power, humility and green tea
Jan. 29th, 2023 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesmissjaneSo, at church this morning we read the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes. While I was failing to listen attentively to the sermon (a much too common occurrence over the course of my life) I started thinking about being 'poor in spirit' & 'meek'.
According to John Dickson (an Australian writer & historian, who I discovered during some discreet mid-sermon googling has recently relocated to Chicago: who knew?) the concept of humility as a virtue was anathema to pre-Christian western thought. It is of course now entirely ingrained, on a surface level at least. Award recipients conventionally speak of being/feeling humbled. Which is weird, you know, because they exactly aren't. They are being lauded. Why then do they 'feel humbled'? It will of course be a pretence in some cases, inevitably (the existence of such a pretence speaks to a cultural agreement that humility is indeed a virtue: one shouldn't be seen to exalt too much in one's success). But it surely must be a psychological reality in others.
One of the things that I have intuited over the course of the C-Dramas I have watched, without having much in the way of words to put to it, is the the relationship with power/achievement portrayed is often different. Nie Mingjue in 'The Untamed' is an interesting example. It doesn't take too much squinting to see him as a bloodthirsty bully. He is about force of arms, revenge, and yelling. He is demonstrably *not* a good sect leader: he rebukes his men early on when he finds them mistreating Meng Yao, but obviously doesn't care enough about the whole ish to get his hands dirty with the nitty gritty of how that persecution continues *to his sect's great injury* when Meng Yao is promoted to an important role. Yet he is seen by his equals as a great man, mighty in power and dependable in righteousness. He is aggressive, tactically stupid (Oh, Sunshot isn't going well? Why don't I just sneak into the stronghold and take WRH out singlehanded?), and obviously emotionally unstable. But just look at the breadth of his shoulders, and the size of his sabre! He's a *real* man, a real leader.
Look, I am a victim of Fanon as much as the next person, and so I yield to the overwhelming tide of NMJ simpitude, I'm just saying NMJ being one of the good guys isn't an obvious conclusion from what we are shown in CQL. One factor of this (though not the only one by a long shot) is that NMJ lacks even a single shred of humility.
Neither, I would venture, does he value humility in others. The opposite is shown clearly in his comments after Mian Mian rebels from her sect in response to being pushed around for voicing what was (initially) a really rather timid differing perspective on WWX's supposed crimes.
Even though NMJ was one of the prime proponents of the 'WWX is a dangerous war criminal and should not be tolerated' narrative, when LQY pushes back, and then puts her money where her mouth is by walking out he is all approval. Not of her *position*, but of how she held it. Her posture of defiance and dignity overrode the fact that he disagreed with her. It didn't sway him to change his mind about WWX, but it raised LQY in his estimation. Mian Mian actually goes in the course of this scene from fairly meek in her manner to belligerent. Even though she was (in the view of the story, though not most of the in-story witnesses) *right*, it is not that which is seen as commendable in the moment. What was commendable was that she was bold.
OK: scene change.
One of the older c-dramas I watched with pleasure last year was 'The Story of Ming Lan'. There's a lot that could be said about this show, and surely has been by people smarter than me. I bring it up now because there was a particular character and story line which depicted something I had never consciously seen depicted/interrogated before. I am talking about Gu Tingye (the male main character)'s step mother, i.e. Marquis Gu's third wife (I'm sure she had a name, but I honestly don't remember her being referred to by anything other than position throughout.). In days of yore, the noble Gu family fell on hard times, and Marquis Gu was forced to put away his beloved first wife in order to marry for money. The unhappy victim of this arrangement was Tingye's mother, the daughter of a wealthy-but-not-influential family from the countryside. She died in anger and distress, shortly after giving her husband all her earthly goods and a baby son he could hardly bear to look at. The Marquis, his fortunes repaired, then married his beloved first wife's sister (the first wife was also dead by now, I can't quite remember how that happened), which sister then proceeded to make life a living hell for Gu Tingye as he grew, and then well into adulthood.
So far, so absolutely normal for this kind of harem drama. It's disgruntled women making each other and their progeny miserable as far as the eye can see in these things (while the powerful men who are at the root of the whole problem often keep their hands as white as snow. Argh. Viva la revolution.) The difference is *how* Marquis Gu's third wife operates. Again, this is something that I am floundering around trying to put into words. I saw a video recently by YouTuber 'Avenue X' who spoke about a phenomena which I *think*, but cannot be certain, is the same : 绿茶 (green tea). This is, apparently, current Chinese Internet slang for an evil bitch who presents as "playing innocent, using ...words that makes them look small and timid and weak but kind, doing that to get what they want." (video here) In other words, a weaponised femininity of performed powerlessness which elicits and subsequently controls protective impulses in male power holders to the wielder's ends.
I don't know what if anything I have to say about this phenomenon and how it intersects with meekness and humility. I do know that now I've seen it I can identify it in some western media, but it literally never occurred to me as a thing until I saw such a peak example of it in 《The Story of Ming Lan》.
