Westernized Lifestyle (生活西化 shēnghuó xīhuà)

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Phrase of the week: Westernized Life-style (生活西化 shēnghuó xīhuà)

Chinese language state media’s clumsy protection of the Oscar-winning movie “Every part In every single place All at As soon as,” has given beginning to a brand new euphemism for homosexuality: “Westernized way of life” (生活西化 shēnghuó xīhuà). After the movie received Finest Image on the Oscars, Hollywood’s annual award ceremony, Folks’s Day by day republished a 2022 article from state-run Shanghai-based outlet Wenhui Day by day that panned the movie for having allegedly “failed to flee Orientalist stereotypes.” A central battle of the movie is the preliminary unwillingness of the protagonist Evelyn, a Chinese language-American laundromat operator, to just accept that her daughter Pleasure is a lesbian. In an early scene, Evelyn refers to Pleasure’s girlfriend Becky as Pleasure’s “excellent buddy.” Satirically, state media protection of the movie additionally euphemized Pleasure’s sexual orientation: the Wenhui Day by day piece republished by Folks’s Day by day referred to Pleasure as a “daughter with a westernized way of life.” The road instantly grew to become fodder for Weibo customers, who riffed on the absurdity of assigning a geopolitical angle to a person’s sexual orientation:

Nameless netizen: If homosexuality is a westernized way of life,
and heterosexuality is an easternized way of life,
then bisexuality is globalization,
and asexuality is deglobalization.
I ponder if which means watching Pornhub alone is “Chinese language studying as substance, Western studying for software.”

Nameless netizen: Me, popping out of the closet: “Mother, Dad, there’s one thing I’ve at all times wished to let you know: my way of life is, er, Westernized…”

Nameless netizen: So your way of life is just too westernized, is that it? A few of this conventional Chinese language drugs will treatment you. [Chinese]

The euphemism additionally impressed severe reflection on state media’s seeming retreat from the extra tolerant positions it held a decade in the past. WeChat essayist “Comrade A-Qiang” (“comrade” having turn out to be an affectionate catch-all time period for LGBTQ+ folks) documented state media’s retreat from acknowledging and respecting the existence of the LGTBQ+ group and lamented “the ‘Comrade Spring’ is now long gone”:

CCTV in 2011: “Surrender discrimination, and please respect all teams’ private selections.”

CCTV in 2013, on Worldwide Day In opposition to Homophobia: “We are able to all put apart our prejudice and enmity.”

Folks’s Day by day in 2018：”Put apart your prejudices and be tolerant of others. Allow us to hope that every one love could also be secure from hurt and that every one folks might stay out the colours of their hearts.”