too early. But in so jesting I sense they have a smug superiority about the alleged beauty of their women.
really affected her, reading the stuff -- and watched CCTV instead. One night she exclaimed, "Come see what they are advertising!" I stopped working and looked. It was an amazing ad. A guy dressed like a medico showed some pills and did a lot of talking -- this guy is white, but they dubbed his yakking in Putonghua -- with an impressive laboratory in the background. Then the scene shifted to a miserable-looking Chinese girl of about 20. A medico, Chinese this time, put a tape around this girl and measured her chest -- bustline,so to speak -- and what do you know, not in metric but in imperial inches! It showed 28". Then a sequence of videos showing her taking the pills daily, and at the end of that the medico returns and measures her again -- it is 34" this time!
The price of the pills for a 2 week course? 370 yuan, about a week's wage for the average worker, so its about dollar for dollar. Another ad, for the same pill, in a different channel of CCTV, showed the lucky girl getting married after a miserable time earlier on when her chest was like a landing strip.
Another kind of ad is about skin whitening creams, not quite as expensive as bust expansion pills, but bad enough. Now, the model used in this ad is not dark-skinned, in fact I did not see the point
in advertising this in south-western China where the girls were so fair that many looked anemic -- not a heap of sunshine in these parts. It was explained tome by Fangzhen (the HK prof) that pale skin was a Chinese (female) obsession, and merely being fair is not enough. He put it more crudely than that -- he said the Chinese were among the most racist in the world as far as skin color was concerned. In marriage partners for their children, they prefer in descending order: Han people (Chinese); then the neighbors who look Han (Koreans, Japanese,Vietnamese, the Chinese minorities); then equally, fair-skinned south-east Asians and white people; then northern Indians (fairer, you see), then the others who are almost unmentionable. The idea that one's child would marry an African is completely unimaginable, outside any Chinese ontology. Today, with the economic dominance of the white nations, it has become acceptable to have white sons-and daughters-in-law, almost as good as Han. As you go eastwards in south China, the girls become darker (more sun). This correlates well with the common belief that girls in south western China are prettier -- I think because they are fairer. I heard a prof in Guizhou (west) say in jest that whenever married men from Guangzhou (east) come to Guizhou and see the girls there, they always regret marrying too early. But in so jesting I sense they have a smug superiority about the alleged beauty of their women.
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