Maybe I'll have something more to say after ruminating over it during next week's sermon.
According to John Dickson (an Australian writer & historian, who I discovered during some discreet mid-sermon googling has recently relocated to Chicago: who knew?) the concept of humility as a virtue was anathema to pre-Christian western thought. It is of course now entirely ingrained, on a surface level at least. Award recipients conventionally speak of being/feeling humbled. Which is weird, you know, because they exactly aren't. They are being lauded. Why then do they 'feel humbled'? It will of course be a pretence in some cases, inevitably (the existence of such a pretence speaks to a cultural agreement that humility is indeed a virtue: one shouldn't be seen to exalt too much in one's success). But it surely must be a psychological reality in others.
One of the things that I have intuited over the course of the C-Dramas I have watched, without having much in the way of words to put to it, is the the relationship with power/achievement portrayed is often different. Nie Mingjue in 'The Untamed' is an interesting example. It doesn't take too much squinting to see him as a bloodthirsty bully. He is about force of arms, revenge, and yelling. He is demonstrably *not* a good sect leader: he rebukes his men early on when he finds them mistreating Meng Yao, but obviously doesn't care enough about the whole ish to get his hands dirty with the nitty gritty of how that persecution continues *to his sect's great injury* when Meng Yao is promoted to an important role. Yet he is seen by his equals as a great man, mighty in power and dependable in righteousness. He is aggressive, tactically stupid (Oh, Sunshot isn't going well? Why don't I just sneak into the stronghold and take WRH out singlehanded?), and obviously emotionally unstable. But just look at the breadth of his shoulders, and the size of his sabre! He's a *real* man, a real leader.
Look, I am a victim of Fanon as much as the next person, and so I yield to the overwhelming tide of NMJ simpitude, I'm just saying NMJ being one of the good guys isn't an obvious conclusion from what we are shown in CQL. One factor of this (though not the only one by a long shot) is that NMJ lacks even a single shred of humility.
Neither, I would venture, does he value humility in others. The opposite is shown clearly in his comments after Mian Mian rebels from her sect in response to being pushed around for voicing what was (initially) a really rather timid differing perspective on WWX's supposed crimes.
Even though NMJ was one of the prime proponents of the 'WWX is a dangerous war criminal and should not be tolerated' narrative, when LQY pushes back, and then puts her money where her mouth is by walking out he is all approval. Not of her *position*, but of how she held it. Her posture of defiance and dignity overrode the fact that he disagreed with her. It didn't sway him to change his mind about WWX, but it raised LQY in his estimation. Mian Mian actually goes in the course of this scene from fairly meek in her manner to belligerent. Even though she was (in the view of the story, though not most of the in-story witnesses) *right*, it is not that which is seen as commendable in the moment. What was commendable was that she was bold.
OK: scene change.
One of the older c-dramas I watched with pleasure last year was 'The Story of Ming Lan'. There's a lot that could be said about this show, and surely has been by people smarter than me. I bring it up now because there was a particular character and story line which depicted something I had never consciously seen depicted/interrogated before. I am talking about Gu Tingye (the male main character)'s step mother, i.e. Marquis Gu's third wife (I'm sure she had a name, but I honestly don't remember her being referred to by anything other than position throughout.). In days of yore, the noble Gu family fell on hard times, and Marquis Gu was forced to put away his beloved first wife in order to marry for money. The unhappy victim of this arrangement was Tingye's mother, the daughter of a wealthy-but-not-influential family from the countryside. She died in anger and distress, shortly after giving her husband all her earthly goods and a baby son he could hardly bear to look at. The Marquis, his fortunes repaired, then married his beloved first wife's sister (the first wife was also dead by now, I can't quite remember how that happened), which sister then proceeded to make life a living hell for Gu Tingye as he grew, and then well into adulthood.
So far, so absolutely normal for this kind of harem drama. It's disgruntled women making each other and their progeny miserable as far as the eye can see in these things (while the powerful men who are at the root of the whole problem often keep their hands as white as snow. Argh. Viva la revolution.) The difference is *how* Marquis Gu's third wife operates. Again, this is something that I am floundering around trying to put into words. I saw a video recently by YouTuber 'Avenue X' who spoke about a phenomena which I *think*, but cannot be certain, is the same : 绿茶 (green tea). This is, apparently, current Chinese Internet slang for an evil bitch who presents as "playing innocent, using ...words that makes them look small and timid and weak but kind, doing that to get what they want." (video here) In other words, a weaponised femininity of performed powerlessness which elicits and subsequently controls protective impulses in male power holders to the wielder's ends.
I don't know what if anything I have to say about this phenomenon and how it intersects with meekness and humility. I do know that now I've seen it I can identify it in some western media, but it literally never occurred to me as a thing until I saw such a peak example of it in 《The Story of Ming Lan》.
Maybe I'll have something more to say after ruminating over it during next week's sermon.
